“I was not aware the FSB employed beautiful actresses,” the young man said, in a foolish attempt at flirting. The smell of alcohol clung to his wool coat like an extra layer of clothing.
Aleksandra ignored him and pressed the accelerator, forcing his bejeweled partner to scamper out of her path.
With her petite figure and pouting lips, Kanatova felt she looked more like someone’s baby sister than a beautiful actress. Uncommonly rich mahogany red hair stood out in stark contrast to the golden green of her eyes. Evidently, many men preferred the baby-sister look. She heard it all the time from her male counterparts when they were trying to get her into bed.
It was no accident that Aleksandra found herself in St. Petersburg. Mikhail’s last report had mentioned the possibility of loose plutonium hitting the black market. Old Soviet ordnance popped up with great regularity now, and it was the job of her unit to track it down. More often than not, the weapons were rifles, or dilapidated shoulder-fired antitank missiles that were more likely to blow up the shooter than the intended target.
Mikhail’s find had been different. If he had been correct, the weapons that had gotten him killed were far worse than a few rusted RPGs.
When she was a child, Aleksandra’s uncle had told her frightening stories of Baba Yaga. Sometimes called the Bone Mother, this Slavic folk villainess was a wicked old hag who lived deep in the forest. Her house moved through the woods on gnarled chicken feet and was surrounded by human skulls. The Bone Mother was attended by a set of bodiless hands and her best friend and lover was Koshchey the Deathless, a bearded old sorcerer who rode naked on an enchanted horse calling down whirlwinds and stealing little girls. Sometimes the Bone Mother gave secret advice to children who were on quests — but more often, she simply ate them with sharpened iron teeth.
As frightening as the stories were, the Baba Yaga Mikhail Polzin proposed was far more dangerous.
Aleksandra slowed to allow an ambulance to pass. She glanced at the pile of folders on the passenger seat. Her willingness to use her looks along with her persuasive demeanor had netted her a sizable stable of informants from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok.
Information from this source said Rustam Daudov, a Chechen resistance leader, had been in Uzbekistan at the same time Mikhail was killed. Stories of Baba Yaga were rife among Chechen terrorists who considered such a thing the holy grail of weapons caches. And they were right to. Rustam Daudov would do anything to get his filthy hands on such a find. Aleksandra had put out feelers with every contact she could think of, offering twenty thousand American dollars for information regarding the terrorist’s present whereabouts. It was too big a coincidence that a killer of his prominence had been in the same city as Mikhail on the day he was murdered.
Days went by with nothing.
Then a college student had fallen dead of radiation poisoning at St. Petersburg Clinical Hospital No. 15. Local agents said he’d died of massive exposure, but there was no material found. Kanatova’s superiors had sent her to check the local pulse and see what she could learn. Reports had pointed first to the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Gatchina. A lonely widowed scientist there who seemed overly interested in Aleksandra’s freckled nose assured her the institute was missing no plutonium. He did, however, remember that a Chechen resembling Daudov’s description had been asking questions. The last he knew, this Chechen had rented a flat in the suburb of Pushkin, five blocks from Vitebsk Station.
Pitiful official estimates initially put the Vitebsk death toll at eleven. Accounting for traditional Russian understatement when it came to catastrophe, Aleksandra assumed the count would nudge upward exponentially in unreleased reports. It was only a matter of time before the media began to hazard all sorts of guesses and accusations. Unlike the past sensibilities of Pravda and the glory days of the USSR, Russia’s modern media had grown into a ravenous beast that had to be fed. The first releases to go out on the Internet said a train had derailed. A ruptured gas line had been the next blogosphere theory.
Five minutes after detonation, reports of a bombing in an American train station had ticked across the bottom of the television in Aleksandra’s hotel room. A moment after that, politsia radios buzzed with word of a bomb in Vitebsk.
Rescue workers in yellow reflective vests swarmed the area like ants. Some carried stretchers laden with mangled bodies out of the smoldering building. Vents of steam hissed here and there as fire crews worked to control secondary blazes. Aleksandra drove past a green commuter bus that lay knocked on its side like a wounded dinosaur, blown over by the initial blast that had torn the heavy wooden doors off the station. She shook her head at a pair of stockinged female legs protruding into the snow under the street side of the bus, their owner crushed like the witch from The Wizard of Oz.
Past the overturned bus, Aleksandra maneuvered around a queue of three ambulances and nosed the Lada up against a sooty, three-foot snowbank in front of an idling blue and white police truck. A stout man wearing a digital camouflage parka bearing the three stars of a senior politsia lieutenant waved his arms and shouted for her to keep moving. She turned the key to kill the engine as he stomped up to the car door.
Lieutenant Sergey Tarasov stopped short and his graying mustache curled into a full grimace when he recognized Kanatova. She was well aware of the krysha protection rackets he set up for the pimps and their prostitutes in St. Petersburg. Krysha meant “roof” in Russian, and the lieutenant provided such a shelter from government meddling as long as he was well compensated.
Russia was a land of workarounds where the shortest distance between two points often meant leveraging dangerous liaisons. Aleksandra’s knowledge of Tarasov’s criminal activities made him a possible threat — but it also allowed her a certain degree of control as long as she didn’t stretch him to the breaking point. And this she found vastly more important than the Russian mob paying a “police tax” to be left alone with their whoring ventures.
Kanatova adjusted the blue fox ushanka on her head and dropped her car keys in the pocket of her down parka. Deep snow crunched under her boots as she surveyed the riot of activity. A flick of her wrist signaled the snarling Lieutenant Tarasov to follow. He was a pig, a slob, and most certainly a rapist, but his rank might come in handy tonight. Aleksandra gave her head a shake as if she’d sneezed, annoyed at the very stench of the man. Hers was such a nasty business.
The five doors under the double-columned windows at the near end of the station were gone. Dark fans of soot and debris had spewed across the snow from each gaping hole as if some angry giant had taken a broom to the inside of the great hall and swept everything out into the street. A tangle of gray hair and blood-sodden wool was wrapped around a yellow traffic bollard beyond the doors, flung there by the blast. Closer inspection revealed pieces of charred limb embedded in the snow.
White goose down flakes sifted around flashing emergency lights. Heavy snow dampened the cries of the wounded — and gave the feeling of a garish snow globe of carnage. Aleksandra paused twenty meters from the demolished doors beside a woman’s high-heel boot. It was expensive, probably American, and made of black leather. A five-inch shard of shattered bone stuck from the boot top.
“Ah, yes,” the pig Tarasov said, sneering as he misjudged her reason for stopping. “This is most certainly close enough for your investigation. It is well and good to stop outside the real horror. The destruction inside the station is much more gruesome. It could be quite traumatic to one not accustomed to—”