Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

When he stepped outside, it was snowing.

Podil

Kyiv, Ukraine

The night was very cold; the snow had stopped falling. Scorpion huddled in the shadows near a kiosk across from the building. He watched a red and yellow tram go by, the light from its windows reflected on the snow. He was supposed to meet Iryna in an apartment above a pub in Podil, the old river port and former Jewish district, on a street off Kontraktova Ploscha, Contracts Square, but he was about to call it off. He had spotted at least three men in thick jackets covering the front entrance, and there were probably more covering the back and inside. He called her cell phone.

“Pryvit,” she said, and at the sound of her voice he imagined her tilting her head to the side to hold the phone to her ear under a black curtain of hair.

“Get rid of your muscle with the guns. It’s like a mafia meeting in Vegas,” he said.

“Someone wants to meet you. He needs protection. Besides, what if you’re the-” She stopped abruptly. He waited for her to say, what if he was the assassin, but she didn’t.

“We both know that’s not true,” he said. “Besides, if I was the one…” He left the threat unfinished.

“Give me a minute,” she said, and must have covered the phone because he heard only muffled sounds. “All right. Come up when it’s clear,” she said, coming back on the line.

He saw one of the men near the pub open his cell phone to answer a call. He hung up, then made more calls. Scorpion watched as two of the three men left their posts and went inside the pub. He waited another minute, then crossed to the front door.

“ U vas yest pistolet?” the man with the cell phone said, asking in Russian if he had a gun.

“Da,” Scorpion said, handing him the Glock from the holster at the small of his back. “I want it back.”

“Bez bazaar,” the man said, then thoroughly frisked him. When he was done, the man indicated that he should go up to the second floor.

Scorpion stepped into the lobby and took a narrow elevator to a single apartment that occupied the entire second floor. Slavo, the aide he had seen with Iryna, was waiting with a pair of tapochki house slippers. After Scorpion stepped across the threshold, Slavo handed him the tapochki, and Scorpion took off his street shoes and put them on. As was the custom, he left his shoes by the door and went in.

They were waiting for him in the dining room. Iryna was sitting at the table with a stocky middle-aged man with a shock of graying hair and a cleft chin. Scorpion immediately recognized him as Viktor Kozhanovskiy from his posters and images on television. Kozhanovskiy got up to shake his hand. He did it like a politician, clasping Scorpion’s hand with both of his as if to convey his deep friendship and sincerity. On the wall behind him a silent TV showed the lead news of the day: a fistfight in the Verkhovna Rada-the parliament-between members of Kozhanovskiy’s party and supporters of Cherkesov, who were accusing Kozhanovskiy of corruption.

“Welcome, Mr. Kilbane. Will you have some tea?” Kozhanovskiy said in good English as Scorpion sat down.

“Why not?” Scorpion said. “But first…” He took out the handheld electronic sweep unit. “Do you mind?”

“We should do the same to you,” Kozhanovskiy said. “Go ahead.”

As Scorpion scanned for bugs, Iryna poured the tea into a stekans- a glass with a metal base and handle. When he completed the scan, he sat down. Iryna gestured that he should help himself to sugar, jam, or honey, and passed him a plate with horishke pastries and bublyky, almond cookies.

“Of course, we called Reuters in London,” Kozhanovskiy said, pouring himself more tea and mixing in a teaspoon of jam. “It seems you are who you say you are.”

“Nice to know,” Scorpion said, thinking it was a good thing Shaefer had followed up. But the cover was thin, very thin.

“Iryna has briefed me. Firstly, has anyone seen Alyona? None of our people seems to know anything.”

“She was at the Black Cat, the cafe on Andriyivsky Uzviz, this morning. She was supposed to be in a play but hadn’t shown for last night’s performance. She told her fellow actors she couldn’t be in the play anymore.”

“They were concerned?” Kozhanovskiy asked.

“With good reason. Apparently, her boyfriend-this Sirhiy Pyatov-is abusive. She was afraid of him. She told them they were mixed up in something.”

“Isn’t he with the campaign?” Kozhanovskiy turned to Iryna.

She nodded. “Dirty tricks.”

“Like what?” Scorpion asked.

“You have to understand, this is self-defense,” Kozhanovskiy said, lighting a Marlboro Menthol. “The Cherkesov campaign paid someone to publish a story in Sevodnya that claimed I looted the treasury when I was Minister of Finance. Among other things, they’ve accused us of running a heroin ring out of our campaign headquarters, that I’m a puppet for the Americans, and even that I’ve fathered a secret love child with Iryna!”

“That’s a better story than the assassination. Is it true?” Scorpion said.

Iryna looked directly at Scorpion. “I work with Viktor Ivanovych. I don’t do it with my legs spread. Gospadi! To be taken seriously as a woman in this country isn’t so simple.”

“Iryna is a public figure in our country.” Kozhanovskiy said. “And because she’s beautiful, she gets more than her share of media attention, which is helpful to us. But trust me, her brain is more valuable to us than her looks.”

“So what kind of dirty tricks did Pyatov do?” Scorpion asked Iryna.

“He created a false Facebook page supposedly of one of Cherkesov’s officials named Makuch,” she said. “It implied that Makuch is a pedophile. Pyatov also put out leaflets in Donetsk claiming Cherkesov is a homosexual. They put Photoshopped pictures of him in a woman’s pink panties and bra on the Internet,” a ghost of a smile on her lips. “He sent out notices in Kharkov oblast, an area we expect to go overwhelmingly for Cherkesov. They were supposedly from the Central Election Commission, telling people they hadn’t registered properly and were not eligible to vote.” She shrugged. “Things like that. They do the same to us.”

“What else can you tell me about Pyatov?”

“In the beginning, he was useful, as I said. Then he stopped showing up. No one’s seen him in two or three weeks.”

“And neither of you has heard anything about an assassination plot?”

“Not till you showed up,” Iryna said. She looked hard at Scorpion. “What’s happened to Alyona? She’s only been missing for a few hours. What aren’t you telling me?”

She was good, Scorpion thought. Whoever judged her just on her looks underestimated her. She had that extraordinary combination of being cool, smart, and sharp that the Russians call krutoy.

“She’s probably dead,” he said, watching them. Kozhanovskiy stared at him, stunned. Iryna had to stifle a gasp. Either they were both great actors or he had caught them by surprise.

“What do you mean ‘probably’?” Iryna said, taking a deep breath.

“There’s no body. I entered her apartment. There were traces of blood in the bed and in the shower. I found a hacksaw from Pyatov’s work hidden under the sink, its blade missing. The hacksaw frame had traces of blood. Her neighbor told me sometime around noon there were screams and sounds of a quarrel and the televidenie got very loud. Later, she saw Pyatov leave alone with a big suitcase on wheels.”

“Gospadi,” Iryna said softly, almost to herself. My God.

“What about Pyatov?” Kozhanovskiy asked. “Does anyone know where he is now?”

“I checked at his work,” Scorpion said. “They haven’t seen him in three weeks.”