Scorpion Winter s-2 Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Why was she there?”

  “To make sure we stopped Pyatov. She didn’t trust me,” Scorpion said.

  “Eta lozh! ” That’s a lie! Kulyakov shouted, leaping out of his chair and pointing at Scorpion. “They’re in it together! They’re thick as bedbugs, those two!”

  “Molchat!” the hatchet-faced suddya said, holding his hand up for silence. “Is prisoner Iryna Shevchenko here?”

  “She’s outside,” Kulyakov said.

  “Have her brought in,” the suddya said.

  Kulyakov signaled to one of the guards and a moment later Iryna was led into the room. She wore a gray prison shift, her hair in its pixie cut. She looked pale and very thin. They sat her in a chair a few feet from Scorpion’s. As they led her in, his eyes searched hers. She looked frightened, worried, he thought. He tried to smile at her, but he could see she was shocked at his appearance, his gauntness and bruises.

  “You are Iryna Mikhailivna Shevchenko?” the hatchet-faced suddya asked. She nodded. He looked at his papers for a moment. “You were the campaign manager for Viktor Ivanovych Kozhanovskiy?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice so soft they had to strain to hear her.

  “Speak up!” one of the other judges, a balding man with a goatee like Lenin’s, demanded.

  “ Da, yes,” she said louder.

  “You know this man?” the hatchet-faced suddya said, indicating Scorpion.

  “Da.”

  “You were with him at the stadium in Dnipropetrovsk when Yuriy Cherkesov was murdered?”

  She looked questioningly at Scorpion.

  “Look at me, not him!” the hatchet-faced suddya thundered. “You were with him?”

  “Da.”

  “To kill Cherkesov?”

  “No, to stop Pyatov!” she cried. “We tried to stop it!”

  “Even if it meant forcing Ukraina into war with Russia? Your political ambition was more important than the Motherland!”

  “No! My father was Artem Shevchenko, founder of the Rukh, the Independence movement without which we wouldn’t even have a country! Ukraina would still be an oblast of Russia! How could I ever go against the Motherland?”

  “Lies! You see how she twists things?!” Kulyakov said, leaping to his feet. “What business did the head of the Kozhanovskiy campaign have at a Cherkesov rally? She did it to make sure her lover,” pointing at Scorpion “went through with it! They are equally guilty!”

  The hatchet-faced suddya looked at Iryna.

  “You were lovers with this man, this Scorpion?”

  Iryna looked desperately at Scorpion.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “They made me.” She looked at the hatchet-faced suddya. “They did things to me, those mudaky bastards! Gospadi, do I have to say it?”

  “Molchat!” Silence! the hatchet-faced suddya demanded, slapping the table sharply with his palm.

  “She seduced him,” Kulyakov said. “Part of his payment for killing Cherkesov. She was his sooka whore. Tell them,” he said, coming up to her and grabbing her face tightly with his hand. “Admit it!”

  “Is it true? You were lovers?” the suddya asked, his eyes focused on hers.

  She tried to look desperately over at Scorpion, her eyes glistening.

  “Da,” she whispered. “It’s true.”

  “Why do we waste time listening to these lies?” Kulyakov said. “They have admitted they were there together. This man,” he pointed at Scorpion, “has admitted killing seven people at the stadium, not even including Cherkesov and the others in the automobile. He was the last one seen with Shelayev, who was also found murdered. Both these criminals have confessed to their crimes! They have shown no evidence of innocence or remorse. What more is needed?”

  “I agree,” the goateed suddya said. “The evidence is overwhelming.”

  “And I,” the hatchet-faced suddya said.

  The judges began to confer among themselves. They talked and nodded their heads.

  Iryna turned toward Scorpion. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t hold out,” she said.

  “Did you tell them about my code name, Scorpion?” he whispered to her.

  “Gospadi!” she cried, looking away. “Is that what you think of me?”

  The three judges passed around a paper. Each of them signed it in turn.

  They were going to execute both of them, Scorpion realized. For him it was foregone, but there might still be a chance for Iryna.

  “We have concluded-” the hatchet-faced suddya began.

  “Podazhdite!” Scorpion cried out. Wait! “You’ve got it backward. She didn’t seduce me! I seduced her! I killed Cherkesov! It was a Western plot. Iryna,” nodding at her, “tried to stop me. I forced her to come with me after the assassination. I did it! She is innocent!”

  “ Tak, you admit you killed Cherkesov?” the hatchet-faced suddya said.

  “I did it!” he said, looking at Iryna. “She had nothing to do with it.”

  “Why? What was your reason?”

  “I was paid.”

  “But by whom? Who wanted Cherkesov dead?”

  “An international conglomerate who thought Kozhanovskiy would be more sympathetic to their interests. Everyone here knows that Kozhanovskiy wanted to be closer to the West.”

  “An American company?” the goateed suddya put in.

  “An international company, but yes, of the West,” Scorpion said.

  For a moment no one spoke.

  “He’s lying. He’s trying to save her,” Kulyakov said, looking at Scorpion.

  “That’s stupid,” Scorpion said. “If as you contend, she brought me into this, if I’m about to die because of her, why would I want to save her? I’d want to see her dead!”

  The hatchet-faced suddya stared at Scorpion for a long moment. No one in the room said anything. He turned and whispered quickly with the other judges. The goateed judge was disagreeing about something. Suddenly, there was a stir.

  Two Black Armbands came into the room, their hands on their gun belt holsters. Someone followed them in, followed by two more Black Armbands. The hatchet-faced suddya was about to object to the interruption when he saw who it was. Scorpion recognized him instantly. Heavyset in a dark suit, bald, horn-rimmed glasses.

  Gorobets.

  “Vybachte,” Gorobets said in that same soft voice. “Excuse the interruption.”

  “The sud is honored, Minister,” the hatchet-faced suddya said.

  Gorobets walked over to the bench and, leaning over, spoke with the three judges. Once, he turned to look back first at Scorpion, then at Iryna. He and the judges spoke for another few minutes, then Gorobets turned to leave. He glanced again at Iryna and fixed Scorpion with a long hard look. Then, without a word, Gorobets and his Black Armbands left the room.

  “What happened?” Iryna whispered to Scorpion.

  “Whatever they planned just changed. You’re a hot potato,” he whispered back.

  The three judges talked among themselves, one and then another glancing over at Scorpion and Iryna. They seemed to have reached a decision. The hatchet-faced suddya marked something on the paper and signed it. He turned the paper so the other two judges could initial it, then turned back to Iryna.

  “Iryna Mikhailivna Shevchenko. Based on the prisoner known as Scorpion’s confession and additional information that has come to the attention of this sud, we find there is insufficient evidence to hold you for the assassination of Yuriy Dmytrovych Cherkesov. You are free to go, but with the understanding that if additional evidence should be found, you may be charged in the future. You may go.”

  Iryna came and stood next to Scorpion.

  “This is not an open sud, Iryna Mikhailivna. Leave at once!” the hatchet-faced suddya demanded.

  “What are you going to do with him?” she asked, indicating Scorpion.

  “Take her out!” the suddya ordered.

  Two guards came and grabbed her.

  “ Nyet! He’s doing it for m
e, you fools! He is innocent!” Iryna cried out, looking at Scorpion as if to memorize his face as two guards dragged her out of the room.

  The hatchet-faced suddya stared coldly at Scorpion.

  “Mikhail Kilbane, also known as Peter Reinert, also known as the foreign agent Scorpion, the sud sentences you to death for the murder of Yuriy Dmytrovych Cherkesov. Sentence to be carried out within twenty-four hours. The sud is concluded,” he said, picking up his papers.

  The three judges stood and filed out of the room.

  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, Scorpi
on 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.