Private Moscow (Private 15)

He closed the desk, put the book on the lid and brushed the worst of the ice off the cover. Dinara made out a bright yellow masthead and a pair of blank eyes above a giant, gaping mouth.

“I know this,” Jack said. “It’s a Goosebumps book.” He read the words at the top of the masthead. “R. L. Stine.” His fingers tracked to the text at the foot of the cover. “Night of the Living Dummy.”

Jack stood upright and fixed Dinara with a puzzled look.

“Why is there a child’s pencil case and an American kids’ book in a maximum-security military base?” he asked.

CHAPTER 72

WE SEARCHED THE rest of the base as thoroughly as we could, but in the end the freezing conditions defeated us, and we left without going inside two of the hangars. The others had all been empty, and apart from the desk in what we assumed had once been a classroom, we discovered nothing of note.

I struggled to imagine what Ernie Fisher had been doing there, and had even more difficulty picturing Karl Parker at the base.

It was a little after 3 p.m. when we returned to the idling car, which was almost out of fuel. Our journey back to Volkovo took fifteen minutes. There had been no fresh snowfall and I’d dug out the worst drifts on our way to the base.

We found Leonid waiting in the bakery. He was sitting at a small table enjoying a coffee and pastry, chatting to the owner, who stood behind a display counter.

“Anything?” Leonid asked when we entered.

“We found a classroom and an old American children’s book,” I said. “Nothing else.”

“Kofe?” the baker asked.

Finally, a word I could understand. I shook my head. “No, thanks,” I replied. “We should get going,” I said to Dinara and Leonid. “Get back to Moscow. See if we can pick up any leads. I want us to look into Ernie Fisher’s work at the embassy.”

Leonid got to his feet.

“You find anything?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “The people I spoke to were junior personnel. Gate guards, patrolmen. None of them knew about any of the classified activities at the base. And they didn’t recognize anyone in the photo.”

Leonid settled his check, and we left the bakery, got in the truck and headed south. We filled up at a gas station not far outside town, and as we sped toward Moscow in the fading light, I tried to put the pieces together.

Karl Parker had asked me to New York to tell me a secret, but he’d been killed before we could speak. If Madame Agafiya and the Volkovo bar owner’s testimony was to be trusted, it seemed likely Karl knew Ernie Fisher and Elizabeth Connor, and that they might have met in Russia, where Fisher seemed to have spent some time in a maximum-security military base. If Fisher had been a Russian operative, why had he been killed by one of his own?

I sat in the back of the truck, turning over scenarios, while Leonid drove. After a couple of hours, he and Dinara traded, and another three hours later, I took the wheel. It was 9 p.m., and we were a little under one hundred miles from Moscow when my phone rang. I pulled to the side of the dark, deserted road and took the call.

“Jack, it’s Victoria. Justine Smith said I should call.”

“Victoria, how are you and Kevin holding up?”

She sighed. “It seems wrong, but you eat, you sleep, you do the mundane things that need to get done. I always thought grief was all-consuming, but life forces its way in.”

“I’m sorry, Victoria,” I said. “I wish I could have done something.”

“You’re doing enough,” she replied. “Sorry it took me a while to return your call. Kevin and I have been staying with my folks.”

“I wanted to ask you about Karl’s childhood,” I said. “He talk about it much?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I couldn’t tell her what we’d discovered. Not yet. Not without more evidence.

“We’re just running full background on all the victims,” I replied.

“He didn’t like talking about it,” she said. “His parents died in a car crash when he was seven, and he didn’t have any other family, so he went into the foster system.”

“I didn’t know that.”