Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

She traced her finger down his face from his forehead down his nose and lips to his chin.

“How do I know?”

“You were with me,” he said. “It was an inside job. A power play inside Svoboda. So we just need to figure who stood to gain from Cherkesov’s death.”

“Gorobets! He’s the big winner, especially if that clown, Davydenko, wins! He’ll be running the country. We’ll denounce him!” She sat up excitedly.

“Right now everyone, including the politsiy, thinks we’re the killers. We need proof. We need the bomber.” He looked at her. “What was so urgent that you texted me?”

“I heard from Oksana.”

“Your mole in Gorobets’s office?”

Iryna nodded. “She said something. Gorobets has a bodyguard. Big guy with scruffy blond hair in his eyes.”

“Shelayev.” Scorpion nodded. The guy who crushed heads like eggshells. “What about him?”

“She said she hasn’t seen him since the assassination. No one seems to know where he is, or if they do, they’re not saying.” She looked at Scorpion, her face with its pixie haircut barely visible in the darkness. “Could he be the assassin?”

“He’s Gorobets’s man. And he’s Spetsnaz-trained. Possible, very possible.”

“She said something else. It bothered me. That’s why I had to see you.”

“What?”

“She said that two days before the rally in Dnipropetrovsk she went to a cafe near the university here in Kyiv. She saw Shelayev having coffee with Alyona.”

Scorpion sat up suddenly and slapped his forehead. “What an idiot! How stupid of me not to have seen it!” He looked at Iryna. “Did they see her?”

“She didn’t think so. She hasn’t told anyone.”

Scorpion gripped her shoulder. “You have to get hold of her! Tell her not to say a word to anyone. If she says anything, she’ll be killed. And especially nothing about Shelayev.”

Iryna nodded. Scorpion got up and walked naked to the window. They were on the twelfth floor of a Left Bank apartment building that overlooked a bridge over the Dnieper, the lights from the bridge reflected on the ice in the river. The van with Danylo was still parked on the street below. Something about it bothered him, but he wasn’t sure what. He turned and looked at her.

“Where did she live, Alyona?”

“You know. The apartment near the Central Station.”

“No, before then. Maybe with her parents or something. If she were in trouble, where would she go?”

“Her father died. Her mother came from Bila Tserkva, I think. Gospadi, you don’t think she’s alive?”

“Very unlikely. But whatever happened, she’s at the center of this thing,” Scorpion said, grabbing his clothes and starting to dress.

“What are we going to do?”

“When we get there, we’ll figure it out,” he said, turning on his laptop computer.

He gave her the new identity cards he’d had Matviy make for her, one with the blond wig photo, the second with her pixie haircut.

“How’d you get these?” she asked, studying the names she would be using.

“Santa Claus. Shit!” he said, looking at the laptop screen after he had clicked onto the BBC’s news. bbc. co. uk website.

“What is it?” she said.

“Have a look.” He turned the screen for her to see. There had been a shooting incident involving Russian troops at a border village called Vovchansk, near the city of Kharkov in eastern Ukraine. The headline was that Viktor Kozhanovskiy, acting as prime minister, was expected to announce a full mobilization of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at 0600 hours local time.

“Gospadi,” she whispered. “It’s really happening. What will NATO and the Americans do?”

Scorpion didn’t answer. He went back to the window and peered down from behind the curtain. The van was still there, no smoke coming from its exhaust. If Danylo had been sitting in it through the night, he would have frozen to death. An SUV was double-parked behind the van. As he watched, he saw five men crossing the street toward their building. He began grabbing things and shoving them into his backpack.

“We have to go,” he said.

This time she didn’t say a word. She immediately began cramming things into her carry-on. He went into the kitchen and rummaged like a madman through the pantry and under the sink, throwing contents and cans onto the floor. He found a bag of flour and two aerosol cans of cleaning spray. He came back to the main room, dumped the flour out of the bag onto the sagging sofa and tossed the cans on top.

“Do you have any fluids? Perfume, nail polish, hair spray, anything?” he asked her.

“Here. Why?” she said, digging in her handbag. She handed him a bottle of eau de cologne and another of nail polish remover. He poured them both over the sofa, the cans and the flour. He went back to the kitchen, turned on the gas in the oven but didn’t light it, and left the oven door open.

“Give me your lighter,” he said, shoving her toward the door. She handed it to him, her hand shaking.

“Do you ever leave an apartment normally?” she asked.

“Apparently not in Ukraine,” he said, flicking the lighter and holding the flame to the drapes. When they started burning, he put the lighter flame to the spilled perfume and nail polish remover on the sofa. An acrid cloud of flame and smoke mushroomed up.

“How do you say ‘fire’ in Ukrainian?” he asked as they headed out of the apartment.

“Pozhezha.”

“Come on,” he said, heading to the next apartment. He started pounding on the door and yelling, “Pozhezha! Pozhezha!” then ran to the next apartment and shouted and pounded again.

Iryna ran the other way to another apartment, shouting, “Pozhezha! Dopomozhit!” Fire! Help!

They ran past the elevator. It was coming up. As it did they shouted and pounded on other apartment doors on the floor. People, most in pajamas or half dressed, were coming out of their doors. They could smell smoke in the hallway. Scorpion spotted tendrils of smoke coming from the bottom and sides of their apartment door. Men, women, children, everyone began shouting, screaming, and rushing out of their apartments and into the halls.

Scorpion grabbed Iryna’s hand and led her toward the staircase. Suddenly, a massive explosion rocked the hallway. It blasted the door off their apartment, lifting them off their feet and knocking them to the floor. A whoosh of flame shot out of the blasted doorway into the hall. People screamed in panic. Everyone began running.

“ Zabyraysya! ” Get out! “Down the stairs! Hurry!” Iryna screamed in Ukrainian as she and Scorpion joined a cluster of people pounding down the staircase. On the floor below, she and Scorpion ran out to the hallway. They pounded on doors and shouted again, and when they got back to the staircase, a river of people were scrambling down.

Scorpion spotted two men, one with a prison cross tattoo on the side of his neck, trying to come up the stairs. The two men were swamped by the people swarming down, and after a moment of trying to go against the tide hearing the cries of “Pozhezha!” they gave up and joined the flood of people running down the stairs. Scorpion and Iryna were swept with the crowd out into the frozen street.

Iryna spotted the van. She started toward it, but Scorpion grabbed her arm and pulled her away. She struggled, trying to go back.

“I have to see Danylo. Make sure he’s all right.”

“He’s dead. Come on,” he said, pulling her with him.

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s dead,” Scorpion snapped. They walked quickly away from the van toward the street corner. She started to look back.

“Don’t,” he said, pulling on her arm to keep her walking with him. The prison tattoo was a dead giveaway, he thought. The men after them were Syndikat blatnoi. Mogilenko’s thugs. He should have taken care of Mogilenko before. The question was, how did they find them? How did they know about the apartment? And how did they know about Danylo? As they turned the corner, Scorpion spotted a man getting into a small Skoda sedan.