Terrorbyte (21 page)

Anyway it was just a little stress episode, nothing more than a smallish migraine – understandable considering the circumstances. I was pretty sure it wasn't some kind of transient ischemic attack. I was fully functional and had no muscle weakness, slurred speech, or facial numbness. A few painkillers for the headache before it became significant and I would feel okay.

Lee was searching files and would then visit Sam. Mac and I were taking Praskovya home with us. He needed to learn how we worked. We needed to know what he knew.

Mac made coffee and checked the answering machine. Twenty-seven messages from his mother. I told Praskovya to make himself comfortable in the living room and joined Mac in the kitchen to listen to the messages. They were the best yet. The first fifteen dealt with Mac's avoidance of her, ranting about how he never answered the phone anymore. The next five were thinly-veiled threats about her coming on down to teach him a lesson on telephone etiquette. We switched off the machine at that point.

“Yeah, she's definitely grandmother material,” I said, then hustled out of arm's reach.

“Smartass!” he called after me, “Ask Praskovya how he has his coffee.”

Praskovya yelled back, “Black, thank you.”

The phone messages lightened my mood. Mac's mom had become the comic relief in our lives. I felt calmer and less bogged down by the case. I really wanted a cigarette. I satisfied the craving by imagining I'd already had one, created from all the secondhand smoke that poured down the phone and into our answer machine, courtesy of my manic mother-in-law. Excellent. Mac's mom was transformed into a nicotine fix. That worked for me. Now to get Praskovya working for me. Darkness, or a sort of dark cloud, edged into my mind whenever his name came up. It billowed like his overcoat in the breeze that morning.

I had to stop thinking in romance novel terms. The billowing had to stop. I knew it was too late when a cloud parted and revealed Praskovya, all dark and mysterious, standing under an old stone bridge. He looked expectantly across the river that tumbled over moss-speckled green stones. White foam gathered in small pools among rocks. A woman with long dark hair and a flowing purple cloak picked her way carefully towards him.

This new madness was getting out of hand. He wasn't even my type.

I sighed, cleared the scene from my head and dropped into an armchair across the room from Praskovya. In my usual fashion I pulled up my legs and tucked them under me.

He smiled.

I smiled back.

“How is your head?”

“It's, oh … fine.” Almost let an ‘okay' slip out. Damn men, ganging up on me, ruining my word.

“You have a nice home.” He tapped the fingers of his left hand on the arm of the chair. He wore a wedding ring on his right hand.

“Thank you.” I still wasn't getting anything from him. I needed to break him out of the small-talk phase and get to the guts. “Do you know who the Unsub is?”

He crossed his right leg over his left knee. The tapping ceased. His dark eyes looked directly into mine. I looked back. It was like looking into a black hole.

“We don't have a name,” he said.

“How do you know this ex-officer is after our Unsub?”

“She followed his trail across Eastern Europe and we followed her.”

“It's the same person?”

“Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“I told you, she is Selena Vadbolski. An officer with Spetsnaz.”

“Yes, so you told me. How did she become a terrorist?” This woman was important, maybe not to us, but to him. Why? It irked me.

Mac came in with the coffee and placed the tray on the coffee table in the center of the room. He passed Praskovya's first, then mine. Guests first.

“Thank you, Mac. Very nice coffee,” Praskovya said. “Do you grind your own beans?”

He really liked the small talk; quite the Chatty Cathy when it came to subjects other than work-related topics.

Mac said, “Not often, we have a coffee shop close by that makes a very nice blend for us.”

I looked from Mac to Praskovya and back again. And blew my theory that Praskovya wasn't my type right out of the water. I prayed that the ridiculous Mills & Boon scenes would cease to interrupt my cognitive processes. The whole intrusion was akin to running with scissors. At any moment I might trip and slice myself on the sharp edges of the book covers generated by my imagination. Would he swoop to my rescue? The Mills & Boon interludes had to stop.

I pulled him from his coffee discussion with Mac and back to my topic of choice, “Praskovya … how does an officer with Spetsnaz become a terrorist?”

“What drives one to do anything? Why did you become a FBI agent?”

I smiled, but only because I had succeeded in ridding myself of the romance novel connotations. He was less charming now and more infuriating. What if I took my gun and pressed the muzzle against his temple? “Tell me about Selena.”

He uncrossed his legs and placed his mug on the table. “Do you know much about the Russian Federation?”

I shook my head, “No, I'm sorry, I don't.” A little voice in my head kicked in, telling me to listen and not float off: it wasn't a history lesson, it was pertinent stuff. I hate that little voice; it invariably means it's boring stuff that I have to wade through before the good stuff comes out. It took all the little voices to keep me on track. I listened as well as I could, while Praskovya told us of life in The Russian Federation: the crime, the corruption, the unemployment and how the country was desperately trying to recover economically.

They were fighting fires on all fronts and making little progress. Crimes covered up, or simply not investigated during the communist reign, were oozing like septic wounds. One of those things was the high level of serial killing and serial rape. Yet none of this explained how a Spetsnaz officer found herself as a terrorist. Or did it?

“Praskovya, why exactly is she a terrorist?”

He blinked and looked up, astonished. “She committed an act of terrorism.”

It would have felt so good to hold my gun to his temple, or maybe just smack him about a few times. I could break his arm in two and hit him with the soggy end. I sucked it up and remained polite. “Which was?”

“Selena Vadbolski detonated a bomb that blew up a police station, killing forty police officers and support personnel.”

“She blew up a police station?”

“And made threats against other police stations. She planted bombs in five stations. The explosive was stolen from the army.”

“She killed police, she stole explosives and, okay, I understand how that would piss off everyone. Why the hell does she want our Unsub?”

Praskovya sighed. “We don't know.”

And just like that, the blackness reappeared. He slipped back under cloud cover.

“You don't know?”  I couldn't believe it. I was back to square one.

Praskovya's eyes met mine. He didn't speak.

“Where are you staying?” Mac asked.

“The Marriott.”

Mac smiled. “Which one?”

“On 12th Street I think, in Washington.”

Mac nodded. “Yeah, we're familiar with it.” It was the first hotel we'd stayed in together, during another difficult case, a lifetime ago.

“I'll get a car to come pick you up,” I said. “Tomorrow you'll be given a cell phone with our numbers pre-programmed. Contact one of us if you think of anything that might help find our Unsub and your terrorist.” I reached over to a small wooden box on a shelf behind me and took out a business card. “Before you get the phone, you might need to contact us.”

I uncurled my legs and stretched them. I handed Praskovya the card, then went out to our office to call Caine. I told him his replacement for Sam sucked. I heard Caine grind his teeth. He made no comment. I suspected his jaw was locked shut from all the grinding. After a brief rundown on the nothing we'd got out of him, I hung up before he could speak. It wasn't necessary to hear him growl: I just wanted him to know how things weren't progressing.

I called and checked in with Lee. He was still at the hospital. Sam was doing well. Lee was manually searching through hospital records. He mentioned that Marie Kline's file was hefty and scattered. Apparently she'd used several aliases.

He was busy tracing all the components and trying to assemble a clear medical history and find the obstetric notes. Lee being Lee, he'd managed to get several of the women in the records department to help.

My last call was to Rich. I asked for a favor: a car to return Praskovya to Washington. He was happy to oblige. The bar tab was growing.

I wanted Praskovya and his dark cloud out of my home. I sat at my computer and began to search for an old friend, an old Russian friend, knowing he'd be online somewhere. I just had to locate him. He wasn't as difficult to find as I'd thought. Within minutes, we'd dealt with the small talk and he had bestowed me with information on Spetsnaz.

Interesting and helpful information that almost made me forget I needed sleep. What I was going to get was a few hours going over all the paperwork. There were things I needed to chase up: that computer for one, the bug boys for another. And the bourbon. I wanted to know about the bourbon. Why bourbon?

If our Unsub had carved a trail across Eastern Europe, had he used bourbon then, or something more country-specific? Was this particular brand of bourbon available outside the U.S.? Questions, questions … and no freaking answers. All this talk of bourbon made me want a drink. Not bourbon; I doubted I would ever drink it again, although it used to be my drink of choice.

Those last four words reverberated around my brain. He couldn't know that, could he? He's committing crimes in Virginia; lots of people drink bourbon. As the words rattled inside my head, they rearranged themselves and started spelling trouble.

I hurried back into the living room. Praskovya's aura felt so dark and obvious to me, it hung over his head like a thundercloud. I fully expected lightning to fire across the room. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if it had struck me.

“Praskovya, which Spetsnaz group did she work for?” I enjoyed proving I wasn't a total fool when it came to things Russian and that I had sources. Vlad had told me a few vital things in our short conversation. After the fall of communism, some Spetsnaz groups remained intact in the various countries that now had them within their borders. Those left inside the Russian federation, once run by the KGB, were now under the umbrella of the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The FSB controlled the primary counterterrorism and hostage-rescue groups. The initials made no sense to me, until my contact gave me the Russian name for the organization, Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti.

The cloud sucked most of the color from his eyes, making them darker and less attractive. “Spetsgruppa Al'fa.”

I had heard of Al'fa. It was one of the groups controlled by the FSB, the ultimate crack counterterrorist and hostage-rescue group within FSB.

“So you are telling me that an officer from Al'fa committed acts of terrorism?”

“Yes.”

“You are FSB?” It felt good to know something, even if it wasn't a whole hell of a lot.

He smiled. “Yes. I am FSB. We are your FBI equivalent.”

I stretched out my legs. My mind moved on. “Did we ever see that witness report?”

“I don't remember seeing any witness report,” Mac replied.

“Our nonagenarian.”

Mac smiled, amused by my description of the relic from Herndon and the scene of the Laura Amos killing.

Praskovya spoke, “You have a witness? What is nonagenarian?”

“The crypt keeper,” I replied.

“What is this crypt keeper?”

I'd lost him and it brought me unimaginable joy. “Our witness is a ninety-four year old woman. She saw the Unsub leaving an apartment building.”

“This crypt keeper … saw the killer,” Praskovya said, his voice conveying his mental machinations.

I started to move. “Yes, we think so … now I must go hunt down the report she made. I'd like a description of our Unsub.”

Mac stood a split second before we heard a knock at the front door.

“That will be your car,” I told Praskovya. “We will see you tomorrow.”

Praskovya rose and followed Mac out. I waited for Mac to return to the living room, glad that the cloud had left with Praskovya.

Mac didn't say much when he came back in. I could tell he was pleased Praskovya had gone and that he was concerned over this whole terrorist/killer/Al'fa thing.

“One second, my cunning wifey,” Mac said. He eyed me with a small amount of suspicion and asked, “How did you know about Al'fa?”

I smiled. “Did your father ever talk about Vlad?”

Mac attempted to cover his surprise. “I think … a long time ago.”

“Long time ago, back when our dads used to take those fishing trips?”

Our fathers had a long and colorful history together, which we'd only found out about just over a year ago. All our lives we'd listened to our fathers saying they were going fishing, my dad with someone called Tank and Mac's dad with someone called the Colonel. Imagine our amazement when we learned that Tank was Mac's dad and the Colonel was what he called my dad.

“Yeah, back then.”

“Vlad was a friend they met. He was a diplomat then.”

“And you contacted Vlad to get some info?”

“We've kept in touch since dad's heart attack.”

Mac's smile became a grin. “I never know what you'll pull out of your sleeve next.”

Me neither, except this time my ‘next' involved running some background checks on Praskovya while we were checking out the witness description and doing all our paperwork. I wanted to know who we were dealing with.

Music floated around inside my head. It was the opening bars to something familiar, though I couldn't quite place it. I waited with as much patience as I could muster to hear what song my brain would dredge up this time. I didn't have a lot of patience to spare. Lyrics belted forth. I jumped. Who'd have thought my internal stereo was that loud? What did a long cool woman in a black dress have to do with our Unsub? I didn't enjoy the inference that spilled from a nest of bad men and whiskey bottles. I liked even less the reference to the FBI. It was unnerving; if the song had mentioned bourbon and not whiskey, I suspect I may have thrown all my toys from the sandbox.