ODESSA, UKRAINE
Jake and Quinn had no problem finding the apartment where they suspected Petra Kovarik was staying. It was a tiny place off of Sverdlova Street, not far from the train station.
Quinn parked Tully’s Volga against the curb, shut down the sputtering engine, and hesitated for a moment, looking up at the five-story brick building.
It was a hundred-year-old building that hadn’t seen many improvements since it first opened. Jake guessed it might have been a decent address at one time, but time had decayed it like acid slowly dripping on metal.
Jake thought of similarities this building had to Petra’s own apartment building. This time he hoped he had gotten there first. He had been beaten to Tvchenko’s place, almost paying with his life, and someone had gotten to Petra’s place first also. Both times he had been directed to the apartments by Tully O’Neill, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Well, that wasn’t true. Someone could have set off the bomb at Tvchenko’s a minute earlier.
Jake got out and headed up the stairs, with Quinn right behind him.
On the ride from the Odessa Polyklinik, Quinn had explained that Petra might be staying with Helena Yurichenko, a violinist with the Odessa Symphony Orchestra. She and Petra had been best friends while growing up in a small town outside of Kiev. Petra had gone on to the university to study bio-chemistry, and Helena had studied at the conservatory as a musician. Helena Yurichenko had lived in Odessa for nearly nine years. At first she had lived like a queen with the support of the great Soviet Union, but then came the split, and the money became more scarce. She was barely making it now, Jake could tell.
The inside of the building was in worse disrepair than the outside. Plaster was chipped from the walls in the corridor and the stairwell. The wooden railing needed varnish. It wouldn’t take too much, but the place definitely needed a sprucing up.
Jake grabbed Quinn’s arm, stopping him. “Hang on, Quinn. Let’s take it easy. It seems like every apartment I’ve entered in Odessa, someone’s tried to cut my stay short.”
“I don’t think anyone knows about Helena,” Quinn said.
“If we do, someone else might.”
Quinn was thinking it over.
“By the way, how did you find out about Helena?”
Quinn started up the stairs, but Jake pulled him to a halt. “I want an answer,” Jake said.
“That’s right. You’re in charge.”
“You got a problem with that?”
“I read the message.”
“And?”
“It’s bullshit. You’re not even with the Agency.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Is that an order?” He whispered loudly.
“I think maybe I kicked you too hard yesterday,” Jake said. Or maybe not hard enough, he thought.
They stared each other down for a moment in the subdued light of the stairway.
“I finally remembered,” Quinn said. He let out a deep breath and shook his head. “I was such an idiot. A month ago, just after Petra came down from Kiev, I went to the symphony. Rimsky-Korsakov. The Russian Easter Overture. Anyway, I met Petra there. Just happened to sit next to her. She pointed out Helena to me. Said she knew her and had been friends with her since they were kids. She only told me her first name, and I didn’t even remember that until this morning. I had to track down her address through the locals. I’ve got a few contacts.”
Jake considered this. “Great. Let’s see what she knows.”
Jake stepped past Quinn up the stairs.
As they rounded the stairs from the second to the third floors, the sound of a violin echoed down to them. Getting closer, Jake felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle from the beauty of a soft Vivaldi concerto. The sound became louder as they reached room 302.
Quinn looked at Jake, as if wondering whether he should knock on the door and disturb such a luscious, dynamic tone. Jake couldn’t imagine any neighbor complaining about the noise, for it was such a mesmerizing and overpowering sound.
When she stopped playing, Jake quickly knocked. He couldn’t hear if someone had moved to answer the door, so he started to knock again, when the door opened a few inches, bared by a metal security stop.
Peering through the opening was a set of wide blue eyes against a pale face. Long straight hair swept down as far as Jake could see. She was staring at Jake, uncertain what to think of him. She held her violin bow in her right hand like a sword.
“What can I do for you?” she asked in Ukrainian. Her voice seemed to resonate and flow much like her violin.
“I’m Jake Adams, and this is Quinn Armstrong,” Jake said in Ukrainian. “We’d like to speak with Petra.”
She started to close the door.
“Wait,” Quinn jumped in. “Tell her Quinn is here. We are friends.”
She looked at Quinn now, as if she recognized the name finally. Her eyes switched back and forth nervously. “She is not well,” she said in English.
“Please,” Quinn pleaded. “It’s urgent that we talk with her.”
She muttered something and closed and locked the door.
“What the hell was that?” Jake asked. He wasn’t fluent in Ukrainian, but he usually understood more than he could speak.
Quinn smiled. “She told us to go fuck ourselves.”
“Really? And she looked so sweet and innocent.”
“Musicians can be brutal. She’ll be back.”
He was right. A minute later the door opened again. This time all the way. The blonde stood back and motioned with a nod of her head to enter.
Inside was totally different from the entryway. The walls were freshly painted ivory white. There were plants everywhere soaking up the sun streaming through tall windows. There wasn’t much furniture. A small sofa. A chair with a stand and music in front of it. Her violin lay in its open case, cradled in soft red velvet. The lack of clutter made the room look much larger than it was.
There was a small kitchenette off the living room, and a little wooden table with two chairs. Jake and Quinn stood in the middle of the room, as Helena closed the door.
She was wearing a sweater that extended just over her buttocks. Her legs were covered in black tights with stirrups over tiny feet in pink stockings. Jake realized that she was a very small woman, perhaps five feet two, yet she stood tall as if she were much larger. Overall, she was an extremely attractive woman.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked in her version of English, moving into the kitchen area.
“No, thank you,” Quinn said. “I need to speak with Petra.”
Her eyes shifted toward a closed door. “She’ll be out in a minute.”
Jake moved over and looked at her violin. “Your music was beautiful.”
She came closer, as if defending her violin like a mother would her child. “It’s all I have. I would die without it.” She stroked the velvet near the violin’s neck.
“Passion is something lacking in this world,” Jake said, gazing into her eyes. “We need more people who love what they do, instead of those who simply do what is expected of them.”
She thought for a moment. “You do understand. That’s a rare quality.”
“For an American?”
“For anyone,” she corrected, smiling through teeth that could have used braces. It was her only imperfection.
Finally, the door opened and Petra Kovarik came out. Her hair was dark and wet and had just been combed. But her face was blotched with red. She had been crying. She wore tight clothes displaying a perfect body. Jake understood Quinn’s attraction, if his hunch was correct. And the way Quinn was looking at her, Jake was probably right. Officer had fallen for agent.
Quinn met her in the center of the room and they kissed on both cheeks, then quickly on the lips. He whispered into her ear. She took a seat at the kitchen table and Quinn took the other. Jake moved closer to listen, and Helena sat on the sofa and crossed her legs.
“Have you heard about Yuri Tvchenko?” Quinn asked.
She nodded her head, but kept her eyes in a constant stare at the table. It was as if she were peering down through the floor, through the ground, and on to hell. She was scared.
“Who would want Tvchenko dead?” Jake asked.
She looked up at this man she had never met. “Who is he?” she asked Quinn.
“I’m sorry. This is Jake Adams. He’s a friend of mine who knew Yuri. They had worked together a few years back. He was with Yuri when he died. He’s trying to help me find his killer.”
She seemed to relax with that last revelation.
Quinn started again. “What was Yuri working on? You must have been part of that.”
She hunched her shoulders. “We were working on new pesticides,” she said. Her English wasn’t perfect. It flowed with a childlike quality. “It was for agriculture. You spray the fields with this strain and you wipe out the entire bug population. And the larvae and eggs are also affected. They become sterile.”
That was the story Jake had already heard, but there had to be more to it. “Who was he dealing with? Who wanted to buy the strain?” Jake asked.
“I was never involved with that,” she said, looking not at Jake but Quinn. “Yuri was a very secretive man. He trusted no one. We worked together. That is all.”
“You weren’t lovers?” Jake asked.
She laughed.
Quinn gave Jake a quick glare, as if he had just asked a nun how many men she had screwed.
“What’s so funny?” Jake asked.
She tried to hold back her laughter. “Yuri would rather fuck his test tubes. He had no time for women. Besides, he liked men. Young men.”
Quinn looked somewhat surprised. “You never told me that before.”
“You never asked.”
Jake turned and smiled at Helena, who looked bored on the sofa. He swung back to Petra. “What are you hiding for?”
Anger swept across Petra’s face. “I don’t trust the men.” After she said it, she covered her eyes with her hands.
“What men?” Quinn asked.
She started sobbing. “The men who started showing up at the lab,” she forced out.
“Here in Odessa?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“It started a few months back,” she muttered. “One man. Then two came a few weeks later. They were not like those who had come in Kiev all the time. These were different.”
“How?”
“They were more desperate looking. They were Arabs I think. From the Middle East, anyway.”
“So you were still working for Tvchenko?” Jake asked, already knowing the answer.
She nodded. “At his apartment.”
“What about at the private institute?” Quinn asked. He looked more concerned now.
“The original strain was worked there. But he was moving in other directions, and he wanted that closer to him. Where he had all the control. He came to Kiev and got me just over a month ago.”
Jake thought for a moment. “But you said the men started coming a few months back.”
She shifted her eyes up at Jake. “That’s what Yuri told me.”
“What did they say when they came?”
“I don’t know. They talked in the other room. I stayed in the lab.”
Quinn was sitting back now, as if he were looking at an unfaithful wife.
“You’re a bio-chemist and you have no idea what in the hell Tvchenko was up to?” Jake yelled. “I find that pretty hard to believe.”
She threw him an indignant glance. “It’s true.”
“What about chemicals,” Jake said. “Was he working on any new chemical agents?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Jake knew she was lying. Tvchenko’s apartment was full of chemicals. He may have been working on biological strains at the private institute, but unofficially he was working on chemical agents. Jake thought for a moment. Tully O’Neill had had Tvchenko’s place wired. Why hadn’t he mentioned there was a woman there? That other meetings had taken place in the apartment? If she did know what he was up to, then she was one hell of a liar. Regardless, she had a good reason to be scared. Whoever killed Tvchenko, must have seen Petra at the apartment. They would have to assume she knew what Tvchenko knew. She was in danger.
Jake pulled Quinn aside, explaining how he thought Petra was in danger.
“But she doesn’t know anything,” Quinn pleaded.
“It doesn’t matter. They don’t know that. Whoever they are just wants to plug holes.” Things were becoming clearer now for Jake.
Quinn looked at Petra, who was slouched back in her chair brushing her fingers through her wet hair.
“How can we protect her?” Quinn finally asked.
He wasn’t thinking straight, Jake could tell. His eyes flicked back and forth from Petra to Helena and then off to nowhere.
“We’ll have to get her out of here,” Jake said. “What about the consulate?”
Quinn swished his head quickly. “I can’t hide a Ukrainian citizen in our consulate.”
“What about a safe house? You still have to have a few of those hanging around. If not, set one up.”
It was the only way.
“You’ll have to bring Helena with you,” Jake continued. “If we found her, so will they. Better yet, I’ll come up with a place for them.”
It wouldn’t be easy to sell that to Petra, and Jake knew it. But until they had all the answers, there was no other way. Besides, Petra knew more than she was saying. Once they had her on neutral ground, she might open up.