Disposable Asset Page 8

  ‘What brings you to Russia, Mister Holt?’

  ‘I’m representing the firm of Fowler, Weinraub, and Hicks. From Tampa. I was meeting with Anatoly Starostin. Project manager at XE Airband.’

  ‘In Sergiev Posad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which is where you met the young woman in question.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When was that?’

  Measuring out the words: ‘Monday night.’

  ‘Explain the circumstances, please.’

  ‘Bart – Bart Fowler, my boss – told me about the travel advisory. He suggested I wrap it up early. Better safe than sorry, he said. So I switched my ticket to Tuesday morning, the next flight I could get. Then I went to grab a drink near my hotel.’

  ‘Your hotel was …?’

  ‘The Rodinki.’

  ‘And the bar?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Was it called Bierhof? Pivnoj?’

  ‘That was it. Pivnoj.’

  ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘I started talking to this girl. An American girl. She said she was working on her thesis. Said she was afraid to spend the night alone. So I took pity on her.’ Holt’s eyes darted to Ravensdale, back to Vlasov. ‘I’m a married man, I had no designs, but she was a young girl, frightened, so I took pity and told her she could share my room. So she did. And in the morning I left and went to the airport, and while I was there I saw a sketch in the newspaper, so I went to the customs agent and told him I might recognize that face, and next thing I know I’m here. Left alone all night long, no phone call, no lawyer, no food, not even any water, for Christ’s sake. It’s not right. I was trying to help! I was putting myself out there and—’

  ‘The name she gave you?’

  ‘Heidi.’

  ‘Last name?’

  ‘No. Just Heidi.’

  ‘Hailing from?’

  ‘Connecticut, she said.’

  ‘Working on her thesis?’

  Holt nodded.

  ‘Her university?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘Her subject?’

  ‘She mentioned museums, so I assumed it was, you know. Folk art. Something like that. Who gives a fuck?’

  ‘Were you intimate?’

  ‘That’s … I’m a married man.’

  ‘Just between us.’

  ‘We had a few glasses of wine. Things may have gotten a little out of hand. We were both … But that’s neither here nor there. My wife doesn’t need to—’

  ‘You had a few glasses of wine. Where?’

  ‘At that bar. Pivnoj. And then at a restaurant down the street.’

  ‘Named?’

  A shake of the head.

  ‘Café Greenfield? Yamskaya? Trapeza Na Makovtse?’

  ‘The last one, I think.’

  ‘Describe the girl.’

  Holt compressed his lips. ‘I told your people already—’

  ‘Now tell me.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake. Can I at least have a glass of water?’

  ‘First describe the girl.’

  ‘Ordinary. Pretty. Young.’

  ‘And the police sketch …’

  ‘Close.’

  ‘But not exact.’

  ‘Not exact. But close.’

  ‘Where was the sketch wrong?’

  ‘Her hair was shorter, in real life. Streaked black. You know – punk.’

  ‘Height?’

  ‘Ordinary.’

  ‘What’s ordinary?’

  ‘Five three, maybe.’

  ‘Weight?’

  ‘Slim.’

  ‘Fifty kilos? Sixty?’

  ‘One hundred pounds. One ten, tops. Slim.’

  ‘Identifying marks? Scars, bruises, scrapes …?’

  ‘No. She was …’ Holt shook his head again. ‘There was a scratch on her forehead. She said it came from a low ceiling.’

  ‘A deep scratch?’

  ‘Noticeable.’

  ‘On which side of her forehead?’

  ‘Fuck if I know.’

  ‘She was wearing …?’

  ‘Ordinary clothes.’

  ‘What’s ordinary?’

  ‘A parka. Blue jeans. Ordinary clothes.’

  ‘What color parka?’

  ‘Blue. Or black. Maybe dark blue. Christ’s sake. I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz.’

  ‘Hat? Gloves? Scarf?’

  ‘Maybe in a pocket. Not that I saw.’

  ‘Did she have a phone? A computer?’

  ‘Not that I saw.’

  ‘A weapon?’

  ‘God, no.’

  ‘Jewelry?’

  Owen Holt frowned, trying to picture it, and shook his head again.

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Not that I saw. But I picked up the checks.’

  ‘A handbag?’

  ‘I don’t … think so.’

  ‘Didn’t that strike you as odd? An American girl, alone, no purse, no friends, no phone?’

  ‘I assumed she’d left stuff back in her room. I wasn’t worrying about it.’

  ‘What room?’

  ‘At the youth hostel.’

  ‘Did she name the hostel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you where she was staying. She didn’t tell you her last name. Or her university, or the subject of her thesis …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘I mean … nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Russia. How pretty Sergiev Posad is. Stuff like that.’

  ‘Current events? Politics?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see the news, at any point, in her company?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see the police sketch in her company?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you pass any soldiers or police in her company?’

  ‘No. Well – maybe. Walking back to the hotel.’

  ‘Did she react?’

  ‘She took my arm, maybe. We’d talked about how it was scary, being a tourist, an American, with this travel advisory.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Did she seem scared?’

  ‘She said she was scared. She came back to my hotel with me. So she must have been scared.’

  ‘And then she seduced you?’

  Holt’s face darkened. ‘Come on, man.’

  ‘During the night, she slept?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You both slept?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the morning, did she say where she was going?’

  ‘She was still asleep when I left. But over dinner, she mentioned some friends who had gone on to Penza. I got the impression she was going to join them.’

  ‘Names?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘These were other students?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Did she give you any way to contact her?’

  ‘No.’

  Vlasov glanced at Ravensdale, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. ‘If you think of anything else,’ said Vlasov smoothly, ‘tell the guard you want to speak with me. Senior Inspektor Piotr Vlasov.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘The wheels,’ said Vlasov, ‘are in motion.’

  ‘But my—’

  ‘The wheels are in motion.’ He nodded at Ravensdale; they retreated.

  ‘Come on! At least—’

  The door clanged shut.

  Back in the chilly corridor, the Inspektor offered one of his thin brown cigarettes. ‘Are you a betting man? Because we’ll have her, I wager, before the day is done.’

  Leaning forward to accept a light, Ravensdale said nothing.

  SERGIEV POSAD

  Beneath the pebbled turnaround, a harried mother dragged a three-year-old wearing a snot-caked jacket toward a revolving door. A Japanese woman posed smiling before a skyline of minarets and cupolas. A valet listened
to a couple’s complaints and smiled non-committally. No one paid any attention to the man moving circumspectly into and out of the hotel’s lobby via a side door, ferrying small bundles to a long yellow van parked just down the block.

  Behind curtained windows inside the van, five lab-coated technicians shared cramped quarters with chromatographs, microscopes, spectrographs and thermal cyclers. As one team of techs swabbed blood from pillowcases – a surprisingly high percentage of linen recovered from any hotel’s laundry will feature bloodstains – another carefully used tweezers to transfer strands of hair into reaction tubes. The tubes were inserted, four at a time, into a device the size of a small toaster oven. After a heated lid was locked, the temperature of a mixture inside the device rose and lowered in preprogrammed steps, separating and amplifying strands of DNA. Following amplification, a probe tagged with a radioactive marker bound itself within each sample to a complementary sequence. The resulting profile, displayed on a small green touch screen, consisted of three columns of alphanumerical characters, with the leftmost identifying a genetic marker, the center ‘Allele A’, and the rightmost ‘Allele B’.

  At 10:45 a.m., the tech studying the screen gave a tight smile of satisfaction. After double-checking the results against a light-blue sheet of paper, he reached for a phone.

  As his call went through, a lab-coated young woman four hundred kilometers away inserted an identical reaction tube into an identical thermal cycler. She initiated the amplification and radioactive probe, checked the resulting three columns of alphanumerical characters against her own light-blue sheet of paper. She gave her own cool smile and reached for her own phone.

  SEREBRYANY BOR

  ‘We have,’ Vlasov announced, ‘not two, but three matching DNA profiles.’

  He paused, as if waiting for applause. Ravensdale wondered who he saw playing himself in the movie. In his chair before the hearth, Tsoi picked negligently at a callus on his left thumb.

  ‘One,’ continued Vlasov after a moment, ‘constructed from the knit cap recovered at Turygino. One constructed from a hair found in Owen Holt’s hotel room. And one constructed from a bloodstain found just two hours ago, in a vehicle in Novgorod Oblast. The odds of two different individuals possessing identical profiles, I might add, are approximately one in one billion.’ He gave an arid smile. ‘The vehicle is a rental car, in possession of a tourist family named Harris. They checked out of the Hotel Rodinki yesterday morning, just an hour after our Mister Holt. The phone of the teenaged daughter has served as a GPS; my men caught up with them this morning at Lake Ilmen.’

  Elsewhere in the mansion Elena laughed, an innocent laugh, covering a full octave.

  Vlasov crossed to a makeshift map table set up atop the harpsichord, thumped it with an index finger. ‘I believe our quarry was a stowaway – the bloodstain was found on a swath of carpeting in the rear of the hatchback, where luggage would be stored – and the family had no knowledge of her presence. But, of course, they are being questioned even now.’

  Ravensdale lit a cigarette, joined Vlasov by the laminated map. The asymmetrical Lake Ilmen was surrounded by a latticework of tributaries and meandering rivers. The only roads passing within shouting distance were the A-116, M-10, and E-105. Police checkpoints on the highways had been indicated by grease pencil. ‘Open country out there,’ he remarked.

  ‘Indeed. Lakes and forests, the occasional provincial village. Last night the Harris family overnighted in one of these villages—’ Another imperative thump of the index finger. ‘Here, in Valdai. And sometime after dark, as it so happens, a Minsk motorbike was stolen from a parking lot directly beside their hotel.’

  Ravensdale bent closer. ‘Traveling by road, she would have hit a spot check by now.’

  ‘I concur. Therefore, she has left the road. Traveling through this countryside on a Minsk, however, she could not average more than forty kilometers per hour. Last night the temperature dropped to ten below. Factor in the wind chill from riding a motorbike, and no human could have endured. We must assume she was forced to stop and shelter until sunup, and probably not too very far from Valdai.’ The Inspektor’s finger described a tight circle. ‘The parameters of the search have been refined accordingly. The new description – American, dark-blue parka, scrape on the forehead, short hair streaked black – has been released to my people, along with the alias and cover story she used with Holt. But not to the media. No need to let her know we’re on to her.’

  Still picking at his callused thumb by the fireplace, Tsoi wore a faintly troubled expression.

  ‘We have dogs and jeeps scouring the countryside. Helicopters and quadricopter drones, for difficult terrain. Thanks to FAPSI at the GRU, the use of a spy satellite. Of course, we maintain our vigilance at roads, railway, and bus stations. We focus now on the Minsk, but remain aware of the possibility that she has picked up, by hook or by crook, another ride. Within the next few hours, if she continues in the direction she has been going, we’ll find her near Lake Seliger.’

  Ravensdale nodded. Tsoi reached for his khat root. From someplace nearby the girl laughed again, musically.

  SIX

  LAKE SELIGER, NORTH OF OSTASHKOV

  After relieving her bladder she walked a few paces from the Minsk, stretching her legs.

  The sun was just cresting: a bright, cloudless, steely winter day turning on the axis toward afternoon. Her shadow had shrunk to almost nothing. In another few hours, she thought, twilight would come. The slush would refreeze, and the already-bitter cold would turn vicious. But by then, God willing, she’d be back in civilization.

  She touched her toes, popping her vertebrae. Before climbing back on to the bike she spent a final minute soaking in the black pine and silver birch, the distant flat shimmering mirror of Lake Seliger. Under different circumstances, she might actually have enjoyed the view. The countryside was pristine, bold, starkly beautiful. Except for a single hunting blind on stilts, she had not passed any evidence of human habitation since morning.

  Then suddenly the wind turned and she heard voices, dismayingly close. Ducking low, she rolled the bike quickly into the nearest copse of ice-dappled trees.

  It came again: a murmur of conversation, sending a thrill of terror plaiting down her spine. A moment later they came into view, two figures walking not twenty-five yards away.

  ‘When all of a sudden,’ one man was saying. He looked six feet tall and nearly as wide, a descendent of hardy Russian peasant stock. He wore a thick handlebar mustache and fur trooper hat, and carried a double-barreled shotgun loosely in the crook of one arm. ‘This dark-suited government functionary runs up and hands him a telegram. Stalin reads it and then says, “Comrades! A historic occasion! I have in my hands a telegram of congratulations from Leon Trotsky!”’

  His companion – shorter, younger, more heavily bundled against the cold – listened intently.

  ‘He opens the telegram and begins to read. “Joseph Stalin – you were right and I was wrong! You are the true heir of Lenin! I should apologize! Trotsky.” The crowd goes mad. But then, from the front row, this little … tailor …’

  Without warning the man took a knee, peering closely at the snow. Then he looked up, directly at Cassie’s stand of pine.

  Standing again, he raised a hand, beckoning the younger man to follow. He hefted the shotgun and came forward, heavy boots crunching. In the blink of an eye, he was almost atop her; she could either announce herself or be discovered.

  She eased out of the trees, hands extended, not quite raised. The shotgun snapped up. ‘Po’shyol ’na hui!’ the man exclaimed.

  When he saw her more clearly, his stance relaxed. As he came forward again, she caught the scents of woodsmoke and beet soup. He was in his middle sixties, handlebar mustache flecked with gray. The other, thirtyish, was almost certainly his son – they shared the same wide forehead and anvil-like jaw.

  ‘Where did she come from?’ asked the younger. The elder only shook his head.

  They w
ere almost within arm’s reach. She calculated odds. Two against one. And even the smaller man was twice her size. But, of course, size didn’t matter. You hit first, and you hit hard …

  ‘You heard him,’ said the elder. ‘Well? Cat got your tongue?’

  ‘Hold on.’ Canny, now. ‘Does she look familiar to you?’

  ‘Never seen her before in my life.’

  ‘No; remember that picture? From the news.’

  Papa Bear frowned doubtfully.

  ‘It’s her,’ said the son. ‘Who else would be out here, all alone?’ His .22 rifle came up. ‘You hold still,’ he commanded, and then: ‘We’d better—’

  In no particular hurry, she reached for the shotgun’s barrel.

  Twisting it back, she pinned Papa Bear’s index finger inside the trigger guard. Then all his bulk meant nothing; she tugged lightly, maneuvering him between herself and the youth, as he cried out. The empty lake threw back the sound.

  The .22 barked. Papa Bear shuddered. Wrenching the shotgun free, she returned fire. The younger man blew backward like a dead leaf caught in a gale, rifle flying from his hands.

  Then two men lay on snow turning red. Echoing gunshots bounced away through the forest, chased across the frozen lake.

  The boy stared at the sky with wide, preoccupied eyes. She moved closer, kicked the rifle away. His gaze turned searchingly toward her. A light inside them flared, guttered, and died.

  She turned back to Papa Bear. The side of his throat had been opened by the .22 slug. A tiny shred of skin puffed with each whistling, ragged breath. The index finger of his right hand had been torn almost free.

  ‘You … devil,’ he managed.

  She socked the shotgun into her shoulder. Under the circumstances, it would be a mercy.

  He coughed; a bubble of blood popped on his lips. He started to prop himself up on one elbow, fell back, rolled over, and sighed.

  She watched for a long minute. He did not move again.

  At last she lowered the gun. She waited, expecting remorse, or nausea, or redoubled rage at Quinn – more innocent blood now stained her hands, more innocent blood which would never wash out. But she felt nothing except a dull urgency, and in a way, that was worst of all.

  Setting the shotgun carefully on the ground, she got her hands beneath the larger man’s arms. But he proved even heavier than he looked. She had dragged him only halfway to the treeline before she needed to rest. Worse, the passage left a muddled bloody furrow in the snow. Until a fresh snowfall, the track could not be effectively concealed.