Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (27 page)

Now, all she could think about were the scores of terrifying photographs she’d seen over the years in newspapers and on TV. Anguished faces of family members, of all nationalities, whose loved ones were being held hostage by lunatics or extremists of one brand or another. How often did governments delay action until, as fanatics were wont to do, they executed their captives? How often did rescuers arrive too late, only to find dead bodies?

Mercy tied not to think about Talia like that—helpless, tortured, or worse. But her imagination knew no end to the horrifying images of what might be. Her stomach cramped, eyes burned, throat constricted. After silent miles of driving, she looked up and out of her bleak thoughts at a passing road sign. Confused, she checked the GPS locator on her phone. It appeared Sebastian had chosen a secondary highway that angled well to the north of their destination.

Mercy straightened up in the car’s rock-hard seat. “Why this route? Won’t it take longer?” Now that she was this close to where her mother had last been seen, the urgency she’d felt for months had become nearly intolerable.

“Pripyat is at the far northern edge of Ukraine,” Sebastian said, “near the Belarus border.”

“I know. So?”

“These roads cut just above the northern sector of the Chernobyl wasteland, avoiding military check points. My sources suggest we approach Pripyat through the back door. Less obvious than driving straight down the main highway from Warsaw or Kiev.”

“Your sources,” she repeated.

“I have my ways.” The corners of his full lips pinched into a hint of smile.

Mercy narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t even want to think about what that might mean.” Besides, at the moment, her ability to make her brain work logically seemed illusive. She was too tied up in emotional knots.

Mercy slid down in the worn seat and stared out the passenger window at mile after mile of early-season grain, a sea of gold occasionally crossed by a teal-blue northern flowing river. There was little traffic along the highway. More activity in the fields than on the road. But she saw behemoth green or red agricultural combines less frequently than individual farmers using horse-drawn hand ploughs that jerked and bumped with agonizing slowness through heavy black clods of soil. The early summer heat here wasn’t the same as in the tropics, but it was intense and magnified by the flat grasslands around them. There was no AC in the car. The sun baked them inside the little car. Hot Mercy. Hot. . .hot. . .hot—and she grew drowsy.

Sebastian continued driving in silence. She found their lack of conversation strangely comforting. Silence was far better than assurances that everything would be “all right.” Because, in her heart, she already sensed that it would not. This might, in fact, be a fool’s errand with a bleak outcome.

Eventually, she slept.

Mercy woke to the warmth of Sebastian’s palm resting on her thigh, and a startlingly different, cooler landscape: primeval forests of gray-green conifers interspersed with crystal blue lakes. The highway narrowed, and Sebastian turned off onto a local, badly pitted road. The Lada rattled past a wooden cart driven by an old man. A decrepit mule pulled cart and man along, the faded-red wagon creaking along with its load of cabbages. A pair of kestrels wheeled against a smoky sky visible between treetops. It started to rain.

“Let me spell you for an hour or so,” Mercy said. She doubted he’d slept much the night before, having flown from Mexico City to St. Thomas and then needing to get her off the island immediately.

He gave her a tired smile and pulled over to the side of the road. “Gladly. Wake me if you need me.” They circled around the car from opposite sides, and he dropped a kiss on her cheek as they crossed paths.

Mercy drove on while Sebastian dozed, his dark head resting against the passenger-side window. The nervous knot in her stomach tightened until she felt she would have doubled over in pain had the steering wheel not been in the way.

Twice she had to slow then stop the car and wait for a herd of wooly, gray sheep to clear out of the road. She drove on through villages that looked as if nothing about them had changed in five hundred years. Sebastian slept on, his slumber becoming so deep the car’s jolts failed to disturb him. She had to stop herself every few minutes from reaching across to comb her fingers through his glossy black hair. She tried to focus on what she knew of their destination.

Mercy remembered that Pripyat had been a modern, upscale city, built to house the Chernobyl atomic energy plant’s directors, scientists, technicians and their families. What was left of those dwellings? Soon they’d find out. Soon she’d walk in her mother’s footsteps. Talia’s last? She swiped at her burning eyes with the knuckles of one hand.

The second border crossing came between Homel in Belarus and Chernihiv in Ukraine, where they would pick up their guide. This was the land where Stalin, in his cruel madness, engineered a famine in 1932 that killed millions. Every generation seemed to produce a villain bent on outdoing the depravity of all those who had come before him, or her. Women could be just as cruel, she was sure. It was just that they had a harder time acquiring the power necessary to slaughter thousands. Her mood clearly was growing gloomier and more bitter by the mile.

Again, using their new identities, they passed through Customs and Border Control without a hitch. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Arnez seemed to fit the expected profile of an American couple on holiday. Since so many Latinos lived in the States, Sebastian’s accent failed to provoke even a ripple of concern from the guards.

As Mercy drove away from the most recent checkpoint, Sebastian studied her with concern and rested a hand on her knee. “You look a little ashen, darling. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

He nodded his head but didn’t look convinced.

Her chest ached from the effort to breathe. She clutched the steering wheel to keep her hands from shaking. Yet something now whispered to her that Talia was near, and alive. The mother-daughter bond had never felt stronger.

Sebastian cleared his throat. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

No,
she thought,
you won’t understand.
“You never told me which of your criminal friends helped arrange this little escapade.”

“They are not friends.”

“But they did advise you. Why?”

Sebastian barked a laugh. “Not out of the goodness of their hearts, I assure you. They have selfish reasons.” He gazed solemnly out the open passenger window at a cluster of deer standing at alert in the middle of a sun-streaked hollow. “Starting at least fifteen years ago, the Russian mafia established a presence in Brighton Beach on the East Coast of the U.S. There are so many Russian immigrants living in that part of New Jersey now, it’s referred to as Little Odessa.”

“What about the old Cosa Nostra and other established crime families? Are they being edged out of their cherished criminal businesses?”

“Yes. Not only have they already lost precious territory to the Russians, the extreme violence of gangs like the Tambovs may result in an unprecedented clamp down on prostitution and drugs throughout the U.S. and Canada. Even in places where the Russians haven’t yet established control.”

Mercy squinted at the road ahead. “That means a lot of resentment between the two camps.”

“Resentment is a mild word for what may soon become open warfare. The old crime families know about the Tambovs’ radioactive black market. They don’t want any part of what happens as a result. They can’t profit from it, and such activity only means trouble with law enforcement for them.”

“Because,” she guessed, “national governments are bound to step in, and then the mafia—Russian or otherwise—will have to fight the military as well as federal and local police.”

He nodded, and she asked no more questions. These were matters beyond her control.

As soon as they entered the old-world town of Chernihiv they followed directions Sebastian had been given to the Hotel Hradetsky.

Mercy couldn’t help thinking as she viewed its crumbling exterior and shabby lobby that it must have seen happier days. They found the hotel’s restaurant. She chose a table that put their backs to a wall and allowed a full view of the rest of the room, including the bar and a window that overlooked the street. They ordered pints of Slavutych and drank the beer with slices of rustic dark bread and a remarkably good white cheese while waiting for their guide to appear.

“His name is Mihkas.” Sebastian checked his watch. “We’re almost an hour early.” He observed her for a long moment, his gaze burrowing into her, darker than dark.

“I’m all right,” she answered the question in his eyes.

“I don’t want to lose you.” He reached out to rest his hand over hers on the stained tablecloth.

“We’ll be careful,” she murmured, then said what had been on her mind since he’d found her in the Virgin Islands and told her of his plan. “You didn’t have to come with me. You can still go back.”

“I know.”

“You have Maria to think of. Your daughter needs you. I have no one but my mother.”

His rugged, rancher’s face, scored by sun and wind and rain, like the desert around his beautiful hacienda, softened. “We all make choices. I’m here because this is where I want to be. Where I need to be.”

She turned away to hide her tears of gratitude. “If we get out of this alive, Sebastian, you’ve earned a lifetime of brownie points.”

“Brownie points?” He scowled, confused.

She laughed and took another sip of her beer. “Never mind.”

                                          30

A man with a bright red beard stepped into Mercy’s field of vision just as she was lowering her glass to the tabletop.

He looked to be about fifty years old, but in this unforgiving part of the world one never knew. He could as easily have been thirty-five. Although the April day was warm, he wore blue jeans, a heavy long-sleeved polo shirt with a sweater over it, and scuffed hiking boots. Under one arm he carried an old bulging leather briefcase.

When his eyes locked with hers, he immediately started toward their table, head bowed, back humped like a laboring camel. “You are Mr. and Mrs. Arnez?” His mumbled accent made them Mee-ster and Mee-sus.

Our very own Boris Badenov, she thought.

“We are.” Sebastian stood and waved him cheerfully to a seat. “Won’t you join us?”

“I am Mihkas.” He didn’t offer a second name. “You are ready to leave?” His tone was forceful and brusque, although his mannerisms—lowered eyes and small, nervous hands—made him appear timid, almost mouse-like.

“We are ready,” Mercy said, then thought to curb her impatience and be polite. “But would you like something to eat first?”

Mihkas shook his head. “You have your supplies?”

“Supplies?” Mercy looked at Sebastian.

Mihkas lowered his voice. “You want to go to Chernobyl,” he stated with a weary sigh, as if they were both rather stupid, “you need to bring food.”

Mercy finally understood. “I see. No restaurants in the ghost town?”

“
Nyet
,” Mihkas said, his mood verging on irritation. “Here in Hradetsky Hotel, the government inspects all produce, milk products, meat for radiation. In Pripyat, people sometimes grow their own vegetables. And the cows, ah—” his hands fluttered in distress “—not metered.”

Mercy noticed Sebastian’s tan had gone a shade paler.

And so, they went shopping.

She bought
holubtsi
, cabbage rolls stuffed with seasoned rice and meat and wrapped in paper. And a kilo of
salo
, at their guide’s insistence. Mercy wrinkled her nose. The stuff looked like nothing more than slabs of raw pork fat. Hard sausages and two loaves of crusty bread joined their larder from another local shop.

“Salo,” Mihkas repeated softly to himself, a giddy smile on his face whenever he uttered the word. “Most good to spread on bread.”

When Hell freezes over, Mercy thought and shot Sebastian a disgusted look.

Sebastian smiled and packed everything into the trunk of the little Lada. Mihkas insisted on holding his briefcase on his lap in the rear seat. He drummed stubby fingers anxiously on the cracked leather as they pulled out of town, heading west toward Chernobyl.

“Why you want to go that place?” he asked after a while.

“A friend of mine came here,” Mercy said, repeating the story she and Sebastian had rehearsed on the plane. “She asked us to look her up during our visit.”

Mihkas stopped drumming and considered this. “She live here now?”

Sebastian and Mercy exchanged looks. “Not permanently,” he said. “Her visit was unexpectedly extended.”

“She’ll be going home with us,” Mercy said. Which seemed to satisfy the man. She felt relieved, as if they’d passed a mysterious test.

The countryside grew more and more desolate as they drove. At one point Mihkas told Sebastian to leave the two-lane highway and take an unpaved road for several miles before returning to the main route. Was he guiding them around military check points? Her stomach burned and felt queasy at the thought. A sour fear coated the inside of her mouth.