Meanwhile, she would go through the NSA’s most recent report of comm intercepts, analyzing calls made by Kasperov prior to the man’s disappearance, along with those received or placed by his girlfriend, by Nadia, and by a branching tree of dozens of others related to them.
Fisher took a seat beside Kobin, who was studying a map of Russia from one of Charlie’s computer stations.
“Hey, asshole,” Kobin said without looking up.
Fisher spun the man’s chair around and leaned forward, getting squarely in Kobin’s face. “I heard you got something for me.”
“I’ll need some guarantees.”
“Guarantees?”
“I’m a businessman.”
“Well, all right,” Fisher began slowly, lowering his voice. “I guarantee that if you don’t give me what I need, there’s going to be pain in your future. A lot of pain.”
“Come on, Fisher, you know what I’m saying… I’m just talking about him, Kestrel. I don’t want him brought back here. I don’t want to see him… ever… again.”
“Because you shot him in the head?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Hard to tell anymore, right? Good guys… bad guys…”
“So, you’re not planning to bring him back here, right?” A tremor had worked its way into his voice.
“Actually, my plan was to put the two of you in your cell, stand back, and watch the smackdown. We could take bets on how long you’d last.”
Kobin drew his head back. “Give me some fucking credit. Where Chuck Norris ends, I begin…”
Fisher couldn’t help but grin.
“See, see, I made you laugh. Now you’re amused and we can strike a deal.”
“Tell me where Kestrel is, otherwise—”
“All right, all right!”
Fisher stood back and folded his arms over his chest. “Talk.”
“He’s not coming here, right?”
“I doubt it. But if he does, you won’t have to see him.”
“You promise?”
Fisher raised one brow. “Does a promise mean anything to a scumbag like you?”
“Coming from you it does.”
“I’m flattered. Now… talk.”
“Okay. Two of Kestrel’s old army buddies used to work for me. Point is I hired a lot of those old Russian spec ops boys. The government doesn’t pay ’em shit and then fucks ’em over in retirement, so they used to do a lot of freelance work for me once they got out. I even recruited a few of them right out of the exclusion zone.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Fisher. “Been there before. Long time ago.”
Kobin turned and pointed to the map. “It hasn’t changed. Twenty-six hundred square kilometers around Chernobyl — where the nuclear reactor blew and they have three-eyed fish and trees that glow in the dark.”
“What the hell were they doing there?”
“If these guys couldn’t find work in private security or something else, a lot of ’em got really desperate, turned to game poaching, illegal logging, and metal salvage operations inside the zone. Some of them got legit jobs giving tours, but a lot of them became criminals — especially the ones with a disability like a limp or something. They’d get help from the samosely—the people who refused to evacuate, like a lot of old people, or the ones who resettled illegally. You wouldn’t believe how many people are still going in there, looking for a quick score.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“Yep, some of ’em are that desperate. If you’ve been there, you might remember the place is controlled by the State Agency of Ukraine on the Exclusion Zone Management. They call it S-A-E-Z. Of course yours truly — being a Ukrainian American — has friends in the agency. Good friends.”
“So you picked up Kestrel there? I can’t believe he’s that desperate.”
“He’s not. I just talked to one of his army buddies, actually an old mentor who got him into special forces in the first place. He told me that before Kestrel moved to St. Petersburg, he spent some time as a kid with his foster parents in a little town called Vilcha; it’s right there in the exclusion zone.”
“So he’s gone back to a contaminated town to what, reminisce?”
“No, here’s where it gets good. Security’s tight, like I said. You don’t get past the checkpoint without papers. So I talked to my friends at SAEZ, and they issued a temporary contractor’s clearance pass to a man named… wait for it… Glib Lakeev.”
“That’s one of Kestrel’s aliases.”
“Bingo. And according to my contacts at SAEZ, he hasn’t entered the zone yet. But the pass is only good for three days, so that Russian fucker is planning something— and we know where he’s gonna be.”
“And you think it’s Vilcha?”
“Tell you why. He never worked in the exclusion zone like his buddies. Vilcha is his only connection to it. If he’s going into the zone, I bet everything that he’s going there.”
“To do what?”
Kobin laughed through his big nose. “What the fuck do I look like? A mind reader? Maybe he’s going in there for a beer with a radioactive corpse.”
Fisher turned to Grim, who’d been eavesdropping on the conversation. “What do you think?”
“I think we can be in Kiev in less than three hours.” She faced Charlie. “Can you get us into the SVR’s comm network in less than three hours?”
“Are you crazy? I’m still sifting through Kannonball’s code — it’s slow going…”
“I thought so. Flight deck, prepare for departure. We’re heading to Kiev.”
Fisher crossed to the SMI table and frowned at Grim. “No argument?”
Her voice turned grave. “None — because I think I know why Kestrel’s going to Vilcha.”
13
Two hours and fifty-one minutes later, Paladin touched down at Kiev’s Zhuliany Airport, where Fisher and Briggs rented Suzuki C90T touring bikes for the trip over to Vilcha, with plans to arrive before sunset. The irradiated ghost town lay about seventy-nine miles northwest of Kiev and twenty-five miles east of Chernobyl in Ukraine.
Since its 1991 breakaway from the old Soviet Union, Ukraine remained a country vacillating between its past and uncertain future. The official language was Ukrainian, although Russian was the native tongue of a quarter of the country’s forty-five million citizens and was designated an official language in thirteen of its twenty-seven regions. The country had a working partnership with NATO yet remained home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Inside the exclusion zone, where all time had ceased in 1986, everything that was unequivocally Ukraine said so — only in Russian. The photos Fisher had reviewed during the flight over left a hollow feeling in his gut. Vilcha had been ripped straight from some postapocalyptic novel like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. The place would make them feel like the last men on earth.
They reached the main checkpoint — a meager striped pole barrier along with a ramshackle guardhouse that had a familiar red stop sign in English hanging crookedly from its side wall. They slowed, then came to a halt, and Fisher lifted the visor on his helmet, wincing slightly at the frigid air. He handed the old man smoking an unfiltered Camel an envelope stuffed with greenbacks.
The man narrowed his gaze on Fisher before accepting the envelope.
Fisher returned a hard gaze of his own and said curtly in Russian, “Andriy Kobin sends his regards.”
The guard seemed unimpressed — meaning he’d probably met Kobin before. He counted the money, turned back to his younger partner, then nodded. He faced Fisher and asked in broken English, “Why you go into zone?”
Fisher answered in Russian and without hesitation: “We’re on vacation.”
The old guard rubbed the corners of his eyes, removed his cigarette from his chapped lips, and revealed to Fisher the ugliest missing-toothed grin this side of Siberia. He turned back to his partner, then began to chuckle so violently that he broke into a fit of coughing. Once he finally cleared his throat, he beamed and cried, “Send postcard. Have fun! Good times!” He waved them on.