Scorpion Winter (12 page)

The concierge asked for their identity cards.

“No identity cards, no questions, no
militsiyu
,” Scorpion said. He added an additional two thousand
hryvnia
to the money he held out.

Iryna said something to the man in Ukrainian and he nodded, a smirk on his face as he took the money. After he left, she told Scorpion, “I told him we were both married to other people. I don't think we're the first to use this place for sex. That—and the money.”

“He didn't seem to recognize you,” Scorpion said.

“The wig,” she said, taking it off along with the glasses. “But I still need something in case I have to get rid of the wig,” she added, sitting in front of a mirror, a towel wrapped around her neck. She took out a scissors she'd bought in the beauty supply store and began cutting her hair. Scorpion watched her, then checked for cargo flights to Kyiv on his laptop. There was an old-fashioned TV in the living room. He turned it on.

They found a news channel. Kozhanovskiy and Gorobets had accused each other of staging the assassination to win the election. Gorobets demanded a postponement so the Svoboda party could select another candidate. Open fighting had broken out between the Chorni Povyazky and Kozhanovskiy supporters in every major city in Ukraine. A female reporter interviewed a Black Armband who stared menacingly into the camera and said that if they found Iryna Shevchenko or the foreigner before the
militsiyu
did, they'd know what to do to them. For a moment Iryna stopped working. She and Scorpion looked at each other in the mirror.

Scorpion helped cut her hair in the back. When she was done, the change was incredible. She had a short pixie cut and bangs slanting sideways across her forehead, which made her look almost completely different and yet unbelievably sexy.

“I feel naked. It's not too awful, is it?” she asked.

He had never seen anyone so beautiful. The world had shrunk to just two of them. Everything that had happened, the stadium, the shootings in the tunnel, their desperate escape, seemed to come together like a thunderclap. He couldn't stop himself, was no longer in control. He grabbed her and kissed her hard. She kissed him back hungrily and they staggered toward the bed. They pulled at each other's clothes and bodies. It was as if they couldn't get enough of each other. It was like madness. They tumbled onto the bed naked and she grabbed at his hips, pulling him into her. Even inside her, he couldn't get enough of her. When they finished, they lay there, gasping.

“
Gospadi
, what was that?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“What do we do?” she asked, her eyes reflecting the light from the living room.

“I don't know that either,” unable to take his eyes off her. In the middle of this mission with the whole world against them, this was crazy, he told himself.

“You have to tell me something,” she said. “Anything. I can't keep going with somebody whose name changes by the minute, who might disappear forever any second. Do you have a code name or something?”

He hesitated. “Scorpion,” he said finally.

“It's horrible,” she said, making a face.

“I chose it.”

“Why?” She lit a cigarette and lay on one elbow, watching him.

“When I was a boy, the man who became the closest thing I ever had to a father used to call me ‘Little Scorpion,' ” he said.

“I don't understand. Why would he say such a thing?”

Scorpion thought about his real father lying facedown in the sand, of the Saar raiders, the “wolves” of the Arabian desert, who had killed his father and tried to kill him too, and how Sheikh Zaid had saved him and, when the sheikh tried to touch his dead father, he had stabbed the sheikh with his Boy Scout knife. That's when Sheikh Zaid had called him Little Scorpion for the first time.

“Long story,” Scorpion said now. He became aware of the news announcer's voice from the TV in the living room. “What's he saying?” he asked.

“The Russians are moving large numbers of troops and tanks to the Ukrainian border. I can't believe this,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “Maybe the snow will slow them down.”

“Maybe,” he said.

That night he dreamt about Arabia. He was in Sheikh Zaid's tent, sitting by the fire at night, the way it was when he was a child. He was telling Sheikh Zaid he had found a woman. The sheikh told him that before he could marry he first had to find out who he was, the same question Iryna kept asking. He couldn't tell her, he told the sheikh. Someone, some thing, had been pursuing him since Yemen. The tent grew dark. He could no longer see Sheikh Zaid. His enemies were getting closer; he could feel them right behind him in the darkness. He started to turn around . . .

He awoke suddenly in the middle of the night reaching for the Glock under his pillow. The apartment was freezing cold. Iryna lay next to him. Even asleep she was unbelievably beautiful. She looked like she was dreaming; perhaps of snow slowing the Russian troops. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. After washing his hands in ice-cold water, he went to the window. It was covered over with frost. He rubbed a circle on the window with his hand and peered out.

The street was white with snow and empty under the streetlight.

It had stopped snowing.

Chapter Twenty

Metrograd

Kyiv, Ukraine

T
hey flew to Kyiv from Zaporozhye on a cargo flight, no questions asked, thanks to bribes all around. While they waited in a shedlike area to board, they watched a female news commentator on a TV behind a counter. Iryna translated in a whisper.

The United States and Britain had called for a special meeting of the UN Security Council to deal with the crisis. In Brussels, the foreign ministers of the NATO countries were meeting in emergency session. Satellite reports indicated that Russia had moved four tank divisions of the Second Guards Tank Army plus three infantry divisions to the border area near Kharkov. Kozhanovskiy had called on the United States and the Western powers to honor their NATO treaty obligations to Ukraine. Oleksandr Gorobets, speaking for the Svoboda party, declared that the election must be delayed for a month to allow Svoboda to choose another candidate.

There had been more street fighting in Kyiv. The streets close to Khreshchatyk Avenue and around the Pechersk district were filled with roaming packs of Black Armbands. Kozhanovskiy's supporters had begun to form what they called “Citizens Militsiyu” to defend themselves. Someone had bombed the Central Synagogue of Kyiv on Shchekovitzkaya Street. Two people, a woman and a nine-year-old boy, were killed. In Dnipropetrovsk, police were conducting a house-to-house search for Iryna Shevchenko and the foreigner, Michael Kilbane, wanted for questioning in the killing of presidential candidate Yuriy Cherkesov.

Iryna was translating it for Scorpion when the flight company manager they had bribed signaled for them to board the plane. They sat behind the crew in the cockpit, facing each other on fold-down jump seats. She was in her blond wig, glasses, and Ushanka hat; he, with a two-day stubble, in his overcoat and peaked Cossack hat.

The aging Antonov turboprop shuddered as it climbed into the frigid air. It dipped and rattled over the snow-covered landscape. The noise of the engines was so loud, Scorpion thought they could risk talking.

Iryna leaned toward him and whispered in his ear. “It's happening. Everything we feared,” her breath visible in the cold air.

He nodded.

“How can I stop it? How can anyone?” she said, biting her lip.

“Somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble to frame us. We need to find them.”

“Any idea who?”

“Yes,” Scorpion said grimly.

The flight got them back to Kyiv in an hour. They passed through the Boryspil Airport cargo area the same way they had gotten through the Zaporozhye terminal—with bribes passed in handshakes. Once inside the terminal building, they separated, staying in contact by cell phone as they stayed alert for anyone who might be watching them. Scorpion used his hand to shield part of his face from security cameras while walking toward the street, saying,
“Tak, tak”
—Yes, yes—in Ukrainian into the cell phone, because he knew they were looking for a foreigner. He spotted two men, both in overcoats, by the exit doors.

“
Ni
, Dmitri,” he said to his cell phone as he walked by them. Outside on the street, he waited in the queue for a taxi, pretending to talk and meanwhile watching for Iryna. The two men in overcoats watched her walk by, their eyes following her. One of them said something and they started after her.

Scorpion called Iryna on his cell phone as he got into a taxicab. Calling her “Nadia,” the cover name they'd agreed on for her, he told her to take a different taxi and tell the driver to follow his cab, then told his driver to take him into Kyiv. Through the rear window he saw Iryna get into the next taxi and spotted the two men who followed her running toward a sedan parked behind the taxi queue.

Scorpion's taxi headed to the Boryspilske Shosye Highway to Kyiv, Iryna's taxi four cars behind his. Looking through the rear window again, he saw the sedan following in traffic. His taxi got on a highway heading west, four lanes in each direction, cleared of snow.

Why didn't they try to take them at the airport? he wondered. Maybe they weren't sure it was Iryna, or wanted to see if they could tie them to Kozhanovskiy and destroy the opposition altogether. Either way, he knew they had to lose the tails. He told the driver to take him to the Metrograd, the big shopping mall downtown in Lva Tolstoho Square.

They drove past block after block of apartment houses on Kyiv's Left Bank. Scorpion's cell phone rang. It was “Nadia.” He told her he had to do some shopping at the Metrograd, and she said she would meet him in the tennis store in the sports section of the mall and hung up. The taxi drove across the bridge to the Right Bank, then turned up along the river before cutting over toward downtown. He was thinking what a beautiful city Kyiv was, in spite of everything, with its gold-domed churches and parks covered in snow, when he saw a man's body sprawled on the sidewalk. No one stopped. People scurried past, giving a wide berth to the body.

Scorpion checked the rear window again. The sedan had moved right behind Iryna's taxi. His taxi stopped at the entrance to the mall. He went inside and down the escalator to the lower underground floor. The mall was modern, bright with goods and shiny windows, and filled with people shopping in spite of the crisis. But there was an air of unease; people were looking around suspiciously, not talking much or in whispers.

He went into a department store, and after checking to make sure no one was watching, went out another door and through the mall, crossing from one underground hallway to another. He stopped in an electronics store to buy four new disposable cell phones and an iPod Nano with a radio, then went to the tennis store in a section of the mall devoted to exclusively to sports and called Iryna's cell phone.

“Are you clear of them?” he said in English. “Pretend you're talking to a boyfriend.”

“Nyet, glupyi chelovek,”
she said in Russian. No, you silly man.

“Go into a store with multiple exits. Duck behind something so they lose sight of you. Go out one of the exits. I'll wait,” he said, pretending to inspect tennis racquets while he activated and programmed the new cell phones.

A few minutes later she walked into the tennis store. He pretended not to know her and checked the mall to make sure she hadn't been followed. It looked like she'd lost them. Motioning her to follow, they went out of that store and into a ski store.

“What are we doing?” she whispered, checking ski jumpers in a rack.

“We've got to get you a new ID,” he said.

He told her to go into a dressing room, and a moment later followed. Once inside, he took her photo with his cell phone camera, first with the blond wig on, then in her new pixie cut. They took the escalator down to the Metro station under Tolstoho Square and switched subway trains twice to make sure they weren't followed.

“Who were they?” she asked, watching the doors as they pulled into a station.

“SBU,
militsiyu, politsii,
Syndikat
blatnoi
, the Chorni Povyazky, take your pick. The only one not after us is the Salvation Army.”

“Is this how it's going to be?”

“If we're lucky.”

“Gospadi,”
she said, half to herself. “What next?”

“I need an Internet café. Also a place to stay. Someplace where they won't ask questions.”

“I can do that,” she said.

He nodded. “If they think we're in Kyiv, they'll probably be looking on the Right Bank, so make it someplace on the Left Bank. Here.” He handed her one of the new cell phones. “Use this. We'll dump the ones we're using.”

“Get off at the next stop, Vokzalna,” she said.

“Why?”

“There's a twenty-four-hour Internet café on Chokolovsky Avenue.”

The café was full despite the cold weather and dangerous streets. Many were young people tweeting about demonstrations and what was happening. Scorpion paid a young man who looked like a student a hundred
hryvnia
for his seat at a desktop computer facing the wall. A few minutes later Iryna got a computer too.

Glancing around to make sure no one was looking, he inserted the flash drive and loaded the NSA software onto the computer. He logged onto the NSA server and began reading the translated transcripts of the calls made by Oleg Gabrilov since he had last checked. Thanks to his bugs, the NSA had all of Gabrilov's calls, from the embassy, from his apartment, and from his cell phone. There was a single phone number that Gabrilov had called once a day; the first time, after he'd made his call to Alyona's cell phone following Scorpion's visit. A transcript of another call caught his attention. Gabrilov had said: “They've taken the bait.”

The SVR was running something, probably the frame for the Cherkesov killing, Scorpion thought. But why would the SVR want to assassinate Cherkesov, Russia's biggest ally in Ukraine? And how would Gabrilov know that he and Iryna had taken the bait about Pyatov? What was happening at the time? Scorpion checked the date and time of the call. And then it hit him.

Gabrilov had made the call yesterday, before the assassination, right after he told Gorobets about Pyatov. That meant Gabrilov knew Michael Kilbane was in Dnipropetrovsk, and the only reason for him to be there was because he knew about Pyatov. Scorpion checked the phone number on the NSA database. When he read it, it made no sense. The number was registered to a Chinese trading company, Lianhuay China Trading, Ltd., on Vorovskogo Street in western Kyiv. The SVR and the Chinese intelligence service, the Guoanbu, were deadly enemies. Why would Gabrilov be contacting the Chinese?

Things were spiraling out of control. And what the hell did the Chinese have to do with it? He needed to get to Shaefer. He plugged earphones and a minimicrophone into the computer and Skype'd Shaefer's BlackBerry. It was a private BlackBerry, not in Shaefer's name, and that the Company didn't know about. On the third ring, someone picked up.

“Cine este?”
Shaefer said in Romanian over sounds of a conversation in the background.

“It's FOBE. Can you talk?” Scorpion said in English.

“Un moment,”
Shaefer said, and Scorpion heard him say something to someone in Romanian. When he came back on the line, the background sounds were quiet. “Are you out of your mind!? I shouldn't talk to you! I shouldn't know you!”

“We were set up,” Scorpion whispered.

“Who gives a crap? Have you any idea how hot you are? You are so PNG you don't exist!” CIA-speak for persona non grata.

“I need a drop.”

“Don't you get it? If I wanted to—which I don't—I can't come near you with a ten-foot pole.”

“What about FOBE?” Scorpion said. What he and Shaefer had been through together in Forward Operating Base Echo had to trump anything coming down the Company's chain of command. They were foxhole buddies. Shaefer was one of the good guys.

“You're out past Pluto, amigo. This is a bridge too far.”

“I just need—” Scorpion started.

“I'm burning this number. Don't call again,” Shaefer said, and hung up.

Scorpion sat there for a moment, stunned, staring blankly at the computer screen. Not Shaefer, he thought. It couldn't be. In Chaprai in Pakistan, bad intel had turned FOBE into a death trap. Their Delta Team had come under an intense Taliban attack that lasted three days and nights, at the end of which he and Shaefer were the only ones left alive. When they finally got evac'd out, they'd decided to join the CIA so no other American grunt would get killed because of lousy intel.

Only now, even Shaefer had cut ties with him. It meant this was so hot the CIA didn't want to be associated with this thing. It also meant the Company—and the NSC—had concluded that unless the U.S. walked away now, they were headed for war. It was too big. He had to get to Rabinowich.

He checked his watch. It was almost 11:00
A.M.
, four in the morning in Virginia. He Skype'd Rabinowich's home number. The phone rang three times, then clicked over. A recorded telephone company voice came on the line. It said the number he was calling was no longer in service and there was no new number. Christ, they'd gotten to Rabinowich too. The CIA's best brain and ultimate in-house rebel! Apart from Shaefer, the only person he had always counted on.

The only connection he had left was the teenage chat room where Rabinowich, posing as a teenage girl from Omaha named Madison, chatted with him as her online boyfriend, Josh. Scorpion unplugged the earphones and mike and went to the online chat room. When he tried to log in, however, he was blocked. Instead of a login, he got a message telling him he had been permanently removed. Only the chat operator using a kill command for him specifically could've done that, he thought, feeling like he'd been kicked in the stomach. Even Rabinowich wanted no part of him. He was alone; completely cut off.

“Everything all right?” Iryna asked him.

“Fine,” Scorpion said, entering the Alt key sequence that would cause the NSA software to completely scrub any trace of his activity or that he had ever been on the computer, even resetting the computer's clock and clearing his transactions from its local Internet server. When it finished, the software would delete itself. He tried to think of what to do next.

“I found a flat,” Iryna whispered. “In Desnianskyi
raion
. It's on the Left Bank, near Volhogradska Square.”

Scorpion looked toward the door as a pair of Black Armbands walked in and began shoving people out of the way. They grabbed one young man at a computer—he looked like a student—and threw him to the floor. They started kicking him. No one interfered.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” Scorpion said.