Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“Same thing. The only way Kozhanovskiy has a chance, and to try to stop the war, is to solve this thing.”

The snow made driving treacherous, even with all-wheel-drive. He peered through the arcs of the windshield wipers and tried to stay in the tire tracks made by trucks far ahead. There was almost no traffic except for the headlights of an occasional truck coming the other way. She lit a cigarette.

“The Chorni Povyazky killed Pyatov?” Iryna asked.

“It was the militsiyu. ”

“Did Pyatov say anything about who is behind this?”

“We only had a few seconds before they came in.”

“And Alyona? What did he do with her?” she asked, not looking at him.

“He seemed confused. Almost as if he didn’t know what I was talking about.”

“Did you believe him?”

“No,” he said, and shook his head. He didn’t want to tell her what Pyatov had actually said. It was bothering him. A loose end that didn’t fit. “He was just starting to talk when they killed him.”

“Christ, what a mess.” She looked at him. “I don’t even know what to call you now.”

“Peter.”

“You saved my life. I’m grateful, but I don’t know who you are. You’re like a ghost. I don’t know how to do this.”

“If we get captured,” he said, “the less you know about me the better.”

“We were set up, weren’t we?”

He nodded, then checked the rearview mirror. There were headlights behind them in the distance. He’d have to keep an eye on it.

“Who did it?” she asked.

“When we find that out, we’ll have our assassin,” he said.

Following the GPS, he drove across a steel bridge over the river and down Lenina Prospekt, the main avenue of Zaporozhye. The street was wide and gleamed with electric lights from advertising signs and buildings. As with Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, the sidewalks were lined with winter-bare trees and crowded with cars, yellow trolley buses, and mashrutkas, despite the falling snow.

“What do we do first?” she asked.

“Change the image. Get rid of the car,” he said, making a turn to go around the block to make sure they weren’t being followed. After several more turns, the GPS squawking, and he was sure there were no trailing headlights, he drove to a big Trade Ukraina shopping center and pulled into the parking garage.

“Take everything,” he told her, getting out and grabbing his backpack from the trunk. “We’re leaving the car here. Use your hat to wipe everything down.”

They went over everything they had touched, stopping when anyone was near to make sure they weren’t seen doing it. He had Iryna put her Ushanka hat back on with a scarf over the lower part of her face so no one would recognize her. When they were finished, he locked the car and they walked into the mall.

Most of the stores and cafes were still open. On the second floor, they found a beauty supply and wig store. They went in and bought some things, then went shopping for clothes. When they were finished, they stopped in a cafe where Scorpion checked for rental apartments on his laptop. They found one not far from the mall and Iryna called. By the time they left the mall pulling new carry-ons, she was wearing a curly-haired redheaded wig and steel-rim glasses under her Ushanka hat. Scorpion wore a suit under a new overcoat and a peaked Cossack-style fur hat. He carried his old clothes, including the bloody jacket, in a plastic bag.

The snow was still falling.

“You think there’ll be a flight tonight?” she asked.

“Not in this,” he said, indicating the snow.

They walked on side streets near the mall. Scorpion left the bag of old clothes in a trash bin behind an apartment house. He dropped the BMW keys along with his Michael Kilbane passport and press pass torn into pieces in a sewer opening. They walked to the rental apartment in the snow.

The rental was in a Soviet-style brick apartment building on Stalevarov Street, just a block from Lenina Prospekt. The apartment concierge met them at the front door. He was a fat balding man in a Metalist Kharkov soccer sweatshirt. He showed them an apartment on the fifth floor, the living room window looking down at a lone street lamp in the snow-empty street. It was four hundred hryvnia a night. Scorpion told him they’d take it for a week for 2,500 hryvnia.

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?”