Avery thought that within a couple years, it’d be the North Korean nuclear crisis all over again, this time in Europe. At least by then, he’d be too old to be doing this shit any longer.
Avery and Aleksa arrived in Sosny at 10:00AM in a rental car, a Volvo he’d picked up at the airport. He drove this time, wanting to be the one behind the wheel in case a situation arose requiring tactical defensive driving. He’d left her alone at the hotel when he picked up the car. She’d insisted on going with him, but if the mafiya used their connections to have the police and KGB looking for her, the airport was the last place she should be.
When he returned for her at the hotel, two hours later, he found her curled up in a ball on the floor, behind the bed, sobbing and shaking, but she thankfully snapped out of it quickly, overcome with relief when she saw him, as if she hadn’t expected him to come back at all. She was still shaken up from what had happened last night, barely twelve hours ago, and she hadn’t slept well, waking up every hour or two from vivid nightmares reliving the attack. Avery didn’t tell her that she’d probably be messed up for a long time and would probably need professional help to deal with it. Once, in her sleep, she was badly shaking and crying out, and Avery had to gently wake her up and calm her down.
Avery would be relieved when they parted ways.
Other than the first time he saw someone die violently, a buddy in the army, Avery had never reacted that way toward violence again. After Mike Gomez bled out in Avery’s arms, aboard a Black Hawk, Avery had simply decided that this wasn’t something he wanted to deal with, and he put up brick walls in his mind and secured everything behind it. He just hoped the walls stayed intact.
Yuri’s contact was a nuclear technician named Vasil Romanchuk. Fifty-six years old, a functioning alcoholic, his time at the research facility went back to the Cold War days. He’d helped Yuri, coming forward with what he knew of the uranium transfer, only because he’d become increasingly suspicious that he was being set up to take the blame. If anything went wrong with the HEU deal, or word of it became public, he suspected the KGB would show up at his home to arrest him for selling weapons grade material to the Krasnaya Mafiya. Then he’d probably be killed quietly in prison, and the Belarusian government would have covered up its involvement in the affair.
The institute itself was a sprawling complex consisting of several low-laying compounds and two silos occupying a large plot of land with clean, freshly paved streets and lush, well-maintained lawn. There was a heavier uniformed police presence around the premises, Avery observed as he drove south on Mullovsoye Road, along the northeastern length of the facility’s perimeter, surveying the target along the way.
“That building is where the HEU is stored,” Aleksa said. She pointed to a large warehouse sitting behind a high fence, with a guard booth and barrier at the street entrance. Avery could make out a uniformed security officer checking the credentials of a car that had just pulled up.
“Where are you supposed to meet the contact?” Avery asked.
Aleksa directed him to a street café three blocks away. There were other restaurants and stores nearby, and she said that it was an area where staff and students from the nuclear institute regularly came on their breaks, and there’d be nothing suspicious about Romanchuk leaving work to come here.
“What’s the contact look like?”
“He’s short, overweight, bald, and has a mustache and glasses. And he’s always pale, because he rarely sees the sun. He’s either inside here working or at home drinking until he passes out.”
“I’m going to take a walk and have a look around. Litvin’s thugs or the police may be looking out for you, and we don’t know if Yuri compromised the meet before he died.”
Avery didn’t need to mention that Yuri’s killers would have tortured him and put him through hell before finally killing him. He had to assume that the Ukrainian reporter had revealed everything he knew.
“But Vasil doesn’t know you,” Aleksa protested. “He’ll never talk to you. You’ll scare him off. Besides, he doesn’t speak English.”
“I’m only going to check for surveillance and see if he’s even here,” Avery said. “If he is, and it’s clear, I’ll come get you, and you’ll talk to him.”
“You can’t accompany me. He’ll already be suspicious and paranoid because Yuri’s not here. I can’t walk in with a stranger.”
“I’m not going inside,” Avery assured her, trying to hide his impatience. “I’m going to stay outside and keep an eye on things while you take care of business, okay? Tell him whatever bullshit you need to about Yuri, just get him to talk.”
“I can do that.”
“Are you sure?” Avery pulled over four blocks from the meet site. He put the car in park and turned to face Aleksa. He doubted her readiness to go into a potentially dangerous situation alone. “If you’re not, tell me now.”
The comment had the desired effect. Her expression hardened. “I said I can do it.”
Avery left it at that and got out of the car. Aleksa slipped behind the wheel and watched him walk away. He carried his Glock beneath his windbreaker this time. If they were ambushed again, he wanted to be prepared. If the enemy did send someone else after them, they’d have more guys and guns this time. They only survived last time because the mafiya killers had been expecting Aleksa to be alone, and they made the dangerous assumption that she’d be an easy hit. But now they knew she was accompanied by someone who could put up a fight.
It was 10:25AM, thirty five minutes before the meet. Vasil Romanchuk always took a break at this time, Aleksa had explained, but usually at a different restaurant. He switched locations when meeting with Aleksa and Yuri, because he knew the KGB and security would be familiar with his normal daily routines and patterns, and most personnel at a sensitive facility like the Institute for Power and Nuclear Research would warrant a close watch by the KGB.
Avery first executed a rudimentary surveillance detection run, covering the distance to the meet site and doubling back to cover his tracks. It came up dry, but, by necessity, it had been a rush job, plus he wasn’t familiar with the area to do a proper job of it.
He soon made his way back around to the café. This time, when he walked past, he spotted a fat man fitting the contact’s description sitting at a table alone. Avery crossed the street, called Aleksa on her cell phone, and told her to proceed to the meet with Romanchuk.
A minute later, he spotted Aleksa parking across the street from the café. As she got out of the Volvo and walked down the sidewalk toward the café, Avery’s eyes never rested, taking in every face and vehicle nearby and assessing what they were doing and their threat level. A lot of passing eyes gazed over Aleksa, but Avery easily attributed that to the attention any reasonably attractive woman received from males.
As Aleksa entered the café and sat down across from the fat man — Avery could just barely see them from across the street through the front window of the café—he returned to the Volvo, got behind the wheel, keyed the ignition, and continued watching and waiting, his muscles clenched tight and the hairs on the back of his neck stood out. He didn’t know why he was so on edge, but he trusted his instincts to tell him when something was wrong, and they were screaming at him to grab Aleksa and get the hell away from here.
Barely four minutes later, a police car pulled up near the café and rolled to a stop. Two officers got out and went inside. Nothing unusual, Avery told himself, but he tensed when he saw a second police cruiser drive past. The officer riding shotgun eyed Avery as they passed him. Avery looked straight ahead until the cruiser was gone, then observed it in his rearview corner as it turned the corner.