Scorpion Winter

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Boryspil

Kyiv, Ukraine

He sat shackled on the floor of his cell, waiting for his execution. They had left the light on, and a guard peered in through the peephole. He no longer thought of escape. Even shackled and with his groin aching, he might be able to take a couple of the guards out, but they knew how dangerous he was. They would come with more than enough men to subdue him. In the end he would only hurt a few brutes.

He hadn’t thought it would end this way. With so many questions unanswered. What had happened with the war? No one seemed to act as if they were at war, and he hadn’t heard any explosions or sirens. Had he managed to stop it or was he buried so deep behind Lukyanivska’s thick walls that missiles had hit the city and he hadn’t heard them? Had Akhnetzov gotten through to someone in Russia? What had happened with YouTube? Why did everyone act as if no one knew anything about it? How had they managed to track him and Iryna to the TV station? Who had betrayed them?

What of Iryna? He had tried to save her, but it was whatever Gorobets said to the judges that did it. Why would Gorobets want to save her? Was it because she was too much of a hot potato for them? The daughter of Artem Shevchenko, founder of the Rukh, was that it? At least she was safe-for the moment. She cared for him. Maybe even loved him. He’d seen it or something close to it in the last desperate look she had thrown at him when they dragged her from the courtroom. He wished he could see her, touch her.

For a moment he allowed himself the fantasy of the two of them on his sailboat, the Laawan, named for the friendly west wind in Arabia, its sails bellied with a fresh breeze somewhere in the Cyclades islands, say the ink-blue waters between Syros and Paros. He pictured how she would look in a bikini, the sun warm on their skin, the blue of the Mediterranean for as far as they could see, the two of them digging into a freshly grilled sea bass hot from the galley, washed down with a good Batard-Montrachet grand cru wine.

He’d almost pulled it off, he thought. He cast his mind back over everything that had happened. Where had he screwed it up? What had he missed? How had the SBU known they were at the TV station? Who tipped them? Akhnetzov? The station manager, Korobei? Why? They wanted the show to take place.

He was sure they hadn’t been followed from the Central Station. It wasn’t the SVR. He’d taken care of Gabrilov, and anyway, he’d gotten past the SVR’s part in this. Unless there was another player in the game. But who? He’d stayed away from the CIA’s Kiev Station, and in any case, the Company wanted him to stop this thing. And what about that YouTube video he’d posted? Even if the CIA was involved, they would have wanted it to be seen. It would have either defused the crisis with Russia or proven that the U.S. was in the clear and had had nothing to do with it.

Unless there was another mole inside Kozhanovskiy’s office.

Then it hit him.

Slavo.

But how had they tracked Iryna? He was sure she hadn’t been followed to the train station. But maybe they didn’t need to. If Slavo had gotten hold of her latest cell phone number, they could have tracked her that way with GPS.

He looked up. There were sounds in the corridor. His heart began to beat rapidly. His life was about to end. For a moment his mind flashed on Iryna, then Najla that night in Amsterdam. He thought of Kelly and how she looked, her skin burnished like gold as the sun set over the Sea of Galilee. He was leaving a lot of unfinished business behind. Who doesn’t? he thought. Everyone leaves unfinished business behind.

He heard the guards coming closer. It sounded like at least a half-dozen of them. They stopped outside his cell door. His throat was dry. He couldn’t swallow. It was hard to breathe.

He remembered a night in the desert when he was a boy. One of Sheikh Zaid’s sons, Malik, by his second wife, Latifah, had died. The boy had fallen and the wound became infected, and by the time they got him to a hospital, it was too late.

They were sitting by a fire in the tent at night during the three days of mourning. Latifah started to cry uncontrollably, and Sheikh Zaid, instead of comforting her, sent her away. When Scorpion looked at him questioningly, Zaid had said: “She does not understand. There is a hadith of the Prophet of Allah, rasul sallahu alayhi wassalam, peace be upon him, of ibn Umar from his father. The Prophet said: ‘The deceased is tortured in his grave for the wailing done over him.’ ”

“So we should not cry?” Scorpion had asked.

“It makes no difference. But it is better not,” Sheikh Zaid said, but Scorpion could see the tears in his eyes.

A key scraped in the lock and the cell door clanged open. He steeled himself. A bullet in the back of the head and the pain ends. Say nothing. Show them nothing, he told himself. Everyone dies. He took a deep breath and looked at the man who stepped into the cell. The man was looking to the side, his face in shadow, saying something to a guard, and at first Scorpion couldn’t be sure who it was. Then he stepped into the light and he could see his face. A well-built man in his sixties in an Armani suit and steel-rimmed glasses, his hair almost completely white. It’s impossible, Scorpion told himself. He must be hallucinating.

“Scorpion,” the man said, and the voice was unmistakable.

Ivanov. Alias Checkmate, director of the Russian FSB Counterintelligence Directorate. Ivanov himself. Looking much as he had the last time Scorpion had seen him in Saint Petersburg. Immediately, it brought it all back. Najla. The Dacha Club on Nevsky Prospekt, and how it ended in the warehouse near the Narvskaya port. Scorpion struggled to his feet, his groin aching.

“Take off his shackles,” Ivanov told the guard in Russian, and said to Scorpion in English: “Can you walk?”

“I’m not sure,” Scorpion managed.

“Come on,” Ivanov said, grabbing his arm to help support him. The guard supported him on the other side. “We don’t have much time.”

Scorpion tried to walk. Without the shackles, he could do it, but just barely.

“So there was no invasion, no war?”.

“No. Why are you stopping?” Ivanov asked, as Scorpion stopped walking.

“There’s something I have to do,” he said.

“Not now. We only have a few minutes,” Ivanov said. “I don’t want this to turn into a nomenclatura administrative shitting contest.”

Ivanov and the guard helped him hobble down the corridor toward the locked steel door to the cell block. Screams echoed from behind several of the cell doors.

“Where’s Kulyakov?” Scorpion asked, leaning between Ivanov and the guard. There were two plainclothes men with them-he assumed they were FSB-and another prison guard.

“He’s not here,” Ivanov said, looking at the guard.

“Pravda,” the guard said. It is true.

“What about Stepan?” Scorpion asked.

“Who?”

“A crazy blondish man who helps with interrogations.”

“Yego krysha ushla,” the guard said to Ivanov-his roof is gone-meaning, he’s crazy as hell.

Ivanov stopped. He looked at Scorpion.

“We don’t have time for this.”

“He killed a young woman. She didn’t deserve it. Not from him,” Scorpion said, pushing them off and hobbling forward on his own.

“I was right,” Ivanov frowned. “You’re a sentimentalist.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” Scorpion said. “Gde on?” he asked the guard. Where is he?

The guard indicated the staircase. They went up two floors, Scorpion wincing at every step, to an office off a corridor. Ivanov opened the door and peered inside. He motioned the guard closer.

“Is that him?” he asked.

The guard nodded.

Stepan was sitting alone at a table. He was staring at a lit candle, where he held a squirming white mouse, its pink eyes bulging, over the flame with a pair of tongs.

“I’ll give you one minute,” Ivanov said, checking his watch. “Then we leave-with you or without you.”

Scorpion went in and closed the door behind him.

“Y ou saved me. Why?” Scorpion asked. They were sitting in the backseat of a Lada Riva sedan driving along Grushevskogo past government buildings in Mariinsky Park. For Scorpion, the setting was surreal. He felt like any second the view would be revealed as a dream and he would be back in his cell, about to receive a bullet in the head.

“I am superstitious. All Russians are, even the atheists. Especially the atheists.” Ivanov smiled. “Here,” he said, pouring a shot of vodka from a flask into a shot-sized metal cup. “Stolichnaya Elit, not that Ukrainian piss they drink here. You look like you need it. Budem sdarovy,” he said.

Scorpion drank and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What’s superstition got to do with it?” he asked.

“Twice now you have helped Russia,” Ivanov said. “The funny thing is both times you had no intention of doing it. These idiotsky adventuristov!” he growled, and Scorpion knew he was speaking of SVR adventurism. “Dragging us into a war with NATO that we have no business in and could not win, and for what? A Ukrainian politician we could buy, sell, or replace a hundred times over? Chto idiotism!” What idiocy! “Anyway,” he poured another slug of vodka into the metal cup and drank it down, “I had a feeling, a premonition, that someday we might need you again. ‘Bog lyubit troitsu,’ ” he said, quoting the old Russian proverb that God loves threes. He shrugged. “Call it superstition, or an insurance policy.” Scorpion started to laugh but had to stop, wincing because of the pain, and then laughed and winced at that.

“For a man who was within minutes of being a corpse, you are surprisingly jolly. What’s the joke?” Ivanov looked at him curiously.

“Superstition. Really?” Scorpion grinned. “I suppose the fact that keeping me alive as a witness to who really killed Cherkesov, and gives you leverage over both the SVR and whoever wins the election in Ukraine, has nothing to do with it.”

“I was right,” Ivanov said. “I always tell my subordinates one should never underestimate the Americans. Because they often do stupid things doesn’t mean all of them are stupid.” He shook his head. “If I thought I could trust you and if you weren’t such a damned sentimentalist, I would hire you in a second. I’m glad I didn’t terminate you that time in Saint Petersburg.”

“Makes two of us,” Scorpion said. “What happened with the invasion?”

“We did a deal.”

“What deal?”

“Davydenko and Kozhanovskiy jointly signed an agreement with the Russian foreign minister that regardless of who wins the election, Ukraina will conclude a treaty guaranteeing Russia a renewed lease on the Russian Black Sea Fleet naval base at Sevastopol, with an easement in Crimea to supply the base for another fifty years. In exchange, Ukraine gets a discount on the prices we charge Europe for oil and gas.”

“So the crisis is over?”

“For today.”

“You know about Shelayev? That he killed Cherkesov?”

“I have the video. It proved quite useful within our own…” He hesitated. “… discussions. What will you do now?”

“You mean, am I leaving Ukraine?”

Ivanov smiled. “ Yei bogu, but it’s a pleasure doing business with someone who understands how the game is played.”

“You don’t want me dead because I give you leverage, but my presence here is a problem.”

“Let’s just say we have an understanding with Davydenko,” Ivanov said. They were driving on a bridge across the Dnieper. Scorpion looked out at the river, white with ice. He had the sense that he would never see it again. A ray of sunlight beamed through a crack in the clouds, making the snow and gold-domed spires look like a fairyland city.

“You mean with Gorobets,” Scorpion said.

“ Gospodin Gorobets is a friend and ally of Russia.”

“What if Kozhanovskiy wins the election?”

“He won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“We’ve done our own polling. If absolutely necessary, we’ll create another crisis, but it won’t be necessary.”

“Where are we going?”

“Boryspil Airport. You can use your Reinert passport. There won’t be any difficulties,” Ivanov said, tapping a cigarette on a slim crocodile-skin case. One of the FSB men leaned over from the front seat and lit it for him.

“I need to see Iryna Shevchenko first. I won’t leave without talking to her.”

“She’s waiting at the airport.” Ivanov spoke briefly with the FSB man who had lit his cigarette. The man made a quick call and nodded to Ivanov. “ Da, yes, she’s there.”

“Why did Gorobets intervene to let her go? The video?”

“You see how useful you’ve been?” Ivanov said. “That stupid charge against her was a liability. Anyone would have seen through it. She would have become a martyr-more dangerous in death or prison than she could ever be on her own. It would have given Kozhanovskiy a cause.”

“You want me out of Ukraine too, don’t you?”

Ivanov took a deep puff and exhaled. Through the window, Scorpion could see industrial sites and rows of apartment buildings. They were on the highway to the airport.

“I have something to tell you. Call it professional courtesy,” Ivanov said. He seemed uneasy.

“I’m listening.”

“You need to know who betrayed you. Who do you think tipped where you were to the SBU?”

“Kozhanovskiy’s aide, Slavo. Even though we kept changing, he got her latest cell phone number and they tracked it.”

Ivanov shrugged. “You are talking about a Joe. The real question is, who was running him?”

“The SVR. Gabrilov.”

Ivanov shook his head and exhaled smoke. “Gabrilov is back in Moscow.”

The fact that Ivanov was here meant that he had ordered it, Scorpion thought. Gabrilov was probably being beaten to a pulp in a Lubyanka cell by the FSB that very minute. The SVR had played with fire, and now the Kremlin was reining them back in. He looked at Ivanov, sitting there so calmly. The Russian was waiting to tell him something, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.

“All right, Checkmate. I know you want to tell me. It’s probably why you came to Kyiv. So let’s have it. Who set me up?” Scorpion asked.

Ivanov smiled. A tiny sign that he was enjoying their mental chess game and appreciated Scorpion’s having figured it out.

“It was the CIA’s Kyiv Station. One of yours. Somebody in the Company doesn’t like you.”

Scorpion didn’t say anything. He wanted to tell Ivanov to fuck off, but it made too much sense. Back when he was about to die, he had realized there was another player in the game. He didn’t want to believe it, but it had the feel of truth. But why? If the Russkies wanted Davydenko to win, Washington sure as hell didn’t. What the hell was going on?

“You could be feeding me black info,” Scorpion said.

“If I thought it would work, I would.” Ivanov smiled. “But it might bring you back to Moscow. Don’t come to Russia, Scorpion. After going to so much trouble to save you, I wouldn’t like to have to kill you anyway.”

“I wouldn’t be too crazy about it myself. What’s going to happen to them, to Viktor and Iryna, when Davydenko wins?”

“They’ll make noise, and when the noise dies down, they’ll be arrested. Not for Cherkesov; something else. Corruption perhaps.” Ivanov shrugged. “There’s a lot of corruption in this country.”

“As opposed to Russia?”

“Or America?” Ivanov grinned, showing his teeth. They both smiled.

“And Russia controls Ukraine?” Scorpion said.

“There are people who believe Ukraine is part of Russia. That someday we’ll get it back. I’ve heard people at the highest levels say such things.”

“Still, you opposed the SVR in this.”

“I opposed their tactics. Not necessarily their goal.” Ivanov glanced out the window at the traffic on the M03 highway and beyond to the buildings and the endless snow-covered plain. “Maybe they would be better off. Look at their history. This is a tragic country.”

Scorpion thought about Alyona and Babi Yar and Olena, the woman in the trailer-restaurant, and the millions starving to death in the Holodomor. He thought about Gorobets with his Black Armbands and what was coming.

“Yes, it is tragic,” he said, looking up. A highway sign up ahead read: AEROPORT BORYSPIL 6 KM.

T hey put him in a private airport holding room, empty except for bottles of Svalyava mineral water on a console and a few plastic chairs. The walls and everything in the room was white, even the plastic chairs. There was nothing personal there. It was a place where people waited, their lives elsewhere.

Even before he reached the center of the room, Scorpion spotted two hidden cameras. They were taking no chances, he thought. In addition to the cameras and bugs, they had a half-dozen FSB and SBU plainclothesmen and militsiyu stationed outside the door to make sure he got on the plane. He had less than an hour till his Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.

He asked to go to the men’s room. On the way, he pickpocketed a cell phone from one of the SBU plainclothesmen. After asking the guards to wait outside and checking the stalls to make sure they were unoccupied, he called the Dynamo Club and asked for Mogilenko. A rough-sounding man’s voice got on the line.

“Idi na tsuy huesos,” he was told. Fuck off. “What do you want with Mogilenko?”

“Ya frantsoos,” Scorpion told him. I’m the Frenchman.

After a long minute, Mogilenko came on the line.

“ Tu es fou, salaud? Or should I call you Kilbane? I knew you weren’t French,” Mogilenko said.

“I need a favor,” Scorpion replied in French.

“When I cut off your head and balls, you’ll consider it a favor, fils de pute. Where are you? No matter how far you go, it won’t save you.”

“ Ecoutez, don’t be stupid. This is business,” Scorpion said.

“ Va te faire foutre,” Mogilenko said, telling him to fuck off. Then after a moment, “What do you want?”

“You know Kulyakov? Prokip Kulyakov.”

“Maybe. What about him?”

“Be too bad if someone did to him what you were planning to do to me,” Scorpion said.

“He has friends.”

“So do I. Fifty thousand of them.”

“What is this? A joke? A miserable fifty thousand hryvnia?”

“Dollars,” Scorpion said.

There was a moment of silence.

“It must be admitted, you are un type inhabituel. ” An unusual type. “What you did to my men on the bridge was exceptionnel. Kulyakov’s SBU. It’s a complication.”

“How much more complicated?” Scorpion asked.

“Seventy-five.”

“A hundred thousand. Half now, half when it’s done. In five minutes I’m getting rid of this cell phone. Text me a bank account number.”

“Maybe you come back to the club and we discuss it,” Mogilenko said.

“One more thing,” Scorpion said. “It has to take a long time. A work of art.”

“What did he do, this Kulyakov?” Mogilenko asked seriously.

“The same to a woman. Young, beautiful like Marilyn Monroe. You’d have liked her,” remembering the photograph of Alyona in the cafe.

“This changes nothing between us, salaud. You still owe me,” Mogilenko growled.

“At the end, he needs to be warmed up. Use l’essence.” Gasoline. “And he has to be still alive when you do it.”

“One hundred thousand. Half now, the rest within twenty-four hours of Kulyakov’s…” He hesitated. “… sortie de grand.” Grand exit. “And Kilbane, on the second payment, don’t make me wait.”

“D’accord,” Scorpion said, ending the call.

On the way back to the waiting room, he slipped the cell phone back into the SBU man’s pocket. He had just finished transferring the money for Mogilenko with his laptop when Iryna came in.

She looked the way she had when he first met her. She wore a black sheath dress, pearls, the Ferragamo purse, the pixie cut that, if anything, made her more striking, and then there were those stunning lapis lazuli eyes. It was as if she hadn’t been touched by prison or anything else that happened. When she saw him, she gave a little cry and ran into his arms. He could feel her trembling as he held her.

“I’ve been crying since yesterday. I thought you were dead,” she sobbed. He let her cry, holding her tight. Finally, she pulled back and looked at him. “I’m a mess. I wanted to look good for you.”

“You look damn good. You look as good as anything I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“I thought I’d never see you again. Then they told me you were at the airport. I don’t understand.” She shook her head. “Not any of it.”

“The Russians. I’m their insurance policy. In a way, it’s funny.” He half grinned. “Sometimes you need your enemies more than your friends.”

Her eyes scanned his face as if there were an answer for everything there, if she could just find it.

“What are you talking about? Insuring them against what?”

“In case Gorobets ever decides to do any original thinking that isn’t first preapproved in Moscow.”

“The Russians know about Shelayev? Is that why there wasn’t an attack?” He watched her wrinkle her brow and figure it out. “I see,” she said, fishing in her purse for a cigarette.

“For what it’s worth,” he shrugged, “you should feel good. We stopped the invasion. Without you, it wouldn’t have happened.”

She lit the cigarette and exhaled. “But we’re losing the election. The latest polls… they’re going to elect that idiot, Davydenko. Can you imagine?”

“Idiots get elected all the time. Welcome to democracy.”

“What do we do now?” she said, and it was like opening a floodgate. He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask it.

“If we hadn’t been captured, would you have come to Krakow?”

She got up, tossed the cigarette on the floor and stepped on it.

“Damn you,” she said. “Don’t you understand anything besides yourself? Can’t you see what’s happening? This isn’t America. Once Gorobets takes over, democracy is dead. Ukraine is finished. Viktor is a fool! He’s listening more to Slavo than to me these days. If I leave, there’s no opposition. Only Gorobets. My father,” she choked, “would roll over in his grave. I can’t.”

She grabbed both his hands tightly. Her eyes burned like blue fire. “Stay here. Stay with me. We’ll fight it together.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’d always be on the run. Too many people want me dead.” That was true enough, he thought. Mogilenko and the Syndikat, even with their deal. Gorobets. Kulyakov and the SBU, the SVR, even the CIA. “A whole alphabet wants me dead. Even worse, they would use me against you.” He looked into her eyes. “It won’t work. Either you get on the plane to Frankfurt with me or we’re done. I can’t stay.”

She leaned back and let go of his hands.

“You work for the CIA, don’t you? That’s what they could use against you, us, isn’t it?”

“No, I told you. I’m independent.”

“But you were with the CIA at one time?”

He nodded.

“Of course. It had to be something like that,” she said. “Politically, it’s impossible. We’re impossible.”

It’s worse than that, Scorpion thought. It was the CIA that betrayed them to Kulyakov.

She put her hand to his cheek. “You look like hell,” she said. “So why am I so damned attracted to you?”

“Maybe you just like men who are trouble. It’s very Slavic.”

She looked at him curiously. “We never fought, did we? Does that mean we don’t love each other? Not even enough to fight?”

“I don’t know what it means. Right now I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.”

“I’d have walked to Krakow to be with you if I wasn’t tied hand and foot to this country,” she said, and a shiver went through him. “I’d’ve crawled,” she said softly.

“It would have been worse if the Russians had come in. We saved a lot of lives,” he told her.

“Not everyone,” she said, and he knew she was thinking of Alyona.

“No, not everyone.”

One of the FSB men who had been in the car with him and Ivanov came in.

“ Gospodin Reinert, the plane is boarding,” he said.

Iryna came close to Scorpion. She smelled of cigarettes and Hermes 24 Faubourg, and it took everything he had not to put his hands all over her. The FSB man watched them from the open doorway, the sounds of the terminal flooding in. A boarding call for group two for the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt came over the loudspeaker.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“Someone tipped the SBU to where we were,” Scorpion said.

“Do you know who?”

“Yes, but not why,” he said, thinking he was going to find out if it killed him.