Hail Warning

Somewhere on the Continent of Asia

Kara walked down the stairs of the Boeing 787 on the wide tarmac. She spotted a man who had been seated next to her on the airplane. Before they had even reached the terminal, Kara turned on the charm and asked the olive-skinned man, “I don’t have any currency, and I need to make a phone call.”

It was a white lie. She had Kornev’s wallet stuffed with money, but she wanted to use a phone that could not be traced back to her. She reasoned borrowing a cellphone from a traveling stranger was optimal.

As she walked toward the terminal building, she realized that she didn’t even know where she was. She had bought a ticket for the first plane out of Termez. The destination had been told to her by the pleasant woman working the ticket counter in Uzbekistan. But Kara had not taken it in. She knew where she wanted to end up, and all the places in the middle were just that, places on the way to her end destination. She recalled that the country ended in the phoneme — stan, but that meant it could have been any of several countries packed tightly into the same region.

The man smiled back at Kara and began fumbling around in his pocket for his cellphone. His hand came back holding a small flip phone which Kara accepted with a gracious smile.

“Thank you so much,” Kara said.

“You are very welcome,” the man told her. “Are you going to be staying in town?” he asked, thinking this just might be his lucky day.

“No, I wish I were,” Kara told him, making a pouty face. “I am flying out on the same plane once it is refueled.”

The man looked unhappy. He shifted gears and told Kara, “Enjoy your very short time in our country.”

“I will,” Kara told him. “And, thank you again. I will be a minute, I promise.”

Inside the terminal, Kara walked to the nearest wall to provide privacy before dialing the number from memory. She gave her surroundings a quick 360-degree scan while she waited for an answer. The phone began to ring. It rang three more times before the answering machine engaged.

The voice recording said, “Leave a message.”

She recognized Dr. Nikita Sokolov’s voice, although it sounded a little younger. When at the doctor’s home, Kornev had joked with the doctor about never answering his phone.

She left a message. “This is Victor’s friend, Tonya. Victor needs your help. He is in one of the tunnels that leads from one of his garages to his house. He told me you know about all his secret tunnels. He needs your help to get out of one of them. If you don’t help him, he will most certainly die in the tunnel.”

Kara stopped talking for a moment to consider if there was anything left to tell the doctor. Satisfied with the message, she flipped the phone closed after erasing her call from the phone’s call history. She returned the phone to its owner, thanking him once again.