Coercion (7 page)

He flipped Luda over onto her stomach to continue from behind.
  He did not want to see her face when it happened.  Vasily already had too many tormenting scenes imprinted on his mind’s eye, and there was no sense in adding more unnecessarily.  He knew that he was performing a duty in the service of his country, that he was a sniper using unconventional bullets in a silent war, but that didn’t mean he was a man without conscience.  He did what he had to do.  (Some nights were better than others.)

This battle peaked with
a mismatched confluence as Luda climaxed and spasmed simultaneously.  She was coming and going at the same time and her body didn’t know what to do.  As she heaved and contorted, moaned and groaned, Vasily realized that his naïve date was probably blissfully unaware of her peril.  He didn’t roll her over to check.  Eventually her contractions became extreme enough to bring him to a powerful finish despite his apprehensions.  They went limp simultaneously, but for very different reasons.

Vasily
walked to the bathroom and shed the killer condom directly into the toilet.  Most men would not have the stomach for such a device, but he thought it was brilliant.  As long as you weren’t careless, the poison would transfer cleanly from the prophylactic to the woman’s bloodstream, while the man remained fully protected behind his latex shield.  It was an elegant device and, considering Luda Orlova’s alternatives, the very best way to go.

As Alex wriggled to conceal himself behind the rear seat of Elaine’s minivan, he
worried he was acting foolishly—fatally foolishly.  He had always relied on his instincts, and he didn’t want to stop now, but he was also well aware that Frank’s instinct had failed him here. 

Frank had always been the exceptional Ferris, the genius,
the inventor.  Alex weighed the torch in his hand and wondered how far he could carry it. 

It had been a challenging week, in more ways than one.  Frank was buried now, but Alex could not lay him to rest.  Not yet.  He would not
feel right taking the time to grieve until his killer was resting in either a six by eight cell or a two by six box.

Despite
Frank’s “Elaine” conclusion, Alex had initially favored Jason as the likely killer.  He had no hard evidence, but he had intuition, intuition and a few clues.  Jason had referred to the UE-2000 progress report as motivation for suicide, although he had not spoken to Vogel and Alex had not mentioned it to him.  Jason had also said he was dropping the UE consulting project because it would remind him of Frank.  Alex didn’t buy it.  If the UE-2000 was anything close to the revolutionary technology Jason himself claimed, it was virtually inconceivable that he as an aspiring consultant would give up the opportunity to be a part of that team.  Finally there was his drop-by the morning after; what really compelled that?  Was it a driving desire to pay immediate respect as he claimed, or was it a nervous check on the status of the investigation?

Apparently, it really was a show of respect.  After Jason left
, Alex got on the phone with an old CIA friend and confirmed Jason’s travel schedule on the day of Frank’s murder.  Jason had indeed been on an airplane at the critical time.  There was no way he could have done it.  Alex’s intuition had failed.  Perhaps he was just too close to the case.  Perhaps the emotional overload was short-circuiting his sensors.  Still, here he was concealed in the back of a minivan in the United Electronics parking garage, relying on his intuition again.

After dismissing Jason, Alex spent the next few days following Frank’s lead
.  His focus was on Elaine’s after-hours activities, especially those at work.  Alex used Frank’s card key to gain round-the-clock access to United Electronics.  Dressed as a janitor, he would install a network of miniature surveillance cameras around the UE-2000 each night, and remove it each morning.  In the mean time, he monitored the cameras from a storage room whenever Elaine was in the building.

To Alex’s amateur eyes, the UE-2000 loo
ked like the other engines he had seen out the window of a plane.  The one notable exception was the series of air intake flaps running along each side.  They reminded Alex of the gills on a shark, and apparently he wasn’t alone.  When talking amongst themselves, the engineers referred to the UE-2000 as
Sharky
.

His first night on the job, after a surprisingly unchallenging lock-picking exercise, he copied Elaine’s personnel file. 
He combined it with her FBI file and the notes from a few interviews, and scoured through the lot into the wee hours over two Venti Starbucks and a quart of General Tsao’s chicken.  By morning he had a funny feeling from more than just the ill-matched dinner combo.  Everything he had read, everything he had seen and heard told him that Elaine just wasn’t the type.

As one of three senior engineers on the UE-2000 project, Elaine Evans had a good job doing what she liked
to do.  She seemed to be content with it.  She considered her work to be important but not all-important.  She was attractive, kind, and humble.  She went to church, kept to herself, and traded no one evil for evil.  Only the death of her husband spoiled an otherwise perfect life.

Cal Evans
had died three years earlier testing a plane for the Air Force.  Alex had looked into that too, searching for some link to United Electronics, but found none.  Then Alex looked for Cal’s replacement, but according to the chatty nanny across the street, Elaine had not yet thrown her bustier back in the ring.  She invested every waking hour outside work and church into caring for her four-year-old daughter Kimberly.  To an outside investigator, it certainly appeared that she had adjusted to her new life as a widow and single parent as well as one could expect.

Alex looked for financial motive, but found no compelling circumstance on her books.  B
etween her husband’s life insurance, his pension, and her job at UE, she was doing well.  Her daughter had a good nanny and was attending an exclusive preschool.  Their affluent home was paid off.  Elaine’s life appeared to be the American dream, less one husband, and in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t half bad.

Alex
knew the fact that her profile didn’t fit the mold should not have surprised him.  After all, Frank had been fooled for months.  But even with that knowledge it did surprise him.  Simply put, Elaine was too wrong. 

Nonetheless, just
ten minutes ago, Alex had seen her sabotage Sharky with his own eyes.  An hour after the last of her colleagues had gone home, Elaine had removed an access panel from the prototype engine and replaced an aluminum tube with one from her purse.  Alex had no idea what that would do, but he doubted it was good.  During the process, something had dripped from the proximal connection point.  If it was fuel…

He
stared at the monitor with a dumbstruck expression as she worked, questioning if he would ever be able to trust his intuition again.  Then Elaine turned toward the camera as she bent to pick up the access panel and he saw tears running down her face.  Tears!  With a clap of mental thunder everything fell into place, and Alex found himself running for the employee parking lot.

As she walked to her car, Elaine felt herself approaching an invisible precipice.  She had been skirting the rim of a bottomless pit for eleven months now, betraying her friends, her company, her country…  But tonight she feared she had crossed over, and the freefall was about to begin.  She had to get home.  She had to see Kimberly.  She had to hold her daughter in her arms and focus on what she was fighting for. 

Elaine always felt wretched on days like these—days the instructions came through.  But then, there had never been a day quite like this.  Before
, she had only been forced to choose between Kimberly and a machine.  Though painful, the contest had not even been close.  Tonight, however, she had chosen to put other lives at stake.  In all likelihood, Sharky would explode tomorrow amidst a crowd of anxious engineers at the weekly test run.  Dozens could die.  It would be her fault.

For the first time in her life, Elaine understood the Middle Eastern women who walked into American bars with dynamite strapped to their chests.  A good person could be driven that far, if the pressure were applied long enough, hard enough, in the right place.  Kimberly was her pressure point.  Someone had pressed, and she had changed. 
She had become one of them.  She, Elaine Evans, widow, mother, engineer, American, had been turned into a terrorist.

Minister Sugurov found himself staring through the window of his lofty office, looking at nothing at all.  Officially, he was just tasked with managing Russia’s foreign affairs, but emotionally he was concerned with them all.  For months, the bread queues had been getting longer and the inflation rate had been climbing higher, but the end seemed no nearer. 

He turned to reach for a cigarette but his hand never made it to the pack.  The distinctive
ri-ri-ring
of his private phone diverted his hand to the special black receiver instead.  He looked at the gilded clock above his desk—a gift from Gorbachev himself to commemorate fifty years of distinguished service—and nodded.  Seven p.m. in Moscow meant eight a.m. in California.  Andrey was right on time.

The
telltale
swish
came across the line as the scrambler engaged.  Sugurov always found the sound comforting, although the news that followed often was not.

“I’m listening.”

“Good evening, Sir.  Are we secure?”

“Good morning.  Yes, we are secure.”

“It appears that all is going well.  The kickoff went as scripted.  There are still a lot of balls in the air—that’s always the case in the early stages of operations this complex—but I believe those balls will be landing as predicted.”

“Is Alex’s mind proving to be as sharp as you’d expected, his demeanor as unflappable?”

“The latter was the wildcard, of course.  We know from his file that Ferris is a rock under fire, but the death of a loved one can make even a professional fracture when he should be focusing.  Fortunately, Alex is a laser.  I predict that he will be heading your way within a week.”

“Excellent.  Your predictions are more like prophecies Andrey, however, if for some reason it begins to look like Alex will take much longer than that, you’ll need to find a way to nudge him along.”

“Is it that urgent, that … bad, Sir?”

“Yes, I’m afraid it is.  Gorbachev is losing power by the hour.  Perestroika is a beautiful plan, but a long-term one.  Long-term plans do not bode well for politicians in years when it’s hard to buy bread and sausage.  Gorbachev may be popular there in the US, and over in Stockholm, but the people of Russia are sick of dieting.  I fear he won’t be able to hold on at home if there’s a major disruption.  You—and Alex—have simply got to
come through.  Quickly.”

“Understood.”

“One more thing: You’ve done a fine job of leading Alex to the water, Andrey, and I admire the way you got him to dive right in.  But keep in mind that Alex has no idea he’s swimming in a shark tank.  For that matter, even we don’t know who lies beneath or how deep the currents flow.  So bear in mind that no matter how good you think Alex Ferris may be, he will drown without your help.”

“You can count on me, Sir, to the end.”

Anna
Zaitseva looked up as she finished the day’s first operation and the assisting nurse caught her eye.  “It’s okay, Anna.  You saved him.” Vova nodded down at the patient she had just closed.

Vova knew her well enough to guess what she was feeling; industrial accident cases always reminded her of her brother Kostya.
  “What’s next?”  She asked.

They were a good team, she and Vova,
albeit an unusual one.  As a female doctor with a male nurse, patients almost always addressed him first.  Then Vova would open his mouth and suggest in his unmistakably gay lilt that they ask the doctor.  Given his size and strong rural-Siberian accent, it was like watching a grizzly bear speak with a chipmunk’s voice.  Everyone was caught off guard the first time.  Then, as patients’ faces reddened or jaws slackened, Anna would chime in with the authoritative tone people expected of physicians.  Although she had initially cultivated the voice to counter the fact that she was much younger and prettier than most people’s image of a competent physician, Vova made her stage voice especially apropos, and she enjoyed the effect.

She gave Vova a grateful smile before repeating her question.  “What’s next
, Vov’?”

“Frostbite in theater three.”

As they went through the perfunctory inter-operational routine of changing from soiled gowns to fresh, scrubbing and re-gloving, Anna found that she couldn’t get her mind off Kostya.  Her brother had died along with twenty-four others in their village from the vilest type of industrial accident: a radiation leak.  She suspected it was also the worst possible kind: avoidable.  But she didn’t know for sure.  Not yet.

“You went to the memorial service last night, didn’t you?”  Vova didn’t wait for her reply.  “I wish you’d stop going, Anna.  It gets you too worked up.  And besides, it’s been five years now.”

“It’s become more of a social event than a memorial service.”

“But it still upsets you.”

“Of course it still upsets me.  They still haven’t explained how it happened.”

“And they never will.  The government is still living-down Chernobyl.  They’re not about to add Academic City to the list.”

“But no one was even punished.”

“Perhaps not physically, but you can bet the guilty, whoever they are, are paying spiritually.”

Anna hoped that was true.  Vova had not been at the hospital back then.  He didn’t see the twenty-five when they came in like a cord of firewood on a flatbed truck, scarred beyond recognition.  He didn’t have to look in horror at twenty-five of the village’s best and brightest burned so badly that their skin sloughed off like a glove as she tried to hold their ravaged hands.

Anna used a sterile towel to dab her eyes.  Fifteen were already dead on arrival at the hospital.  They were the lucky ones.  The other ten…  That was the only time before or since that she had lost her composure in front of a patient.  She had run off to vomit and take a tranquilizer before returning to do her job.  Anna had been horribly ashamed of her actions at the time, but she soon realized that most of her colleagues had been unable to return at all.  Fortunately, the senior physician had served two years as a combat medic in Afghanistan.  He had the composure and the courage to make the only humane decision.  He personally gave the victims the overdose of morphine that allowed each to fade away peacefully while she held their hands.  Anna learned Kostya was among the ten only after the fact, when she opened his documents in order to fill out the death certificate.

She shook her head.  “Frostbite you say?”

“It looks like his fingers are going to make it, but his left foot has to go.”

Anna nodded.  They were seeing a lot of severe frostbite cases this winter, especially on Saturday, Sunday and Monday mornings.  Men would go out on payday weekends, drink themselves to within an inch of their lives, and then try to stumble home only to pass out in the snow somewhere along the way.  In the winter they usually died from exposure, but this patient—Professor Petrov according to his papers—had been warmly dressed and had probably not been out there long before a snow-plow driver spotted him and radioed for an ambulance.

Anna knew that with frostbite of this severity, making it to the hospital was only half the battle.  The temperature had dropped to minus
forty last night, well below the point where the body’s defenses close off distal capillaries in order to conserve heat at the core.  The alcohol had not helped either.  Petrov could still die from shock or a dozen other complications spawned by his frozen extremities.  It would not be her fault if he did, but she would be darkened by a shadow of guilt all the same.

Many of Anna’s colleagues turned their noses up at men like Petrov.  They figured he got what he deserved for behaving the way he did, and saved their compassion for the wives left home alone to worry if their alcoholic husbands would ever return.  Anna, however, did not blame these men.  She blamed the system that had failed them.

Perestroika
had turned Russia on its head, and not everyone could adjust to the new reality.  Gorbachev’s great restructuring pulled them relentlessly forward toward an unknown future while they clung stubbornly to the past they knew.  The tension ripped many apart.  For Anna, the plight of the Petrovs was easy to understand.  These men had lived in a very stable system for decades.  Perhaps it was not the best system, the richest or most efficient, but it was dependable and it had given them both a sense of purpose and a source of pride.  As the signs and posters that still hung everywhere proclaimed, “
They were Building Communism!”
 
But not anymore.  Now they were limping to their graves on plastic feet.

Anna used a marker to circumscribe three-fourths of Petrov’s ankle and then drew the flap she would fold up to stitch over the stump. 
This was so sad
.  She knew the leg would barely bleed as she cut through it with her scalpel—lack of blood supply was why it had to go—and that made her task bearable.  But when it came to sawing the bone, she would hand off to Vova.  There were some things she just couldn’t get used to.

Anna
looked up at Vova, got a nod, and began to cut.

They say the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the most powerful man on earth.  Anna had to secretly question this.  How powerful could he be if even his best-educated citizens, professors like Petrov, were resorting to the bottle in droves just to escape the life he managed for them?  It wasn’t that she specifically blamed Gorbachev,
although she knew many others did.  Anna understood that he too had inherited most of the problems they were dealing with today, but still…  Why should Gorbachev have the Nobel Peace Prize and Time Magazine’s
Man of the Decade
on his resume when she had men like Petrov on her table?

It wasn’t just the new alcoholics who were hurt by the reforms; perestroika was affecting almost everyone, including Anna herself.  With her father and brother both premature victims of service to the State, and her mother’s pension made meaningless by skyrocketing inflation, Anna had to support two households by herself.  She knew that physicians in the West earned a lot of
money, that supporting two women there would not present a problem given her credentials, but the rules were different here.  In the Soviet Union, doctors were considered social workers, and paid accordingly.

Anna had not thought much about money when
father was around to take care of mother.  Before entering medicine she had prepared herself to be content with a life that would include but a few modest possessions and basic food.  That was normal.  But it was getting tough now that she had to support her mother as well.  Of course, when entering medicine she had expected to have a husband to help pay the bills by now. 
Don’t go there
…

To be honest, sometimes the whole situation did get her down.  If she thought about it objectively, her apartment almost resembled a prison cell, one that she voluntarily locked herself in at night when her work was done.  Fortunately, Anna was not naturally materialistic and her plight was no different from that of her neighbors, so there was little to covet and her predicament was easy to ignore—at lea
st until someone like Professor Petrov came along and reminded her just how close to the edge she lived.

“Yes, Professor, I think I understand you.”

“You talking to yourself there Anna?”

Anna looked up from Petrov’s new stump.  It was the anesthesiologist, Ruslan, who had interrupted her thoughts.  He was the kind of guy you knew was hitting on you because his mouth was open.  He was just twenty-six, two years younger than she, and slight of build.  Nonetheless, Anna knew from talking to her friends that many found him attractive because of his boyish charm and flirty sense of humor.  He had no such effect on her.

“Yes, Ruslan, I am.  The Professor here is in no mood to talk.”

“I’m in the mood for talk, or anything else you might care to try.”

She ignored the comment.  How could he be thinking about sex while standing over a case like this one?  The blind persistence of the opposite sex never ceased to amaze her.  Last year, one notable gentleman had been so persistent… 
Don’t go there either.
  When Anna finally found a guy she was interested in, he would know it.  He would not need to hound her night and day.

Petrov suddenly began convulsing on the table and Ruslan ran back to his station as the EKG went wild.  “Defibrillators,” she yelled to Vova.  He flicked the switch to power them up and then handed her the paddles.  Anna placed one on either side of Petrov’s sternum and pushed the buttons.  Nothing happened!  She looked up and saw that the status light on the machine was still red.  Anna stood there, paddles poised, waiting for the green light to indicate that the defibrillators would fire.  Three seconds, ten seconds, thirty seconds, and then the EKG went flat.  Petrov was in cardiac arrest.  Forty seconds, forty-five, fifty, sixty seconds, and then it
was too late.  Petrov died with her hands on his heart.  He died because the mighty USSR, the other great superpower, could not afford to replace a battery.  How long could this go on?