CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jack hung up, leaned back in his chair, raised his arms, and laughed aloud. Then laughed again. A few seconds later someone knocked on the door. “It’s open.”
“All okay?” said Tré, peering inside.
“Most definitely. I just talked with Damien Falconi. He’s flying in the day after tomorrow. Saturday morning. We’ve got lots of work to do. I’m going to text you the number of his assistant who’ll help you with the arrangements. I’d like to set up a meeting as soon as he arrives with just him, Jan Cummings, Martin Bentley, and me. Then, we’ll have a session with all the department chairs. Reserve the boardroom, please. Then we’ll do a tour. And book us a dinner reservation at La Petite Maison. One of the private rooms.”
“Shall do. Super exciting. By the way, chief, I met your niece Kaitlyn in the volunteer office. I guess we’ll be seeing her around.”
“I’m not sure if it’s worth her effort,” Jack said. “She’ll be heading back home at the end of next week. But it’s her choice.”
The phone rang back out at Tré’s desk, and he excused himself. He returned a moment later. “Chief, there’s a call you may or may not want to take.”
“Who is it?”
“Her name is . . .” Tré looked down at a Post-it Note. “Marianna Kovalenko, a journalist from some magazine in Ukraine. She wants to speak with you about an article.”
“When’s my next meeting?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“All right, put her through.”
He picked up his desk phone.
“Hello, Dr. Forester,” said a woman with a pronounced accent. “I am Marianna Kovalenko. Thank you so much for talking with me. You are the new hospital CEO, yes?”
“Just the interim CEO,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“I feel a little desperate. I’m not sure what to do. Back in summer, I talk to the CEO of your hospital, Mr. Everts, and he agrees for me to come visit a few days to start tomorrow to write article about the hospital. But I get to New York City and call his office this morning and they tell me he is gone and it is you in charge.”
“I’m afraid that’s true.”
She sighed wearily. “That is not good luck for me. I have come a very long way. Dr. Forester, may it still be possible to come and have interviews? It would mean so much to me. I write about health issues because I was once a nurse.”
“Under ordinary circumstances, I’d be happy to see what we could arrange, Ms. Kovalenko. But the timing isn’t good right now.”
“I understand. The notice is too short for you. If I had known, I would have tried to find other hospitals to visit. But I thought this was all arranged with Mr. Everts.”
“You say you have a letter from him?”
“Yes. I have it in my hand right now. Maybe he did not tell other people. You could check his schedule, maybe? Many experts of health care in my country know of your hospital because you have good medical school and good research and are not in the big city. I had written an article about you in the past. I mentioned that you did not sell to the big company Health Wealth Associates when they wanted to buy you some time ago, that you want to stay free.”
“So, you came all the way only to write about New Canterbury?”
“Yes. Call me Marianna, please. Is there any chance you might help me, please?”
“Could I put you on hold a moment?”
“Of course, Dr. Forester.”
Jack picked up his cell phone and dialed Jason Everts’s mobile number. It rang and rang, then went to voicemail. The mailbox was full. He buzzed Tré.
“Yes, sir?”
“Do you know if Mr. Everts’s assistant is still in the office downstairs?”
“I believe she’s taking some vacation time now that Mr. Everts is gone.”
“Can you access his calendar?”
“Sure thing.” The sound of keystrokes came over the phone. “Yep, here it is.”
“Do you see any mention of an interview with this woman?”
“Yes. There’s two hours blocked out tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
He picked up the desk phone again and reconnected. “Ms. Kovalenko? Listen, I can’t promise much, but if you come to my office, we’ll do the best we can for you.”
At a quarter past noon local time, 4,700 miles away in Kyiv, Ukraine, the real Marianna Kovalenko stepped out of the Ukrainian Week offices on Mashynobudivnykiv Street. The wind was gusty and cold, but it felt good to be away from her desk. It had been an intense morning of research and writing. The piece she was working on about the lingering health effects in villages close to Chernobyl was coming together.
Traffic was light. She could hear children playing soccer next to the secondary school. As she walked westward toward the Kvartal Shopping Mall to look for winter things at the new consignment shop, she heard a sudden scuffing of shoe leather on the sidewalk behind her. Her spine tingled as powerful hands vised her arms and a hand clapped over her mouth. Two men propelled her toward a gleaming white Mercedes and threw her into the back seat, climbing in on either side. The car sped away, the whole thing over a dozen heartbeats. She still had her canvas purse slung over her shoulder. The men pulled off their balaclavas.
“What is this about?” she asked, keeping her voice steady.
No response. They were big men and barely left her enough room to breathe. She glanced from side to side. One of them was beyond middle-aged and had shaggy gray hair and a flattened, misshapen nose that had obviously been broken many times—and never set. The other appeared in his twenties and looked athletic. His scalp was clean shaven. The tattoo of a snake curled around his neck and up the side of his head behind his ear. The smell of expensive seat leather mingled with body odor, onions, fish, vodka, and cigarette smoke.
“Please tell me what this is about?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” said the older one. His accent was eastern Ukrainian. Donbas.
“Are you sure you have the right person?” She stated her full name.
Silence.
A weird thought struck her. “Are you police?”
The younger man laughed. “No. We’re much nicer than them.”
The driver’s eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. He had a broad Asiatic face, maybe Mongolian. What did all this mean? Which right-wing politician or oligarch had she insulted in print most recently? Aronofsky? Lemnitzer? Potemkin? The list was long. But she hadn’t received any death threats in almost a year. If they were going to assassinate a journalist, it was usually a bullet to the back of the head in broad daylight. But other methods were used, like nerve poisoning or bombs or hacking into a car’s computer system to cause accidents.
But if this wasn’t a typical execution, what else could it be? The most obvious answer was that they wanted to torture her first. That was not unheard of with journalists. Yes, this was likely it. She groaned and felt nauseated. If she was going to suffer and die, she at least wanted to know who the bastard was.
For some reason they hadn’t blindfolded her. Not a good sign. They didn’t care what she saw. They were heading south through the residential and commercial streets of Holosiivskyi District not far from her apartment, the tree branches along the street almost bare of autumn foliage. Winter was coming quickly. Soon they were passing factories on the outskirts of the city. Then for half an hour they drove southward on the western side of the river, deeper and deeper into the countryside.
The car slowed and they turned left onto a gravel secondary road. If they continued, they would soon come to a bridge over the river. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath to steady herself. Her worst fear was of drowning. Did they know? The driver braked and turned onto an even less developed road cutting into the forest. Stones ricocheted against the wheel wells. This went on for some minutes as the brush on either side grew taller and denser.
Then they emerged into a clearing. It was small and scattered with little hillocks that could have been old burial mounds. On the far side sat a little stucco dacha with a green tin roof. A black Land Rover was already parked there. The driver pulled next to it. She closed her eyes and took three slow deep breaths, her heart pounding in her neck. She had imagined such a thing as this happening one day. Whatever her fate, she would soon know.
The driver leaned against the car and lit a cigarette as the other two men maneuvered her inside. The interior looked modern: one large room with a kitchen that had wood cabinets and a stove set in a small island. The walls were white. Dark beams crossed the ceiling. There was a bookshelf and a flat-screen television. A bald little man in a dark pinstripe suit and red tie sat on a couch watching a soccer game with the sound off. He leaped to his feet. He was short and slender except for a large belly, and he had an odd-looking mustache open in the middle.
“Ms. Kovalenko,” he said. His Ukrainian had a Russian accent. “Welcome. Release her, boys.” He motioned toward the table. “Sit, please. Let us have a drink and talk.”
“I prefer to stand. Which oligarch are you doing this for?”
“Assist the lady to sit.”
The two goons had remained standing on either side of her. They took her arms and walked her over to the table, forcing her into a chair.
“Thank you, boys,” said the little man. “You can watch the game if you like. She’s not going anywhere.”
They marched to the couch and one of them turned up the volume. The sounds of cheering filtered through the room.
The little man sat opposite her. “Tea?” he offered. “Not to worry—no poison.”
“No.”
“Or maybe vodka or wine?”
“No.”
“Seltzer with lime?”
“No.”
“A Diet Coke?”
“We are out of Diet Coke,” the older goon called over.
“Nothing,” she said. “What do you want of me?”
“Just some help. We are going to borrow your identity for a week or so. That’s all.”
“What do you mean, borrow my identity?”
The main door opened, and the Asian-looking driver lugged in two suitcases that she recognized as her own. They’d invaded her apartment after she’d left for work that morning.
“Thank you, Boris,” said the little man, switching into English. “Put them in her bedroom.”
“Which bedroom?”
“The big one, of course. She’s our guest.” He turned back to Marianna. “Boris is new. He is from Mongolia and is a very distant relation to me, thanks to a philandering cousin of mine. He can’t speak Russian or Ukrainian yet, but he did learn English, so use that to communicate with him. Your English is good, I assume?”
“Passable,” she said.
Boris opened the bedroom door with his boot and dropped her suitcases on the floor, where Marianna heard them clatter and fall over.
“Now, Ms. Kovalenko, I will tell you what you need to know,” said the little man. “An actress is going to visit the New Canterbury Medical Center in New York State to interview Dr. Forester, the dean, using your credentials as a journalist. She will tell them she is there to write a follow-up article to something you wrote in the past.”
“You want to use my identity to spy on someone. Why?”
Reaching across the table, he patted her hand. She pulled it away. He continued. “After her work there is done, you will go free, and you will use her notes to write the article. Your magazine is being told you had a sudden opportunity. That’s why you’re gone. All is being explained to everyone. Your editor is our friend. Very clean. No mess.”
“What gives you the right?” she demanded. “Who do you work for?”
“Ms. Kovalenko, just to confirm, you have never had contact with this Dr. Forester, correct?”
“I have only seen his photo when I did research.”
“Good. We will be very fair to you, my dear. When you submit this article to your magazine, we will pay you an additional five thousand American dollars, whether they decide to publish it or not. Not a bad deal, right?”
“And if I don’t go along with this, you will kill me.”
“Not quite. First, we will kill your sister, her husband, and their two daughters. We know where they live. And then you will die. The same applies should you ever divulge any of the details I have just shared with you.”
She closed her eyes, her head growing tight.
The little man continued. “Though you write nasty stories and fake news, you will not be harmed for that. This is just business. Boris, along with Ivan One and Ivan Two will not molest you. I also call them Ivan Nose and Ivan Snake, but I don’t suggest you do the same. Boris even brought your jogging clothes from your apartment, didn’t you, Boris?”
“Yes,” said Boris from the doorway to her bedroom, standing there and filling it, his arms folded across his chest.
“Of course, you will only be able to do your jogging on the little road right here where we have CCTV, and you must be out for no more than twenty minutes. Enough to work up a good sweat upon your athletic body. If you do not return, then we will go to your sister’s house.”
A terrible thought seared across her mind. “What if something happens to the actress over there?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“If she dies or is caught, will harm still come to my sister and her family?”
The little man raised his bushy brows with an impression of surprise that almost looked genuine. “If it is not you who causes the problem, your loved ones will face no danger. Solemn promise. We do not hurt our fellow man for the fun of it.” He made the sign of the cross.
“It’s Potemkin, isn’t it?” she said, unable to hold back a sob.
“I hope you will never know,” he said.
She dabbed at her eyes with her jacket sleeve.
“Boys, tell Ms. Kovalenko that my word is good.”
“His word is better even than good,” said the younger of the Ivans. “It is like fine Japanese whiskey.”
The little man rose to his feet, placing a straw fedora on his head. “Till later, Ms. K,” he said. “I’ll drop in to join you for dinner from time to time. In the meanwhile, ciao!”