C. Graham - The Solomon Effect

Jax leaned forward. “You’ve no idea what happened to him?”

“I heard he fled east, to the Russians. But who knows?”

Jax met Tobie’s gaze, but said nothing.

Leon glanced from one to the other. “Why are you asking me about all this, James?”

“You know I can’t tell you that, Leon.”

Leon let out a long sigh that shook his narrow chest. “It’s still out there, isn’t it? That pathogen…whatever it is. It’s still out there, and someone has it. Someone who’s planning to use it.”

When Jax didn’t answer, Leon raised one shaky hand to rub his eyes, and his voice broke. “God help us all.”

The call from Andrei came through about ten minutes later. Excusing himself, Jax retreated to a small chamber on the far side of the courtyard.

The Russian came straight to the point. “Remember that boy you were interested in?”

“Stefan Baklanov?”

“That’s him.”

“You found him?”

“Not exactly. But we picked up someone who appears to have been looking for him. A Chechen by the name of Borz Zakaev.”

Jax glanced toward the courtyard, where October was drinking peppermint tea with Ginsburg’s Islamic wife. He said, “Has this guy told you anything?”

“Not yet. But we’re working on him. It shouldn’t take long.”

Jax knew what that meant. Once, the Russian use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” had helped brand the Communists as bad guys. But after the last few years, the West had kinda lost the high road on that subject.

He said, “Listen, Andrei: have you ever heard of a Nazi doctor named Kline? Martin Kline? There’s a good possibility he was picked up by the Russians at the end of the war.”

“Kline.” There was a pause. “Never heard of him. Why?”

Jax didn’t even hesitate; he needed the Russian’s cooperation, which meant that now was not the time to pussyfoot with the truth. “I’m beginning to think U-114’s hazardous cargo wasn’t exactly what we thought it was.”

Andrei’s voice sharpened. “This Kline…what was his specialty?”

“Biological warfare.”

“I don’t like the sound of this, Jax.”

“Neither do I.”

Andrei said, “There’s an Aeroflot flight leaving Ben-Gurion Airport for Moscow at two A.M., with connections on to Kaliningrad. Be on it.”

“What makes you think we can trust this guy?” asked October as their flight backed away from the terminal at Ben-Gurion. Around them, the lights of the airport lit up the night with a sulfurous glow.

Jax looked up from tightening his seat belt. “You mean Andrei? What makes you think I trust him?”

She made an incoherent noise deep in her throat. “Then why are we going to Russia?”

“Because Halloween is less than twenty-four hours away, and we’re running out of options.”

“You can’t seriously think the Russians are behind this?”

“The Russian government, no. Some other interests in Russia, very possibly.”

She was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand how anyone could do something like this. How could you deliberately unleash a plague you know is going to kill millions? Who could hate that much?”

“A lot of people hate that much. Look at what the Russians did to Kaliningrad. What the Turks did to Izmir. What Hitler did to the Jews.”

“But that all happened a long time ago.”

“Not that long ago. Remember Sabra and Shatila? There’s been a lot of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry whipped up in the last few years. Not just in the States, but in Europe and Russia and China, too. That kind of stuff turns ugly in a hurry.”

“But this disease won’t just kill Arab Muslims. It’ll kill Arab Christians, and Jews.”

“Another perennially favorite target. And as for the Arab Christians-” He pushed his carry-on bag further under the seat ahead of him. “Most people don’t even know they exist.” He paused. “I suppose it’s one way to solve the Middle East crises.”

“By wiping out everyone in the area? That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

“More extreme than nukes? Do you know how many good Christian Americans have been calling for the United States to nuke the entire Arab world?”

She stared across the runway to where a long row of planes was already lined up, waiting for takeoff.

Jax said, “From a practical standpoint, the problem with nuking the Arab world has always been contamination, right? No one wants to set off a bunch of atomic bombs in the midst of the richest oil fields in the world-oil fields everyone has been trying to get their hands on for years. But if you could get rid of the population…”

“Then you could just walk in and take over the oil fields, no problem. You think that’s what this is about? Oil?”

“It’s a possibility,” said Jax. “The United States isn’t the only country that’d like to get its hands on the Middle East. Everyone’s going to be running out of oil eventually. Europe, China-”

“Russia.”

“Russia,” Jax agreed. “They might be a big exporter of oil now, but it won’t last forever. Think about it: of the five things we know for certain about these bad guys, at least three of them are clustered around Russia.”

She frowned. “Five things? We know five things?”

“At least. We know that whoever these bad guys are, they’re neither Jewish nor Arab.”

“Obviously. But that still leaves a hell of a lot of options open. What else?”

“We know that our bad guys command some serious resources in terms of money and personnel.”

“You mean, as in a government?”

“Once, I’d have said so. But there are some very rich crazies out there. And with the way everyone hires mercenaries these days, there are private ‘security companies’ all over the place. Not just in the U.S., but in places like Britain and South Africa and Russia, too.”

“That’s two,” said October, holding up her fingers. “But as links to Russia, they’re both pretty shaky.”

“I wasn’t counting those as the Russian links.” He held up his own fingers. “Three, the last time this Dr. Kline was seen, he was headed toward Russia. One of the questions we haven’t addressed in all this is, How did our bad guys find out the pathogen was on that U-boat?”

“You think Kline told them?”

“It seems like a pretty good possibility.” He held up another finger. “Four, out of all the salvage outfits operating around the Baltic Sea, our bad guys decided to hire the Yalena, a Russian ship. And five, our bad guys have people in Russia. They were there last Saturday, when they killed Baklanov and his crew. They were there when they killed Anna Baklanov. And they’re still there, looking for this kid-presumably because he can identify them.”

“Which is why we want the kid,” she said.

“Which is why we need that kid.”

October leaned back in her seat, her hands curling around the ends of the armrests as the plane hurtled down the runway toward takeoff. “We know something else,” she said.

He swung his head to look at her. “What’s that?”

“We know that if they find that boy before we do, they’ll kill him.”

“If we don’t figure out who’s doing this and stop them, tens of millions of people are going to die.”

“You say that like the boy doesn’t matter.”

Their gazes met, and Jax knew they were both remembering the same thing: a dark-headed, gangly boy with one arm thrown across the shoulders of a happy, panting mutt. “No,” said Jax softly. “The boy matters.”

Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October

7:05 A.M. local time

Stefan awoke cold and tired and hungry. He’d passed a restless night, startling at every loose board banging in the wind, every furtive rustling from the unseen creatures of the dark.