Cooper found it impossible to breathe. Straining his eyes, he found the problem. An S-shaped carcass hook stuck from his neck, just below the jaw. It was a miracle that he was still conscious.
A small hand with manicured black nails grabbed the rusted hook and gave it an impatient twist. Metal scraped bone and Cooper groaned reflexively, choking on his own blood. His eyes fluttered as he watched the woman stuff the satellite phone in the pocket of her jacket.
That’s right, he thought. Take the phone outside with you…
He wracked his foggy brain, trying to remember how much of the text he’d completed. He’d hit send the moment he’d heard the noise, just before the woman hit him. He hoped it was enough.
The beam of a second flashlight played across the stone floor. A set of black boots clicked into view.
“I have it, my darling,” Valentine Zamora said, broken, distant in Cooper’s ears, as if coming through a long pipe. “Can you believe it? It is actually mine.”
“It means you are rich?” The woman’s voice was whiskeyed and raw, as if she’d been screaming for three hours at a rock concert.
“I am already rich.” Zamora giggled, a high-pitched, almost feminine sound. “No, no, no. This will show the world that your precious Valentine is not a person to shove about like a little child.”
Cooper strained to hear more. Through the gathering fog, and unable to turn his head, he could only see the murderous couple from the waist down. They stood together, arm in arm as if watching a sunset, waiting for him to die.
“It is amazing!” Zamora stomped his foot. “Baba Yaga is mine.”
Baba Yaga.
The words struck Cooper as cruelly as the rusty hook. He’d feared as much, even alluded to it in his text, but the reality of hearing it spoken filled him with overwhelming dread. He fought to stay conscious, suddenly cold beyond anything he’d ever experienced. Years of training barked inside his head, screaming at him to get to his feet and do something.
Baba Yaga was an intelligence black hole, a poisonous soup of Cold War theory and whispered stories of gray-haired Soviet spies.
No longer able to focus, Cooper’s mind drifted back and forth from his mission to thoughts of his family in Virginia. By slow degree the bone-numbing chill melted into waves of enveloping warmth. His breaths grew shallow and further apart. There was nothing he could do, no matter how great the threat. His eyes gave up a single tear as they fluttered shut for the last time.
A crimson ribbon seeped from the wound in the young American’s neck and dripped to the broken stone below, mingling with the blood of countless slaughtered lambs.
Two grubby boys in thigh-length wool coats and tattered ski hats carried the wooden crates along the weathered planks and onto the deck of the cargo ship. A stubby vessel, the Pravda was not quite seventy feet long. It was hardly big enough to be called a ship, but Zamora preferred not to think of his precious cargo heading out to the world’s largest inland body of water in a mere boat.
Monagas stood with his thick arms behind his back, shouting savage threats to keep the lazy boys motivated.
Zamora sat at the stern next to the thick-hipped woman on boxes marked as tins of sturgeon caviar. He held a phone to his ear. A sly smile crossed his face, twitching the corners of his pencil-thin mustache. The woman leaned back on both hands, eyes closed, face to the sun.
“Hello, Mike,” Zamora said, speaking louder than usual, as was his habit when he was talking to someone halfway around the world. He kept his voice sickeningly sweet. “How are you?”
“Mr. Valentine,” Mike Olson answered. His breathy Texas drawl was almost giddy. “I’m fine, sir. How are you?” He pronounced Zamora’s name like the lover’s holiday. It was a convenient and easy-to-remember alias.
“Just fine, Mike, just fine,” Zamora said. His English was accented but flowed easily due to his time at American universities. “Listen, I talked about a donation to your program, but I’ve come into a sort of a windfall. I’d like to do something… I don’t know… more significant in nature.”
“Deanne and I are so grateful to you, sir,” Olson answered. “You’ve already been so generous.” The sound of a children’s choir singing to the soft notes of a piano purred in the background. “And the kids appreciate the support. To date, we’ve heard from over three hundred. They’re flying in from all over the U.S. for the event — from all denominations and cultures. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, a group of Baha’i children from Illinois. Imagine, so many ethnicities and religions, uniting their voices for peace, right here in the Bible belt.”
Baha’i, Zamora thought. His Iranian mother would have a fit at that. “Very nice,” he said, running his fingers like a spider up the woman’s thigh beside him. “I have something very special in mind. One of my colleagues will be in touch shortly.”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Valentine,” Olson gushed. “We could make a real difference here.”
“Yes,” Zamora said, “I do believe we will.” He ended the call.
Giggling loudly, he tromped his feet against the deck of the ship as if he was running in place before finally leaning back beside the thick-hipped woman.
“What is it?” She opened her eyes, blinking against the bright sun. He could just make out the tiny dark hairs that ran along her upper lip. Sometimes he thought she could grow a better mustache than him if she’d wanted to.
“Nothing, really.” The corners of his pencil-thin mustache twitched. “I was just thinking of how I will get our Yemeni friends to blow the buckle off the Bible belt.”
“You’re tickling me, my darling.” The woman put her hand over his, pressing it hard against the inside of her thigh. “You know I’d rather be slapped than tickled.”
“As you wish.” Zamora gave the soft flesh inside her thigh a rough squeeze.
The woman yawned. “In any case, before you can blow up anyone, we have to get your precious cargo past the authorities and all their radiation detectors.”
“We will put Baba Yaga in the normal pipeline, hide her in plain sight, so to speak. As long as the containers aren’t specifically interrogated by sensors we will be fine.” He grinned, pounding a fist repeatedly against his knee as if he couldn’t contain himself. “While we go south, Monagas will continue on to Finland with the loose material. Do you know what they call it?”
She shook her head, causing her black bangs to shimmer in the chilly breeze. “What, my love?”
“MUFP.” He giggled again, putting a hand to his mouth. “Isn’t that a funny word? It reminds me of the sound you make when you are… you know…”
“MUFP?”
He winked a dark eye. “Missing Unaccounted-For Plutonium.”
Trauma doctor Eileen Clayton was standing beside Birdie, the charge nurse, leaning over the other woman’s desk to show off photos of her new grandbaby, when a heartrending wail curled in from the waiting room. Birdie shivered at the sound, searching for her Crocs under the desk with the toe of her stockinged foot.
“What the hell was that?”
Clayton took off tortoiseshell reading glasses and shoved them in the pocket of her scrubs. She was a tall, African American woman, and her extremely short hair accentuated high cheekbones and the length of her neck. Like Birdie, she wore pink scrubs. Her natural smile fled as another wailing moan rose from the waiting room.