Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“What happened?” Iryna whispered to Scorpion.

“Whatever they planned just changed. You’re a hot potato,” he whispered back.

The three judges talked among themselves, one and then another glancing over at Scorpion and Iryna. They seemed to have reached a decision. The hatchet-faced suddya marked something on the paper and signed it. He turned the paper so the other two judges could initial it, then turned back to Iryna.

“Iryna Mikhailivna Shevchenko. Based on the prisoner known as Scorpion’s confession and additional information that has come to the attention of this sud, we find there is insufficient evidence to hold you for the assassination of Yuriy Dmytrovych Cherkesov. You are free to go, but with the understanding that if additional evidence should be found, you may be charged in the future. You may go.”

Iryna came and stood next to Scorpion.

“This is not an open sud, Iryna Mikhailivna. Leave at once!” the hatchet-faced suddya demanded.

“What are you going to do with him?” she asked, indicating Scorpion.

“Take her out!” the suddya ordered.

Two guards came and grabbed her.

“ Nyet! He’s doing it for me, you fools! He is innocent!” Iryna cried out, looking at Scorpion as if to memorize his face as two guards dragged her out of the room.

The hatchet-faced suddya stared coldly at Scorpion.

“Mikhail Kilbane, also known as Peter Reinert, also known as the foreign agent Scorpion, the sud sentences you to death for the murder of Yuriy Dmytrovych Cherkesov. Sentence to be carried out within twenty-four hours. The sud is concluded,” he said, picking up his papers.

The three judges stood and filed out of the room.

Boryspil

Kyiv, Ukraine

He sat shackled on the floor of his cell, waiting for his execution. They had left the light on, and a guard peered in through the peephole. He no longer thought of escape. Even shackled and with his groin aching, he might be able to take a couple of the guards out, but they knew how dangerous he was. They would come with more than enough men to subdue him. In the end he would only hurt a few brutes.

He hadn’t thought it would end this way. With so many questions unanswered. What had happened with the war? No one seemed to act as if they were at war, and he hadn’t heard any explosions or sirens. Had he managed to stop it or was he buried so deep behind Lukyanivska’s thick walls that missiles had hit the city and he hadn’t heard them? Had Akhnetzov gotten through to someone in Russia? What had happened with YouTube? Why did everyone act as if no one knew anything about it? How had they managed to track him and Iryna to the TV station? Who had betrayed them?

What of Iryna? He had tried to save her, but it was whatever Gorobets said to the judges that did it. Why would Gorobets want to save her? Was it because she was too much of a hot potato for them? The daughter of Artem Shevchenko, founder of the Rukh, was that it? At least she was safe-for the moment. She cared for him. Maybe even loved him. He’d seen it or something close to it in the last desperate look she had thrown at him when they dragged her from the courtroom. He wished he could see her, touch her.

For a moment he allowed himself the fantasy of the two of them on his sailboat, the Laawan, named for the friendly west wind in Arabia, its sails bellied with a fresh breeze somewhere in the Cyclades islands, say the ink-blue waters between Syros and Paros. He pictured how she would look in a bikini, the sun warm on their skin, the blue of the Mediterranean for as far as they could see, the two of them digging into a freshly grilled sea bass hot from the galley, washed down with a good Batard-Montrachet grand cru wine.

He’d almost pulled it off, he thought. He cast his mind back over everything that had happened. Where had he screwed it up? What had he missed? How had the SBU known they were at the TV station? Who tipped them? Akhnetzov? The station manager, Korobei? Why? They wanted the show to take place.

He was sure they hadn’t been followed from the Central Station. It wasn’t the SVR. He’d taken care of Gabrilov, and anyway, he’d gotten past the SVR’s part in this. Unless there was another player in the game. But who? He’d stayed away from the CIA’s Kiev Station, and in any case, the Company wanted him to stop this thing. And what about that YouTube video he’d posted? Even if the CIA was involved, they would have wanted it to be seen. It would have either defused the crisis with Russia or proven that the U.S. was in the clear and had had nothing to do with it.

Unless there was another mole inside Kozhanovskiy’s office.

Then it hit him.

Slavo.

But how had they tracked Iryna? He was sure she hadn’t been followed to the train station. But maybe they didn’t need to. If Slavo had gotten hold of her latest cell phone number, they could have tracked her that way with GPS.

He looked up. There were sounds in the corridor. His heart began to beat rapidly. His life was about to end. For a moment his mind flashed on Iryna, then Najla that night in Amsterdam. He thought of Kelly and how she looked, her skin burnished like gold as the sun set over the Sea of Galilee. He was leaving a lot of unfinished business behind. Who doesn’t? he thought. Everyone leaves unfinished business behind.

He heard the guards coming closer. It sounded like at least a half-dozen of them. They stopped outside his cell door. His throat was dry. He couldn’t swallow. It was hard to breathe.

He remembered a night in the desert when he was a boy. One of Sheikh Zaid’s sons, Malik, by his second wife, Latifah, had died. The boy had fallen and the wound became infected, and by the time they got him to a hospital, it was too late.

They were sitting by a fire in the tent at night during the three days of mourning. Latifah started to cry uncontrollably, and Sheikh Zaid, instead of comforting her, sent her away. When Scorpion looked at him questioningly, Zaid had said: “She does not understand. There is a hadith of the Prophet of Allah, rasul sallahu alayhi wassalam, peace be upon him, of ibn Umar from his father. The Prophet said: ‘The deceased is tortured in his grave for the wailing done over him.’ ”

“So we should not cry?” Scorpion had asked.

“It makes no difference. But it is better not,” Sheikh Zaid said, but Scorpion could see the tears in his eyes.

A key scraped in the lock and the cell door clanged open. He steeled himself. A bullet in the back of the head and the pain ends. Say nothing. Show them nothing, he told himself. Everyone dies. He took a deep breath and looked at the man who stepped into the cell. The man was looking to the side, his face in shadow, saying something to a guard, and at first Scorpion couldn’t be sure who it was. Then he stepped into the light and he could see his face. A well-built man in his sixties in an Armani suit and steel-rimmed glasses, his hair almost completely white. It’s impossible, Scorpion told himself. He must be hallucinating.

“Scorpion,” the man said, and the voice was unmistakable.

Ivanov. Alias Checkmate, director of the Russian FSB Counterintelligence Directorate. Ivanov himself. Looking much as he had the last time Scorpion had seen him in Saint Petersburg. Immediately, it brought it all back. Najla. The Dacha Club on Nevsky Prospekt, and how it ended in the warehouse near the Narvskaya port. Scorpion struggled to his feet, his groin aching.

“Take off his shackles,” Ivanov told the guard in Russian, and said to Scorpion in English: “Can you walk?”

“I’m not sure,” Scorpion managed.

“Come on,” Ivanov said, grabbing his arm to help support him. The guard supported him on the other side. “We don’t have much time.”