Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (4 page)

Storey turned away from the window, her gaze fixed intently on Mercy. “You’re sure of that?”

“Of course I’m sure!” Mercy didn’t bother trying to hide her anger. “Why would I lie about something like that? She’s
my mother
. She could be hurt, or worse. Why would I conceal information that might help locate her?”

The woman’s expression remained unreadable. It was clear to Mercy that the woman knew more than she was willing to say in front of Kramer.

Suddenly, the detective came to life. He laughed, shaking his head. “Well, that’s just grand. Like we don’t have enough bad guys in the city already—now we’re importing criminals. Are you willing to share that bastard’s information with us so we can try to pick him up?”

Storey smiled, almost sweetly. “We’d be delighted, Detective.”

Mercy watched, mesmerized, while the two of them made nice and saved a copy of Yegorov’s image for distribution by the police. She caught a glimpse of the oversized face of the cop’s watch: 3:42 a.m. Under the influence of mind-numbing fatigue, she succumbed to a vision of Kramer and Storey having makeup sex then shook away the just-too-awful image.

Mercy watched the detective walk out of the room, closing the door behind him to leave Mercy and the agent from Red Sands alone.

“This looks bad.” Storey reached out to touch Mercy’s cheek bone.

She winced and pulled away. “Don’t!” Even the lightest touch irritated the inflamed skin and underlying bruising. She had intentionally avoided looking in the mirror in the ladies’ room when she’d used the toilet.

“It needs cleaning, if not stitches. Did Yegorov do that to you?”

“I went for a swim. The canal won.” Mercy coughed out a dry laugh. “Rock beats flesh every time.”

The momentary tweak of one corner of the woman’s lips came close to a second real smile. “Seriously, Ms. O’Brien, let me take you home.” She bent forward, making sure Mercy met her eyes and was listening. “I owe you a little more information, and it’s nothing the DC police need to know. I can have a doctor meet us at your place to check out your boo-boos.”

Boo-boos? Mercy eyed her skeptically. Margaret Storey didn’t look the mothering type. “And a lock smith?”

“Good idea. And after we’ve taken care of that, I have a proposition for you.”

                                          4

Talia stared at the writhing brown snakes that bound her wrists and ankles. Lying there, curled up on her side in ‘The Cold Place,’ she studied them for a long time before finally deciding they might not actually be alive. Or snakes. Maybe they were just dirty strands of hemp. Rope that moves, by itself? Why not. Then again, sometimes the snakes talked to her. She’d believe anything.

Her head felt too heavy for her neck to lift. Her eyes too dry to blink, even if they hadn’t been swollen nearly shut. Fur had grown over her tongue. Her body blazed, a raging furnace, and then went so bitterly cold she couldn’t stop trembling. Chest, face, limbs—they all shrieked in agony.

She tried to sit up but couldn’t even rise onto her elbows. So she just lay there. In the cold. Watching the snakes. Listening to the persistent hiss of their snaky-language, which meant nothing to her.

She seemed to recall a struggle. No, that was too mild a word for what had happened to her. Attack—that was more like it. Yesterday? Or had it been months ago, years, or maybe just days? She found it impossible to track time. Then again, perhaps it was all a terrible dream—imaginary fists and shouting and pain, all of it a series of nightmares that had morphed into this murky present.

But she didn’t think it had been a dream. The beatings felt even more real than the snakes. Rough hands restraining her. One brutal blow after another. They’d bludgeoned her head, her body. They’d used their fists then heavy, blunt objects, maybe even her own camera. She couldn’t be sure. But that wasn’t the worst of it. What came after, she tried not to remember.

Whether hallucinations, dreams, or memories—they’d come and gone, come and gone. She could no longer separate the apparitions from reality although, at this moment, she felt relatively lucid. Except for the snakes.

Damn snakes.

Another place that wasn’t The Cold Place came to her with sudden clarity: East 53rd Street, Manhattan. Her apartment. A man in a wheelchair. He loved her. They’d argued. “Just don’t go alone, please.” He sounded resigned though, and a little sad. “It’s too dangerous.”

The fog in her head brightened from a dense cinder-gray to pale mauve, clearing a little, allowing more information into her brain. Another familiar voice spoke to her: “Story like this…a career maker, Talia. Good for the magazine, too.” Harold, her editor. “But I don’t like putting you and Mark in harm’s way.” Mark, her lover, the man in the wheelchair. His image opened a floodgate, and the rest of the conversation in the magazine’s New York office came back to her in a wave.

“He’s not going with me,” she’d told Harold. “Anyway, I’ll be back in three days. Four tops. Piece a cake.” She’d winked at him.

Had she really believed it would be that easy?

She should never have come. If only she had listened to her Belarus contact’s warnings. She should have told the research team at the London Conservation Union that they’d need to send their own people. Should have…should…should...

But if her plan had succeeded, her photographs would have provided irrefutable evidence to add to the LCU’s report, revealing gross corruption since the nuclear disaster decades ago at Chernobyl, resulting in a terrible peril even today. Thousands of innocents around the world were in jeopardy!

Talia tensed the muscles of her lower back and delicately shifted her hips, letting their weight, along with gravity, roll her body to its other side. That small effort set her head spinning and brought on another wave of nausea. She had to lie very still and put the tangle of events out of her mind until the worst of the spell went away.

Despite the queasiness, she felt hungry, desperately so. She tried not to think about food. If only she could create a reliable timeline for what had happened to her, maybe then she’d understand where she was, find a way to free herself and go home.

Tiny details slipped, one by one, into place in her fuzzed brain—like folders into a file drawer. She’d arrived in Kiev on a Thursday. That same afternoon she paid a driver to take her out of the city and drive her toward the Belarus border. “As close to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as you can get,” she instructed him. She had to pay him triple to do as she requested, then more to let her out and wait while she shot photographs. From a considerable distance away, with a telephoto lens, she’d focused on what remained of the Chernobyl RBMK reactors. She’d e-mailed digitals to Harold that night. He was ecstatic.

The next day she joined a small, chatty group of German and Japanese tourists for the bus tour that wound through stunningly beautiful Ukrainian forests, past security barriers after suitable bribes passed hands. They’d arrived at Pripyat, the village that had been the closest to the nuclear compound where most of the residents had worked as managers, scientists, technicians, clerical staff and maintenance crew. 

Since the nuclear disaster, trees and flowers had grown back. Wild animals and birds returned and, strangely enough, seemed to thrive. Perhaps this was because they had little or no competition from humans in the Exclusion Zone, only recently reopened by the government to brief, escorted tours. She saw delicate, sweet-eyed deer grazing. Energetic black squirrels scampered up and down elegantly straight tree trunks. If the forest had once burned, there was no sign of that destruction now. At least, not from where she’d stood that day.

“You see,” the tour guide said cheerfully, “the animals are perfectly healthy and happy in their home.”

One of the German men turned to her, winked, then said in English, “But they do glow at night.”

She laughed along with him, but felt her gut tighten.

Again Talia’s thoughts clouded frustratingly. Memories, like the surface of a puddle, blurred as she tossed thought pebbles into it. She tried again to open her eyes and managed to crack them just wide enough to tell it was dark. But whether she lay on a bed, the floor, or outside on bare ground she couldn’t have said. Every nerve synapse seemed to have shut down, except as a receptor of pain.

She drifted.

Another memory: The bus arriving at the village. Her shock at the relaxed manner of the guide and translator as they announced the safety rules: “Stay on cement walkways. Don’t touch anything. You will be fine.”

As if you could draw boundaries around something that was invisible, odorless, and silent: radiation. The half-life of Plutonium-238, she’d learned, was 88 years. Other forms of Plutonium retained their dangerous power far longer. Extended exposure to the material, even after decades had passed, was as deadly as any biological weapon.

At first, the guide cast the tourists’ raised cell phones and cameras only a lazy glance as they snapped away. One of the few Americans on the tour announced that he planned to put up a website to honor those who had died. A German woman told the group that she was related to one of the 31 victims, which the former Soviet government initially claimed were the only deaths.  Talia knew that the LCU had long ago proven the death toll was far and away above that figure, into the thousands once you counted those who had died lingering deaths due to unexplained cancers and other diseases, now believed to be a result of radiation poisoning.

Talia switched cameras, stowing her pocket-size Minolta and switching to more sophisticated gear to run some video. She panned the area. When the group moved along, she hung back then wandered off by herself and focused on a chain-link fence behind which hundreds of abandoned ambulances, busses and military vehicles had been left to rust away. She switched equipment again and shot a fast twenty or more images with the Canon EOS-Mark II, moving toward what appeared to be a warehouse of some sort.

And then it happened.

A man she hadn’t seen before stepped in front of her lens. Thick-necked and surly, he bellowed in a throaty accent, “No, bitch! No fucking way.” His enormous paw came up in front of her lens to block her shot then turned, palm up, in a ‘give-me’ gesture.

It was abundantly clear that he wanted her not just to stop taking pictures, he expected her to hand over her camera―seven thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. Hell, no!

She shook her head. “The guide said photographs are allowed,” she lied.

“Nyet!” he snarled, eyes menacing.

She turned and started marching away from him, back toward the rest of the tour group. Quickly. She’d be safe with others as witnesses to the man’s bullying.

When she looked back to see if he was following her, he was snapping his fingers like a haughty maitre d’ summoning up his wait staff. Two gun-toting thugs stepped out from behind the warehouse. She looked around, heart exploding in her chest, frantic now. The tour group was nowhere in sight. She broke into a run toward the bus.

It struck her that, as pissed off as the guy seemed, he’d take all of her equipment—three cameras, pricy lenses, the memory cards in her camera bag that contained every photo she’d taken since arriving in the area. Probably even confiscate her phone. Physically, she was no match for the three men if they used force. She didn’t doubt they would.

Talia scanned the wooded terrain. Her eyes burned. She needed a hiding place, fast. Maybe the guard had seen only the big cameras. She might ditch the smaller Minolta, come back for it later.

Ferns and pine needles, interspersed with boulders and fallen tree trunks, carpeted the forest floor beneath her running feet. She calculated the moment when she’d round the next bend in the path, pass through a broken gate and, for a few precious seconds, be out of her pursuers’ sight behind one of the abandoned dachas. She reached into her camera bag, grasped the Minolta and looked around, trying to figure out how to hide it. She could just fling it as far from the path as she could, but what then were the chances she’d ever find it again? Or that
they
wouldn’t.

She took another step. The ground wobbled under her boot soles. Odd. She stepped to the side, slid her fingers deep into the weeds where she’d stood, and found the edge of a slate slab. When she lifted it, she saw that it concealed a hole. She dropped the camera down into it, replaced the slate, scuffed pine needles and dead leaves over it, and kept on running.

She never made it to the bus.

Talia could still feel the vicious enthusiasm of the men’s boots as they cracked into her ribs. She’d cried for help, begged them to stop. They must have pulled her camera bag off of her at some point. Maybe they’d smashed everything to dust then and there.

Since then, pieces of her memory had gone totally, irrevocably missing. How had other people on the tour reacted to seeing the guards beat her? Even if they’d been on the other side of Pripyat, unable to see them pummeling her, what possible explanation could the guide have given for her absence on the return trip?

A wave of delirium swept her away again. She wept for the cozy comfort of her Manhattan loft, for dear Mark and her precious Mercy. How worried they must be!

“Why are you m-monsters keeping m-me here?” she whimpered to no one. For she was certain she was alone and abandoned, left to die in a dank prison cell. Why hadn’t the bastards simply killed her and been done with it?