There was a short, uncomfortable silence.
“I brought copies of my case notes as you requested,” Vedenskaya told Smith at last. She prodded the heavy winter coat bundled beside her on the seat. “They’re there, hidden inside a selection of old medical journals. I will give them to you after we leave. It is too public here.”
“Thank you, Elena,” Smith said gravely, with genuine gratitude. He looked sidelong at her. “But what about the blood or tissue specimens taken from the victims? Is there any way you could smuggle samples of those out to us?”
“It would be impossible,” she answered shortly. “Your friends Petrenko and Kiryanov saw to that. All biological specimens are now kept under strict lock and key. No one can obtain them without a signature and signed forms from the Ministry authorizing specific experiments or tests.”
“Is there anything else you can tell us?” Fiona asked at last. “Anything at all?”
Vedenskaya hesitated briefly, looked sideways to make sure no one else was in earshot, and then answered in a lower voice, one that could barely be heard over the loud clatter of dishes and conversation from the rest of the restaurant. “I heard a rumor, a rumor that greatly disturbed me—”
The two Americans stayed silent, waiting for her to go on.
The Russian woman sighed. “One of the hospital orderlies, a man who had spent many years as a political prisoner in a labor camp, claimed that he saw that madman Wulf Renke examining one of the dying patients.”
Startled, Smith sat up straighter. “Renke?” he muttered in disbelief.
“Wulf Renke? Who is he?” Fiona asked.
“An East German scientist. Basically, a biological weapons expert with a very ugly reputation for coming up with new and especially nasty ways to kill people,” Smith told her. He shook his head. “But it couldn’t have been him. Not really. That bastard has been dead for years.”
“So it is said,” Vedenskaya said softly. “But this orderly knew the German well…painfully well. While a prisoner, he was forced to witness a series of vicious experiments Renke conducted on other inmates at his camp.”
“Where is this man now?” Fiona pressed her. “Can we talk to him?”
“Only if you can summon the spirits of the dead,” the gray-haired woman told her curtly. “Unfortunately, he fell beneath the wheels of a tram—shortly after he began telling the story of what he had seen in the hospital.”
“He fell? Or was he pushed?” Smith wondered grimly.
Vedenskaya shrugged. “They say he was drunk when it happened. For all I know, that could be true. Almost all Russians are drunk at one time or another.” She smiled bitterly through the smoke curling from her cigarette and then tapped her empty vodka glass with a single, tobacco-stained finger.
Outside, the snow flurries were coming down harder now, beginning to cover the heaped mounds of older, smog-blackened snow and ice. Fresh flakes dusted the streets and parked cars, steadily accumulating in a layer of white powder that sparkled faintly under the street lamps and in the wavering beams of passing cars.
Still fastening his thick parka, a young-looking man with a long, slightly crooked nose left the Kafe Karetny Dvor. He stood motionless for a moment, waiting for a break in the evening traffic, and then crossed the street at an angle. Once there, he walked rapidly east along Povarskaya Street, brushing through throngs of pedestrians hurrying along the pavement beneath bobbing umbrellas. Most were loaded down with purchases made during an evening’s shopping among the Arbat District’s trendy boutiques and galleries. He carried his own furled umbrella cradled casually under one arm.
A couple of hundred meters up the street, he paused to light a cigarette, standing right next to a large black luxury sedan idling along the curb.
Instantly, the car’s rear side window slid silently down, revealing little of the darkened interior.
“Vedenskaya is still inside the restaurant,” the young man muttered.
“And she is with the two Americans?” a voice from inside the sedan asked quietly.
“Yes. I’ve left one of my men in there to keep an eye on them. He’ll report the moment they get up to leave. From the look of things, I’d say that will be soon.”
“Your team is ready?”
The young man nodded. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. The tip glowed bright red in the darkness. “Perfectly ready.”
Erich Brandt leaned forward slightly, just far enough so that a tiny bit of light from the street lamps fell across the harsh lines of his square-jawed face. “Good.” His icy gray eyes gleamed briefly. “Then let us hope Colonel Smith and his friends have enjoyed their meal. After all, it will be their last.”
Chapter Seventeen
Smith held the door open for Fiona Devin and Elena Vedenskaya and then followed them out of the Kafe Karetny Dvor. After the warmth inside the Azeri restaurant, the freezing night air cut deep, biting through every layer of his clothing. He gritted his teeth to stop them from chattering and hunched his shoulders, grateful at least for his thick wool coat.
Together they walked a short distance up Povorskaya Street and then stopped in a small huddle on the sidewalk to make their farewells. Other pedestrians edged around them, hurrying onward toward their homes or errands. Occasionally, cars drove past on the street, rumbling by in a procession of bright headlights mixed in with the occasional blare of an angrily honked horn and the faint crunch of studded tires rolling over fresh drifts of new-fallen snow.
“This is for you, Jonathan,” Vedenskaya murmured, reaching into the recesses of her coat and pulling out a thick plastic binder. “Use the information it contains wisely.”
Silently, Smith took the binder and opened it. It was full of dog-eared medical journals, some in English, others in Russian and German. He flipped open the cover of one, a months-old copy of The Lancet. Neatly folded inside were several pages crowded with Cyrillic typescript, evidently a selection of the gray-haired Russian scientist’s case notes. He looked up with a quick, grateful nod, knowing how much she was risking by smuggling these out to him. “Thanks. I’ll make sure this data gets to the right people.”
“That is good. With luck, lives can still be saved.” She looked fiercely at Fiona Devin. “You remember our agreement?”
“I do,” Fiona told her quietly. “No names will be used in any news article I write, Dr. Vedenskaya. Of that you may be sure.”
The other woman nodded back, this time with an austere smile. “In that case, I shall wish you well—”
Suddenly she reeled forward, almost knocked off her feet by a man who crashed straight into her from behind. He had been walking too fast, striding with his head well down and his collar turned up against the falling snow. She only saved herself from falling by grabbing Smith’s arm. Angrily, she let go and whirled around. “You there! Watch where you’re going, why don’t you?”
Abashed, the man—young, with a slightly crooked nose—stepped back quickly. “Izvinite! Excuse me!” he muttered. Grinning foolishly, he retrieved the umbrella he had dropped in the collision and reeled off down the street, walking now with exaggerated care.
Vedenskaya sniffed, disgusted. “Drunk!” she said. “And this early in the evening! Bah. Alcohol is our national curse. Even the young poison themselves.”
“Are you all right?” Smith asked.
Still tight-lipped with anger, she nodded. “Yes. Though I think the lout must have poked me in the leg with that damned umbrella of his,” she said, rubbing at the back of her left thigh. Then she shrugged. “But it’s nothing serious.”
“Still, I think it’s high time we all went our separate ways,” Fiona said worriedly, following the apparent drunk with her own narrowed eyes. “We have what we need. There’s not much point in standing around out here in the open, risking more unwanted attention.”
Smith nodded. “Makes sense.” He turned back to Vedenskaya, patting the binder she had given him. “Look, I’ll keep you posted by private e-mail on what we learn—”
br />
Smith stopped in midsentence. The Russian woman was staring at him with an expression full of horror. “Elena? What is it?” he asked quickly. “What’s wrong?”
She drew in a single deep, shuddering breath and then choked, gasping for air. Jon could see the muscles in her neck straining as she struggled to speak. Her eyes were wide open, grotesquely bulging almost out of their sockets, but her pupils were constricted, reduced to tiny black pinpoints. Her knees sagged.
Shocked, Smith reached out.
But before he could catch her, Elena Vedenskaya collapsed, crumpling to the snow-covered pavement like a rag doll. Her arms and legs jerked wildly, flailing and twitching as she writhed, apparently gripped by a series of eerily silent convulsions.
“Call an ambulance! Now!” Smith snapped to Fiona.
“I’m on it.” She nodded crisply, pulled out her phone, and punched in 03, Moscow’s medical emergency number.
Jon dropped to his knees beside the stricken woman. The wild, frenetic spasms were fading, leaving her lying contorted on her back. He set aside the plastic binder, yanked off one of his gloves, and then laid two fingers against her neck, feeling for her pulse. It was very fast and very weak, fluttering like a broken-winged bird. Not good. He leaned forward, putting his ear to her nose and mouth. She was not breathing.
Christ, he thought bleakly. What the hell had just happened to her? A heart attack? Not likely, given what he was seeing. A stroke or seizure? Maybe. Another, infinitely more frightening possibility flickered vaguely at the back of his mind, but he shook his head, knowing he did not have the time or the information he needed to chase down that fugitive thought. A firm diagnosis would have to wait until later. In the meantime, he had to do his best to keep her alive until the Russian paramedics could arrive.
“One of the hospitals is dispatching an emergency medical team, Colonel,” he heard Fiona Devin report over the babble of shocked voices from a rapidly gathering circle of onlookers. “But it might take five minutes or more to reach us.”
Smith nodded, frowning. Five minutes. For most medical situations, that was a good response time—very good, in fact. But under these circumstances, it might as well be an eternity.
Working fast, he stripped off his coat, bundled it up, and shoved it under the older, gray-haired woman’s shoulders, tilting her head back to help open her airway. Then he pulled her jaw forward with one thumb, shifting her tongue out of the way. He listened again. She was still not breathing. Gently, he turned her head to the side and probed the back of her throat with his fingers, searching for any obstruction, any lump of mucus or bit of food, that could be choking her. There was nothing.
Grim-faced, Smith cradled Elena Vedenskaya’s head in his arms, pinched her nose shut with his fingers, and began rapid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, blowing hard enough to see her chest rise. Every so often, he paused and put his ear to her mouth and nose again, checking to see if the Russian woman was breathing on her own yet. But she still lay paralyzed, staring up at the sky with eyes that never blinked.
He kept working, forcing air into her lungs. Breathe, Jon willed silently. Come on, Elena, breathe. Two or three minutes went by in a blur of frantic activity. A siren keened in the distance, drawing closer.
Under his fingertips, Vedenskaya’s pulse faded, staggered on for a few more irregular beats, and then stopped. Hell. He switched to CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, alternating mouth-to-mouth breathing with short, powerful compressions on her sternum in an increasingly frantic effort to restore her breathing and restart her heart. Nothing worked.
Fiona knelt beside him. “Any good?” she asked somberly, carefully speaking in Russian.
Smith shook his head in frustration. “I think she’s gone.”
Several of the bystanders staring down at Vedenskaya overheard them and crossed themselves rapidly, from right to left in the Russian Orthodox manner. One or two took off their hats in a show of respect for the dead woman. Others began edging away. The drama was over.
“If so, we should leave, Colonel,” Fiona suggested softly. “We really can’t afford any official complications.” She picked up the binder containing Vedenskaya’s case notes from the pavement. “Not now.”
Smith shook his head again, still continuing his CPR. Rationally, he knew that Devin was right. By now, Elena was almost certainly beyond anyone’s help. And getting embroiled in a militia investigation of her death would put them both at risk. For one thing, his John Martin cover was not designed to stand up to intense scrutiny. But he was a doctor first, before he was an intelligence agent. He had an ethical duty to aid this stricken woman. So long as he kept pushing oxygen into her lungs and doing his best to restart her stopped heart, she still had a chance, however slim.
And then, suddenly, it was too late to duck out anyway.
With its siren still wailing, a red-and-white ambulance braked to a stop along the curb. As the siren died away, the rear doors of the vehicle popped open and a slim, sallow-faced man in a rumpled white doctor’s coat jumped out with a black medical bag clutched under one arm. Two burly paramedics scrambled out in his wake.
The doctor waved Smith aside with one dismissive hand and bent down beside the body to conduct his own quick, almost cursory, examination.
Wearily, Jon stood up, brushing the snow off his knees. He looked away from Vedenskaya’s contorted corpse, fighting down a sense of failure and abiding sorrow. Patients died. It happened. But it never got any easier. It always felt like a defeat.
The sallow-faced Russian doctor felt for a pulse. Then he sat back on his heels and shrugged. “Poor woman. It’s much too late. There’s nothing I can do for her.” He nodded to the paramedics standing nearby with a portable stretcher they had pulled out of the ambulance. “Well, go ahead, boys. Get her into the ambulance. Let’s at least get her away from the prying eyes of the morbidly curious.”
The two big men nodded silently and clumsily bent down to begin preparing the body for transport.
Still shaking his head, the white-coated doctor climbed back to his feet. He turned slowly, contemptuously surveying the small and rapidly shrinking crowd of onlookers. His gaze swung toward the two Americans. “Which of you can tell me what happened to her? A heart attack, I suppose?”
“I don’t think so,” Smith said flatly.
“Why not?”
“She collapsed quite suddenly, suffering convulsions and muscle spasms—within a second or so after experiencing what appeared to be complete respiratory failure,” Smith answered rapidly, running through the symptoms he had noted. “Her pupillary muscles also showed signs of extreme contraction. I tried mouth-to-mouth first, and then CPR when her heart stopped, but unfortunately neither technique produced any beneficial result.”
The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Cogently summarized. I gather you have medical training, Mr.—?”
“Martin. John Martin,” Smith replied stiffly, mentally kicking himself for slipping so naturally and unconsciously into medical jargon that did not fit his cover identity. Clearly, Elena Vedenskaya’s horrifying death had rattled him more than he realized. He shrugged. “No, no medical training. But I have taken a couple of first-aid courses.”
“Only first-aid courses? Really? You show remarkable aptitude.” The doctor smiled in polite disbelief. “Still, it is fortunate that you are here.”
“Oh? In what way?” Smith asked carefully.
“Your training and your observations will be very helpful in filling out my report on this tragic incident, Mr. Martin,” the other man said calmly. He nodded at Fiona Devin. “That is why I must ask you and this charming companion of yours to accompany us to the hospital.”
Fiona frowned.
“Don’t worry, this is only a matter of routine,” the doctor said, holding up a hand to stifle any protests. “I assure you that any inconvenience will be temporary.”
The two paramedics finished strapping the dead woman onto their stretcher and heaved her up between them. “W
atch out for her left leg,” Smith heard one of them mutter brusquely to the other. “You don’t want to get any of that stuff on your hands.”
Stuff? Jon felt his blood run ice-cold. He remembered the young “drunk” who had collided with Vedenskaya, “accidentally” jabbing her with the tip of his rolled-up umbrella. Suddenly all the damning symptoms he had cataloged fell into place: respiratory collapse, convulsions, her constricted pupils, and finally, complete heart failure.
Jesus, he thought grimly. She must have been injected with some kind of deadly, fast-acting nerve agent, probably a variant of Sarin or VX. Even a drop of either toxic compound on bare skin could kill. Pumping VX or Sarin directly into the bloodstream would be even more lethal. He looked up quickly and saw the sallow-faced doctor watching him with a cold, calculating expression.
Smith took a step back.
With a slight smile, the white-coated man pulled a small, compact pistol out of his white coat—a Makarov PSM, a Russian-made knockoff of the Walther PPK. He held the weapon down low at his side, aiming straight at the American’s heart. Slowly he shook his head. “I hope that you will resist the temptation to act unwisely, Colonel Smith. Otherwise, we will be forced to kill both you and the lovely Ms. Devin. And that would be a terrible shame, would it not?”
Bitterly angry with himself for missing the warning signs of this ambush, Smith grimaced. The other man was just outside his reach. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the ambulance driver, as big and hard-eyed as the others, had climbed down out of the cab. This man now stood close behind Fiona Devin, holding a pistol pressed hard into the small of her back.
Her face had gone pale, either with anger or fear or a mixture of both emotions.
Smith forced himself to stand very still. Carefully, he showed his open, empty hands. “I’m unarmed,” he said tightly.
“A rational decision, Colonel,” the doctor said approvingly. “No one would benefit from any useless heroics.”
The first two paramedics roughly slid Elena Vedenskaya’s blanket-wrapped body into the back of the ambulance. They swung away and stood waiting for further orders.