State of Emergency

CHAPTER 4


St. Petersburg

7:26 PM





Aleksandra Kanatova slumped against the wheel of her black Lada sedan and wiped the tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand. She was smartly dressed in a white down ski jacket, gray cowl-neck wool cardigan, and jeans snug enough to show off the round hips of her gymnast’s body. A stylish blue fox ushanka sat low over her ears against the cold. The splash of freckles across her tawny complexion made wearing makeup an afterthought.

At first glance one would say she was the icon of a young Russian professional. But something was not quite right. The clothes she wore were crisp and fashionable—but her fingernails were chewed down to sorry nubs. Golden green eyes that should have sparkled in the glow of streetlights held the damaged, sidelong stare of a young woman with a deep bruise on her soul.

Aleksandra’s grandmother was one of the few in generations of Soviets who had consistently read the Bible despite the atheist views of her government. She called Aleksandra a pretty whited tomb with dead men’s bones inside, ever chiding her for some unatoned sin. Babushkas were known more for their unbridled candor than their tact.

Aleksandra was well aware that she carried a heavy load of unresolved sins, but these were not the cause of her darkness. Her eyes had once shone as they should have, before Mikhail was dead. There was nothing she could do to bring him back, but such deep and abiding sadness was not a thing she could peel off like a dirty cloak and exchange for a new one. Death was final, and now, so it seemed, was despair.

The coffin-like cold inside the musty car and the heaviness in her heart pressed against Aleksandra’s chest and threatened to rob her of all auspices of control. She pounded on the steering wheel with both hands and screamed at the top of her lungs for a full minute. Then, drying her eyes, she squared her shoulders and cursed herself for such weakness.

The Lada’s fan had a difficult time keeping the windscreen free of encroaching frost. Aleksandra had to lean forward with her eyes just above the top of the steering wheel, to peer through the tiny oval of clear glass as she drove. With such a small view of the world, it was difficult to make sense of everything amid the flashing lights and glowing ice fog outside. It was chilly enough in the car to make her blue fox hat a necessity to keep her ears from freezing while she drove. Some men in her unit insisted that the sedan was in perfect order and it was she who frosted up the windows with her frigid heart.

Traffic on Zagorodny Prospekt had snarled to a standstill with gawkers and arriving politsia vehicles. A heavy snow poured from the blackness above the city as if from a sieve, choking arterial roads and slowing emergency vehicles. Mournful wails of the wounded—and Russian women were masters at wailing—mingled with the hi-lo sirens of arriving ambulances.

In well-practiced Soviet bureaucratic fashion, a roadblock had been erected even before rescue efforts had begun, as if it was a foregone conclusion that there was something to hide at the blast site. Two bleary-eyed politsia sentries in navy-blue waist-length parkas with curly gray Astrakhan collars and hats stood in the swirling snow. The shorter of the two, an Asian-looking woman with almond eyes and huge metal hoop earrings, held back while her male partner, a young man with the piercing look of a Cossack, stepped officiously in the middle of the street and flagged down Kanatova’s black Lada. His Astrakhan hat was thrown back on his head at a cocky angle. Both officers were more bone than muscle, and looked as if they wore the uniforms as a costume instead of a badge of authority.

Kanatova rolled down her window and extended the credential card identifying her as an agent of Federal’-naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service. The modern progeny of the heavy-handed Soviet KGB, FSB agents still commanded fear if not actual respect from local politsia.

Presidents Putin, Medvedev, and then Putin again had vowed to clean up corruption among the nation’s police forces. Judging from the two standing outside Kanatova’s sedan, their proposed housecleaning hadn’t made it as far as the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin.

“I was not aware the FSB employed beautiful actresses,” the young man said, in a foolish attempt at flirting. The smell of alcohol clung to his wool coat like an extra layer of clothing.

Aleksandra ignored him and pressed the accelerator, forcing his bejeweled partner to scamper out of her path.

With her petite figure and pouting lips, Kanatova felt she looked more like someone’s baby sister than a beautiful actress. Uncommonly rich mahogany red hair stood out in stark contrast to the golden green of her eyes. Evidently, many men preferred the baby-sister look. She heard it all the time from her male counterparts when they were trying to get her into bed.

It was no accident that Aleksandra found herself in St. Petersburg. Mikhail’s last report had mentioned the possibility of loose plutonium hitting the black market. Old Soviet ordnance popped up with great regularity now, and it was the job of her unit to track it down. More often than not, the weapons were rifles, or dilapidated shoulder-fired antitank missiles that were more likely to blow up the shooter than the intended target.

Mikhail’s find had been different. If he had been correct, the weapons that had gotten him killed were far worse than a few rusted RPGs.

When she was a child, Aleksandra’s uncle had told her frightening stories of Baba Yaga. Sometimes called the Bone Mother, this Slavic folk villainess was a wicked old hag who lived deep in the forest. Her house moved through the woods on gnarled chicken feet and was surrounded by human skulls. The Bone Mother was attended by a set of bodiless hands and her best friend and lover was Koshchey the Deathless, a bearded old sorcerer who rode naked on an enchanted horse calling down whirlwinds and stealing little girls. Sometimes the Bone Mother gave secret advice to children who were on quests—but more often, she simply ate them with sharpened iron teeth.

As frightening as the stories were, the Baba Yaga Mikhail Polzin proposed was far more dangerous.

Aleksandra slowed to allow an ambulance to pass. She glanced at the pile of folders on the passenger seat. Her willingness to use her looks along with her persuasive demeanor had netted her a sizable stable of informants from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok.

Information from this source said Rustam Daudov, a Chechen resistance leader, had been in Uzbekistan at the same time Mikhail was killed. Stories of Baba Yaga were rife among Chechen terrorists who considered such a thing the holy grail of weapons caches. And they were right to. Rustam Daudov would do anything to get his filthy hands on such a find. Aleksandra had put out feelers with every contact she could think of, offering twenty thousand American dollars for information regarding the terrorist’s present whereabouts. It was too big a coincidence that a killer of his prominence had been in the same city as Mikhail on the day he was murdered.

Days went by with nothing.

Then a college student had fallen dead of radiation poisoning at St. Petersburg Clinical Hospital No. 15. Local agents said he’d died of massive exposure, but there was no material found. Kanatova’s superiors had sent her to check the local pulse and see what she could learn. Reports had pointed first to the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Gatchina. A lonely widowed scientist there who seemed overly interested in Aleksandra’s freckled nose assured her the institute was missing no plutonium. He did, however, remember that a Chechen resembling Daudov’s description had been asking questions. The last he knew, this Chechen had rented a flat in the suburb of Pushkin, five blocks from Vitebsk Station.

Pitiful official estimates initially put the Vitebsk death toll at eleven. Accounting for traditional Russian understatement when it came to catastrophe, Aleksandra assumed the count would nudge upward exponentially in unreleased reports. It was only a matter of time before the media began to hazard all sorts of guesses and accusations. Unlike the past sensibilities of Pravda and the glory days of the USSR, Russia’s modern media had grown into a ravenous beast that had to be fed. The first releases to go out on the Internet said a train had derailed. A ruptured gas line had been the next blogosphere theory.

Five minutes after detonation, reports of a bombing in an American train station had ticked across the bottom of the television in Aleksandra’s hotel room. A moment after that, politsia radios buzzed with word of a bomb in Vitebsk.

Rescue workers in yellow reflective vests swarmed the area like ants. Some carried stretchers laden with mangled bodies out of the smoldering building. Vents of steam hissed here and there as fire crews worked to control secondary blazes. Aleksandra drove past a green commuter bus that lay knocked on its side like a wounded dinosaur, blown over by the initial blast that had torn the heavy wooden doors off the station. She shook her head at a pair of stockinged female legs protruding into the snow under the street side of the bus, their owner crushed like the witch from The Wizard of Oz.

Past the overturned bus, Aleksandra maneuvered around a queue of three ambulances and nosed the Lada up against a sooty, three-foot snowbank in front of an idling blue and white police truck. A stout man wearing a digital camouflage parka bearing the three stars of a senior politsia lieutenant waved his arms and shouted for her to keep moving. She turned the key to kill the engine as he stomped up to the car door.

Lieutenant Sergey Tarasov stopped short and his graying mustache curled into a full grimace when he recognized Kanatova. She was well aware of the krysha protection rackets he set up for the pimps and their prostitutes in St. Petersburg. Krysha meant “roof” in Russian, and the lieutenant provided such a shelter from government meddling as long as he was well compensated.

Russia was a land of workarounds where the shortest distance between two points often meant leveraging dangerous liaisons. Aleksandra’s knowledge of Tarasov’s criminal activities made him a possible threat—but it also allowed her a certain degree of control as long as she didn’t stretch him to the breaking point. And this she found vastly more important than the Russian mob paying a “police tax” to be left alone with their whoring ventures.

Kanatova adjusted the blue fox ushanka on her head and dropped her car keys in the pocket of her down parka. Deep snow crunched under her boots as she surveyed the riot of activity. A flick of her wrist signaled the snarling Lieutenant Tarasov to follow. He was a pig, a slob, and most certainly a rapist, but his rank might come in handy tonight. Aleksandra gave her head a shake as if she’d sneezed, annoyed at the very stench of the man. Hers was such a nasty business.

The five doors under the double-columned windows at the near end of the station were gone. Dark fans of soot and debris had spewed across the snow from each gaping hole as if some angry giant had taken a broom to the inside of the great hall and swept everything out into the street. A tangle of gray hair and blood-sodden wool was wrapped around a yellow traffic bollard beyond the doors, flung there by the blast. Closer inspection revealed pieces of charred limb embedded in the snow.

White goose down flakes sifted around flashing emergency lights. Heavy snow dampened the cries of the wounded—and gave the feeling of a garish snow globe of carnage. Aleksandra paused twenty meters from the demolished doors beside a woman’s high-heel boot. It was expensive, probably American, and made of black leather. A five-inch shard of shattered bone stuck from the boot top.

“Ah, yes,” the pig Tarasov said, sneering as he misjudged her reason for stopping. “This is most certainly close enough for your investigation. It is well and good to stop outside the real horror. The destruction inside the station is much more gruesome. It could be quite traumatic to one not accustomed to—”

Aleksandra pushed back the thick fur of her fox hat so she could glare up at the stupid man. He could have no idea of the blood and sorrow her eyes had seen. She said nothing, but reached instead to the pocket of her parka for a metal box the size of a cigarette pack. She stooped to hold the device over the mangled boot, playing it over the burned leather. A thin needle jumped across the illuminated face. Kanatova stood quickly, taking a half step back in spite of herself. Her heart pounded inside her chest. The cold air suddenly took on a bitter taste.

“You will get used to it, my dear,” Lieutenant Tarasov said, his false compassion congealing in the cold like sour milk. “If you think this poor piece of bone is bad, the interior would certainly be too much for your stomach.” Tarasov puffed up like a self-important toad. “I myself found a victim’s tongue stuck to a tile—”

“You have been inside the station?” Aleksandra’s head snapped up.

The lieutenant seemed to take her question as a sign of admiration. He shrugged. “Good citizens are in danger—”

“It is a simple enough question, Tarasov.” She held the metal box against his camouflaged parka. The black needle pegged to the right. “But I have my answer.”

“Someone had to oversee the rescue, my sweet.” He smoothed the corners of his mustache.

“Stop touching your mouth.”

“You are easily excited,” Tarasov chuckled. “I can appreciate that.” He took a step closer, putting a hand on Aleksandra’s shoulder, then letting his hand slide down to her breast. “May I call you Aleks? Do your friends call you Aleks or Sasha?”

Aleksandra closed the gap between them in a flash, bringing her hand from the pocket of her parka to shove it between his legs. “You will call me Agent Kanatova!” she hissed.

“Ahhh.” Tarasov raised a wicked brow. “ ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ ”

“I would not quote dead Englishmen if I were in your shoes.” Aleksandra gave a little tug, letting the lieutenant feel the hooked blade she had at his groin.

“You would threaten me?”

“I do not threaten.” Aleksandra shook her head. “You are already cut. Give your leg a shake. If you do not hear a little thud, perhaps I have not yet removed anything important.”

Snow continued to sift down around them. She sniffed from the cold.

“What do you want?” Tarasov’s shaggy mustache appeared to wilt as a dawning reality chased away his bravado.

“I want you to shut your mouth and listen to me,” she said. “You must be decontaminated before you leave this site—you and everyone else who has gone inside.”

Aleksandra stepped away slowly, withdrawing the cruel-looking knife. Shaped like a talon, there was indeed fresh blood on the curved blade. She kept an eye on the pallid Tarasov as she took a cell phone from her pocket and punched in the number with her thumb. She’d given him too much to think about for him to try and hurt her anytime soon.

“This is Kanatova,” she said when the other party had picked up. “Polzin’s information was correct. Radiation is confirmed. Someone should tell the Americans.” She shoved the phone back in her parka.

“Wha . . . what are you saying?” Senior Lieutenant Tarasov attempted an angry stomp of his foot, but Aleksandra could see there was no commitment in it. He seemed scared to look down and see how much damage her knife had done. “Radiation? Do you think this is connected to the dead boy at the hospital?”

Of course it was connected, Aleksandra thought, gritting her teeth. What sort of idiot could possibly think a dirty bomb and a college student dead of radiation poisoning could be in any way unrelated? The problem was figuring out how. Instead of voicing her opinion, she nodded slowly, surveying the scene of mangled bodies and destruction. “There is much worse to come, I assure you,” she said, almost to herself.

“Worse than this?” Tarasov’s eyes flew wider under wild gray brows. “Worse than you cutting my . . . worse than radioactive?”

Aleksandra bit her bottom lip fighting the urge to chew on her already horrid fingernails. The chilly air suddenly grew more bitter and metallic. The smell of cooked flesh made her stomach turn flips. “Vitebsk Station still stands. Life muddles on for kilometers in every direction.” She looked directly at the lieutenant. “Oh yes, there are things much worse than this. . . .”

Tarasov tugged at the collar of his uniform. “You spoke of decontamination?”

“The teams are on their way,” Aleksandra said, taking out her phone again.

“What do you intend to do?

“Now?”

“Yes, now.” Tarasov’s hand trembled at the end of his powerful arm, an arm he would have been all too happy to strike her with two minutes before.

“I’m but a lowly civil servant,” she said. “I will call in for orders.”

Kanatova took shallow breaths. Falling snow helped to scrub the chilly air to be sure, but there could still be dangerous levels of radiation floating around her in the darkness. She’d made her next decision before she pressed the buttons on her phone. She knew Mikhail Polzin better than his own wife. She would naturally be the one to pick up this investigation. Her bones ached with dread at the daunting thought. The layers of Russian bureaucracy surrounding his death, stolen Soviet-era weapons, and the detonation of a dirty bomb would be like trying to walk a tightrope in the dark. It could be done, but one would have to be extremely careful—and extremely lucky. She had no time for such things. By the time she got the approvals she needed, it would be too late.

Growing up Russian had instilled in Aleksandra the value of the workaround. If something was against the rules, one found a way around that particular rule. If the bureaucracy of the Russian government would hinder her investigation, she’d simply go to America. They’d surely be neck deep in their own investigation by the time she arrived. Following their discoveries wouldn’t be difficult at all—the silly Americans paraded their best information on the television. CNN would indeed be her source.