The pilot closed the cargo bay door and entered the small cabin where Arkady had observed the stowage of the container.
“Is everything all right?” the pilot asked quietly.
Arkady knew exactly what he meant. He wasn’t offended. This was a dangerous business.
Though he was a superbly well-trained and careful nuclear engineer, and had taken all the necessary precautions, the pilot couldn’t know that.
Instead of answering, Arkady opened his briefcase and extracted a small Geiger counter. He switched it on, walked to the cargo bay, and waved it over the container. They both listened to the welcome sound of soft, gentle ticking. The Geiger counter was picking up on the ambient radiation, higher than normal in the area surrounding a nuclear power plant, but nothing more than that.
The pilot nodded, satisfied, and without a word made his way to the cockpit. Arkady walked down the steps onto the tarmac. There was one thing more to take care of before takeoff.
Telling the Vor that the first stage was successful.
If this trip proved successful, there were many more such trips in the future. His Vor, an already powerful and rich man, would become one of the most powerful men in the history of the world.
Arkady opened the green cell phone. He had three of them, one for each stage of his long journey. Three brand-new cell phones, onetime use only. He dialed a long number, connecting to a remote mansion in the northern state of Vermont, in the United States.
The cell phone was unencrypted. If there was one thing guaranteed to catch the attention of America’s frighteningly powerful electronic surveillance agency, the NSA, it was an encrypted cell phone message to the United States. So there was no encryption and no nonsense about packages on their way or delivery times.
The NSA’s endless banks of supercomputers, trolling daily and tirelessly through a terabyte of data spanning the globe, was trip wired with a number of key words, package and delivery being two of them, that would have immediately picked up on those words.
The Vor’s money had bought the services of one of the junior NSA officers and the Vor had the list of words. The Vor thought of everything.
No packages, no deliveries. Their code was the weather.
The cell phone at the other end was picked up immediately. It, too, was a one-off, to be destroyed after the message. Arkady had memorized each of the Vor’s one-off cell phone numbers, though they were twelve digits each.
A laughable exercise. Child’s play. In Kolyma, numbers had kept him sane. He’d memorized pi to the thirteenth decimal, prime numbers up to the first five hundred, and had perfected in his head a risk calculation method the Vor used to this day.
The Vor himself, a literary genius, had memorized every word of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Vassily Worontzoff, the greatest man in the world. The man who’d saved his life and, perhaps more important, his sanity in Kolyma. His Vor.
“Slushayu.” I’m listening. The Vor’s deep voice, with its cultivated Muscovite accent, reassured Arkady at the deepest possible level that all was right in his world.
“Greetings,” he replied, looking up at the black clouds roiling in the sky. A fierce Siberian wind was blowing, and the temperature was well below freezing. He huddled more deeply into the sheepskin jacket the Vor had bought him. “I just thought you might like to know that the weather here is perfect. Sunny skies. Very warm weather.”
“Excellent,” the Vor replied. “Stay safe, my friend.”
Content that this enormously important project was off to a good start, Arkady removed the cell phone’s SIM card, threw it into the woods, where it disappeared into the dense undergrowth with a whisper of rustling leaves, and crushed the plastic casing of the phone beneath his heavy boot.
Arkady trotted back up the steps, sat down in the leather seat, buckled up, and made himself comfortable. This was the first stage of what was going to be a long journey.
The cabin was quiet and comfortable. The pilot had chosen well. The Tu-154 could take off from the gravel runway of the abandoned military airfield and could fly above the rest of Russian air traffic.
They were in the lower reaches of Siberia, the largest uninhabited land mass in the world. They would reach their destination—a remote airfield near Odessa—in about twelve hours, stopping only once to refuel. Then, to Budva, in Montenegro, by bus. From there, a ship would be waiting to take him and his cargo to Canada. The final leg would be a truck crossing into the United States, into Vermont.
The pilot quietly announced that they would be taking off in one minute. Exactly sixty seconds later, the sleek plane taxied, then lifted, heading west.
Parker’s Ridge, Vermont
November 18
The man with the shattered hands and the shattered soul used his stylus to punch the Off button on his cell phone. He still had the use of his index finger and thumb, but only as a pincer. The zealous prison guards who had taken a hammer to his hands had been thorough. He could use the stylus to tap out letters on a keyboard or a number pad. He could feed himself. He could pick up a glass of vodka.
It was enough.
Vassily Worontzoff glanced outside the big picture window of his study, noting the wind whipping the big leafless oak tree’s branches into a frenzy. Though it was only early afternoon, the sky was almost black. The forecast was for snow during the night and for the temperatures to dip well below zero. The forecaster had stated all of this in the somber tones of a man announcing certain disaster.
Vassily would have laughed if he had still been capable of laughter. How weak the Americans were! How easily they despaired! He was a survivor of Kolyma, the Soviet Union’s cruelest prison camp, where the prisoners had to work the gold mines in temperatures as low as minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
It had been so cold that tears froze on the cheeks. They fell with a merry tinkle to the hard frozen earth in crystals which belied the hell the prisoners lived in. The zeks called this “the whisper of the stars.”
How many tears he’d shed when he’d lost his beloved Katya. How the stars had whispered.
He’d written a poem about it, in ink made from burnt shoe leather on a piece of intact shirt, donated by a zek who, improbably, was being released. It had been published back in Moscow. When word filtered back from five thousand miles away that the zek Vassily Worontzoff had written a poem about Kolyma, the guards had gone into a frenzy of cruelty. They’d shattered his hands, thinking a writer without hands couldn’t write.
Foolish, foolish men.
So much had changed since then.
If the guards who’d tormented him weren’t dead of vodka poisoning, they were living on the equivalent of fifty dollars a month in some rathole back in Russia. And he—he was already rich beyond their comprehension and about to become one of the most powerful men on earth, able to switch great cities off like a light.
Able to be with his beloved Katya.
He’d lost her in Kolyma but he’d found her again in this small, pretty American backwater, with its birch trees and larches, so like the woods around the dacha they’d had outside Moscow.
Charity, she was called now. Charity Prewitt. Absurd Yankee name. He hated calling her Charity. She was Katya. His Katya, though she didn’t realize it yet.
But soon this charade would be over and she would be with him again.
He was the Vor. Immensely powerful.
So powerful he could bring Katya back from the dead.
Parker’s Ridge
“Read any good books lately?”
The pretty young woman stacking books and sorting papers in the Parker’s Ridge County Library turned around in surprise. It was closing time and the library wasn’t overwhelmed with people at the best of times. By closing time it was always deserted. Nick Ireland should know. He’d been staking it out for a week.