Private Moscow

Chapter 72

We searched the rest of the base as thoroughly as we could, but in the end the freezing conditions defeated us, and we left without going inside two of the hangars. The others had all been empty, and apart from the desk in what we assumed had once been a classroom, we discovered nothing of note.

I struggled to imagine what Ernie Fisher had been doing there, and had even more difficulty picturing Karl Parker at the base.

It was a little after 3 p.m. when we returned to the idling car, which was almost out of fuel. Our journey back to Volkovo took fifteen minutes. There had been no fresh snowfall and I’d dug out the worst drifts on our way to the base.

We found Leonid waiting in the bakery. He was sitting at a small table enjoying a coffee and pastry, chatting to the owner, who stood behind a display counter.

“Anything?” Leonid asked when we entered.

“We found a classroom and an old American children’s book,” I said. “Nothing else.”

“Kofe?” the baker asked.

Finally, a word I could understand. I shook my head. “No, thanks,” I replied. “We should get going,” I said to Dinara and Leonid. “Get back to Moscow. See if we can pick up any leads. I want us to look into Ernie Fisher’s work at the embassy.”

Leonid got to his feet.

“You find anything?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “The people I spoke to were junior personnel. Gate guards, patrolmen. None of them knew about any of the classified activities at the base. And they didn’t recognize anyone in the photo.”

Leonid settled his check, and we left the bakery, got in the truck and headed south. We filled up at a gas station not far outside town, and as we sped toward Moscow in the fading light, I tried to put the pieces together.

Karl Parker had asked me to New York to tell me a secret, but he’d been killed before we could speak. If Madame Agafiya and the Volkovo bar owner’s testimony was to be trusted, it seemed likely Karl knew Ernie Fisher and Elizabeth Connor, and that they might have met in Russia, where Fisher seemed to have spent some time in a maximum-security military base. If Fisher had been a Russian operative, why had he been killed by one of his own?

I sat in the back of the truck, turning over scenarios, while Leonid drove. After a couple of hours, he and Dinara traded, and another three hours later, I took the wheel. It was 9 p.m., and we were a little under one hundred miles from Moscow when my phone rang. I pulled to the side of the dark, deserted road and took the call.

“Jack, it’s Victoria. Justine Smith said I should call.”

“Victoria, how are you and Kevin holding up?”

She sighed. “It seems wrong, but you eat, you sleep, you do the mundane things that need to get done. I always thought grief was all-consuming, but life forces its way in.”

“I’m sorry, Victoria,” I said. “I wish I could have done something.”

“You’re doing enough,” she replied. “Sorry it took me a while to return your call. Kevin and I have been staying with my folks.”

“I wanted to ask you about Karl’s childhood,” I said. “He talk about it much?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I couldn’t tell her what we’d discovered. Not yet. Not without more evidence.

“We’re just running full background on all the victims,” I replied.

“He didn’t like talking about it,” she said. “His parents died in a car crash when he was seven, and he didn’t have any other family, so he went into the foster system.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Like I said, he didn’t like to talk about it,” she replied. “And he had his official records sealed by court order. I think he tried to erase as much of his childhood as he could. He just found it too painful.”

I thought about her answer. Karl’s behavior was compatible with the actions of a spy, or they could have been those of someone who wanted to forget a traumatic childhood.

“Anything else?” Victoria asked.

“Can you dig out any childhood pictures you have of Karl?” I asked. “Send them to Justine?”

“Sure,” Victoria replied. “And Jack...” She hesitated. “Thank you for everything you’re doing.”

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “I owe it to Karl to find out the truth.”

“What did she say?” Dinara asked from the back after I’d hung up.

“He lost his parents young and went into care. He took steps to get his childhood history sealed.”

“Either he suffered things as a child that he wanted to keep secret,” Leonid remarked, “or he’s a spy.”

“My thoughts exactly,” I said.

“I may have a way for us to find out what was going on at that base,” Leonid said. He was leaning back in the passenger seat, which he’d set to recline, and looking at him made me think of a lazy snake. Languid and patient, but lightning fast and deadly when the time came to strike.

“It will involve us doing a deal with the devil,” he revealed.

I shot him a skeptical look.

“Let’s go,” he told me. “I’ll explain on the way.”

I put the truck in gear and we headed into darkness.