The Boy from Reactor 4

She snapped her arms out and made a cross with her body. Small black revolvers sprang into her palms from under her jacket.

“Your cousin, Kirilo, sends you birthday greetings from Kyiv. He says to tell you your father was a bitch.” Puma turned her guns on Victor. “Death to bitches and their sons.”

“Anya,” Victor said, barely managing to get the name out in time.

She froze.

Victor tapped the manila folder. “I have pictures of Anya.”

Puma’s lips parted with astonishment, flashing the promise of yellow-and-black teeth.

“Would you like to see some pictures of your beautiful daughter? Playing an hour ago in Shevchenko Park?”

CHAPTER 7

WHEN NADIA GOT home to her apartment on East Eighty-Second Street at 11:55 p.m., she bolted the door and called the doorman to make sure he remembered: “No visitors under any circumstances.”

Water dripped from her clothes and pooled at her feet. She went straight to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of Mount Eden chardonnay. Crystal trembling in her hand, she downed a glass of the buttery anesthetic in two takes. She poured another one and took it with her into a hot, steaming bath.

After a forty-five-minute soak, Nadia showered, washed her hair, and wrapped it in a towel. She lay down in bed to rest her eyes for fifteen minutes and woke up two hours later. She dried her hair, slipped into her favorite pajamas (the ones with the pink gorillas), and ordered a succotash of green beans and corn from Gracie’s Diner.

While waiting for her dinner to arrive, Nadia studied Internet search results for Andrew Steen. Google had 2.4 million hits for such a spelling. Another 815,000 if she spelled it “Stene.” That was over 3.2 million matches for the two most likely spellings alone.

Find Damian…Find Andrew Steen.

As Nadia’s mind drifted, her eyes scanned the amethyst sticky notes taped to the border of her iMac: call Marko, mail COBRA payment, call Mama (that one was so old the color had faded to lavender), schedule lunch with Johnny Tanner, Milan’s phone number—

Nadia grabbed her cell phone and tapped the digits into the keypad.

“The number you have dialed is out of service.”

She sank back in her chair. It was probably a prepaid phone.

When her godfather was murdered a year ago, Nadia returned home to Connecticut for his funeral. She grew up in an insular Ukrainian community. Her parents were immigrants. Although she was born in Hartford, Nadia went to kindergarten speaking only Ukrainian. She went to Uke school twice a week for seventeen years and even served as an altar girl at the Ukrainian Catholic Church. In fact, that was her nickname in the community. The “Altar Girl.” Her parents put enormous pressure on her to be a good Ukrainian American and a superior student in both schools. Once she left for college at Colgate, she never came back until the funeral.

The deeper she dug into her godfather’s killing, the more she realized she never really knew the Ukrainian American people she had grown up with. Among them was her father, the scowling and screaming family man who seemed to hate every minute of his life. He died when Nadia was thirteen, before she ever had a chance to ask him about the source of his perpetual discontent.

Her investigation put her life in jeopardy. Nadia uncovered a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring for priceless icons and relics from Ukraine and solved her godfather’s murder. The FBI shut down the ring and arrested the killer, a childhood friend of Nadia’s. The event was reported in local papers. People in the Uke community knew who she was now. Milan must have heard about her exploits. He must have assumed she was a proven troubleshooter of some kind, and now he was probably dead.

Millions of dollars. Those were Milan’s words. His shooting and abduction off the street implied they might be true. Nadia’s savings were running out. It didn’t matter if Milan was referring to a pot of cash or an object of value.

She had to find out more, and she knew who had the answers.

CHAPTER 8

PUMA SAT SOBBING quietly in a chair. Her twin revolvers lay unloaded beside the pictures of her daughter on the desk. Victor rubbed her shoulder as he circled around her like a nurse comforting a terminal patient.

“There, there,” he said. “It’s not your fault. I had my suspicions when an old friend from the Bratsky Krug called to tell me they were sending you with a special package. I thought you might be working for my cousin. But I wasn’t sure until the guns appeared in your hands.” Victor pointed to the package she’d brought. “Is that for me?”

She nodded.

“May I?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer before removing the paper. In the framed photograph, Victor stood posing beside two members of the Krug in front of a three-story cinder block building. The grim looks on their emaciated faces told their story.