The Fourth Courier Read online

  “You sound tired.”

  “I am, and I won’t be pretty in the morning.”

  “You were pretty last week.”

  “That was pre–morning sickness. You want a description?”

  “No.”

  “Before I put on makeup?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “I should get Ned to take a picture.”

  “It might ruin your marriage.”

  “You’re right, bad idea,” she said, and hung up.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THEIR TIRES RUMBLED ON THE girdered Poniatowski Bridge. Dark clouds extinguished the dying sun on the horizon.

  The driver had to concentrate on staying between lane markers that had been worn away. “If you sick, you should go to better hospital,” he advised Jay.

  “My guy is already dead, but thanks.”

  As they cut through Praga’s back streets, the driver pointed out landmarks of the who-slept-here variety, but in his account, it was where Solidarity’s leaders had been arrested, held indefinitely, or assassinated. He pulled to a stop and asked how long to wait, and Jay told him to return to the embassy.

  The hospital’s glass doors reflected the gray dusk. Too often he was in hospitals interrogating the dying or IDing the dead, and knew the antiseptic-smelling foyer all too well. He crossed to the information desk. Someone at the embassy had written morgue in Polish for him on a slip of paper, which he now showed to a woman far too big for her schoolgirl’s desk. The note earned him a wave through a set of swinging doors. Then he was lost and showed the note to anyone who looked employed, following their vague directions into the hospital’s dungeon-like bowels, where he turned a corner and breathed embalming fluid. He didn’t need Detective Kulski pacing in the corridor to tell him that he had found the morgue.

  “Dr. Nagorski is waiting,” Kulski said.

  Jay followed him inside. The room was cold. Bloodied bandages had been discarded on the floor. A fluorescent light, hanging from two short steel chains, illuminated the dead man on a metal trolley. He was shadowless, bone white. A violent red wound, carved and raggedly resewn, bisected him from his Adam’s apple to the patch of hair in his groin.

  He shook hands with the pathologist. Dr. Nagorski was eighty at the youngest, and impatient in a way that could be mistaken for spry. “Shall we begin?” he asked. “I speak English, Mr. Porter, and will make my summary in English. Unless you prefer Polish?”

  Jay knew the Polish words for many body parts, yet they hardly seemed meant for the same species, so crudely were they rendered on the trolley. “English, please,” he said.

  The doctor picked up calipers and positioned himself at the victim’s head. “Caucasian male, it is obvious, late sixties. Two hundred ten centimeters tall and approximately eighty-five kilos.” Tall and skinny, Jay translated, and listened as the doctor inventoried routine characteristics: general state of health (fair), distinguishing scars (none), no missing limbs. “I estimate his time of death between midnight and four. With the cold, it is difficult to be more precise. He died from a bullet wound to his heart.” The doctor touched the calipers to the chest wound. Made at close range, it was clean, the flesh below it discolored from the heart’s last explosive pulse.

  Dr. Nagorski grasped the victim’s ruined cheek with the calipers. “He was dead before his face was cut. There is little bruising and he swallowed no blood.” Before relinquishing the cheek, he added, “The dental work is Russian.”

  “All the others were cut first?” Jay wanted to verify.

  “I only examined the third victim, but yes, I read all the pathology reports. Another difference is the trajectory of the bullet. In this man, it is up, not straight into the heart, and he was shot from seven to ten centimeters, not—”

  In Polish he asked Kulski for a word.

  “Point blank,” the detective told him.

  “He was not shot point blank,” the pathologist continued. “Also the others had gunpowder on their flesh, but on this man, it is on his clothes.”

  “What about clothing tags? Or any ID?”

  “There was no ID, and like the other victims, all the clothing tags are removed. Jacket, shirt, underwear, and all very cleanly cut away.”

  The pathologist switched to Polish to say something to Kulski, and the expression on the detective’s face changed as if he had hit a mental speed bump. They spoke briefly before Dr. Nagorski resumed his report. “The gun was not a TT this time. The damage to the tissue is much greater. It has the signature of a P-83.”

  “Police issue,” Kulski said tightly. “They are not sold legally, and there’s only a small black market for them. Before a gun is issued, we shoot it three times and keep the bullets.”

  “You have a ballistics fingerprint for every P-83?”

  “That way, the guns can be traced.”

  “Which explains the small market for them. Are you suggesting that maybe a policeman is involved?”

  “It has to be considered.”

  “Too bad we don’t have a bullet.”

  “We do,” spoke up Dr. Nagorski, grinning with his own cleverness. He displayed a metal lump in a sandwich bag. “It was stopped by his shoulder.”

  Kulski took it out of the bag to examine the misshapen slug. He handed it to Jay, who asked, “Is your lab good enough to get the ballistics off this?”

  “It may be too damaged.”

  “Our forensics unit in DC might be able to get something. They invent equipment.”

  “I will request clearance from Director Husarska.”

  “Clearance?”

  “For releasing evidence.”

  Dr. Nagorski turned the dead man’s hand to display a surgical cut adjacent to the little finger. “Here is another surprise.”

  “The callus?” Jay asked.

  “Not a callus, a sixth finger.”

  “A what?” the other men asked.

  “The last victim had the same thing, and like you, I thought it was a callus, so I didn’t investigate. In fact, it is a rare genetic condition.”

  “Are you suggesting that the couriers were related?”

  “There is almost no other explanation possible.”

  “Could radiation exposure cause it?” asked Kulski.

  “No,” Jay answered. “Deformities caused by radiation are not passed on genetically. How they assert themselves is random.”

  “Because of his age, and the ages of the other victim I examined, I would guess this man to be his father,” Dr. Nagorski elaborated. “Now for the radiation!”

  With a gamesman’s glee, he unfolded chairs and made the two lawmen sit and lift their feet. He waved a Geiger counter wand around Jay’s shoes, prompting an occasional click. “Obviously you are here only a few days. Your shoes sound like Warsaw before Chernobyl.” Then he tested the detective’s shoes and the counter popped like popcorn. “Unfortunately, this has become background radiation for Warsaw. Now listen.” The doctor pulled the victim’s shoes from an evidence bag and ran his wand over them. The counter sizzled. “He has walked through a contaminated area many times, yet his body has little trace of it except for his hands.” To demonstrate, he ran the counter the length of the dead man and there was hardly a tick until his hands set it off again.

  “That’s the pattern for someone who works at a nuclear plants,” Jay spoke up. “He would have scrubbed when he left a contaminated area, so there is not much on his body. His shoes picked up radiation that inevitably leaks outside. His hands are hot because he was delivering something hot.”

  “Also, his teeth are very loose, which suggests radiation exposure,” continued the pathologist. He pointed the calipers at the man’s foot. “He twisted his ankle; you can see the bruising. It occurred before he died, otherwise he would not bruise so much, and I found these.” The doctor displayed a bag of mint candy.

  Kulski examined it. “It’s Russian.”

  “It’s the first proof where he’s from,” Jay said.

  “I h
ave prepared a report for you,” the doctor said and handed it to Detective Kulski. “Do you have questions?”

  “I will,” Jay answered. “May I take some pictures?”

  “Of course, but don’t ask him to say ‘cheese.’”

  Jay mused on morgue humor—he had heard a lot of it—as he shot his Polaroids of the man’s cut face and mysterious sixth finger. They thanked Dr. Nagorski and left him to his grim tasks.

  Outside the hospital, Kulski offered, “I can drive you to the embassy or your hotel.”

  “I can take a taxi.”

  “It’ll give us a chance to talk.”

  “In that case, the embassy.”

  Detective Kulski led them to a proper police cruiser.

  “Why the upgrade?” Jay asked.

  “I’m not undercover at the hospital.”

  They got in, and Kulski reached to open the glove compartment. “Before I forget, I have these for you,” he said, and handed Jay copies of evidence photographs of the fourth courier’s murder’s scene. “I will also ask Eva to make a copy of Dr. Nagorski’s report for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kulski pulled onto the road to navigate Praga’s congested streets. “It doesn’t make sense that the labels are removed,” he said, thinking aloud. “Especially so cleanly. The killer would need to move his body and open his clothes, and there was no evidence of that.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Jay replied. “Someone didn’t want the couriers traceable, even to an underpants factory. The labels were cut out before they left home, and I think I know where home is. My assistant in DC has uncovered some missing uranium at one of Russia’s reactors. I can’t tell you where.”

  “Is it enough uranium for a bomb?”

  “A small one, or enough to create havoc in a lot of places. If the fuel is delivered efficiently, even a small amount can make a city uninhabitable.”

  Their tires hit the bridge and rumbled noisily. Night had swallowed the river. Only headlights on the cars speeding along the riverside drive revealed its course in the void below.

  “So last night, below us, there might have been an atomic bomb?” Kulski asked.

  “It has to be considered.”

  They came off the bridge and passed stores displaying cardboard likenesses of products they’d sell if they had them. Kulski deftly steered through a clogged roundabout to shoot past the Forum Hotel; in its shadows, sallow hookers in their sixties competed with twentysomethings for potential tricks heading inside. Soon they merged with Aleje Ujazdowskie, lined with stately facades of gracious mansions outlined by virgin snow.

  “I am afraid for my family,” Kulski said. “We have a cottage at the lakes. Perhaps they would be safer there. In an instant, Warsaw could be annihilated.”

  “I don’t know how far away the lakes are, but yes, it would probably be safer, especially if we’re dealing with only a dirty bomb. A fullfledged nuclear device, that’s a different story.”

  Then men fell silent, pondering the gravity of the situation. Kulski pulled up to the curb at the embassy.

  “I have to believe we will always manage to prevent our annihilation,” Jay said. “If we’re only postponing it, why bother?” He got out of the cruiser.

  “What would you do if your sons were in Warsaw tonight?”

  “I’d ask for a key to your cottage,” he answered and closed the car door.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BACK AT HIS DESK, JAY spread out his few Polaroids of the autopsy and gave them a quick look before reaching into a drawer for his case files. He opened the one marked #3 first, using a magnifying glass to search the man’s hands for a bump constituting a sixth finger. He thought he could make it out, but it might have been the power of suggestion. The photos of the first two victims were inconclusive.

  Kurt tapped on his door and walked in. “I promised you this.” He handed him a thin file. “We have more on Mladic. He’s been watched for a while. These are only my CliffsNotes.”

  Jay opened the file. Kurt had stapled four photographs inside its cover. The earliest—Mladic at his handsome slimmest—was a formal portrait in his military uniform. His clear blue eyes stared at the camera from under the bill of his cap. The other photographs were more recent, showing a middle-aged man who’d gained weight but not indecently. In one he was out of uniform, sitting at an outdoor café wearing a leisure suit. “Take away his stars,” Jay remarked, “and he could be an insurance salesman.”

  “That picture was taken two years ago on Hvar.”

  “In Yugoslavia? Funny, Husarska has a poster of it hanging in her office. She says it’s her dream to live there. It’s an island, right?”

  “It’s become a big destination for Eastern Europeans now that they can travel.” Kurt picked up Jay’s headshot of the dead man and handed it to him. “Meet Dr. Sergej Ustinov, chief weapons designer at Kosmonovo. He was expected at a conference in Reutov two days ago and never showed up. Apparently he had designed a suitcase atomic bomb and was expected to display it.”

  “Is he missing with the bomb?”

  “It might be two bombs. Apparently he left Kosmonovo with two suitcases.”

  “You have surveillance on the ground in Kosmonovo?”

  “We try. You up for a workout?”

  “I’m up for a stiff drink. Autopsies and missing bombs can do that to you.”

  “A workout will help relieve stress.”

  “All my gear’s at the hotel.”

  “I have extra shorts and a towel.”

  Jay shrugged. “I guess I don’t have an excuse.”

  Kurt guided them through a labyrinth of corridors and down a stairwell to a basement that had its own maze of rooms. On the way, Jay filled him in on the missing Russian physicist and the highlights of Dr. Nagorski’s autopsy. “Have you ever heard of someone having a sixth finger?” he asked.

  “Yeah, the last king of Greece.”

  “He did?”

  “It’s a little bump on the side of the hand, isn’t it?”

  “More like a bone spur. The third and fourth couriers both had one, and possibly the others. I can’t be sure from the photos.”

  “Meaning what? They were related?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “That’s a weird twist. Here we are.” Kurt opened a door to reveal a room bright with fresh white paint and mirrored walls. Alongside a bench press laid an orderly row of free weights, and in a corner was a stack of red exercise mats.

  The room was hot and Jay loosened his tie. “I don’t think we need a workout to build up a sweat.”

  “All the heating for the embassy runs through those,” Kurt said, and pointed to the pipes crisscrossing the ceiling.

  “You set this up since you’ve been here?”

  “Remember, I’m the Security Officer. Security gets anything it wants.”

  “It’s pretty spiffy with all the mirrors.”

  “That’s one reason why there’s no money for a shower curtain.”

  “And no one else uses this place?”

  “Maybe they’re waiting for a shower curtain. We change in here.”

  A second door led into the locker room. Not much larger than a walk-in closet, it had two short banks of lockers separated by a bench, and a musty shower stall at the far end.

  Kurt opened a combination lock and handed Jay gym shorts. “Washed recently.”

  “I’m glad for that.”

  They sat on the bench facing opposite walls and pulled off their shoes and socks, tossing them into lockers. Then they were back on their feet slipping off shirts and pants. “Now you can see the full extent of the damage,” Kurt said, skipping his fingers across the shiny welts that peppered his chest. “In braille it says ‘From Beirut with love.’”

  They slipped on gym shorts and returned to the other room, where Kurt grabbed a couple of the red mats. “Let’s spread all these out so we have plenty of room.”

  Soon they’d covered the floor.

 
“Ten minutes warm-up?”

  They sat on the mats to stretch—reaching for toes, rolling heads, twisting shoulders. In the overheated room, they were soon sweaty, their backs making sucking sounds every time they came off the mats. Each knew they were assessing each other. Except for his scarred chest, the CIA man was smooth and muscled, with veins etching his ebony body. Jay was in good shape, too, though not so obsessed with exercise that he went around the world building embassy gyms. He figured he could handle anything the CIA man threw at him.

  “Carl invited Mladic to a little party tomorrow evening,” Kurt said. “You’re expected to show up, too. He’s billing it as informal cocktails with some of the Country Team. As added bait, he’s holding it at the official residence.”

  “So he liked my idea. Do you think Mladic will bite?”

  “He already did. Hook, line, and sinker.”

  Jay got to his feet to stretch at the waist. “Whatever the last courier brought, Mladic obviously didn’t get. He wouldn’t be sticking around for a cocktail party—he’d be home playing with his bomb—which means the exchange wasn’t made. Whatever he had to trade must still be in his room. It’s probably a suitcase full of money.”

  Jay laced his fingers behind his head and, pacing, flapped his bent elbows like butterfly wings. “Can you get into Mladic’s room? Not you personally, but Langley. You seem to have a good network in place here.”

  “Anyplace else, we could bribe our way in, but not the lodge where he stays. The same manager has been running the place for over forty years, watching the same people’s comings and goings—literally. Everyone assumed the KGB had installed cameras for blackmail purposes, but the manager himself never betrayed anyone. When the place was privatized, he bought it, and he’s not going to start betraying his best customers now. You’d be amazed by what struggling old commies are willing to pay for a red-flocked fuck down memory lane. Ready for weights?”

  “Ready.”

  “Three lifts each, and we add ten pounds after each round until the weights win. Where do you like to start?”

  “One forty. But let’s add twenty pounds to two hundred, and ten after that.”