“Over the border, back to Moldova,” said Hera.
“No, they’d want to keep the country as a safe haven,” said McEwen. “They’ve clearly worked from there before. They’re going to go somewhere safe.”
“They’re being followed,” said Danny, yawning again.
“They parachute out,” said Hera.
“I could see that,” said Danny. “But where?”
The possibilities were endless. Danny scaled back, suggesting that they have MY-PID check for leases and plane charters that might be suspicious.
“No offense to the computer,” said McEwen, “but don’t you think we’re better off doing the legwork ourselves?”
“The computer can find things we can’t,” said Danny.
“And vice versa.”
“All right,” Danny agreed. “Let’s do it both ways.”
“We’ll take care of it,” McEwen told him. “In the meantime, why don’t you get some rest?”
“I think that’s a good idea,” said Hera.
“Ganging up on me?” Danny smiled.
“Your eyes are like slits, Colonel,” said McEwen. “I hate to be the one to say this, but you really do need your rest. There’s no substitute.”
“Thanks, Mom,” he said sarcastically.
She frowned.
“You’re right,” he admitted. “I’m off to bed. Wake me if you find anything important.”
54
Northwestern Moldova
Nuri was hungry as well as tired, and since it was dinnertime, the first place he stopped when he got to the village was the café. The hostess acted as if he was an old friend when he came in, taking him to the table at the front with great ceremony. Her tray of cordials quickly followed.
“Too tired to drink,” he said.
“No, no, tired good. Pep you up.”
Maybe he would have a drink, he decided. He felt pretty wound up, too keyed up to sleep.
“You should have a drink with me,” Nuri suggested as she began setting out the bottles.
“Oh, I cannot do that. Not with a customer.”
“You sure?”
“My husband is the cook,” warned the woman.
“He should have one as well.”
The woman laughed and said he would not like the effect even a single drink would have on his food.
Nuri picked a green bottle at random. To his surprise, the liqueur was pink.
To his even greater surprise, it actually didn’t taste bad.
“I think I should put myself in your hands,” he said, handing back the menu. “I’m very hungry.”
She nodded confidently.
“I imagine it will be different than what your Russian friends ordered last night,” he added.
Her smile turned to a frown. “They wouldn’t know good food if it bit them.”
“Why do so many Russians come here?” he asked. “To the village—not here. Here it’s obvious. Your food is so good. And the cocktails.”
He pointed at his empty glass.
“They only drink vodka,” she told him.
“What is it about the area? If they don’t really ride bikes?”
She shrugged. “It’s always been that way.”
Nuri got little else from her but food. She brought an appetizer dish that looked as if it were pancakes, though there were bits of what he thought were meat in them. The main course was familiar—beef with noodles, and very good.
Dessert consisted of two pastries. They looked exactly the same, but tasted very different. One, filled with some sort of fruit, was borderline delicious. The other, with a mystery filling, was borderline poisonous.
Maybe not so borderline. Nuri had one bite, felt his stomach start to turn, and got up to use the restroom.
When he came back, the hostess was clearing the table. He started another conversation, mentioning that someone had told him about a Russian doctor who helped train athletes for the Olympics before Moldova was independent.
“Russian doctors.” She made a face.
“Bad?”
“One struck my mother in the street twenty years ago. She could not walk forever after that accident. Did he even apologize? And he came back many times—still sometimes I see him.”
“He lived here?”
“Not lived. But stayed. Russians.” She shook her head.
“Came here a lot?”
“Not in my café.”
“But the town.”
“They come in. They think they own us.”
“I’m sure. What about this guy? He owned a house?”
“She has the house. A kilometer out of town. She is Russian, too. He pays, I’m sure. You know the kind. With a family. On the side, they play.”
“You know his name?”
“Pfff—all Russians. Who keeps track?”
She took the dishes and went back into the kitchen.
Nuri reached into his pocket for the MY-PID controller and called up a photo of the doctor.
“Is this him?” he asked when she returned.
The hostess made a face, then looked at him as if he had tricked and betrayed her.
“I’m an investigator for the Olympics,” he told her quickly. “We believe this man may have done some illegal things. If you have information about where he lived here, or any of his dealings, it would remain confidential. I would never say where I got it.”
It was one thing to complain about the Russians, and quite another to reveal that you were investigating them, especially when you had appeared to be just a benign tourist. The woman instantly turned cold, going so far as to pretend that she didn’t understand his English.
It had been a calculated risk, and Nuri knew he had had lost. But her reaction made it obvious that the doctor was in fact the same person. Finding which property he owned was simply a process of elimination, solved within a few minutes by MY-PID as it searched through property and utility records. These were somewhat sparse, but the computer filled in the gaps by accessing every possible record it could find. It finally gave Nuri two possible locations for the house.
There was no way he was going to sleep now, at least not until he checked them out. They were two kilometers away, one northeast and the other just slightly northwest of the hamlet.
He drove past both. Neither looked much like the sort of place a man who lived in the Chisinau mansion would choose. Both were over a hundred years old; neither measured more than eight hundred square feet. One leaned to the left; the other seemed to be missing a foundation pier on the right. The lights were on in both houses, but neither had cars out front.
Nuri debated what to do. The action at the farm had shown that the Wolves were extremely formidable, and he didn’t want to walk into an ambush. On the other hand, the longer they waited to talk to the woman, the less likely they’d find anything of use. He debated it back and forth and finally decided to see what he could find out.
Nuri parked in the driveway of the house that was missing the foundation pier. It was a muddy, rutted affair that cut diagonally across the front yard. He got out of his car. He was still working on his cover story when the door opened. The inside light framed a slender blonde in her early twenties standing in the doorway.
“Can I help you?” she asked in Moldovan.
“I am looking for Dr. Nudstrumov,” he said, using Russian.
“Dr. Nudstrumov? What are you saying?”
She was still speaking in Moldovan, and didn’t appear to recognize the Russian at all when Nuri repeated it.
“I don’t know a doctor,” she told him. “Do you have the right house?”
The woman was pretty, and certainly the sort that might be kept in a love nest, as the woman at the café had put it. But as soon as Nuri heard a male voice behind her, the theory lost a great deal of credibility.