by Peter Sasgen
“Let’s get the porter up here,” Scott said. “Maybe he knows something.”
“He’s already told us everything he knows,” Abakov said.
“Well, maybe he forgot something.”
Abakov bristled.
“I’m not trying to encroach on your territory, Colonel, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just want to ask him a few questions.”
Abakov boarded the elevator and rode it, clanking and grinding, to the lobby.
Alone in the room with Scott, Alex said, “Abakov never saw the bodies except at the Murmansk morgue. Only photos of them.”
“That’s right.”
“Then his report is based solely on secondhand information from his investigators.”
“Right again.”
“Which means it’s suspect.”
Scott nodded.
“And you don’t believe that the porter kicked the door in, do you?”
“The old man we saw downstairs? No way.”
“Then who did?”
Scott ran a hand through his hair. He thought it would be so simple, but suddenly everything had been turned upside down.
“Tell me.”
He looked at her. Was she reading his mind?
“It was Alikhan Zakayev, wasn’t it,” she said. “Or one of his men.”
They heard the lift start its return trip from the lobby with Abakov and the porter on board.
“Zakayev must have known that Drummond was hunting for him and that he was here with Radchenko,” Scott said. “He killed Drummond and Radchenko and made it look like a murder-suicide.”
“Jake, why fake a suicide? Why not just kill Drummond and Radchenko and get rid of their bodies?”
“Because their disappearance would raise too many questions. At least with a murder-suicide there’d be a good reason to cover up what happened.”
“All right, I can buy that, but what was Drummond doing here with Radchenko, and what was he after?”
The scissors gate rattling open signaled the lift’s arrival. Scott put a finger to his lips.
The porter had eyes bleary from vodka and too much TV. He looked about seventy and smelled like the hotel: unwashed and musty. He was painfully thin, with arms like sticks and tufts of white hair that stood straight up on his head as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.
“What’s your name?” Scott asked.
The old man started at hearing an American speak good Russian. “Nikita Fyodorovich.”
“May I call you Nikita?”
“That’s what my friends call me.” He glanced around the room with the practiced eye of an innkeeper concerned that his establishment maintain its reputation for quality. He looked at the tossed bed and frowned.
“I was told that you were the person who discovered the dead bodies in this room.”
Nikita hesitated. He looked at Abakov. “Tell him,” Abakov said.
“I didn’t know there was another man in the room with the Amerikanski until I broke in.”
“Why did you break in?”
Nikita fingered white beard stubble while he considered. “The American had been in the room all night and now it was the next day. When he didn’t come down to pay for another day’s stay, I got suspicious.
Here, you always pay in advance for each day that you stay.”
“Do you always break down a door when some one doesn’t pay?”
Nikita had terrible breath, and when he exhaled heavily before answering, it washed over Scott. “I went up three, four times and knocked. I called to him. He didn’t answer. I waited until noon before I did it.
You can’t ever let them go a full day without paying.”
“Why didn’t you use a passkey instead of breaking down the door?” Scott said.
Nikita’s eyes flicked to Abakov. “I already told the police everything.”
“Tell me.”
“The chain lock had been set.”
“You mean the American had set it?”
Scott saw a tremor affect Nikita’s blue-veined hands. He linked them behind his back. “Yes, that’s what it was.”
“Why would he do that?”
Nikita lifted a shoulder.
“How did you break down the door?”
“I kicked it in.”
“This new door is pretty thick. Was the old one this thick?”
Nikita shrugged again.
“You didn’t hurt yourself—kicking it in, I mean?”
Nikita looked as if he’d been insulted. “I’m stronger than you think.” He thumped his chest with a fist.
“Did anyone see you do it?”
“No.”
“Weren’t there other guests on this floor? Did they hear you do it? Did they come out of their rooms to see what was going on? It must have made a lot of noise.”
“This isn’t Moscow. They knew to mind their own business.”
“I don’t understand,” Scott said.
“I think what he means, Jake,” said Alex, “is that old habits from the Soviet era die slowly.”
“I see,” Scott said. “After it was all over, who fixed the door?”
“A man who does odd jobs for the hotel. He does carpentry and fixes plumbing and electricity. He’s also an exterminator.”
“When did he fix it?”
“The next day, after the police had finished.”
“And before Colonel Abakov arrived?”
Nikita shrugged again. “We needed to rent the room.”
Scott gave Nikita six hundred rubles for his trouble and watched him depart.
“He’s lying,” Scott said. “He couldn’t have kicked in that door. He couldn’t kick his way out of a paper bag.”
Abakov said nothing. He tested the lock from both sides of the newly installed door with a shiny brass key tied with sturdy twine to a piece of wood with the number 312 burned into it like a brand. Satisfied that it worked properly, he stood with arms folded across his chest and sniffed, perhaps picking up the faint scent of mistaken assumptions.
“Someone kicked the door in and shot them,” Scott said. “Then they told Nikita to make up a story, to get the door fixed, and to keep his mouth shut. Everyone in Murmansk knows to keep their mouths shut. As you heard Alex say, Colonel, old habits from the Soviet era die slowly.”
Abakov looked shaken, as if his investigative skills had suddenly been proven worthless. The vein in his neck started throbbing impatiently. “Are you trying to make a fool of me, Captain? What do you know that you’re not telling me? Who is this person you think killed Admiral Drummond?”
“Alikhan Zakayev.”
Abakov stared at Scott in icy silence.
Before Abakov could speak, Scott said, “Drummond was sent to Russia to find Zakayev. That’s all I can tell you. Zakayev probably knew Drummond was looking for him and he probably knew Drummond was going to meet Radchenko—not to buy sex but something else. Information. That’s why he killed him or had him killed.”
“What kind of information?” Abakov said with a hint of skepticism.
“There’s only one kind of information Radchenko could possibly have had that would interest Frank.
Information that someone, probably Zakayev, was planning to steal fissile materials from Olenya Bay.”
“How would Radchenko, a seaman, have that information?” Abakov said.
“I don’t know, Colonel. Perhaps he overheard something.”
“Are you telling me that if Zakayev had fissile material, he could build a nuclear bomb?” He rounded on Alex. “Is that possible, Dr. Thorne?”
“Theoretically,” she said, “but it would be very difficult to build a bomb. He’d need U-235 or Pu-239.
But recycled naval reactor plutonium is not easily made critical; plus, he’d need a trigger and a pusher of, say, lithium deuteride and—”
“Are any fissile materials missing from Olenya Bay?” Abakov demanded.
“Not so far as I know. But one can never be one hundred
-percent sure. There’s a lot of garbage laying around up there and it wouldn’t be hard to steal.”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Scott said. “Alex, did Frank ever talk to you about the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on fissile material and building a nuclear device?”
“Only in the abstract. Sure, we discussed what it would take, the techinical means and all, but we concluded it would be almost impossible to do without resources that terrorists are not likely to have, like metallurgy labs, that sort of thing. Actually, the weapon that it might be possible for them to build is a radiation bomb: a device that would spread radioactive material over a wide area and contaminate people and cities.”
Abakov, stripped of skepticism, said, “How many people would die if radiation was spread over a population center by one of these bombs?”
“Depends how much radiation was released, the prevailing winds, et cetera. Under the right conditions, perhaps thousands.”
“And if he were to target Moscow…?” Abakov said.
“Colonel, the whole idea is pretty much impossible.”
“Dr. Thorne, please believe me when I say that I know Zakayev, and for him nothing is impossible. He has contacts all over the world with men who would not hesitate to kill millions of people.” Abakov’s brusque manner had given way to solicitation. He was clearly shaken by what Alex had said.
Scott pictured Zakayev the terrorist assembling the raw materials needed to make a radiation bomb. He pictured a grubby clandestine workshop in some back alley in Chechnya and a group of terrorists busy putting the parts together: explosive, wiring, timers, outer explosive shell. The only thing missing might be the fission product, a highly dangerous radioactive nuclide such as strontium, cesium, or cobalt. But there was another way for them to attack their enemies that didn’t require the making of a crude radiation bomb. What it required was stealing a nuclear bomb already built, but he didn’t say what he was thinking.
Scott’s rumination was interrupted by Abakov’s chirping cell phone. An excited voice leaked past Abakov’s ear planted on the phone. He went to the window blind, opened the slats with two fingers, and peered out at the red glow in the sky. “I’m looking at it now,” he said to his caller. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Abakov hung up and said, “There’s been a shoot-out and car bombing in the harbor area. Several men were killed and the Murmansk police think that one of them may be Ivan Serov.”
“The Russian mafiya chieftain?” Scott said.
“Yes,” Abakov said.
“What was it you said in Moscow, Colonel? ‘Where you find Serov, you often find Zakayev.’ ”
The car was a smoking hulk. A sickening smell hung in the air. Two corpses covered with plastic sheeting had been burned beyond recognition, their arms and legs charred stumps reaching skyward, the bodies twisted into grotesque shapes. A third corpse had been burned only below the waist, the internal organs trailing away to a black, unrecognizable mass.
Abakov pointed his foot at the corpse. “This one is a Serov lieutenant.”
“How do you know?” Alex said, a hand over her nose and mouth.
The dead face was jowly and a gray tongue protruded from a wide-open mouth from which, it seemed, a scream had escaped before the man’s brain died.
“There’s this….” Abakov squatted and pointed with a ballpoint pen to a pair of crossed daggers dripping blood tattooed on the man’s biceps. The tattoo had been exposed when the man’s jacket and sweater had been ripped off by the blast that destroyed the car. “We know that Serov’s men wear this tattoo as proof of their blood loyalty. It means they will render their blood for him.”
“Yuck.”
“I’m willing to bet a week’s pay that one of these other two beauties is Ivan Serov himself. It’s not like him to get involved in something as crude as a shoot-out. But now I am thinking he was also involved in the shoot-out in St. Petersburg. Whatever the reason, he must have felt it had to be finished on his terms, here.”
“Was it a feud with Zakayev?” Scott said.
Abakov grunted. “Anything is possible.”
In his element now, Abakov shouldered between firemen rolling up hoses and stowing gear. He greeted Murmansk police officers and spoke to them in rough, clipped argot while they sifted through burnt rubble looking for evidence. Scott and Alex followed in his wake, stepping carefully over burnt wreckage from the car.
“Used to be a BMW,” Abakov said over his shoulder.
He stopped to confer with an officer who then led them to the concrete steps outside the charred warehouse. Inside, a powerful beam from a flashlight played over walls and support beams as the owner of the warehouse assessed damage.
The officer showed Abakov three small, scorched automatic weapons lying on a tarp spread out on the top step of the cement staircase.
“Micro Uzis.” Abakov said, poking one with the ball point pen. “Perfect for hosing down a room or an alley, and easily concealed.” The little 9mm submachine guns had twenty-round box magazines and folding wire stocks. “They’re a favorite weapon of the Russian mafiya,” Abakov revealed. He held up two metal objects. “Do you know what these are, Captain?”
“A safety pin and spoon from a grenade.”
“A Czech grenade,” Abakov said. “Rare.”
“Is that what blew up the car?” Alex said.
“More than likely,” Abakov said.
The police officer said something to Abakov that Scott didn’t catch.
“He says,” Abakov explained, “that they found spent cartridge cases around these steps in two sizes, nine-millimeter and twenty-five-caliber. The twenty-fives are probably from a Czech CZ92. Somebody put up a pretty good fight against Serov and his men. The grenade won it for them. We’ll check these spent nine-millimeter cases against the ones we found in St. Petersburg. They’re probably from the same weapon.”
“Then you think Zakayev killed Serov,” Scott said. “And got away.”
Abakov shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll find Zakayev’s corpse here.”
“Can we talk?” said Scott.
“Um, sure,” Alex said over the phone from her office at the embassy in Moscow. “But can you make it quick.”
“Not on the phone,” Scott said, sensing she was not alone in her office. “At Frank’s apartment. Half an hour?”
“I’m pretty busy…. I told you, that’s why I had to getback to Moscow.”
“So you did. If it’s David Hoffman you’re worried about, tell him I’ll explain things to him later.”
“Scott, please don’t—”
“Just do it.”
Alex found Scott engrossed in Drummond’s papers, which he was preparing for shipment to the States.
He had them laid out in piles on the countertops in the kitchenette. “What’s so damned important that it can’t wait till after work?” she said. “You know I want to help you, but I’ve barely had a chance to decompress from our trip to Murmansk, David’s breathing down my neck, and I’ve got a ton of things to do for him.”
Scott brushed her objections aside with the wave of a hand. “Tell me what Frank said on the voice mail he sent you when he was in Murmansk.”
“Jake, for God’s sake.”
“What did he say?”
Alex frowned. “I told you, nothing. Nothing I could understand. It was garbled, like cell phone calls often are.”
“You must have heard him say something.”
She exhaled heavily. “If you don’t believe me, then listen to it yourself.”
Scott brightened. “You mean that you still have it on your voice mail system?”
“I don’t have it on my system, but all calls to the embassy are stored in the central security archive.”
“Can Jack Slaughter find it?”
“I guess so. Ask him.”
“I will.”
“And I’m going back to my office.”
“Wait. If Slaughter can find the messag
e, I want you to listen to it with me.”
“You don’t seem to understand: I work for David Hoffman, not Jake Scott. I can’t get involved in your”—she searched for a word—“scheme.”
“Scheme? You think this is a scheme? Two men are dead—murdered. Three more were killed in a shoot-out in Murmansk. Some one may have stolen fissile materials to make a crude bomb. And you think this is some scheme that I dreamed up?”
She came to him, put a hand on his arm. “Jake, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It was a poor choice of words.”
His eyes roamed her lovely face as if committing it to memory. He heard her breathing, smelled the musky aroma of her perfume. She kept her eyes down as if immersed in a private reverie. He wondered if she had ever allowed a man into her inner life, and if she had, what kind of man he was.
“Jake, you don’t understand….”
“Tell me.” He slipped an arm around her waist and drew her lightly against him.
“Don’t.” Her breath fluttered across his cheek.
“Don’t what?”
She tried to move away, but he held her. “Don’t complicate things any more than they already are.”
Scott turned her chin up to him so he could look into her eyes. “Alex, it doesn’t have to be complicated.”
“But it will be and I don’t want that now.”
His kiss ended further protest. Her arms linked around his neck and she arched into him. When she pushed away, she allowed his hands to linger around her waist. Moisture glistened on her lips. “Jake, this is no good. That was nice, but wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Perhaps sensing that her comment lacked conviction, she stepped away from Scott and went to the window to look out.
“Is it David Hoffman?” Scott said.
“Not the way you mean it. I’m not in love with him.”
“But he’s in love with you.”
At first she didn’t answer. She turned from the window and, in a low voice, said, “I love this country and the people. I know this will sound melodramatic, but I believe I’m contributing something important by doing what I do to make Russia and the world safer. When Frank arrived in Moscow, I believed that he would help put an end to the nightmare we were facing on the Kola Peninsula. But then he was killed.