The Boy from Reactor 4

CHAPTER 25

NADIA SLEPT FITFULLY for seven hours, bolting upright every time she heard a noise in the hallway or next door. Her subconscious feared any one of them might be the phone call she was waiting for. They weren’t. By 11:00 the next morning, she couldn’t sit still anymore. She put on a light coat and hiked down Khreschatyk, Kyiv’s primary north–south boulevard.

During World War II, she remembered from her classes, the Soviet Army had mined Khreschatyk with explosives as it retreated from Kyiv. When the Nazis arrived on September 19, 1941, Red Army commanders detonated the explosives using radio signals from over four hundred kilometers away. More than three hundred buildings were demolished and one thousand troops killed. The Nazis responded by executing twenty thousand Kyivans. It was the first use of long-distance radio signals to trigger explosives in history.

Clouds hung low on a bitter, overcast morning. The air smelled of flowers and gasoline fumes. Bumpy cobblestone promenades for pedestrians and small-vehicle parking flanked cafés, stores, and restaurants. Ornate Stalinist facades adorned an eclectic assortment of government buildings.

Upon entering Independence Square, Nadia paused at a bronze sculpture of the four Slavic tribesmen who founded Kyiv in the fifth century, including the namesake, Kyi.

The phone pulsated in her purse.

Nadia jumped. Looked around to make sure no one else was within earshot. Yanked the phone out of her purse and cleared her throat.

“This is Nadia.”

No one answered.

“Hello?”

“What was the boy wearing in the picture?”

“Excuse me?”

“What was the boy wearing in the picture?”

“Is this Clementine?”

“Answer the question. I’m hanging up—”

“No, wait.” Nadia remembered the photo her mother had shown her. “Skates. The boy was wearing skates.”

“Are you claustrophobic?”

“No. Well… maybe a little—”

“Too bad. One o’clock at the Caves Monastery. Don’t buy a ticket. Tickets are for tourists. Use the lower entry where the locals go.”

“Okay—”

“Meet me at the entrance to the Far Caves. Not the Near Caves. The Far Caves. Look for the green-roofed walkway. Come alone. I see anyone else, I disappear, eh?”

The phone clicked dead.

Clementine sounded American except for the “eh,” which suggested a Canadian influence. Her voice varied in tone and sounded unreliable, as though she were emotionally unstable or an addict suffering from withdrawals.

After Nadia hung up, she looked around Independence Square. Logic dictated that Specter was watching her at this very moment. Perhaps a local was watching her for him. It was 12:05 p.m. She had fifty-five minutes to lose her tail and get to the Caves Monastery on time.

Nadia sat down on a bench beside a lamppost and an elevated grassy promenade in front of the Central Post Office. She removed a pen, notepad, guidebook, and map from her purse. She’d studied the latter two in detail during her flight from New York.

She planned her course of action with the mathematical precision of an experienced cartographer. The entire exercise took her fifteen minutes.

The Caves Monastery was four miles southeast of her present location at Independence Square. Nadia ambled like a tourist south on Khreschatyk, back toward Hotel Rus. After twenty steps, she turned and took a mental snapshot of the scene behind her. Pedestrians crowded the promenades. She didn’t try to memorize faces, just shapes and colors. Three beats later, she resumed walking south.

At the corner of Arkhitectora, she took a left to head east. The crowd thinned on the side street. Nadia accelerated her pace. Counted twenty paces. Stopped. Turned. A young couple, a businessman, and a babushka rounded the corner toward her.

Nadia took another left onto a promenade beside the Cinema Ukraina. Jogged twenty paces. Turned. Waited.

The couple walked by. The businessman and the babushka turned left and followed her.

Nadia took her third fast left onto Institutska. Twenty paces later, she was back on Khreshchatyk, right where she’d started. She turned right and headed north, in the opposite direction of the Caves Monastery. Twenty paces later, she stopped and turned.

The babushka rounded the corner alone. She wore an old gray sweater and a floral scarf around her head that obscured her face. She might have been seventy-two or twenty-seven. Twenty meters away, their eyes met. The babushka quickly pulled away to peruse a Benetton store window.

Nadia checked her watch: 12:28. She power walked a kilometer farther north. When she got to the Golden Domes of the Cathedral of St. Mikhail, she asked a young man in a warm-up suit for the entrance to the funicular train. He pointed a block ahead toward the far side of the domes.

Nadia looked around. No sign of the babushka. She glanced at her wrist: 12:38. She pulled out her guidebook and strolled onward, pretending to be sightseeing.

The back of the cathedral hung on a cliff. An ancient-looking tram with a sky-blue roof and immaculate white body sat on steep rails, locked in place by heavy cables. People jammed the interior so tightly their faces seemed plastered against the window.

Nadia started toward the cathedral’s rear entrance. She took deep, even breaths.

A bell sounded.

Nadia raced for the funicular.

Snack vendors beneath green-and-white umbrellas gaped as she blew by them. She burst into the domed entrance. The funicular door started to close.

“Wait,” she shouted in English, the language of opportunity. The guidebook said conductors loved to fine foreigners for any and all violations.

The door slid to a close.

Nadia leaped onto the edge of the tram. She wedged an arm and a shoulder inside. The door pressed against her.

A heavyset woman reached out with one hand and pulled it open a few inches. A fat man with garlic breath in her way, however, would not move. Nadia pleaded with her eyes.

“Push him,” the woman said, aiming her disgust at Nadia for not being more assertive.

“Push,” they all shouted, as though her stupidity far outweighed his rudeness.

Nadia spun, stuck her butt into the man’s upper thighs, put her head down, and pushed with her rear.

The man swore under his breath. Nadia slid inside. The woman released her grip. The door slammed shut. Nadia looked up.

A fist smashed against the glass door. A fierce young man in a blue warm-up suit pointed a finger at her. He hurled a single word at her. It sounded like Russian slang. Nadia didn’t understand the word but was certain it wasn’t a compliment.

In the distance, the babushka sprinted toward the empty station like the world’s fastest granny. She was closer to twenty-seven than seventy-two after all. Two people were tailing her, and neither was Specter. As the funicular rolled down the cliff toward Podil, the man in the warm-up suit touched the headphone wrapped around his left ear and jabbered into it.

It was too late. The funicular was the fastest way from Upper to Lower Kiev. She’d be in Podil in ten minutes. In daytime rush hour, it would take a car half an hour to catch up.

The tram was packed so tight it was impossible for Nadia to get to the front. She bought a ticket by passing one hryvnia to the conductor through the hands of her fellow passengers. A stamped ticket and fifty kopek were returned to her the same way. No one grumbled. This was the norm.

The tram descended along a wooded cliffside and a white steel fence. Halfway down the mountain, the vista opened up to reveal the waterfront scene of the Dnipro River. Ships lay moored beside venerable warehouses at the harbor’s edge. Cranes and derricks elevated the skyline.

At the bottom station, the funicular deposited Nadia in Podil, at the opposite end of Kiev from the Caves Monastery. She raced to the subway across the street. Trains ran every two and a half minutes. She boarded a train within sixty seconds of her arrival, repeating the last-second process she had used to board the funicular.

Nadia got off at Arsenalna and hailed a Marshrutka, one of the thousands of Mercedes vans that ran along bus routes. She arrived at her destination at 12:58, certain she wasn’t being followed.

Green-and-gold rooftops covered a campus full of white churches and cathedrals. The headquarters of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the Caves Monastery was a labyrinth of catacombs and tunnels covering seventy acres.

Clementine Seelick, the only clue to Damian’s location, was waiting at one of the entrances to the caves.

Nadia had two minutes to find her.