The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

CHAPTER 31

AFTER SHE RETURNED to the hotel, Nadia walked to the Saint Sophia Cathedral and waited for Marko at an outdoor café. She’d convinced Marko to come straight to the café after he was done with his work at the Central State Historical Archives. No sightseeing. No pops at a bar that struck his fancy. No attempts to pick up the first Ukrainian temptress willing to talk to him.

In Kyiv, Nadia’s father was never far from her mind. He died when she was thirteen, when the thought of a free Ukraine was preposterous. If he could see her sitting outside Saint Sophia in his homeland, the country liberated, he would have died and gone right back to heaven. He’d taken an active role among Ukrainian-Americans, a community of immigrants that believed it was their responsibility to keep Ukrainian culture alive in the free world during Soviet oppression.

It was her father who took her on the Appalachian Trail at age twelve, to the precise spot where Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York met. There, compass in hand, he pruned two branches to create a circle of light on a bed of pine needles. Told her to sit down in the light. Asked her if she understood she was the luckiest girl in the world to be living in the best place on Earth.

He explained what she already knew. That the Soviet Union was in the process of destroying all traces of Ukrainian culture. Its only sanctuary was the free world. Its only hope was the next generation. She was the future of Ukraine. To survive in America as an immigrant’s daughter, she would have to be strong. She would have to be resilient.

And so he handed her a sleeping bag and a knapsack with three matches, food and water for one day, a mess kit, some rope, a compass, a poncho, and her twelve inch Bowie knife. He told her he was proud of her and certain she wouldn’t disappoint him. He said he would return to pick her up in three days at that precise spot. Then he left.

Nadia had been a member of a Ukrainian youth group called PLAST. Summer camps occupied the middle ground between American scouting and ROTC training. Nadia had trained for the three-day survival test since age eight. She knew to find high ground. She knew how to build a lean-to. She knew how to start a fire, and she could boil water and set traps to catch small game. She knew how to defend herself even though she was only twelve. Three days and two nights alone on the Appalachian Trail should have been a routine exercise.

But, of course, it wasn’t.

After a half hour wait, Marko cast a shadow in front of the cathedral. He was breathing heavily.

“Valentine visited the nuclear power plants at Chornobyl every year between 1985 and 1990,” he said.

Valentine. Power plants. Chornobyl. 1985 to 1990.

The words sounded too good to be true. They provided a possible link between Valentine and Bobby.

“That’s incredible,” Nadia said. Then she remembered Marko was not a forensic securities analyst. “Are you sure?”

Marko sat down, took the napkin from under her coffee, and wiped his forehead. “The Ecology Committee had a bunch of sub-committees. One of them was the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Monitoring Committee. It was created in September, 1986 after reactor four exploded. The three guys on the Chornobyl Committee were the three youngest guys on the Ecology Committee.”

“Because the old guys didn’t want to get exposed.”

“Who would? They put Valentine on the Chornobyl Committee as soon as he showed up. So we’ve established a connection between him and Chornobyl. We know he visited the area regularly. The only problem is that was 1985 through 1990. And Bobby wasn’t born until 1996. So we’re back at square one.”

“Not necessarily,” Nadia said. “The Ukrainian government took over sole management of the plants when it proclaimed independence. If you were assuming responsibility for a mess like that, and there were people with previous knowledge of the disaster, wouldn’t you hire them as consultants? At a minimum they’re a low cost insurance policy against missing valuable information.”

“And if that’s the case, Valentine might have kept making trips to Chornobyl for years.”

“He might have done just that.”

“How do we find out if he did?”

“We ask someone who’s intimate with the Zone.”

“The Zone?” Marko said.

“The Zone of Exclusion. No one’s allowed within a nineteen mile radius of the reactors without permission.”

“You know someone like that?”

Nadia remembered Karel, the botanist with Einstein hair who hit on her as soon as he saw her in the café near the nuclear power plant, only to reveal he knew exactly who she was and what she was doing in Chornobyl.

“I do,” she said.