Kestler was briefly and literally speechless, actually stumbling as he hurried from the car to hold open the rear door for her. Prick teaser meets prick teased, thought Charlie, watching the performance. She shook her head against Kestler taking a large plastic workbox and a thick plastic suit-carrier type sheath from her, following both into the rear and directing to Charlie a sculpted-toothed, favoured-mortal-to-local-aborigine smile as she did so. She gave an apologetic hand flutter to Kestler that her equipment took up too much room to allow him in the back as well. As the disgruntled Kestler got into the front she said, ‘I’m still not sure what the fuck I’m doing here but I hardly expected to hit the ground running! What have we got?’
Kestler noticeably blinked at the ‘fuck’. He said, ‘You haven’t met Charlie. Assigned like I am. From England.’
Hillary twisted back in the rear seat. ‘Hi! I thought you were local!’
‘They’re different from us: they wear animal skins and grunt a lot,’ said Charlie.
She laughed, unrebuked. ‘I thought they did that in England, too! And painted themselves with woad.’
‘Not in London. Only out in the country.’
The car began to slow, impeded by the congestion from part of the inner ring road as well as the Arbat being simultaneously closed off. The driver asked Kestler which scene they wanted and when Kestler identified the Arbat, turned on his emergency siren and lights and overtook the stalled traffic on the wrong side of the road, flashing for street patrol Militia to clear intersections ahead of them, and Charlie was glad they had accepted Popov’s suggestion to take an official vehicle. Knowing the closeness of the Arbat Charlie became serious, answering Hillary’s initial question while Kestler was engaged with the driver.
She listened, just as seriously. ‘What’s this Arbat place?’
‘Tourist quarter. Largely pedestrianized.’
‘How wide an area has been cleared?’
‘Extensive, from what we were told this morning.’
‘It had better be, if these lorries are contaminated.’
‘Not predominantly because of the health risk,’ qualified Kestler, from the front. ‘The chief concern is that the general public – abroad as well as here in Moscow – will find out what’s happened.’
‘Tell me you’re kidding me that no official warning has been given!’ demanded the girl.
‘We’re not kidding you,’ assured Charlie, flatly.
‘This isn’t a joke, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Welcome to the real world,’ invited Charlie.
‘This isn’t the real world! It’s the unreal world!’ She looked searchingly around the car, then back to Kestler and Charlie. ‘Where’s your protective stuff?’
Kestler and Charlie exchanged looks. Kestler said, ‘We don’t have any.’
Hillary said, ‘This isn’t happening! I just know this isn’t happening!’
‘It is,’ argued Charlie. ‘Look!’
The scene ahead was like one from a surrealist movie. For fifty yards in the direction they were approaching the road and the surrounding pavements were crowded with milling, other-way focused people and protesting, horn-blasting vehicles cut off from a view of absolutely unmoving and unpeopled emptiness, as cleanly as a sharp knife separates one side of a cake from the other, by metal-fences barriers hedged by shoulder-to-shoulder Militia. As far as they could see beyond the barrier there were no cars. There were no trolleys. The windows of every building and shop were blank. There was a fountain which didn’t spout water. It looked exactly like the desolation Charlie imagined would follow a nuclear explosion.
‘Just an ordinary, downtown Moscow street investigation, folks!’ mocked Hillary, making an up-and-down hand cupped masturbating gesture. ‘Nothing to see! Just move along now; all go home!’ The mockery stopped. ‘How’s this going to be kept quiet, for Christ’s sake?’
Charlie had had the same thought listening to Natalia itemizing the arrest warrants at that morning’s meeting. Instead of answering he physically pulled Hillary against the seat as they reached the barrier. ‘Sit back! Don’t go forward!’
Unprotesting Hillary remained where Charlie had hauled her. As the barriers were briefly moved aside there was the pop of flash bulbs and the sharp whitening of television lights. Obediently pressed against the seat, Hillary said, ‘I just know there’s got to be a reason for what you’ve just done!’
‘Three letters a foot high all over your back,’ said Charlie. ‘God knows who the media were back there but it’s supposedly free here now. How’d you think they’d interpret an FBI scene-of-crime scientific officer, especially one looking like you do, in an ordinary, downtown Moscow street?’
‘Buried deep down somewhere I’m sure there was a compliment,’ grinned Hillary.
‘Buried deep down under a lot of practical common sense, maybe,’ half confirmed Charlie. He was surprised to see the bearded Aleksai Popov already at the scene, which was around a sharp curve in the approach road and completely out of sight of the road block. Popov was surrounded by uniformed and plainclothed officials, grouped about ten metres from the neatly parked, side-of-the-road cluster of vehicles. None wore any sort of protective clothing. Charlie counted four men around the lorries. All appeared to be wearing cotton overalls, like Hillary, but with their faces obscured with hamster-pouched air-filtering masks.
‘Doesn’t look as if I’ll need this,’ said the girl, patting the suit-carrier. ‘Maybe an idea for your guys to stay with the others; though.’
‘You speak Russian?’ challenged Kestler, simply.
Hillary grimaced. ‘Can’t think of everything. Wait until I check for levels.’
Kestler identified Popov as they approached on foot and Charlie was uncritically aware how long it took Natalia’s lover to get his eyes up to the American girl’s face. Popov greeted her in English and said the Russian technicians were expecting her.
From the way she bent her body away from it, her equipment box was heavy. When she was about five metres from the lorries she put it down and took out what looked like a hand-held mobile phone and a mask quite different from those the Russians were wearing. There were no side filters but it was looped to a back-pack canister she slipped expertly on as she continued towards the vehicles. The Russian scientists stood together as a group, watching her, and there was a flurry of hand language when she reached them. Hillary vaulted lightly into the rear of each truck, disappearing for what seemed a long time in every one. After the interior check she went crab-wise beneath them, her hand-held device raised aloft and afterwards checked each cab and finally the BMW before gesturing back to them. Once more, uninvited, Charlie tagged along. There was no objection from anyone. Popov went with them. By the time they got to the lorries, Hillary had the mask unclipped, hanging loosely at her throat.
‘Clean enough to take the kids to school,’ she greeted. To Kestler she said, ‘Ask them what the reading was when they got here.’
Kestler did and a balding technician with a grey, chin-fringed beard said five, offering a much larger instrument for Hillary to look. Charlie attached himself to them as she established, through Kestler, the exact time of their arrival, the scale of dissipation since then and the precise places in each vehicle, including the BMW, that had given off a radiation reading. Hillary ended the scientific exchange with a smiling handshake and Popov said, ‘I’ll let you have the written forensic report.’