Scorpion Winter

Chapter Twenty-Six

Darnytskyi

Kyiv, Ukraine

“Who’s the ski jacket in the van across the street?” Scorpion asked.

“Danylo. Viktor sent him to-” Iryna started, but couldn’t finish because they were kissing, tongues searching, exploring, tearing off their clothes as if it were the first time; if anything, more intense. Bittersweet too, as if they sensed their time together was coming to an end. Afterward, in bed, she lit a cigarette and told him more.

“You heard there was a riot in the Verkhovna Rada? Anyway, it’s settled. The elections will be postponed for three weeks. It hasn’t been made public yet, but Svoboda is going to announce that Lavro Davydenko will be the party’s new candidate for President.”

“Who’s Davydenko?”

“A nobody. A nonentity. He’s the kind of man that when he enters the room, you get the feeling someone just left,” she said, exhaling smoke angrily.

“Why’d they pick him?”

“He’s Gorobets’s man. If Gorobets sent him to fetch coffee, he’d do it. Ask him a question and he turns to Gorobets and says ‘What do you think, Oleksandr Maxymovych?’ Such a man-not a man, a thing! President! Now of all times!”

“What happened?”

“Didn’t you see the news? As prime minister, Viktor sent a request to NATO to stop the Russian invasion. NATO is meeting in emergency session. Viktor spoke on the phone with the American president. The Americans say they will issue a stern warning to the Russians. A stern warning!” She turned to him “The Americans. Can we trust them?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t do politics,” he hesitated. “Then too

…”

“Then too what?”

“America has its own interests to look out for.”

She stubbed out her cigarette in a jar top she was using as an ashtray.

“I smoke too much.”

“You do,” he said.

She turned to him on her side, her naked breast nudging his arm.

“Did you find out anything?”

“It’s not the Guoanbu. The Chinese made a show of interest in the new gas pipeline to distract the Russians from what they really want: new markets and gas for China.”

“So who killed Cherkesov? The CIA?”

“That’s what the SVR is trying to sell. Except you and I both know it’s not true.”

She traced her finger down his face from his forehead down his nose and lips to his chin.

“How do I know?”

“You were with me,” he said. “It was an inside job. A power play inside Svoboda. So we just need to figure who stood to gain from Cherkesov’s death.”

“Gorobets! He’s the big winner, especially if that clown, Davydenko, wins! He’ll be running the country. We’ll denounce him!” She sat up excitedly.

“Right now everyone, including the politsiy, thinks we’re the killers. We need proof. We need the bomber.” He looked at her. “What was so urgent that you texted me?”

“I heard from Oksana.”

“Your mole in Gorobets’s office?”

Iryna nodded. “She said something. Gorobets has a bodyguard. Big guy with scruffy blond hair in his eyes.”

“Shelayev.” Scorpion nodded. The guy who crushed heads like eggshells. “What about him?”

“She said she hasn’t seen him since the assassination. No one seems to know where he is, or if they do, they’re not saying.” She looked at Scorpion, her face with its pixie haircut barely visible in the darkness. “Could he be the assassin?”

“He’s Gorobets’s man. And he’s Spetsnaz-trained. Possible, very possible.”

“She said something else. It bothered me. That’s why I had to see you.”

“What?”

“She said that two days before the rally in Dnipropetrovsk she went to a cafe near the university here in Kyiv. She saw Shelayev having coffee with Alyona.”

Scorpion sat up suddenly and slapped his forehead. “What an idiot! How stupid of me not to have seen it!” He looked at Iryna. “Did they see her?”

“She didn’t think so. She hasn’t told anyone.”

Scorpion gripped her shoulder. “You have to get hold of her! Tell her not to say a word to anyone. If she says anything, she’ll be killed. And especially nothing about Shelayev.”

Iryna nodded. Scorpion got up and walked naked to the window. They were on the twelfth floor of a Left Bank apartment building that overlooked a bridge over the Dnieper, the lights from the bridge reflected on the ice in the river. The van with Danylo was still parked on the street below. Something about it bothered him, but he wasn’t sure what. He turned and looked at her.

“Where did she live, Alyona?”

“You know. The apartment near the Central Station.”

“No, before then. Maybe with her parents or something. If she were in trouble, where would she go?”

“Her father died. Her mother came from Bila Tserkva, I think. Gospadi, you don’t think she’s alive?”

“Very unlikely. But whatever happened, she’s at the center of this thing,” Scorpion said, grabbing his clothes and starting to dress.

“What are we going to do?”

“When we get there, we’ll figure it out,” he said, turning on his laptop computer.

He gave her the new identity cards he’d had Matviy make for her, one with the blond wig photo, the second with her pixie haircut.

“How’d you get these?” she asked, studying the names she would be using.

“Santa Claus. Shit!” he said, looking at the laptop screen after he had clicked onto the BBC’s news. bbc. co. uk website.

“What is it?” she said.

“Have a look.” He turned the screen for her to see. There had been a shooting incident involving Russian troops at a border village called Vovchansk, near the city of Kharkov in eastern Ukraine. The headline was that Viktor Kozhanovskiy, acting as prime minister, was expected to announce a full mobilization of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at 0600 hours local time.

“Gospadi,” she whispered. “It’s really happening. What will NATO and the Americans do?”

Scorpion didn’t answer. He went back to the window and peered down from behind the curtain. The van was still there, no smoke coming from its exhaust. If Danylo had been sitting in it through the night, he would have frozen to death. An SUV was double-parked behind the van. As he watched, he saw five men crossing the street toward their building. He began grabbing things and shoving them into his backpack.

“We have to go,” he said.

This time she didn’t say a word. She immediately began cramming things into her carry-on. He went into the kitchen and rummaged like a madman through the pantry and under the sink, throwing contents and cans onto the floor. He found a bag of flour and two aerosol cans of cleaning spray. He came back to the main room, dumped the flour out of the bag onto the sagging sofa and tossed the cans on top.

“Do you have any fluids? Perfume, nail polish, hair spray, anything?” he asked her.

“Here. Why?” she said, digging in her handbag. She handed him a bottle of eau de cologne and another of nail polish remover. He poured them both over the sofa, the cans and the flour. He went back to the kitchen, turned on the gas in the oven but didn’t light it, and left the oven door open.

“Give me your lighter,” he said, shoving her toward the door. She handed it to him, her hand shaking.

“Do you ever leave an apartment normally?” she asked.

“Apparently not in Ukraine,” he said, flicking the lighter and holding the flame to the drapes. When they started burning, he put the lighter flame to the spilled perfume and nail polish remover on the sofa. An acrid cloud of flame and smoke mushroomed up.

“How do you say ‘fire’ in Ukrainian?” he asked as they headed out of the apartment.

“Pozhezha.”

“Come on,” he said, heading to the next apartment. He started pounding on the door and yelling, “Pozhezha! Pozhezha!” then ran to the next apartment and shouted and pounded again.

Iryna ran the other way to another apartment, shouting, “Pozhezha! Dopomozhit!” Fire! Help!

They ran past the elevator. It was coming up. As it did they shouted and pounded on other apartment doors on the floor. People, most in pajamas or half dressed, were coming out of their doors. They could smell smoke in the hallway. Scorpion spotted tendrils of smoke coming from the bottom and sides of their apartment door. Men, women, children, everyone began shouting, screaming, and rushing out of their apartments and into the halls.

Scorpion grabbed Iryna’s hand and led her toward the staircase. Suddenly, a massive explosion rocked the hallway. It blasted the door off their apartment, lifting them off their feet and knocking them to the floor. A whoosh of flame shot out of the blasted doorway into the hall. People screamed in panic. Everyone began running.

“ Zabyraysya! ” Get out! “Down the stairs! Hurry!” Iryna screamed in Ukrainian as she and Scorpion joined a cluster of people pounding down the staircase. On the floor below, she and Scorpion ran out to the hallway. They pounded on doors and shouted again, and when they got back to the staircase, a river of people were scrambling down.

Scorpion spotted two men, one with a prison cross tattoo on the side of his neck, trying to come up the stairs. The two men were swamped by the people swarming down, and after a moment of trying to go against the tide hearing the cries of “Pozhezha!” they gave up and joined the flood of people running down the stairs. Scorpion and Iryna were swept with the crowd out into the frozen street.

Iryna spotted the van. She started toward it, but Scorpion grabbed her arm and pulled her away. She struggled, trying to go back.

“I have to see Danylo. Make sure he’s all right.”

“He’s dead. Come on,” he said, pulling her with him.

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s dead,” Scorpion snapped. They walked quickly away from the van toward the street corner. She started to look back.

“Don’t,” he said, pulling on her arm to keep her walking with him. The prison tattoo was a dead giveaway, he thought. The men after them were Syndikat blatnoi. Mogilenko’s thugs. He should have taken care of Mogilenko before. The question was, how did they find them? How did they know about the apartment? And how did they know about Danylo? As they turned the corner, Scorpion spotted a man getting into a small Skoda sedan.

“Call him. Tell him we need a lift. We’ll pay him,” he told Iryna.

“Probachte! Pryvit!” Excuse me! Hello! she called out, waving to the man, who just looked at her.

“Anything else, your highness?” she whispered to Scorpion.

“Smile,” he said.

For a hundred hryvnia the man agreed to take them to Tolstoho Square. Within minutes they were driving across the bridge Scorpion had looked down on from the apartment window. A pale sun, pale as the moon, cast a cold light on the frozen river. The man tried to talk to Iryna, but she answered in monosyllables. They drove through traffic. The man dropped them off near the Metro entrance on the museum side of the square. They waited till he drove off, then began walking.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“We need a car. I looked it up before. There’s a car rental agency on vulytsya Pushkinska.”

“I can’t keep doing this,” she said. For a moment she stood there, trembling.

“No,” he said.

T hey spotted the car agency on the ground floor of an office building. Scorpion used his South African passport and driver’s license in the name Peter Reinert to rent a four-wheel-drive Volkswagen Touareg SUV.

While they waited for the car, Iryna took off her Ushanka hat and he saw she was in her pixie cut; she hadn’t had time to put on the blond wig. Scorpion was instantly on guard, but no one seemed to recognize her. After the rental agent programmed the GPS, they drove the Volkswagen into traffic.

“What’s the best way to Bila Tserkva?” he asked.

“Go left, there,” she said, pointing. “We need to get to the M5 going south.”

“How far?”

“Eighty kilometers, give or take,” she said.

A few minutes later she had input the town into the GPS and they were getting directions from it in Russian. Scorpion turned onto a wide street that had been cleared of snow.

“Feel better?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She stared straight ahead. They were driving on a boulevard with a broad divider lined with bare trees and with trees along both sides. Not for the first time, it occurred to Scorpion that in summer, Ukraine would be beautiful. He glanced at the rearview mirror. So far there was no sign of a tail.

“Are you sure Danylo’s dead?” she asked.

“Pretty sure,” he nodded. It was next to impossible that the Syndikat blatnoi knew about the apartment and not about the van. He hadn’t wanted to go near it not only because they needed to get away, but also because he didn’t want Iryna to see would likely be left of Danylo inside the van.

“I don’t understand,” she said, looking at him. “Who were they?”

“Mogilenko is a sociopath,” he said.

“Mogilenko?”

“Head of the Syndikat, the mafia. His shpana did it. They were the ones after us.”

“Tell me, do you always make everyone so angry with you?”

“It’s a gift,” he said, and in spite of herself, she almost laughed.

“Impossible man,” she muttered.

“Besides Danylo, who else knew about us and that apartment?” he asked.

“Viktor, of course.” She turned to him. “You don’t think…?”

“What does Viktor gain if you die?”

“Nothing. He loses the support of women-and also those who remember my father. Without my father and the Rukh, this country would have never achieved independence. Not Viktor,” she said.

“Well, I’m not buying two landlords in a row. Who else?”

“My aide, Slavo. You don’t think…?”

He didn’t answer.

“It can’t be! Not Slavo!”

“Why not? You have a mole in Svoboda. Why shouldn’t they?”

“You said this was mafia, not politics,” she said, glaring at him.

“Didn’t you say Cherkesov and Gorobets were corrupt? With ties to the mafia?”

“You mean use them as hatchetmen? No dirt on them or their Chorni Povyazky? It almost makes sense. But Slavo?”

“You better call Kozhanovskiy. Let him know. He needs to get rid of Slavo. After you call, get rid of your cell phone. Wipe off your fingerprints and toss the phone and the SIM card out the window separately, about a minute apart.”

Iryna called and spoke rapidly, intensely, in Ukrainian. Afterward she threw the cell phone away and took out another of the prepaid cells Scorpion had given her. As they drove out of the city, they began to see trees and fields of snow. She started to light a cigarette, then stopped and instead tried to find news on the radio. A commentator was arguing with someone on a Russian language talk show. She translated for Scorpion. One man said that if Ukraine was invaded, Ukrainians would have to fight. Not to fight would mean the end of Ukraine as an independent country. The other man wondered if the country was ready for war. They agreed that everything depended upon what NATO and the Americans decided. After a while she shut the radio off and they rode in silence through farmlands on the outskirts of the city.

They passed a long convoy of Ukraine Army trucks filled with soldiers, coming in the opposite direction. Many of the trucks were flying the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.

They passed truck after truck, all heading toward Kyiv.