Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (28 page)

Occasionally they passed a cluster of ancient dachas, built in or before the Communist era. At one time they’d been government-owned, family vacation retreats awarded to good little comrades. Now, Mihkas explained, they were private homes.

Within their tidily fenced lots well-tended vegetable gardens grew. Mercy felt their residents’ quiet pride in the way the cottages were kept up with fresh paint and swept stoops.

“We are close.” Mihkas cleared his throat before continuing. “Just other side of those woods come the black villages.” The evacuated towns left unpopulated since the explosion. “Where you want to see first? The reactors? Everyone want to see reactors.”

“Pripyat first,” Mercy said firmly.

“You won’t find your friend there,” Mihkas grumbled. “Where she is staying? I take you to her first.”

“We go to Pripyat first,” Mercy repeated, an edge to her tone. “That’s what we’re paying you for, to take us where
we
want to go.”

That seemed to remind the Ukrainian of the financial aspect of the trip. “Pay me fee now, please.” He leaned forward between the front seats, his breath smelling of stale borscht and something alcoholic. “Half now. Standard procedure.”

“All right.” Mercy unbuttoned her suit jacket and lifted away a Velcro-sealed lining to reveal a hidden pocket. Sebastian slanted her a cautionary look and kept on driving. “I haven’t had a chance to change my American dollars into your money. Are you sure you want it now?”

“Yes, now. Standard procedure. American is good.” His worried eyes slid toward the side window as if he feared someone might be watching them even as they sped down the road. “Five thousand dollars.”

“That’s not half,” Sebastian snapped. “That was the agreed full payment.”

“Now it is half.” A defiant gleam flashed in the Mihkas’ eyes. “Inflation. I don’t like going to that place. The spirits, they linger.”

“You’re afraid of ghosts?” Mercy asked.

He shrugged and kept his hand out, waiting.

She decided that now wasn’t the time to argue over money. They couldn’t very well shop around for guides for fear of bringing attention to themselves. Mercy counted out five thousand dollars in hundreds.

“Here.” She handed him the money.

It magically disappeared into his clothing.

Sebastian looked up into the rearview mirror to catch the man’s jumpy gaze. “You leave before you finish your job,
amigo
, and you’ll have a lot more than ghosts to worry about.”

Mihkas returned Sebastian’s threatening glare but his voice was tinged with resignation. “Worry is something we Ukrainians do very well. It is in our blood.”

He was a strange, jittery little man, but Mercy rather liked his brazenness. She rested a hand on Sebastian’s arm, signaling him to ease off.

“You must not have been very old at the time of the accident,” she said. “Were you living in this area then?”

“I was a young recruit,” Mihkas said, settling back into his seat now that business had been taken care of, “not much more than boy. My first month in the Soviet army I was sent here. Two days after I arrive, it happened. We were called up to work as liquidators, four-hour shifts. Building sarcophagus around reactor.” He warmed to his story. “The government used helicopters. Dumped thousands of tons of lead and gravel on it. They told us, ‘Yes there is radiation. But not so much. You will be all right.’”

Mercy turned in her seat to look at him. “And have you been all right?”

“I survived.” He shrugged. “Others did not. There was, you see, a very high suicide rate among liquidators. The illness from radiation can be very bad. I grow tumors in my esophagus. The doctors take them out but they grow back. The medicine does no good. I can only ever eat soft foods and liquids.”

The salo,
Mercy thought. Pure fat. It would slide right down.

“My father,” Mihkas continued, “he work in the plant. He was there when it happened. One of the
Thirty-One
.” The casualties initially reported. “They say his death was quick.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

He emitted a strange dry sound from his throat, something between a cough and a sad laugh. “My uncle, they call him to help organize evacuation. His unit camped out in the woods near the reactors for two weeks after explosion, while we were burying the reactor. When he got sick the military doctor examined him and said, ‘You are very healthy, Vlad. Go home. You live a long life.’ But he suffered for years and died full of tumors.”

Mercy didn’t know what else to say.

“The money.” He patted his pocket. “I will get better medicine with it.” He lapsed into silence that Mercy felt was meant not to be broken.

                                          31

They drove for another forty minutes before coming to Pripyat at midday. No tour buses or other vehicles were in sight. “Maybe they have stopped the tours,” Mihkas said, then grinned. “Official ones anyway.”

In front of them rose up a multilevel cement apartment building, most of the windows broken out, vines curling up its sides, the structure and grounds around it abandoned and uncared for. Up and down the streets, nothing moved. The wind blew leaves, debris, and rust-colored dust between buildings.

“Let’s look around,” Mercy said.

“I will stay in car,” Mihkas announced and wedged himself deeper into the dirty beige upholstery.

Sebastian climbed out of the Lada and pointed an accusing finger through the window at the little man. “You’re the guide, señor. This is what you’re paid for.”

“Standard procedure,” Mihkas grumbled. “I bring you here. Now you look around. You don’t need Mihkas.” He jumped at a sudden banging noise.

To Mercy it sounded like nothing more than the wind knocking back a loose shutter.

She walked around the car to join Sebastian on the driver’s side. “It’s all right. The poor guy is clearly terrified. We can look around on our own.”

It didn’t seem right to force Mihkas to revisit the horror of his family’s past. Besides, he had done a masterful job of getting them around government checkpoints to reach the Forbidden Zone. She noticed that Sebastian had taken the key out of the ignition before he got out.

She leaned down to speak to the former soldier through the window. “We’ll be back in an hour to check on you.”

“An hour?” The idea of being left alone for so long ejected Mihkas from the car as if he’d been shot from a bazooka. “No, no—I come.” He snapped open his briefcase. Mercy immediately thought—
gun
.

Of course, there had been no way to bring weapons with them on the plane. And Sebastian had argued against obtaining a weapon in Warsaw, although she was pretty sure he could have done so with his less-than-immaculate connections. But if border guards caught them carrying, they would be arrested and detained for God knew how long.

It wasn’t a gun. Out of his briefcase Mihkas pulled a small black box with a short cable attached to what looked like a microphone.

“What is that?” Sebastian asked.

Mercy suddenly knew, and the thought curdled in her stomach. “A roentgen meter. What’s a safe reading, Mihkas?”

“Kiev is safe. Here is always—” he studied the dial “—questionable.  Not so-o-o bad today. Maybe rained yesterday.”

“Maria,
madre de Dios
,” Sebastian muttered under his breath.

Indeed,
Mercy thought.

They walked as a close threesome, in silence, through the empty city. Pripyat seemed to her a slightly more modern version of an Old West ghost town—the land slowly silting in, burying sidewalks, streets, playgrounds. Weeds and self-seeded trees sprouted from cracks in walkways, building walls, and rooftop gutters. But she was surprised by how clean the air smelled. Devoid of cooking aromas, perfumes, manufacturing and gasoline fumes—the breath of the forest prevailed. Occasionally, the shutter, or wherever it was, banged hauntingly in the wind. Something small and brown scurried from beneath the foundation of a house and across their path.

Rats, Mercy thought, and shivered.

A plastic doll, the flesh tones faded by sun and weather, lay at her feet on the curb. Tourists must have been instructed to leave such tokens of the past where they’d been abandoned by those fleeing the town. Her artist’s imagination created a scene—a parent grabbing a protesting toddler’s hand to drag her hastily onto an evacuation bus. Nothing could be taken. Everything was contaminated.

What had they done about the clothing they’d been wearing?

Mercy reached out for Sebastian’s hand. His dark eyes fell gravely on her. This was a place that warned of the apocalypse. They kept walking, stopping to peer through smudgy windows where they still existed. Searching for any sign at all of life…any evidence of Talia O’Brien.

Pots on stoves that might once have contained food had long since been scoured clean by vermin. Abandoned cars hunkered down beside houses, rusting away, shrubs growing up through some. A push-type lawnmower rested in the middle of a patch of waist-high weeds, grass blades poking up between its blades.

Everywhere Mercy looked there was the sense of men, women, and children scooped up and carried off, their lives interrupted, never to be the same.

Whenever she visited a new place, she had a habit of connecting a specific type of music with it. A theme song or soundtrack of sorts. Mexico had its festive mariachis. Washington, DC sounded like a Coltrane sax solo. This desolate place suited Chopin’s iconic funeral march.

“People were allowed to take nothing?” Sebastian asked, looking as if he was still trying to grasp the enormity of the tragedy.

Mihkas shook his head, eyes wide, skin ashen. Seeing ghosts? “We did not know. They said, ‘You will come back. Don’t you worry. Your things will be safe. We help you clean up.’”

“But in other countries across Europe,” Mercy remembered reading this, “where the wind blew the radiation cloud, the scientists knew immediately from their data that dangerous radioisotopes had been released.”

“
Da
, but it took the government four days to admit anything really bad happened. They said a fire in the reactor. Some have died, but you are safe. We have everything under control. But then…” He lifted a hand and then let it fall, words unnecessary.

Mercy frowned at the ground where it looked as if layers of dirt had been scraped from it by heavy equipment. “Someone has been here recently. Are they starting to rebuild?”

Mihkas screwed up his face in puzzlement. “No.”

They walked on. Some minutes later, at a low rumble that might have been thunder, Mercy turned to Sebastian. “A storm?” she said.

The skin around Sebastian’s blue-black eyes tightened. “Engines.”

Mihkas started hopping in agitation from one foot to the other. “Come! We go now. We must leave.”

The noise grew louder. Beyond the far end of the strip of broken pavement, a thick cloud of dust rose.

“Whoever it is, they’re moving fast,” Sebastian said.

Mercy clamped a hand around his arm. “Maybe it’s just a tour bus.”

“No, no, no!” Mihkas was beside himself by now. He thrust his equipment back into its case, slung the strap over his shoulder and stood in front of them wringing his bony hands. “We go back to car. Leave before they see us. Now. Fast!”

“Before who sees us?” Sebastian asked, his gaze going steely. “Government guards?” Mercy knew he was prepared with the appropriate bribes. It just would have been easier if they hadn’t shown up.

Mihkas stared at Sebastian for another second, the muscles in his face contorted with indecision. He broke into a run for the Lada, clutching the roentgen meter to his chest.

Mercy turned to see two Jeeps and what appeared to be a Land Rover—no government insignias visible—racing toward them. She looked back at Sebastian. “I’d like to ask them about my mother. What do you think?”

“I think we should listen to Mr. Standard Procedure,” Sebastian said, grasping her hand and starting to run toward the car.

Mercy kept an eye on the three vehicles. What appeared to be the long barrel of a rifle extended from the Land Rover.

“I’m driving,” she shouted.

A volley of shots echoed off nearby buildings as they ran.

“Why?” Sebastian said.

“Recent practice.”

Maybe her Red Sands’ training would come in handy after all. Mercy threw herself behind the wheel. Sebastian slammed the passenger door shut behind him. She backed the car around, tires screeching, and hit the gas. They rocketed down the road and away from their pursuers.

Sebastian looked into the back seat. “Who is that?” he demanded of their guide.

“Police, I think. Better not to ask,” Mihkas croaked.

Two shots boomed, echoing through the deserted town.

“Do your police shoot first and ask questions later?”

“Maybe not police,” Mihkas whimpered.

“Military?

“No. Militia. They guard the black villages and—” He shrieked when Mercy accelerated and the Lada crested a hill, briefly taking to air.