Read Online Death Wave by Stephen Coonts - Free Book Online Page A

morgue attendant?”
She nodded.
“That’s horrible!”
“It’s not so bad.” She shrugged. “My … clients don’t talk back, and never give me trouble. The pay is … not too bad, and Dr. Shmatko is teaching me a lot, so that I can go to school and be a doctor myself one day. But first I hope to save enough to get back to the United States someday. It’s … life is hard, here.”
“What about your father? Where is he?”
She shrugged. The expression on her face, behind her eyes, was heart-wrenching. “I don’t know. It’s been two years now. I stopped getting letters, oh, two or three months after he sent me away. I think … I think …”
She was trembling, on the verge of tears.
“It’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Maria. Maria Alekseyevna. My friends … my friends call me Masha.”
It was, Akulinin knew, a common Russian nickname for Maria. “I’m Ilya,” he told her. “I might be able to help you.”
“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here. You’re not army, are you?”
“Not exactly.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re a spy! Who do you work for?”
“I really can’t—”
“You’re with the American CIA! Right?”
“Something like that.” He looked at the corpses on the nearby tables. “I am here to photograph these bodies. So … are you going to turn me in?”
“Of course not! It isn’t every day a girl gets to meet a real-life James Bond! Especially one who grew up in her old neighborhood!”
He pulled out his mini camera and walked over to one of the stainless steel tables. He’d managed to get a shot of one of the bodies earlier, while Charlie was sparring with the Russian officer, but not the others. One of them, in fact, was still anonymously wrapped up in an olive green body bag. He took several more photos of the first two from different angles. The two bodies already removed from the body bags were male Caucasians, still dressed in civilian clothing. Both were heavily tattooed on their arms. One sported a bushy Stalinesque mustache; the other was clean-shaven, his wide-open eyes pale gray against a bright red mask. There was a lot of blood, with deep gashes in their faces and arms.
“This one had a bullet wound,” Masha pointed out, touching the skull of the mustached man and turning it so he could see. “Left temple. Definitely fatal.”
“I … see.” Akulinin wasn’t particularly bothered by death, but the young woman’s casual attitude was a bit disturbing.
“Did Vasilyev tell you anything about these guys?”
“No. Just that he wanted complete path workups, and for them to be checked for radiation. I don’t know why.”
“Well, I can help with that much.” Pocketing the camera, he reached down and pulled up the cuff of his uniform trousers, revealing the small radiation counter strapped to his ankle. Unfastening the chrome-colored device, he held it up, peered closely at a switch on the side, and flicked it.
“It was set to transmit data … somewhere else. Now it will play what it picks up for us, and record it for transmission later.”
Holding the counter like a wand, he passed it over the body in front of him. There was little reaction over the man’s face and shoulders, but his hands, both of them, elicited a sharp clattering static from the device.
“Interesting,” Akulinin said. He stepped over to the other table, passed the counter over the body, and got the same response.
“What does it mean?” Masha asked.
“That these two guys were handling a leaking crate not too long ago.”
“A crate of what?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“These two are Organizasiya, you know. Mafiya .”
He looked at her, surprised.
She touched one blood-smeared arm. “The tattoos.” Reaching across, she swiftly unbuttoned the man’s shirt and tugged it open. His chest, as well as his upper arms, was a solid mass of intricate tattoos. He could see a rose on the body’s chest, a skull, a dagger or sword, delicately interwoven floral designs