Checkmate

30

After ninety minutes of nearly silent travel, Fisher’s escort, Elena, pulled the car to the side of the road and shut off her headlights. “I have to smoke,” she said in slightly accented but letter-perfect English. She got out and lit up. Fisher got out and stretched. His feet crunched on the gravel.

As it had been for the last hour, the road was deserted and dark. Without the glow of the headlights, Fisher now realized just how dark it was. On either side of the road, marshland disappeared into the blackness. They were truly in the middle of nowhere.

His turnaround time between his foray into Hong Kong and his landing at Kiev’s Borispol Airport had been a too-short six hours — just enough time to deliver the hard drive he’d stolen from the Lo Wu warehouse to Grimsdottir, go through a quick Chernobyl mission brief with Lambert, then find an empty office couch to curl up on for two hours.

From the ear-jarring bustle of Hong Kong to the silent, barren wastelands of Chernobyl, Fisher thought. He wasn’t even sure what time zone his body clock was running on.

“You’re nervous,” he said to Elena.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Elena puffed and paced. Twenty-seven, she was tall and slender, with auburn hair held in a loose ponytail. “What I’ve been doing for your country is about information. I give information and they take it. They’ve never sent anyone here. Why would they send anyone here?”

Elena Androtov was a biologist with PRIA, or the Pripyat Research Industrial Association, which managed the thirty-kiliometer exclusion zone around the now-infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Worried that the Ukrainian and Russian governments weren’t fully sharing what they knew about the ongoing effects of the Chernobyl disaster with the world, Elena had walked into a U.S. consulate while on vacation in Bulgaria and offered to be a window on what she and her colleages were really learning inside the Exclusion Zone.

Ideology, Fisher thought. It was one of the four MICE. The reasons why people offer or agree to spy for a foreign agency usually fall into one of four categories: Money, Ideology, Compromise, or Ego. Elena had never asked for money or recognition, nor was she under duress. While the CIA was grateful for her information, none of it was earth-shattering. Her handler had repeatedly reminded her she could quit at any time, no questions asked.

Fisher understood her apprehension at his sudden apperance. For the last six years her handlers had simply accepted her data with a simple “Thanks, make contact when you have more.” And now, inexplicably, she was being asked to play tour guide to some mysterious secret agent.

“How long have you worked here?” he asked. He knew the answer, but talking helped.

“Six years. I came right after university. I wanted to help.”

“Have you?”

“You tell me. How many people do you think died because of Chernobyl?”

“The official count was thirty-one.”

Elena snorted. “Thirty-one! Twice that number of firefighters died within five minutes of reaching the scene, charred to a crisp by gamma radiation. Poof! Gone!”

“How many, then?”

“Over the last twenty years, just counting Ukraine and Belarus, I’d say two hundred thousand. So I ask you: How can I be helping when the whole world still believes thirty-one?”

“Why don’t you get out?”

“I’ve got another year on my contract,” she replied, then seemed to relax slightly. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Then maybe I’ll leave. Leave Ukraine.” She looked up at him. “Maybe I’ll come to America.”

It was more a question than statement.

Fisher said, “Maybe I can help you with that. But for now, you need to get me inside the Exclusion Zone. Get me in, and I’ll do the rest.”

“Oh, really? The Exclusion Zone. Okay, James Bond, what do you know of the Exclusion Zone?” Not waiting for an answer, Elena pointed up the road. “Just over that hill is the checkpoint. Chernobyl is another thirty kilometers beyond that! Thirty kilometers! That’s… that’s…”

“Eighteen miles,” Fisher said.

“Eighteen miles. Another fifteen kilometers past that is Ghost Town.”

“You mean Pripyat?” Before the disaster, Pripyat had been an idyllic city of fifty thousand where most of the Chernobyl workers and their families had lived. For the last two decades it had been deserted.

“Yes, Pripyat. That’s what the disaster did. That’s how bad it was — is. I’ll take you there. You can feel the ghosts. They walk the streets.” Elena laughed and muttered to herself, “Thirty-one people. Hah!”

“You’re pretty passionate about this. Were you always?”

“Oh, no. Just like everyone else, I’d believed the official reports. Why would our government lie about something like that? They’re here to protect us. I was naive. I came here and my eyes were opened. Yours will be, too — if you want to see, that is.”

“I do.”

“Good.” She checked her watch. “Get back in. We need to go.”