The Boy from Reactor 4

He started to answer her with tall tales of elk and bear hunts, her remarkable body exercising some sort of magnetic pull on him yet again, when a crack and a thud broke his spell. Wood splintered, an ax thumped.

Kirilo offered excuses, made apologies, and dashed out the front door, pictures in hand.

“Get me the hell out of here,” he said to his driver after jumping into the backseat. “Fast.”

They tore down the dirt driveway away from Athena, Zirka waving good-bye in the rearview mirror, the thud of the babushka’s ax echoing in the background.

“This isn’t about Damian’s ten million dollars,” Kirilo said to Misha when he got him on his cell phone. “The KGB confiscated the money. I saw pictures.”

“So it’s about a different pot of money. Or something else. Something that’s worth millions.”

“Has she gone back to her hotel?”

“No.”

Kirilo grunted. “She’s too smart for that.”

“Where will you be?”

“Kyiv today, Yalta tonight. I have a breakfast in less than twenty-four hours with a wedding planner. And my daughter. She’s getting married. My daughter, Isabella.”

CHAPTER 35

AT 7:00 ON Thursday night, Anton sped north from Kyiv up the expressway along the Dnipro River in Radek’s van. Nadia sat upright in the backseat while Hayder slouched in front beside Anton. He had ebony skin with rich Turkish features. He wore a dark turtleneck, blue jeans, and a mid-length black coat, with a thin black scarf wrapped around his neck.

Hayder spoke Crimean, Russian, and English, but not Ukrainian. He spoke Russian with Anton but insisted on speaking English with Nadia.

“What is your business in the Exclusion Zone?” Nadia said.

“What?” Hayder twisted and glowered at her. “Why do you inquisition me about my business?”

He turned to Anton and asked him a question under his breath. Nadia couldn’t hear a word except for kurba, the Russian and Ukrainian word for “whore.”

“You want to know about my business?” Hayder said. “I tell you about my business. One, I’m in the import business. Two, I’m in the export business. And three, I’m in the ‘none of your fucking business.’ That’s my business.”

Nadia looked away and let a few seconds pass. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry,” she lied. “I was just trying to get acquainted.”

“Okay, okay,” Anton said. He murmured some soothing words in Hayder’s direction. “We’re all friends here, right?”

“Tell him that,” she said.

“Sure, we are all friends,” Hayder said. “My father can’t get the job in Crimea because he is Muslim. My brother, who was the best chef in Sevastopol, is kidnapped by American government and locked up in Gitmo for no reason when he go to Chicago to open restaurant. And here I am, the black man, in the car with the Ukrainian and the American. Oh, yeah. We are the best friends.”

Nadia studied Anton’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “Anton, are you sure about this?”

Anton cracked a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. Hayder likes to rant. But Hayder is good people. He went to the London School of Economics.”

The most dangerous people in the world weren’t the extremists, Nadia thought; they were the highly educated and super-intelligent extremists. Hayder’s presence made her trip—in the dead of the night, to a radioactive wasteland, in search of a notorious uncle she’d never known existed—all the more surreal. Less than a week ago, she thought she was meeting a nice old man who’d known her father. And now, here she was.

While Anton exited the expressway and turned right, Hayder handed her a small device the size of an old-fashioned transistor radio.

“Dosimeter,” he said. “It measures your exposure to radiation per hour. After the explosion, the reading in the control room was three hundred sieverts. You died in one minute. Today the reading in the control room is thirty-four sieverts. You die in fifteen minutes. In States or in Moscow, normal reading is ten microsieverts. In Kyiv, the normal reading is twelve to sixteen micros. In the Zone, the reading is up to one thousand micros, depending how close to the reactor.”

Nadia held the device gingerly. “That sounds like a problem.”

Hayder shook his head. “No. That is not the problem. Exposure is not the problem. Accumulation is the problem. If you spend five hours in the Zone, you radiate as much as if you spend two hours in the airplane or on the beach in Rio de Janeiro.”

“Then why bother with the dosimeter?”

“To avoid getting particles on the clothes or body. Reactor Four explosion released twenty nuclear substances. Most are not harmful anymore. Three are harmful: plutonium, strontium, and cesium-137. Cesium-137 is in the dust. If cesium-137 gets on body, accumulation is problem. You must scrub quickly or die. The particles are the very big problem.”

The road curved through the night. A pine forest hovered over both sides. The truck’s headlights provided the only illumination. Hayder pointed at something up ahead and whispered to Anton.