“We’ll have everything checked for DNA. Could even be a clue there, someone who was in her apartment, a friend we don’t know about who’s offering them a place.”
Fisher lifted the pendant toward the window for better light. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. What’s inside the glass?”
“That’s for you to figure out.”
“Hey, I picked up another piece of evidence at the café,” said Charlie from the driver’s seat.
“What’s that?” asked Fisher.
“The cute barista’s phone number.” Charlie wriggled his brows as he held up a slip of paper.
“You idiot,” said Grim, shaking her head.
Charlie seemed unfazed. “I have a Swiss girlfriend now. That’s the way I roll.”
Fisher turned to Briggs, who’d been deathly silent since entering the vehicle. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Just replaying that shot in my head.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. Like you said, the wind shifted. You still got him.”
Briggs sighed in disgust. “Not good enough.”
“All right, then, make it up to us next time—don’t miss.”
Briggs’s tone hardened. “I won’t.”
12
ACCORDING to Grim, Oliver “Ollie” Fenton, twenty-seven, was a graduate of North Carolina State’s analytics program and the first member of his family to attend college. He’d assumed he was headed for a career in “big data,” but after a rather serendipitous meeting with a CIA recruiter, he was quickly drafted into the ranks of the agency’s young “quants.” His analysis of the Arab Spring’s effects on the nation of Qatar had caught Grim’s eye, and his conclusions concurred with a recent report she’d read produced by the Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States, a program based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Of the handful of young analysts on board Paladin, he was the best, and Fisher felt comfortable with Grim giving Ollie the pendant and diary for analysis.
Meanwhile, she would go through the NSA’s most recent report of comm intercepts, analyzing calls made by Kasperov prior to the man’s disappearance, along with those received or placed by his girlfriend, by Nadia, and by a branching tree of dozens of others related to them.
Fisher took a seat beside Kobin, who was studying a map of Russia from one of Charlie’s computer stations.
“Hey, asshole,” Kobin said without looking up.
Fisher spun the man’s chair around and leaned forward, getting squarely in Kobin’s face. “I heard you got something for me.”
“I’ll need some guarantees.”
“Guarantees?”
“I’m a businessman.”
“Well, all right,” Fisher began slowly, lowering his voice. “I guarantee that if you don’t give me what I need, there’s going to be pain in your future. A lot of pain.”
“Come on, Fisher, you know what I’m saying . . . I’m just talking about him, Kestrel. I don’t want him brought back here. I don’t want to see him . . . ever . . . again.”
“Because you shot him in the head?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Hard to tell anymore, right? Good guys . . . bad guys . . .”
“So, you’re not planning to bring him back here, right?” A tremor had worked its way into his voice.
“Actually, my plan was to put the two of you in your cell, stand back, and watch the smackdown. We could take bets on how long you’d last.”
Kobin drew his head back. “Give me some fucking credit. Where Chuck Norris ends, I begin . . .”
Fisher couldn’t help but grin.
“See, see, I made you laugh. Now you’re amused and we can strike a deal.”
“Tell me where Kestrel is, otherwise—”
“All right, all right!”
Fisher stood back and folded his arms over his chest. “Talk.”
“He’s not coming here, right?”
“I doubt it. But if he does, you won’t have to see him.”
“You promise?”
Fisher raised one brow. “Does a promise mean anything to a scumbag like you?”
“Coming from you it does.”
“I’m flattered. Now . . . talk.”
“Okay. Two of Kestrel’s old army buddies used to work for me. Point is I hired a lot of those old Russian spec ops boys. The government doesn’t pay ’em shit and then fucks ’em over in retirement, so they used to do a lot of freelance work for me once they got out. I even recruited a few of them right out of the exclusion zone.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Fisher. “Been there before. Long time ago.”
Kobin turned and pointed to the map. “It hasn’t changed. Twenty-six hundred square kilometers around Chernobyl—where the nuclear reactor blew and they have three-eyed fish and trees that glow in the dark.”
“What the hell were they doing there?”
“If these guys couldn’t find work in private security or something else, a lot of ’em got really desperate, turned to game poaching, illegal logging, and metal salvage operations inside the zone. Some of them got legit jobs giving tours, but a lot of them became criminals—especially the ones with a disability like a limp or something. They’d get help from the samosely—the people who refused to evacuate, like a lot of old people, or the ones who resettled illegally. You wouldn’t believe how many people are still going in there, looking for a quick score.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“Yep, some of ’em are that desperate. If you’ve been there, you might remember the place is controlled by the State Agency of Ukraine on the Exclusion Zone Management. They call it S-A-E-Z. Of course yours truly—being a Ukrainian American—has friends in the agency. Good friends.”
“So you picked up Kestrel there? I can’t believe he’s that desperate.”
“He’s not. I just talked to one of his army buddies, actually an old mentor who got him into special forces in the first place. He told me that before Kestrel moved to St. Petersburg, he spent some time as a kid with his foster parents in a little town called Vilcha; it’s right there in the exclusion zone.”
“So he’s gone back to a contaminated town to what, reminisce?”
“No, here’s where it gets good. Security’s tight, like I said. You don’t get past the checkpoint without papers. So I talked to my friends at SAEZ, and they issued a temporary contractor’s clearance pass to a man named . . . wait for it . . . Glib Lakeev.”
“That’s one of Kestrel’s aliases.”
“Bingo. And according to my contacts at SAEZ, he hasn’t entered the zone yet. But the pass is only good for three days, so that Russian fucker is planning something— and we know where he’s gonna be.”
“And you think it’s Vilcha?”
“Tell you why. He never worked in the exclusion zone like his buddies. Vilcha is his only connection to it. If he’s going into the zone, I bet everything that he’s going there.”
“To do what?”
Kobin laughed through his big nose. “What the fuck do I look like? A mind reader? Maybe he’s going in there for a beer with a radioactive corpse.”
Fisher turned to Grim, who’d been eavesdropping on the conversation. “What do you think?”
“I think we can be in Kiev in less than three hours.” She faced Charlie. “Can you get us into the SVR’s comm network in less than three hours?”
“Are you crazy? I’m still sifting through Kannonball’s code—it’s slow going . . .”
“I thought so. Flight deck, prepare for departure. We’re heading to Kiev.”
Fisher crossed to the SMI table and frowned at Grim. “No argument?”
Her voice turned grave. “None—because I think I know why Kestrel’s going to Vilcha.”
13
TWO hours and fifty-one minutes later, Paladin touched down at Kiev’s Zhuliany Airport, where Fisher and Briggs rented Suzuki C90T touring bikes for the trip over to Vilcha, with plans to arrive before sunset. The irradiated ghost town lay about seventy-nine miles northwest of Kiev and twenty-five miles east of Chernobyl in Ukraine.