“What do you think I know?” he asked with a confused smile, trying to sound innocent and even contriving to come off as aggrieved. Nice try, but I wiped that smile off his face with what I said next.
“Tell me about Valen Oruraka.”
I watched his eyes when I dropped that name. They widened until I could see whites all around the irises. His mouth sagged open, too. Yeah, he knew.
“Or should we call him Oleg Sokolov?” I asked.
In a hollow voice filled with equal parts shock and dread, Rolgavitch gasped, “How do you know this name…?”
“How about we accept that I do know it and go from there?” I said. “What’s really on the front burner here is what you can tell me about him.”
“No! No, I can’t,” he protested. “They will kill me.”
I gave him a wide, white, toothy smile. The kind of smile I never show to people who I care even a little bit about. The kind of smile I’d never show to my lover, Junie Flynn. I’ve been told that it is not a very sane smile. Fair enough.
“ They’re not here right now, Yuri,” I said quietly. “ I am.”
Ghost gave a soft whuff.
When he sat there and stubbornly shook his head, I reached over to the row of framed photos on his desk and turned them around, one by one. Wife. Teenage son. Preteen daughter. Baby. I angled the pictures so that their faces were looking at him. I sat down on the edge of the desk and laid the pistol on my thighs.
“Go on,” I said quietly, “tell me how badly you want me to have to insist?”
CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
Lilith sat at the small desk in a far corner of the hotel. Her travel bag lay open but unpacked on the bed and she was methodically strip-cleaning the two unregistered handguns left for her by the local Arklight team.
Her laptop, a small Oracle remote unit in a hardened case, stood ready on the desk. The beatific face of Mona Lisa smiled benignly at her for hours. Then, suddenly, a voice spoke.
“You have a call from your sister Qadira,” said the voice of Oracle.
Lilith set down the bottle of gun oil and tapped a key. The wizened face of the field team leader filled the screen.
“Tell me you found something,” said Lilith.
“Ohan was working for a group of Russians. He said they claimed to be a private organization, but when I, um, pressed him, Ohan said that he believed that some or all of them may have ties to the Kremlin.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“He only knew one of them. A woman who calls herself Gadyuka.”
“Ah,” said Lilith. “So, she’s real, then?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say about her?”
“More than he wanted to. He was very afraid of her.”
Lilith nodded. “Which makes sense if Gadyuka’s reputation is to be believed. The viper is supposed to be very dangerous. Highly skilled. An assassin who is making the move into management. Does he know her real name?”
“He did,” said Qadira, emphasizing the past tense. “Ohan trusted no one and put his own spies on her. They’ve been keeping her under surveillance for him. Ohan even allowed Gadyuka to capture and kill two of them to make her think she had cleaned up the surveillance. The two sacrificial lambs were fed information that implicated a different person, so she never suspected who was tracking her. But Ohan’s network is huge and subtle and very practiced. In the end, though, he gave me everything.”
“Then give it to me.”
“I’m transferring it all to you through Oracle,” said Qadira, then added, “Lilith, this Gadyuka is in the United States. In Washington, D.C.”
Lilith hissed. It sounded like she was in pain, but it was something else entirely.
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
We had a very nice talk, Yuri Rolgavitch and me.
He kept looking at the pictures of his family. He ugly cried. I handed him the box of tissues from his desk. He sat on the leather visitor chair and I sat on the edge of his desk, swinging a foot. Chatting. Ghost came over and began sniffing at Yuri’s naughty bits. The dog has a theatrical flair at times.
Rolgavitch gave me what he had. Every other sentence out of his mouth, though, was him begging me not to hurt his family. He peed his pants. Tears and snot ran down his face. He told me absolutely everything he knew.
The bad news was that he didn’t actually know what Valen was up to. They were friends from high school and he swore he’d tried to talk Valen out of changing his name. The story his friend gave him was that he was reinventing himself because there was a lingering stink on the family. His uncle, Dr. Abram Golovin, had been the structural engineer at Chernobyl and was blamed for that catastrophe. It was a good story, because I’d encountered enough former Soviets who had also re-created their lives and identities as a way of distancing themselves from things they may have done for the Party. Rolgavitch sold it hard, too. He said he kept in touch because Valen was a friend.
I sat for a while just smiling at him. Letting him wonder how much of it I believed.
“Why did Valen study seismology?” I asked.
“Because he did not believe Dr. Golovin was really at fault. It always hurt Valen that everyone blamed his uncle. Valen went to great lengths to obtain his uncle’s design plans and bulk research. He even got materials that had been classified above top secret during the old Soviet Union days. Valen studied seismology but also geophysics and structural engineering. He reconstructed the landscape and geology of the area around Chernobyl to an incredible degree. Three-D models, spreadsheets, deep data analysis. He wanted to prove that the accident was because of a fluke earthquake or something else that a standard geological survey would not have predicted. He learned everything he could about random earthquakes and plate tectonics. He surpassed many of his teachers. Valen is a genius.”
“Uh-huh. So, tell me, what has your genius friend been doing with all that knowledge about earthquakes?”
“I… well, I really don’t know. We haven’t spoken in quite some time.”
“Uh-huh.”
The last e-mail between him and Valen that Nikki found was six years old, but I didn’t for a minute believe they were no longer connected.
“You know something about it, though,” I prompted.
“I really don’t know,” he insisted, fresh sweat rolling down his flushed cheeks. “I asked once but he told me that I wasn’t allowed to know. People have been killed for asking about these things.”
“That’s not my problem,” I said. “Maybe you saw the news yesterday about what happened in the United States. Yeah, I can see you have, so tell me something that will keep me from doing very bad things. What’s Valen up to?”
“I don’t know,” he said quickly. “I’m not on that level, and was warned never to ask more than I was told.”
“Warned by who?”
He hesitated. I made a subtle finger movement that was a cue for Ghost to growl and show his teeth. Yes, I trained Ghost to do that. What can I say?
Rolgavitch flinched. “A woman. I don’t know her real name. No one associated with this uses real names. She is called Gadyuka.”
I wanted to close my eyes and say Ahhhhhh, but did not. I am, after all, a professional.