The Boy from Reactor 4

“Band?” Kirilo said. “What band?”

“It’s called F in Mathematics.”

Stefan threw both purses to the ground. “Nothing.”

Misha glared at Specter. “How can this be?”

Specter turned on the GPS receiver and showed Kirilo. The light blinked at a slower pace. “The signal’s weaker here. It was stronger outside. The tracking device is outside somewhere.”

They followed Specter outside to the car wash itself. Two vehicles were being hand-washed in separate bays while another six waited behind each. Specter homed in on the tracking device until the light turned solid red. He ended up beside a beer delivery truck parked on a strip of grass on the far side of the car wash. The truck’s hood was open.

The driver chomped nervously on a cigar as Kirilo, Misha, and their entourage approached.

“Engine?” Kirilo said with a sympathetic tone.

“Timing belt,” the driver said.

Kirilo grimaced. “Sorry to hear that. We need to take a look in the back. We think you have something of ours.”

The driver didn’t waste time. He unlocked the rear and swung the doors open. Stefan jumped inside and found the tracking device behind a stack of cases of Obolon beer. They questioned the driver if he had seen anyone hovering around his truck.

“Nope. I made my delivery and broke down on the way out. Some boys helped push my truck out of the way.”

Kirilo, Misha, and Specter stepped away from the van.

“She figured out we were tracking her and threw the device in his truck,” Specter said, “figuring the beer guy would go on to his next delivery and it would take us time to stop and ask questions.”

“Smarter than throwing it out the window,” Misha said.

“More clever,” Specter said. “But in this case, too clever. Seventy-two percent of all Soviet-era cars break down every year.”

“You were right about this woman,” Kirilo said with a savage edge to Misha. “I like her. I haven’t killed anyone in eleven years, but in her case, I may have to break that streak. Just to see the look in her eyes at the last second, when she gives up hope, you know?”

Misha and Specter looked at him as though he were insane. Good. That meant they had some morals, which meant there were limits to what they would do, which meant they were vulnerable.

Misha said, “The driver left his taxi here. Why?”

“Your man on the expressway made him,” Specter said. “They know we know the car. And this is a safe place where the taxi company can come get it.”

“Which means the driver is helping her,” Kirilo said. “What do we know about him?”

They paused and looked at each other.

“Phone number,” Specter said. “Of the taxi company. On the side of the car.” Specter and Stefan ran toward the parking lot on the opposite side of the building.

“If they left the taxi here, how did they get away?” Misha said.

“They got a ride or borrowed someone’s car,” Kirilo said.

“Someone who got an F in mathematics?” Misha said.

Kirilo and Misha hurried back to the bar. When they got to the second floor, Radek and the two women were gone.

Specter burst inside as they descended back to the first floor. Stefan lagged behind, out of breath.

“Anything?” Kirilo said, lungs heaving.

Specter shook his head. “The taxi’s gone. You?”

Misha shook his head. “They’re gone.”

“It’s possible your man got the phone number off the car on the expressway when they lost him,” Specter said.

“Find him,” Kirilo said. “The taxi driver. He’ll lead us to the girl.”

CHAPTER 31

NADIA WATCHED THE black-and-white images on the projection screen. They popped and crackled with distortion at the Chernobyl National Museum in Kyiv. Firemen piled up a stairwell toward the blaze in the reactor. They were never to return. Divers waded into the cooling ponds to seal the pipes. No one told them the water was contaminated.

On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster took place at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR, an administrative region of the Soviet Union. It was the only Level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale before Fukushima. A systems test caused a catastrophic power surge. An emergency shutdown caused a rupture in Reactor 4 and exposed it to air.

The ensuing fire sent a cloud of radioactive smoke over the western Soviet Union and Europe. At least 350,000 people were evacuated after the central authorities realized what had really happened. At first, they thought it was a routine fire. Operator error was initially blamed for the disaster. A subsequent investigation concluded that human factors contributed to the explosion but design deficiencies caused it.

The soldiers, coal miners, and construction workers who were assigned the task of ultimately containing the nuclear disaster were called liquidators. In English, the word conjures images of people facilitating a sale at bargain prices. For these liquidators, it was a bad bargain.