Extreme Faction (12 page)

“Great,” Tully said. “Let's check the place out.”

Just then the phone rang and Tully picked up. “Yeah.” His faced became serious and he shook his head. “Thanks,” he said, and slowly hung up. He sat for a moment with his hands folded across his lap.

“What is it?” Jake asked.

“Bad news.” He was looking for the right words. “The two you came here with. Maxwell MacCarty and Bill Swanson. They've been poisoned.”

“What.” Jake rose quickly. “Are they all right?”

“Uncertain. They're at the Polyklinik.”

“That's a butcher shop,” Jake protested. “They've got a better chance with a veterinarian.”

Quinn rose and faced Jake. “It's not that bad.”

“I wouldn't trust them to cut my nails,” Jake said. “Remember, Quinn, I used to work here.”

Tully came around his desk. “Come on guys. I won't have any fucking turf battles. Quinn, you either work with Jake on this one, or I'll have you transferred. I hear Grozny is looking for someone. Jake. I can't tell you anything. The director has put you in charge. But if you want total cooperation, and I think you know what I mean, then I suggest you get along with Quinn.”

Jake was thinking it over. He had nothing against the guy. Quinn was the one who had come in with an attitude. But Jake never took shit from anyone. Respect was gained through personal experience, not hearsay.

Jake loosened up a bit and let out a deep breath. “Fine. Quinn what do you say we take a quick run to the wonderful Polyklinik to see the great job they're doing on our poisoned Americans. Then perhaps we could check out the friend of your agent.”

Tully shook his head. “Get the hell out of here.”

When Jake and Quinn were gone, Tully lit another cigarette. “Fucking testosterone.”

Neither Jake nor Quinn said much on the ride to the Odessa Polyklinik on Sudostroitelnaya Street. Quinn Armstrong was driving Tully's gray Volga sedan, a car that had seen one too many potholes, and looked like it had been parked by a blind man, with dents on the bumpers and quarter panels. They had set aside their differences, whatever they might be. At least verbally.

In fact, Quinn had given Jake a brand new Glock 19, fully loaded, with two extra magazines with hollow points, and a new leather holster. On the drive Jake had put on the holster, and he was now checking over the gun. It felt good in his hand. He loved the Glock.

Jake guessed the silent treatment had something to do with the CIA director putting him in charge of the investigation. The problem was, Jake hadn't really agreed to head up the investigation. While he had been contemplating it, he had heard about MacCarty and Swanson. Now Jake had this tight feeling deep in his gut that said he had screwed up royally not sticking closer to his employers. He knew that he couldn't have avoided what happened to them, but he still felt responsible. He had been hired to protect. Another part of him realized that he too could have been poisoned if he had been with them.

Quinn pulled up to the curb and parked across the street from the Polyklinik. Jake shoved the new Glock into its holster and zipped up his jacket.

The outside of the hospital hadn't changed much since the last time Jake had seen it. While in the Air Force there, he was forced to go to the Polyklinik for stitches to his scalp following a bruising game of ‘touch' football. The consular general had sent over a syringe, needle and thread, and even bandages, because he knew those at the clinic would not be sterile. The hospital was one of those communist-built structures of steel and glass, slapped up in the fifties, that could have been designed by a four-year-old. The workmanship was so shoddy that the cement abutments and window ledges were already crumbling. Probably not enough rock in the mixture, Jake thought.

“It's not that bad,” Quinn said. “In fact, maybe they should look at your ribs.” He smiled with his hairy chin protruding out comically.

“Yeah,” Jake said, “that's gonna happen today. Let's go.”

They locked up the car and skirted across the street between traffic.

Inside, there was a waiting area with dirty cloth chairs, worn and tattered at the edges, and high ceilings that lead nowhere. A skylight would have been nice.

When they reached the information desk on the first floor, they glared at each other to determine who would ask the questions. Quinn deferred.

“I would like to see two Americans who are being treated here,” Jake said in his best Ukrainian. He smiled at the older woman behind the counter.

She returned his smile. “Names please,” she said, her English strained.

My god, how many Americans did they have there, Jake wondered. “Maxwell MacCarty and Bill Swanson.”

She checked a paper chart on a clipboard. “Room 306. Down the hall. Take the elevator to the third floor. You can talk to the nurse there.”

“Thank you,” Jake said, and started to leave.

“You might want to take the stairs,” she said. “The elevator is slow and breaks down periodically.”

Jake nodded and smiled at Quinn as they strolled down the corridor, as if to say, ‘see I told you the place sucked.' They took the stairs.

The third floor was even less impressive than the first. The linoleum floors were an off white, and scared and scuffed with black marks. Probably from gurney wheels that didn't work.

They immediately went to the nurses' station. Jake asked a young nurse in a bright white uniform, cap and all, the status of the Americans. She was reluctant to give any medical details. Only that there was no change. They would have to wait and see. The doctor would be by in thirty minutes, if they wanted to talk with him, they could wait down the hall in the waiting room. They couldn't see the Americans without the doctor's approval.

After waiting fifteen minutes in a small room down the hall, finally an older man in a white doctor's smock came around the corner. He was a slight man, completely gray, with a sunken face, as if he hadn't eaten in months.

“How may I help you?” he asked in Ukrainian.

Jake rose to greet him. “I'm Jake Adams. I work with Mr. MacCarty and Mr. Swanson. This is Quinn Armstrong with the U.S. consulate here in Odessa. How are they doing?”

The doctor looked at the two of them skeptically. “Mr. MacCarty is able to talk,” he started in broken English. “However, Mr. Swanson is worse off.”

“What exactly did they ingest?” Quinn demanded.

The doctor backed away somewhat. “The results are not back from toxicology. It was something they both ate. Perhaps the pork. We're really not sure yet. The police have taken samples from the restaurant and talked with the staff.” He hesitated for a second. “You'll have to talk with them for those results.”

“May we see them?” Jake asked.

“For a moment.” The doctor stepped off down the hall, and Jake and Quinn were right at his heels.

The hospital room was something that might have been around in America at the turn of the century. There were six beds, four on one side of the room and two cramped in a small corner as an afterthought. The lighting was poor. A few of the long florescent bulbs were dark on both ends, burned out and forgotten. The tile floor might have been white at one time, but was now a harsh gray. On the wall next to MacCarty's bed was an ancient black phone with a frayed cord. There was one window with wire mesh across it in a diamond pattern. Jake wondered why the mesh was needed on the third floor. Perhaps the gloom had prompted patients to jump.

All the beds were occupied.

Bill Swanson was in the far corner. Tubes ran from nearly every opening in his body. But there was little electronic monitoring equipment like that found in American Intensive Care Units. Only one machine, an older contraption with red dialogue numbers, checked his heart rate.

Maxwell MacCarty lay in the other corner bed next to Swanson. He did appear in better shape than his colleague. He had more color in his face. Less tubes.

Jake stepped alongside MacCarty's bed. “How you feeling, Max?”

“Just fucking great,” he whispered. He was barely audible.

●

In the basement, in a small room adjacent to the boiler room, two men sat in wooden chairs with headsets on. The wall was a large mass of telephone wires. They had tapped into the phone on the wall of room 306. The recorder was sound activated. They could hear and record anything that went on in the room.

“Sound familiar?” one of the men asked the other.

The other smiled and nodded. “Yes. That's Jake Adams.” He picked up a phone and dialed quickly. In a moment he said, “Adams is here with another man. Yes, we're recording it. I understand.” He hung up.

“What did she say?” the first man asked.

“Keep recording. Call her when they leave. She'll follow them from here. She wants us to meet later with the tape.”

The tape recorder whirred.

●

Jake introduced Quinn Armstrong to MacCarty. “What happened?” Quinn asked.

MacCarty slowly related his story. How they were both sick of continental breakfasts and wanted something they were both used to. When he was done, he admitted it would be nice to get back to Portland, with or without a firm contract. He said that he had eaten only one egg, but Swanson had cleared his plate.

Jake considered that. Why would someone deliberately poison these two? Someone obviously knew who he was, and perhaps even what he was doing. Did they think MacCarty and Swanson were actually working with him? It's possible. Or maybe it was unrelated. Maybe someone didn't want those two opening a plant in the Ukraine.

“Who have you been dealing with on opening your plant here?” Jake asked.

MacCarty's eyes wandered toward Swanson in the other bed. “A man named Victor Petrov. He works with the Agricultural Ministry here in Odessa. We were to talk today with him one last time before signing the deal. I guess he'll have to come here now.” His eyes drifted up.

“I can arrange it if you like,” Jake said, glancing back at Quinn. “But right now you need rest.”

He nodded his head.

As the two of them were walking down the third floor corridor, buzzers went off and nurses started running toward the room with MacCarty and Swanson. Jake tried to get back in the room, but they closed the door.

●

Outside, back in the car, Quinn sat behind the wheel staring straight ahead. “Swanson did eat much more than MacCarty,” Quinn said. “Perhaps MacCarty will pull through.”

Jake shook his head. “I don't think so. The only difference between the two of them was when they'd die, not if. MacCarty's system is trying desperately to fight the inevitable, but he's only delaying death. I've seen how they look before. The moment I saw Swanson I knew he was dead, just waiting for the monitor to confirm it. MacCarty will look like that within three or four hours. I'll bet on it. It was ricin. Twenty-five thousand times as toxic as strychnine. It takes less than two micrograms to kill an adult.”

“What about an anecdote?” Quinn asked.

“No good. It consists of glycoprotein bands that divide into two peptide chains that attack the cells. One chain binds the ricin to the cell's surface and allows the other chain to enter. The white blood cells go crazy trying to get rid of the poison. Death follows due to toxemia. Plus, it's almost impossible to trace in a postmortem, even if you know what you're looking for.”

“Jesus Christ. How do you know all this?”

Jake was drifting off, thinking about his two employers suffering in the hospital. Swanson was already gone. Sure he had been a pain in the ass, but he didn't deserve to die like that. And MacCarty. What would Jake say to his family when the bodies were returned to Portland. They'd want answers, and he wasn't currently in a position to explain their deaths. When he realized Quinn was staring at him, he said, “What was that?”

“How do you know so much about poisons?” Quinn asked.

“College. University of Oregon. My first two years I was a bio-chemistry major. Then I switched to geopolitics.”

“Why?”

He had only revealed that to his closest friends. But it wasn't a secret, really. “I don't know. I had enough for a minor and almost enough for a major in bio-chemistry, but then I had second thoughts about hiding myself in some lab after graduation, only coming out to go to and from work. I think it would have driven me nuts after a few years. So I said the hell with it. Decided to look at various peoples of the world. I continued that by joining the Air Force after graduation.”

“Intel right?”

“Yeah. Human Intelligence. But I also had a decent computer background, so they used me for that also. I was in Germany when my boss found out I had a substantial background in bio-chemistry. They were looking for people to work on a verification team in the former Soviet republics during their drawdown of chemical and biological weapons. He asked me if I'd like to be on the team, and I said yes. I didn't know at the time they'd ask us to go all over the place. Turkey. Iraq. You name it, I went there.”

Quinn looked at Jake. “Where to?”

“Let's go see if we can track down Petra Kovarik,” Jake said. “You said she had an old friend in Odessa.”

“That's what I heard.” Quinn started the car and pulled out into light traffic.

DURANGO, MEXICO

The tin roof on the ramshackle house was getting pelted by a pre-dawn rainstorm. Back when the former DEA had a more formidable presence in Latin America, they had seized the tiny house off Mexican Highway 40 from a group of marijuana growers. The drug dealers wouldn't need the place while serving ten to twenty years in a Mexican prison.

The two CIA officers had taken the Cypriot captain and his three mates to this place on the orders of the Mexico City station chief, who had simply relayed the message from Langley. The orders were immaterial, really, because Steve Nelsen was leading the investigation and had already planned on his special form of “suspect awareness,” as he called it.