“Okay, then Mr. Good Guy. Let me go free.”
Without pausing, Kit pulled an envelope from an inside jacket pocket and gave it to her. “Your passport, your return ticket to Moscow, and three hundred dollars. Udachi. Good luck.”
She looked shocked, not sure whether this was some kind of cruel joke. She checked inside the envelope, then gave Kit a long penetrating stare.
“I should warn you, though: You remember the video they took at the marriage office, where they made me count the money?”
She nodded as a frown set upon her lips.
“Popov sent it to the chief of all the American army. So there are many people looking to arrest me right now. And the American government thinks you, Yulana Petkova, are a Russian spy. That means they’re looking for you too. And the airport is the first place they’d start to watch. Your name will be red flagged. You might want to get to Mexico somehow. Maybe you could fly out of Mexico City. But Cuba would be safer, much safer. So, personally, I’d try for Havana.”
The frown stayed on Yulana’s lips. She downed the last of her vodka, pocketed the cigarettes and lighter, and walked out clutching the envelope.
Kit watched her go. Without a doubt, he now believed that Yulana Petkova had been trapped, just as he had been.
He sat quietly for another few minutes, finished the sake, then rang the buzzer for the waitress. He paid the bill and walked outside, fumbling in his pockets for the valet claim check, but couldn’t find it. He found it in his wallet while walking toward the Mexican valet.
“Sorry, Señor, I know the pretty lady come with you in the black Honda. She say she cold and you coming right out, so I bring the car up, but she jump in and drive away.” The valet looked nervous; he knew he’d made a mistake.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Kit handing him the claim check and a tip. He glanced into the lot to confirm that the car was indeed gone.
He turned away from the valet and scanned the street, but there was no sign of Yulana. His face twisted into a frown as he walked briskly to Sixth Street and then headed west. He knew a Korean soju joint with a hip crowd in the refurbished Chapman Market complex just up ahead. He needed to put a little distance between himself and Koffea and get off the street, just to be on the safe side. He’d misjudged Petkova; she not only took the opportunity to run, she stole his car.
CHAPTER 18
Just as in Korea, where every square foot of level space is fair game to park something on, Koreatown mall parking lots are so jam-packed they have security to direct the chaotic flux of vehicles into seemingly illogical parking configurations. As he threaded through the parking lot of the historic Chapman Market Courtyard complex crowded with trendy young Koreans and Korean Americans, Bennings fished out his sterile cell and called Buzz.
“Good news on this end,” said Buzz.
“Our friend was chatty?”
“Very.”
“Great. Listen, I’m in Koreatown and I need somebody to pick me up,” said Kit.
“What happened?”
“My lovely Russian bride…”
Just then a horn honked. Kit turned around and saw Yulana behind the wheel of the Honda, snaking along in a single-file line of luxury cars. She gave him a wave.
“Disregard that. I’ll be back soon for the debrief.” Kit ended the call, backtracked toward her, and got into the passenger seat.
He and Yulana exchanged a long look that told him he’d made a new ally.
“Thanks for coming back,” he said.
“I almost lost you,” she said as she pulled a fifth of Grey Goose from a paper bag. “I like drinking this better. It will help me tell you some things.”
He nodded.
“So where do we go now?” she asked, inching the car forward.
He checked his watch. “We’ll head back. If that’s okay with you.”
“Yes, it’s okay,” she said, easing the car forward, out of the parking lot and into street traffic. “But do I have to stay locked in that room?”
“I’ll make it nicer for you.”
She nodded. “If I flew back to Russia, I think Popov’s men would just grab me again. Going to the police in Moscow would not help me at all. The SVR might help me because I know state secrets, but they couldn’t return Kala, my daughter, to me.” She looked over at Kit. “So I’m going to take a chance that maybe you can.”
“I’ll do my best, you have my word on that. And since you already pointed out that it’s just me and my three friends and we don’t have nine lives, then you know that it won’t be easy.”
“The story of my life is that things are not easy. So… what to tell you? Well, believe it or not, I’m an engineer. My degree is in engineering physics, but because of politics and my refusal to sleep with my chief, I was transferred to a poorly funded department. I’ve been working as a research-and-development scientist in Samara on special projects.” She sighed. “Can we just stop somewhere?”
They were sitting at a red light at Sixth and Vermont. “Turn right. There’s a restaurant right there, open all night.”
She pulled into a Denny’s and parked in back. After shutting off the Honda, she opened the Grey Goose and took a hit right from the bottle. “Sorry, it’s not polite to drink from the bottle. Reminds me of when I was a teenager.” She offered him the bottle. Just to put her more at ease, he pretended to take a drink.
“So you lived and worked in Samara. A lot of sensitive engineering takes place there. Can you tell me what kind of research you do?”
“Any emerging technologies. We look at everything and evaluate how it might be weaponized.”
“So you’re a black-projects engineer, like our people in DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
“Yes, but without the generous funding DARPA has. They don’t even provide toilet paper in our restrooms.”
“They probably would provide toilet paper if your bosses weren’t stealing the money,” said Kit.
“Yes, perhaps. One thing is… please, don’t ask me to betray my country by giving you any specifics. I won’t do that.”
“I understand.”
“Well, what else? My husband is a civil engineer. He’s an abusive drunk, so we divorced two years ago. I have lived in an apartment with my daughter since then.”
“How do you know Popov?”
“I don’t. I’ve never met him. I know who he is, only because of what I heard from the older engineers. His wife used to be a department chief at a weapons complex in Samara. In the 1990s, when the country was in chaos, Popov and his wife and their thugs looted the arsenal of EMPs, electromagnetic pulse weapons.”
Kit already knew this from having read Popov’s dossier. There are many different types and designs of e-bombs, EMP weapons, or directed energy weapons, but they share common results: the affected target areas, subject to extreme magnetic fields, would be, technologically speaking, sent back one hundred years. Computers and most if not all data on them would be destroyed. TVs and fluorescent lights would glow even if turned off—and never work again. Anything electronic would be rendered useless, forever. Only some diesel engines would survive, but all other vehicles would never start again. Batteries would become warm and ruin cell phones and any device that used them. Telephone lines would pool into mush. Air-conditioning, elevators, refrigerators, cars, trucks, hair dryers, radios, and anything that needed a battery or electricity would be destroyed.
Cascading blackouts would also likely result, knocking out power for potentially tens of millions of people, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the original target, because, unlike wise consumers, electrical substations and generating plants don’t have surge protectors. And once the grid went down in a big way, it would not be so easy to bring it back up.