Dinara nodded and slowed to a halt. She put the truck in neutral and pulled on the parking brake, but left the engine running.
“So nothing freezes,” she explained as she and Jack got out.
They grabbed their coats from the back seat and trudged through thick snow to the deserted base.
Once they were away from the vehicle, the only noise came from their steps. Otherwise the place was eerily quiet. The snow deadened sound, but there was none to be heard. No animals, birds or people, not even a whisper of wind. The clouds hung low above them and didn’t seem to move. Dinara shivered as she and Jack approached what looked like the main administration building, but she wasn’t sure the chill she felt was entirely a result of the cold. She couldn’t shake the sense they were being watched, and, out here, far from help, they were vulnerable.
If such fears troubled Jack, he didn’t show it. His eyes were fixed with grim determination. Dinara could only imagine what he was feeling. Each new revelation would shake the foundations of his friendship with Karl Parker, so the need to discover the truth must be unbearable for him.
The faded sign beside the long three-story structure said “Central Command,” and Dinara translated it for Jack. The main doors were locked but the floor-to-ceiling windows had been smashed, so they stepped over the rusting frames and went inside.
The only thing in the lobby was a broken office chair that had been gnawed by animals. Snow had fallen through a hole in the roof, and huge shining icicles hung from the ragged edges of the collapsed ceiling two stories above.
Dinara and Jack moved further into the abandoned building. None of the interior doors were locked, not even the three-inch-steel blast doors that had been designed to protect critical sections from any kind of attack. It was in one such section, in the east wing of the building, where they discovered an unusual set of rooms. They found four dormitories, each of which contained twelve concrete bunks. Any mattresses were long gone, but there was no doubt these were sleeping quarters.
“Soldiers wouldn’t usually be housed in the command block,” Jack observed. “Why are there sleeping quarters here?”
Dinara didn’t have an answer, and they left the room and continued through the eerie, derelict building.
Further along the wing, they found a large room with panoramic windows that overlooked the rest of the base. The panes had been smashed and a high drift had been blown across the room. When they stepped inside, Jack noticed something protruding from the snow, and he pushed through it to reach a sheet of wood, which he struggled to lift. As she approached to help, Dinara realized the object was an old-fashioned school desk.
She and Jack pulled it free of the icy grip of the snow, and dragged it off the drift onto the concrete floor near the door. Jack opened the lid and found yet more snow, but when he dug around inside, he discovered a Captain America pencil case, and a frozen book that had almost rotted away.
He closed the desk, put the book on the lid and brushed the worst of the ice off the cover. Dinara made out a bright yellow masthead and a pair of blank eyes above a giant, gaping mouth.
“I know this,” Jack said. “It’s a Goosebumps book.” He read the words at the top of the masthead. “R. L. Stine.” His fingers tracked to the text at the foot of the cover. “Night of the Living Dummy.”
Jack stood upright and fixed Dinara with a puzzled look.
“Why is there a child’s pencil case and an American kids’ book in a maximum-security military base?” he asked.
Chapter 72
We searched the rest of the base as thoroughly as we could, but in the end the freezing conditions defeated us, and we left without going inside two of the hangars. The others had all been empty, and apart from the desk in what we assumed had once been a classroom, we discovered nothing of note.
I struggled to imagine what Ernie Fisher had been doing there, and had even more difficulty picturing Karl Parker at the base.
It was a little after 3 p.m. when we returned to the idling car, which was almost out of fuel. Our journey back to Volkovo took fifteen minutes. There had been no fresh snowfall and I’d dug out the worst drifts on our way to the base.
We found Leonid waiting in the bakery. He was sitting at a small table enjoying a coffee and pastry, chatting to the owner, who stood behind a display counter.
“Anything?” Leonid asked when we entered.
“We found a classroom and an old American children’s book,” I said. “Nothing else.”
“Kofe?” the baker asked.
Finally, a word I could understand. I shook my head. “No, thanks,” I replied. “We should get going,” I said to Dinara and Leonid. “Get back to Moscow. See if we can pick up any leads. I want us to look into Ernie Fisher’s work at the embassy.”
Leonid got to his feet.
“You find anything?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “The people I spoke to were junior personnel. Gate guards, patrolmen. None of them knew about any of the classified activities at the base. And they didn’t recognize anyone in the photo.”
Leonid settled his check, and we left the bakery, got in the truck and headed south. We filled up at a gas station not far outside town, and as we sped toward Moscow in the fading light, I tried to put the pieces together.
Karl Parker had asked me to New York to tell me a secret, but he’d been killed before we could speak. If Madame Agafiya and the Volkovo bar owner’s testimony was to be trusted, it seemed likely Karl knew Ernie Fisher and Elizabeth Connor, and that they might have met in Russia, where Fisher seemed to have spent some time in a maximum-security military base. If Fisher had been a Russian operative, why had he been killed by one of his own?
I sat in the back of the truck, turning over scenarios, while Leonid drove. After a couple of hours, he and Dinara traded, and another three hours later, I took the wheel. It was 9 p.m., and we were a little under one hundred miles from Moscow when my phone rang. I pulled to the side of the dark, deserted road and took the call.
“Jack, it’s Victoria. Justine Smith said I should call.”
“Victoria, how are you and Kevin holding up?”
She sighed. “It seems wrong, but you eat, you sleep, you do the mundane things that need to get done. I always thought grief was all-consuming, but life forces its way in.”
“I’m sorry, Victoria,” I said. “I wish I could have done something.”
“You’re doing enough,” she replied. “Sorry it took me a while to return your call. Kevin and I have been staying with my folks.”
“I wanted to ask you about Karl’s childhood,” I said. “He talk about it much?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I couldn’t tell her what we’d discovered. Not yet. Not without more evidence.
“We’re just running full background on all the victims,” I replied.
“He didn’t like talking about it,” she said. “His parents died in a car crash when he was seven, and he didn’t have any other family, so he went into the foster system.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Like I said, he didn’t like to talk about it,” she replied. “And he had his official records sealed by court order. I think he tried to erase as much of his childhood as he could. He just found it too painful.”
I thought about her answer. Karl’s behavior was compatible with the actions of a spy, or they could have been those of someone who wanted to forget a traumatic childhood.
“Anything else?” Victoria asked.
“Can you dig out any childhood pictures you have of Karl?” I asked. “Send them to Justine?”
“Sure,” Victoria replied. “And Jack...” She hesitated. “Thank you for everything you’re doing.”
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “I owe it to Karl to find out the truth.”
“What did she say?” Dinara asked from the back after I’d hung up.
“He lost his parents young and went into care. He took steps to get his childhood history sealed.”
“Either he suffered things as a child that he wanted to keep secret,” Leonid remarked, “or he’s a spy.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said.
“I may have a way for us to find out what was going on at that base,” Leonid said. He was leaning back in the passenger seat, which he’d set to recline, and looking at him made me think of a lazy snake. Languid and patient, but lightning fast and deadly when the time came to strike.
“It will involve us doing a deal with the devil,” he revealed.
I shot him a skeptical look.
“Let’s go,” he told me. “I’ll explain on the way.”
I put the truck in gear and we headed into darkness.