Her father had been a Red Army officer. She’d never really gotten to know him. In 1987, when Aleksa was barely five years old, an American-supplied Stinger missile brought down his helicopter in Afghanistan. A few handwritten letters to her from her father and photographs of him — always in uniform — were all that she had left of him. Her memories of him were only the distant memories of a young child and perpetually faded and grew hazier through the passage of time.
Nine years later, Aleksa’s older brother, was conscripted into the army of the new Russian Federation and ambushed by Chechen separatists while on patrol in Grozny. He was pulled out of his burning armored vehicle and decapitated. Her brother came to her mind with greater clarity than their dad. As was often the case with siblings, they’d played together as children and fought with one another in their teenage years. A day didn’t go by where she didn’t think of him and wonder where he would be now and what type of man he might have become.
Her mother died a year later of alcohol poisoning, from an extreme intake of vodka over a three day binge, leaving twenty year old Aleksa, who was then preparing to go to university abroad, completely alone in the world.
Aleksa left Russia the first chance she got and studied journalism and writing at the University of Buckingham in Britain. Shortly after graduation, she went to work for Reuters, taking assignments in the former Soviet republics. She returned to Russia in 2008 when Boris Gorshkov, a well-known Russian opposition journalist and her closest friend, started his own newspaper investigating corruption at the highest levels of the Russian Federation. In the process the paper made powerful enemies, including corrupt government officials, oligarchs, and organized crime bosses.
Two years ago, Boris Gorshkov was killed in an alley behind a Moscow bar. He was shot three times in the head at close range. There had been neither signs of a struggle nor a search of his body, and his wallet and personal belongings were all left untouched. But local police classified the crime as a mugging. A Moscow Militia lieutenant later sought out Aleksa and told her, on condition of anonymity, that an FSB captain had pressured the militia lieutenant’s department into not pursuing the investigation and that FSB was to take over as a matter of state security.
Boris’ younger brother, Grigory, took over as editor-in-chief of the paper, which has since gone mostly digital. Aleksa remained onboard as its chief national correspondent. She still thought of Boris constantly. She’d held onto this idealistic notion of finding his killer and seeing him brought to justice, but as years passed, that seemed increasingly unlikely.
Like Boris, Aleksa too had been the victim of a supposed mugging. Less than a year after his death, she was ambushed outside her apartment by two men. They beat her and put her in the hospital with a concussion, broken nose, three broken ribs, and a head wound requiring seven stitches. She has found her apartment burglarized and wired for audio surveillance and had her laptop computer, with all of her files, stolen. Her e-mail accounts have been hacked. She’s found her name placed on terrorist no-fly watch lists, and she’s received anonymous death threats.
It was the risks that came with engaging in the practice of independent journalism in Russia.
Within the last year alone, there had been over forty assaults against Russian journalists. Ten were murdered. Each of them had covered corruption from the lowest to highest levels of the Russian government. An oligarch bribing government officials for gas contracts. A company owned by a mayor’s brother removing trees in a local forest to build new roads. Only when an incident is widely publicized by international media will the police investigate. A few hit men with mafia connections have been arrested, but never the people at the top who contracted the hit men. New legislation with safeguards to protect journalists is proposed but never passed by the Duma.
Aleksa and her colleagues were now banned from government press conferences. Public affairs departments from government agencies were prohibited from speaking to anyone from her organization and other banned news services. The FSB formed a special unit to investigate and catch government employees providing information to reporters in an effort to dry up their sources.
European newspapers and television networks continued to offer Aleksa positions and frequently turned to her as a source inside Russia. They offered Aleksa her choice of assignments and competitive salary, but she continued to decline. She held no idealistic delusions about her work and changing Russia. She never regarded herself as an activist or liberal crusader, but she would maintain that above all else she was a loyal friend.
She stayed in Russia only for Boris and the others, and continued the work they had believed in and died for. She thought to do otherwise was to turn her back on them and abandon them simply because it became convenient and safer to do so. She thought that perhaps she would accept a job with the BBC or The International Herald Tribune and move west and find a man only after Boris Gorshkov’s killers were identified, prosecuted, and sentenced.
“What about you, Nick? Is that even your name?”
“Yeah.”
But no one ever called him that. Through school, the army, and the Agency, he’d always just been Avery.
He gave Aleksa the condensed version and explained how his mother had died when he was seven — he never really knew her — and he joined the army immediately after high school, to get away from his abusive, alcoholic father. He never saw his dad since. After three years in the army, he passed Ranger selection.
When she pressed him about relationships, he told Aleksa about how in Afghanistan, waiting to assault an al-Qaeda stronghold, he’d received a letter from his fiancé—a girl he’d known since high school — calling off the wedding and ending their relationship. She’d met someone else, a med student with a condo, BMW, high earning potential, and who was there for her. Avery hated her and never spoke to her again.
After three tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, he left the army to work as an independent security contractor. He omitted the part about CIA, but he thought Aleksa was smart enough to have it figured out.
It was a strange conversation, because it was the first time in years he’d spoken to anyone, let alone a woman, about himself. He didn’t like the feeling of opening up to someone, and he already regretted this conversation, but at least it kept her mind off what happened tonight and seemed to calm her down.
“Thank you, Nick.”
Aleksa was in the bed, under the blanket. Avery still sat at the desk, five feet away.
“For what?”
“What do you think? For everything you did tonight. Just for being there.”
Fuck. “Try to get some sleep.”
TWENTY-ONE
Belarus’s Institute for Power and Nuclear Research is located in Sosny, a suburb about twenty miles outside of Minsk. This is where Belarus housed its first nuclear reactor, which was shut down after the Cold War and was no longer operational. With help from Russia and Iran, Lukashenko intended to re-start the reactor and build nuclear power plants. The first reactor, currently under construction, is supposed to go online in 2016, the second in 2018. Western intelligence agencies had little doubt that the plants will be used to develop bombs and allow Belarus to re-claim its status as a nuclear power. Belarus, with a small inventory of SS-25 Topol missiles they hadn’t returned to Russia after the Cold War, already possessed a delivery system for warheads.