Ekaterina (15 page)

Bam!

“She’s at the embassy.” Vadeem jogged in place for a moment, then lowered his hands. Ryslan picked at the paper label on the lemonade bottle.

“Is she leaving?”

Vadeem worked off his gloves and dropped them on the floor. “I don’t know.” He picked up a towel, scrubbed it across his face, and draped it over his shoulders. “And, I don’t care.” He flopped down on his sofa, a utilitarian black vinyl piece he’d picked up second-hand. The cool fabric sent a chill down his bare back. “They picked her up like she was the First Lady and I haven’t seen her since.”

“Hmm.” Ryslan paced across the room and stared out the window. “What’s Grazovich up to?”

“Sleeping off last night’s party.” Vadeem noticed an odor rising off the sofa. If he didn’t get a shower soon, he was going to alienate even himself. He pushed himself up, feeling his muscles starting to bunch after the abrupt halt in his workout. He stretched from side to side. “Any leads on the weapons contact?”

“We have a guy watching Bartyk in St. Pete, and our man on Fitzkov in Novosibersk hasn’t moved. Then again, he could be buying from a legitimate dealer. You can order Russian weapons off the Internet these days.” Ryslan grimaced. “Don’t you just love capitalism?”

Vadeem winced. Just because Russia was broke didn’t mean they had to parcel off their future. It burned him to see his country surrendering to despair. “Doesn’t it bother you even a little that Grazovich risked his neck to pull her out of customs police, just so she could sight-see around Pskov?” Vadeem shoved a hand through his hair and grimaced as it came back slimy. Shower. Now.

“What about that key? Did you ever find out what it unlocks?” Ryslan turned and finished off his lemonade.

“She doesn’t even know. Probably the deluded musings of an old man.” But from the description of the young monk, Timofea hadn’t sounded deluded.
Fulfill the promise
. It seemed eerily sane, in a cryptic sort of way.

“And you’re just going to let her go? I don’t know Vadeem. I got a gut feeling on this.”

Vadeem had more than that. Gut, heart, and soul feelings. He put a hand to his chest, remembering those amber brown eyes that drilled into him and left him gasping. That sweet smile, so hard earned, but delicate and warm when he draped his coat over her shoulders and when he’d said good-bye. Such a smile could entrance a man. . .

Vadeem slammed his fist again into the bag. Yes, that’s exactly what she’d done. Entranced him. And he’d nearly fallen face first into her little trap. The key gone, gullible Vadeem will simply rifle through top-secret files, totally abandon his common sense, his focus, his
job,
and help her uncover her family secrets.

Bam!

“I need a shower,” Vadeem said. “I’ll be in later.”

“You want me to assign another agent to tag along after her?”

“No, forget her. I’m going back to Pskov to keep my eyes on Grazovich. Whatever he wanted with her, he’s obviously lost interest.”

Ryslan saluted him with the empty bottle. “So be it, Comrade. Miss Moore is officially on her own.”

Chapter 10

Kat gripped the armrests with white knuckles. Flying on a 757 was one thing. Safe, like sitting in a giant movie theater where they served drinks and dinner then, eight hours and two movies later, she exited into a surreal foreign world, a continuation of the movie she entered on the plane.

But this little puddle jumper, an AN-2 biplane that looked like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, obliterated any elements of the surreal she’d experienced on her commercial flight. This reality of flying meant her stomach lodged in her throat, her heartbeat charged into overdrive, and her ears filled with the high-pitched whine of the engine. And she’d never before had the privilege of flying with a goat strapped in the seat behind her. The odor of a few dozen layers of barnyard filth had long since numbed her sense of smell. She just prayed the odor had not also latched itself irrevocably onto her attire.

They were going down. She could tell by the ache in her head.
Please, let us be landing and not crashing.
Across the aisle, Sveta and John Watson looked worse for the wear. Sveta had her fingers curled around her husband’s grip, her other hand white as it grasped the armrest. Her head lolled back against the headrest, her face pale and framed by blonde hair that had lost its life. She had beautiful brown eyes, Kat remembered, and the gratefulness in Sveta’s small voice told Kat she’d made the right decision. God worked in mysterious ways. That’s what Mrs. Watson had said, and Kat wholeheartedly agreed. She liked the petite woman, and her husband, John—Mr. Senator’s son. He seemed a kind fellow, perhaps shell-shocked and fighting impatience, but he, too, had given Kat a warm handshake. “I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t come along.”

That comment had sealed her decision.

No one, however, had warned her about the mode of transportation they would take to the city of Yfa, in a republic of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the new Russian Federation that few people outside of the region had ever heard of before—Bashkortostan. The orphanage was located thirty miles farther in a village called Blagoveshensk. As her ears began to pop, the suggestion of traveling by rail for two days didn’t ring horror in her like it had when Alice Renquist had mentioned it four hours earlier. The train stayed safely on the ground. On a train, food didn’t rise off the plate when the transportation hit an air pocket. And, on a train, she didn’t feel like curling in a ball and hiding under the seat.

“There it is,” she breathed to herself. They cleared the whitewash of a cloud, and the city sprawled beneath them like litter. Gray houses ringed the outside of the city, set on a circular grid that spiraled toward pale high-rises in the center. On the other side of the Belaya River, a muddy snake that slithered north and south, Kat made out the airport. Her confidence took a final nose-dive. It appeared little more than a weed-jutted runway with a two-story windowed garrison at the end. Kat instinctively dug her feet into the floorboards of the plane.

Her lunch nearly emptied on the seat as the AN-2 landed, bounced, and finally slammed to a halt.

“Wasn’t that fun?”

John Watson’s attempt at a joke. Kat gave him a wry smile.

An hour later, after a bone-jarring drive to Orphanage Number Eighty-Seven, she was still trying to find her usual good humor as she employed her sweet-talking wiles on the sentry barring them from the orphanage entrance.

Kat had tried to recover her composure in the backseat of an ancient
Lada
, an exact replica of a 1972 Volkswagen Rabbit her grandfather once owned. The attempt to smooth out her attire and frayed coiffeur in a car without shock absorbers and crammed with suitcases and gifts had shredded her already ravaged nerves. Now, the orphanage guard dressed in a worn white medical jacket and doing a linebacker move in front of the orphanage door had about three seconds before Kat completely unraveled. “But I believe the director is expecting us,” Kat explained to the elderly woman who had wore an expression the color of stone.

“I was under the impression the paperwork was completed. . .” Kat wrestled out another smile, and fought her rising tone. Maybe she should rethink her desire to do field work when she returned to New York. Then again, she’d never before heard of a field worker being barred entrance to an orphanage. Maybe it was her disheveled and slightly unsettled demeanor?

Or maybe there were details to this assignment that had been carefully omitted. She tried to muster her fading confidence. “Please, we would appreciate just five minutes to speak with the director?”

The woman eyed them as if all three had serious cases of smallpox and harbored intentions to infect her precious community. She wasn’t a big woman, but her flashing brown eyes, sharp jaw, and work-worn hands clamped on her hips had Kat at an emotional disadvantage.

Lord?
Kat thought, and looked heavenward.

“Ludmilla Petrovna, what’s the problem?”

Kat’s glance settled on an elegant, middle-aged woman with sandy brown hair and intelligent hazel eyes. She came down the stairs, curled an arm around the sentry at the door, and gave Kat a smile that seemed reasonable, even welcoming. “Can I help you?”

Kat nearly collapsed with relief. “My name is Ekaterina Moore, and this couple here,” she gestured to the two stricken foreigners beside her, “is John and Sveta Watson. They’re here to adopt a child.”

The smile warmed. “Thank you, Ludmilla. I think I can handle this.”

The older woman scraped a warning look over the foreigners as she turned.

“You’ll have to forgive her. She loves these children like her own. My name is Olga Shasliva.” She extended a hand. Her grip was firm, but gentle in Kat’s. “I’m the director here. I’ve been expecting you.” She cast a look at the Watsons, and it reflected a gentleness appropriate for their frazzled state. “So nice to see you again Mr. and Mrs. Watson,” she said in Russian. “Gleb has grown, and I am hopeful the adoption will proceed as expected.”

Kat interpreted, and relief emanated from the Watsons. John pumped Director Shasliva’s hand a moment too long, but the woman seemed to understand. “We all know how difficult it must have been for you to leave without Gleb on your last trip.”

Tears pricked Kat’s eyes. She couldn’t imagine the agony of leaving a child behind after looking into his needy eyes and feeling him wrap around your heart. No wonder Sveta appeared to teeter on an emotional tightrope.

Director Shasliva led the way into the building. “We’ll stop by Gleb’s room on the way to the office.”

Kat followed Olga and the Watsons down a long hall decorated with the cheerful drawings of butterflies, rainbows, flowers. The place was surprisingly clean. Perhaps a bit lackluster, with dull blue paint on the walls and orange and brown linoleum that looked like it had been laid in Stalin’s era, complete with peeling edges, but generally clean. Kat could smell bleach and, farther down the hall, the enticing aroma of soup, perhaps the famous Russian borscht, beckoned from a noisy room. “How many children do you have?”

“Right now, ninety-seven.”

“Ninety-seven children? In this small building?” It looked no bigger than the middle school she attended in upstate New York.

“We are divided by ages. This section is for the preschool children.” She stopped at a door with a giant paper daisy tacked the length of it. “Please don’t go in yet,” she said quietly, her face suddenly solemn. “The other children will see you and it will be difficult for them.”

Kat winced. Of course. They were taking one. Ninety-six would be left behind. “Which one is he?”

Olga pointed to a small tot, all blond spiky hair and pudgy legs, chasing a ball. He fell, giggled, and climbed back to his feet, wobbling like a top. “That’s Gleb.”

Kat watched Sveta as she spied her son again after months of separation. Surely, she was calculating his growth, grieving over lost moments and small achievements. Still, a glow washed over her face, wonder, then a smile. Tears filled her eyes. Kat couldn’t breathe for the magic of the moment.

Yes, this is what she’d always dreamed about, what she longed to be a part of. Uniting families. Perhaps that’s why her own search had consumed her thoughts for so many years.

“I’ll ask the teacher to bring Gleb to my office. You may meet him there, and we’ll get the paperwork started.”

John had to pull Sveta from the door. Kat lingered also, counting heads. She estimated over twenty toddlers playing, laughing, waddling around the room under the watchful care of three thin women in medical jackets. She noticed the lines on the faces of the older women, and the worry in the younger woman’s eyes as she watched the visitors retreat.

Tears pricked Kat’s eyes. This wasn’t easy for anyone. She could imagine the bittersweet joy of seeing a child you’ve loved and cared for since birth, even if it wasn’t your own flesh, carried off to another land. Heart-wrenching happiness.

John and Sveta settled on the sofa in Olga’s office, Sveta with a dazed, unearthly glow around her. John looked equally undone. Kat patted their clasped hands as she took the straight-backed chair. “The Watsons tell me a court date has been set for tomorrow morning at nine for the adoption finalization proceedings. Have there been any changes to the schedule since they received this word?”

Olga sat at her desk, serious now. The warmth lingered in her eyes, but she’d become the institutional mother of ninety-plus children and responsibility hued her expression. “No, all the paperwork is in order and we’ve not been notified of any changes to the court docket. We’ll plan to meet outside the judge’s chambers tomorrow morning at 8:45. Thankfully, our region was one of the first to open our doors to adoption and our local administration is favorable. I don’t foresee any problems.” She pulled out a file, began rifling through papers, checking each one.

“Actually, the previous director made my job that much easier by pushing for adoption during the early days of Glasnost. This was her dream for decades.” She looked up. “All of Gleb’s medical records appear to be in order. Since the Watson’s have already passed initial approval, the court appearance should serve as a mere formality to satisfy the legal adoption requirements. There’s nothing to be concerned about at this point. I believe they’ll find the judge to be quite cooperative. Tomorrow afternoon, we’ll need to arrange for Gleb’s new passport and, hopefully, he’ll be ready to travel to Moscow with his new mama and papa within a day or two, depending on what flight arrangements we can make.”