Scorpion Winter

Chapter Thirty-Four

Verkhovna Rada

Kyiv, Ukraine

Scorpion drove through the darkness toward the checkpoint at Dytyatky, the road with its patches of snow a ghostly white in the headlights. His cell phone had finally gotten into range and he picked up a BBC news broadcast. The Russians had announced a deadline of midnight, after which Russia “would take whatever steps are necessary, including military action, to ensure the security of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine,” the cell phone broadcast said.

“In Kiev,” the announcer went on, “the meeting between presidential candidate Viktor Kozhanovskiy and acting president Lavro Davydenko has ended without a joint statement or any sign of compromise. Mr. Kozhanovskiy has accused Mr. Davydenko of indifference to the suffering of the Ukrainian people and a callous disregard for the sovereignty of the Ukraine. He again demanded that NATO fulfill its obligations under the Membership Action Plan agreement.

“Mr. Davydenko, speaking through his spokesman, Mr. Oleksandr Gorobets, declared that Mr. Kozhanovskiy has no legitimacy because the crisis was caused by Iryna Shevchenko, Mr. Kozhanovskiy’s campaign manager, who is accused of murdering the late Svoboda presidential candidate, Yuriy Cherkesov, whose assassination sparked the crisis. He demanded that Mr. Kozhanovskiy stop protecting her and that she and the accused assassin, a Canadian national named Michael Kilbane, be turned over to the authorities before the Russian deadline.

“In Moscow, the American, British, and French ambassadors have presented a jointly sponsored note to the Russian Foreign Ministry stating that if Russian troops cross the Ukrainian border, NATO will regard it as an act of aggression upon a NATO member country. In London, the prime minister stated in a televised speech to the people of Great Britain that ‘all eyes are now turned to the Ukrainian border. We hope and pray that Europe, which knows well the devastation of war, will not see it revisited upon us.’ ”

At Dytyatky, Scorpion stopped at the checkpoint and stepped into a telephone-booth-like radiation detector. He placed his hands and feet on metal pads. The machine buzzed.

“ Tse ne dobre,” the soldier said, shaking his head. It is not good. “What you are doing in Exclusion Zone?”

“How bad is it?” Scorpion asked.

“You should wash clothes, body. Scrub good,” the soldier said, making a fist to indicate strong.

“Very bad?”

“ Tse ne tak uzhe y pohano,” the soldier said. Is not so bad. “Like maybe two X rays. But you wash good, yes?”

“ Tak,” Scorpion said, nodding.

On the road back to Kyiv, he stopped again at the trailer-restaurant in Sukachi. The same woman, Olena, was behind the counter. He had some borscht and salo, strips of pork fat on black bread. He told her he needed to shower and change clothes.

“Too much radioactivnist?” she said. “What did you do there in zona?”

“I am a scientist. We like to get dirty,” he said.

“There is no hotel or banya bathhouse here,” she said. She looked at him. “My late husband. You’re almost the same size. Come.”

She led him to a house behind the trailer. While he took a shower-ice cold, of course-she laid out a workman’s clothes. He put them on and went back to the trailer to pay her. She waved the money away and poured glasses of horilka for both of them at the counter.

“They don’t fit bad,” she said, sizing him up. “May you have better luck with them than my Hryhoriy had, Tsarstvo yomu nebesne.” God rest his soul.

“He had a bad time?” Scorpion said.

She shrugged. “They were a bad luck family. It started with his grandfather in the Holodomor. He gave his son-Hryhoriy’s father-to a Russian woman, a party official. It was to save him. They were starving. This was when the Bolsheviks deliberately starved millions to death. If the Komsomol brigades found you with even a single grain of wheat, they would shoot you. Cannibalism was widespread. Some say four million died, some say seven, some ten.” She shook her head. “No one knows. The Bolsheviks said it was part of Stalin’s war against the kulaks, but,” motioning him closer, “many believe it was to wipe out the Ukrainians. Hryhoriy’s father was the only member of his family to survive, but it did no good.”

“More bad luck?”

“You could say so. Hryhoriy’s father was a partisan in the war, but he was captured by Germans. They took him to Syrets, the concentration camp they make at Babi Yar, where they killed the Jews. When he got out, he weighed thirty-six kilos. But he was only free for not even a year before he was arrested and executed by KGB.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?” She shrugged again. “In those days they didn’t need a reason. So then comes my husband, my Hryhoriy. All his life he tried to avoid trouble, but it did no good. He was killed in the riots against President Kuchma. He wasn’t on any side. They mistook him for someone else. Like I said,” she drained her glass, “a hard luck family. You look tired,” she said.

Scorpion nodded. The horilka was beginning to effect him. Before he knew it, he was back in the house behind the trailer. He fell asleep sprawled on the bed in the dead man’s clothes.

In the morning, he drove to Kyiv, where he bought a new set of clothes, overcoat, and fur hat at the Metrograd mall. He thought about calling Iryna. But first he needed to deal with the video of Shelayev. They were almost out of time. The Russian ultimatum expired at midnight.

At the Internet cafe on Chokolovsky Avenue he loaded the murky video from the button camera to his laptop. He used Wax, a shareware software video editor, to brighten it so Shelayev was clearly visible. He transferred the video from the laptop to the Internet cafe’s PC and uploaded it to YouTube with a fake new account, putting in Ukraine and Cherkesov as keywords. It was his fail-safe in case something happened to him or if what he was planning didn’t work. He made a DVD of the video and deleted it and all evidence that he had ever been on the cafe’s PC. When he was done, he made the call that would decide everything.

T he Mercedes limousine was parked up on the sidewalk in front of the Benetton store on Khreshchatyk Street. Two workers were taping the store’s windows. All along Khreshchatyk, crowds rushed past merchants boarding up their windows. In the twenty-four hours Scorpion had been away, Kyiv had been transformed into a city at war. Military checkpoints had been set up at major intersections and at roads leading into and out of the city, and air raid sirens were sounding; practicing for the real thing.

Ukrainian Army bivouacs and tents had sprung up in parks, churning the snow to dark frozen slush. SAM antiaircraft missile launchers were parked in front of government buildings, many of them surrounded by walls of sandbags. Everywhere, there were soldiers and a general feeling of fear. People were leaving town or stocking up on food and other essentials as if expecting the missiles to hit any second. It was surreal, Scorpion thought, like a World War Two movie.

A shaven-headed man stood beside the Mercedes limousine, an obvious bulge under his leather overcoat. Scorpion recognized him from Villefranche and the yacht. There was a flicker of acknowledgment in the man’s eyes as well. He held the limousine door open for Scorpion, then climbed into the front.

Akhnetzov was alone in the backseat. Seated on the side toward the front of the limousine was the other shaven-headed man, his hand inside his coat, and Evgeniya, the blond woman from the yacht. As soon as Scorpion was seated, Akhnetzov indicated to the driver to start driving. The limousine swung off the sidewalk and into heavy traffic on Khreshchatyk Street, much of it militsiyu and military, the driver honking his horn to try to get them to move out of his way.

“Where are we going?” Scorpion asked.

“There is a helipad near the Verkhovna Rada,” Akhnetzov said. “The road to the airport is completely jammed. Everyone is trying to get out. I have my plane, a Gulfstream, waiting at Boryspil. Thanks to you,” he growled, “I have to go to Moskva to see what we can salvage.”

Scorpion didn’t say anything. He looked at the blond woman, who avoided looking back.

“I do not see the point of this meeting. You failed,” Akhnetzov said.

“I was set up,” Scorpion said.

“People who fail always have excuses. Our business is done, you and me. Finished,” and Akhnetzov made a sideways cutting gesture with his hand.

“We can stop this.”

“Don’t talk stupidity.” He looked at Scorpion in a way that made the shaven-headed man take out his gun.

“I can stop it, damn it.”

Akhnetzov regarded him curiously.

“How?”

“With this,” Scorpion said, tapping his pocket where he had the flash drive from the button camera.

“Too late. The Russian deadline is midnight. Look at them,” gesturing at the people on Khreshchatyk, many carrying plastic bags, rushing from store to store. “They know what is coming.”

“I have proof,” Scorpion said.

“What proof?” Akhnetzov said. “You have something on Li Qiang?”

“The Chinese were a red herring, what we in the trade call ‘black info,’ ” Scorpion said.

“Still, you made a govno mess. I heard somebody found Li Qiang’s bodyguard, Yang Hao, in a car with three bullets in him.”

“Kyiv’s a dangerous city.”

“So long as you’re around. Why did you want to see me?”

“I know who killed Cherkesov and I can prove it.”

“I’m not sure it matters anymore,” Akhnetzov said. “Things are moving too fast.”

“The Russians have no pretext for war. It rips away their fig leaf.”

“Maybe they don’t care.”

“They’re not a monolith. This whole thing is pure SVR. Who are you going to talk to in Moscow?”

“Trust me, they are plenty important. Why?”

“You can bet there are people outside the SVR, people in the FSB and the president’s office, who might love an excuse to get out of this mess if they can show they got something for it.”

“And tell them what?”

“Cherkesov was killed by a man named Dimitri Shelayev. He was head of security for Gorobets.”

Akhnetzov looked sharply at Scorpion.

“The man behind Davydenko?”

“The man who tells Davydenko what to do. Gorobets runs things. The Chorni Povyazky are his private army.”

“It may be too late,” Akhnetzov said thoughtfully. “What makes you think this will stop the Russians?”

“Because I’m going to put it on TV,” Scorpion said. “When we met on the yacht, you told me you own a TV station.”

Akhnetzov nodded. “We own Inter. The biggest in Ukraina.”

“I want you to put Iryna Shevchenko on in primetime. It’ll be a sensation.”

“To do what? To say she’s not guilty. So what?”

“I have a video of Shelayev confessing he killed Cherkesov on Gorobets’s orders. He was in charge of security that night at the stadium. It made it easy for him to plant the bomb. The whole thing was a power struggle inside Svoboda.”

For the first time, Akhnetzov looked genuinely interested. “He actually says it? He accuses Gorobets?”

“Better than that. After he admits it, he commits suicide,” Scorpion said.

Akhnetzov tapped his finger on his lips. Scorpion watched him work it out. He was reminded again how intelligent Akhnetzov was. He had created a business empire, almost an entire industry, from nothing, from an idea.

“You’ve got the whole thing, the confession, the suicide, everything on the video?” Akhnetzov asked.

Scorpion nodded. “If we prove this all happened within Svoboda, the Russians have no excuse to intervene.”

“No,” Akhnetzov said. “It’s better than that. It’s good television. We’ll put it on Liniya Konfliktu. It’s the top-rated show, primetime.” He spoke rapidly to Evgeniya in Ukrainian. She got on her cell phone and made a call. Akhnetzov turned to Scorpion. “I’ll have Evgeniya send you a text to let you know when to be at the studio.”

The limousine pulled into a park with government buildings and broad expanses of snow. Militsiyu guards stopped it and peered inside. The driver said something to them and the guards waved them on. They drove through the park toward a helipad near a big columned building topped with a dome; the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament building. There were squads of soldiers and two SAM missile batteries parked in front, and a private helicopter was just landing on the helipad. The limousine stopped and the two shaven-headed men jumped out and checked to see that it was clear, then stood by the door as first Scorpion, then Akhnetzov and Evgeniya got out.

The day was gray and cold, the wash from the helicopter blowing against them. From where he stood, Scorpion could see the Puppet Theatre on a snow-covered hill in the distance. The image of Alyona and the bodies hanging in that room beneath the stage flashed in his mind. He hoped it wasn’t an omen.

“Here,” he said, handing Akhnetzov the flash drive from the button camera. “If what I’m planning doesn’t work out, show it to the Russians.”

Akhnetzov nodded. As he and the others started toward the helicopter, Scorpion shouted after him.

“If they don’t invade, you owe me the rest of the money!”

Without turning around, Akhnetzov waved to acknowledge that he heard and continued toward the helicopter. Scorpion watched them board and take off, heading high over the Dnieper River toward the airport. He took out his cell phone and called Iryna.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m with Viktor-and Slavo,” she warned. “We’re leaving for the front. It’s terrible what’s happening.”

“Don’t go. Meet me. We can stop this.”

“You found Shelayev? You have proof?”

“It’ll change everything,” he said. He heard her talking urgently to Viktor in Ukrainian. She came back on.

“Viktor wants to talk to you,” she said.

“Mr. Kilbane?” Kozhanovskiy said. “You found what you were looking for? You can prove we had nothing to do with Cherkesov’s death?”

“I have Shelayev’s confession on video.”

“He says he was acting under Gorobets’s orders?”

“It’s all Gorobets; all of it.”

There was a pause. He heard them talking urgently among themselves in Ukrainian. Kozhanovskiy came back on.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “This is-” He took a deep breath. “-good news.”

“Put Iryna on. We don’t have much time,” Scorpion said.

Iryna came back. He told her where to meet him.

“One moment,” she whispered. He waited until she came back on. She must have gone somewhere to get away from Slavo, he thought. “I’m worried,” she said. “I tried to call the clinic about Alyona. No one picked up.”

“All right,” he said, his teeth clenched.

“Except it’s not all right, is it?”

“No.”

Scorpion ended the call and got back into the limousine. As they headed toward the center of town, he called the Medikom clinic. The phone rang for a long time. He dialed again. Finally, on the third try, a woman answered. He asked for Dr. Yakovenko. The woman told him the doctor had left on vacation. He asked about a patient, giving her the name they had used to check Alyona into the clinic. The woman told him to wait. After what seemed like a long time, she came back on the line.

“I’m sorry, pane,” she said. “There’s no record of any such patient.”