Twisted Reasons

Book 1: Twisted Trilogy

by Geza Tatrallyay

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Crime Fiction; Historical Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Suspense; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers; Russia; heist; nuclear; Vienna; The Third MAn

Synopsis

TWISTED REASONS, the first in a trilogy of international thrillers based on arms and human trafficking from a modern ‘rogue’ Russian state, is the tale of two college friends who get drawn into the heist of nuclear material from a former Soviet site. Arriving in Vienna to find that his friend Adam Kallay, an official at the International Atomic Energy Agency, is presumed dead, crime novelist Greg Martens teams up with Interpol Agent Anne Rossiter and Julia, Kallay’s Russian girlfriend, to solve the case and track the disappearance from a former Soviet nuclear site of enough uranium to make a bomb. The story moves from espionage entrepot Vienna to radioactivity contaminated Chelyabinsk and to front-line Georgia, as the three combat arms merchants allied to Russian secret police to prevent the stolen uranium from getting into the wrong hands. Along the way, Greg learns brutal truths about himself and his family.

Release date: November 28, 2014

Publisher: Deux Voiliers Publishing

Print pages: 286

Content advisory: Some sex scenes

Sample

Prologue

February 1949

András watched the scarlet ooze seep through the crystals of the newly fallen snow crunching beneath his feet. This was the third time he had vomited blood that day, and on this occasion, he did not even make it to the latrines. Just as well, he thought, as he spat more blood, at least out here I can breathe— although the short gasps of bitter cold air stung his lungs. The dizziness, and the fatigue too, returned, and all he wanted to do was to lie down and fall asleep right there. He leaned against the building for a moment to gather strength and kicked snow over the bloodstain to cover it. Looking up, in the Siberian twilight, he saw a guard with a huge dog pulling at a leash, both staring straight at him.

András struggled against the freezing February wind and slowly made his way back to Block 12, which he shared with a hundred or so other prisoners. Escaping from the cold through the flimsy door, he paused for a moment by the wood­burning stove to thaw out, then made his way to Row 6, where he had the top bunk on the right side. He used his meager reserves to climb up and stretch out his exhausted body to rest. Concentrating hard to fight the drowsiness clouding his mind, he turned on his side, raising his head so he could see as he used his blistered fingers to pry out a small notepad and the stubby remains of a pencil hidden between two wooden slats of his bed.

*****

The day before, as he and the others on his shift were scrubbing themselves after their work inside the reactor, András had asked Efim Pleshkov whether he could get him some paper and a writing implement so that he could compose a letter to his wife, and whether he would be willing to get it to her in the event that András did not survive.

Pleshkov had been a friend before the War; they had studied together under the great Otto Hahn, the discoverer of nuclear fission, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. Now he was one of the Russian scientists overseeing the work of the convicts.

Supervisors like Pleshkov only stayed inside the reactor for a maximum of one hour each, whereas the prisoners’ shifts lasted six grueling hours. And with each hour he worked, András felt his condition deteriorate. First had come the nausea and vomiting, then the diarrhea, now several times during each shift, turning each six­hour spell into unrelenting agony. The fever and the headaches made it that much harder to concentrate, and over the last couple of days, the intensifying dizziness and disorientation brought him to the realization that he would not be able to work much longer at this task. The pitiful look that Pleshkov had given him at the end of the last shift only seemed to confirm this.

Where had the sickly looking convicts in his Block from the previous shift been taken to just a couple of days ago? After five days, he and his fellow shift workers now looked equally wasted. He hoped they would all be moved to the camp infirmary; they were in desperate need of medical attention. But he knew enough of Soviet inhumanity during and after the War ...

What was this debilitating chore they were performing? András had studied chemistry and physics; his specialty had been nuclear fission. He was one of many prisoners here at this gulag near Chelyabinsk—many thousands— and their charge was to construct what he concluded must be some kind of reactor complex. When he first arrived, the guards had questioned him—and this is when he had again met Pleshkov, who was present at some of the interrogations—to see whether his knowledge could be useful, but since he was relegated to the drudgery of laying brick and pouring cement, he surmised that the Soviet scientists by now knew much more than he did. No doubt from their spies who were stealing American and British secrets and from the many scientists they had captured across the occupied countries. They did not need him. He was glad not to be forced to contribute his knowledge to what he concluded must be the Soviet effort to construct a nuclear bomb.

Early in the morning, nine days ago, half the prisoners in his Block were suddenly given orders to assemble outside and were led off towards Unit A, which András suspected was the one completed reactor. When he got back that evening from construction labor on another building, those same convicts were lying motionless in their bunk beds, visibly weaker and more spent than usual. All he could get out of the one or two who would speak to him was that they had been taken into the reactor and told to remove some rods and extract metal blocks from them, and that they had felt sicker and sicker during the day.

2

Three days later, András’ shift was ordered to perform the same terrible task. Inside the reactor, they had to haul, one by one, ten­meter long, vertical black rods—András was sure there were more than a thousand of them—out of the coolant water, open them up and manually remove forty or so pellets from each. The anxiety among the Soviet staff was palpable, and at one moment that first day, he was surprised to see the legendary Igor Kurchatov—who András knew from Pleshkov had been placed in charge of the entire Soviet nuclear effort by Stalin—inside the reactor chastising several convicts.

On the way out that day, he had asked Pleshkov what it was they were doing, but he either did not know or, more likely, just did not want to tell his friend. András, though, was convinced that something had gone terribly wrong in the reactor, and that he and the other prisoners were being used to help put it right. It was only on the third day of feeling very ill and weak that he dared admit to himself that the blocks they were handling must be some highly radioactive material.

*****

András could barely stand up by the time the head guard blew the whistle to end the shift. He and his working partner, Grigor—a Russian soldier who had been captured by the Germans, liberated by the Americans and sent back to the Soviet Union—had just managed to complete the dismantling and emptying of one rod between them, but he was glad to be ushered towards the washrooms. He looked around for Pleshkov; he was nowhere to be seen. András made his way to the toilet—a bit more civilized than the latrines behind the Block—and, as had been the case over the last few days, blood came out from both ends. He felt faint and dizzy as he struggled to get up, and went to wash himself thoroughly with the block of lye provided for the purpose. As he dried himself with one of the sandpaper­like communal towels, Pleshkov appeared in the doorway. Their eyes met. András went over to the Russian, pulled out the sheets of folded notepaper and said, “Would you be kind enough ...”

“I can’t promise, but I’ll do what I can.” Pleshkov quickly took the letter, glancing around to see if anyone was watching and tucked it into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

*****
Two military trucks were waiting outside the door, with a line of guards toting

3

machine guns every few meters delineating a path toward them through the snow. The prisoners were ordered aboard. András wearily climbed up the back of the second vehicle and sat down on the cold and slushy floor along with twenty­five others.

“Thank God. Finally, they’re taking us to the hospital,” he heard one of the prisoners say in the rear.

Three guards climbed in; two others closed up the back. The trucks sped away, motors grinding, wheels sliding on the snowy road. András tried to see out, but they were traveling away from the camp. He had the sense that they were going toward the periphery of the complex. The prisoner next to him threw up, mostly blood; he stared dispassionately at the red slime, as the jostling of the truck caused it to flow toward him.

The vehicle stopped and there was some shouting, then it started again. A turn to the right onto a small, unplowed road: the engine struggled as it forced the rough treads of the large tires through the thick snow. András glimpsed the icing sugar­capped conifers of the Siberian forests march by, as the trucks made their way deeper and deeper into uninhabited territory.

Finally, they came to a halt. Motors turned off, and for a moment, there was only the silence of the taiga. Then yelling—two guards opened the back, and they were ordered to dismount. András was shoved forward into the deep snow by one of the soldiers and when he struggled to his feet, he saw that the prisoners from the first truck were stumbling along a sort of dam or spur that led across a large frozen lake, with the machine guns of their guards pointing at them.

He was prodded onto the spur by a Kalashnikov­carrying soldier. He looked around and down on either side, but it was a good four meters to the ice. And he was so, so tired. Even if he were able to jump and not break a leg, what then? Escape was not possible; there were too many armed guards, and he was much too weak to run or fight.

The rat­tat­tat of machine gun fire suddenly violated the stillness of the forest, and András saw those furthest out on the dam fall to the ground or down onto the ice of the frozen lake. Prisoners dropped in rapid succession, like a row of dominoes. András tried, but could not move, and the last sensation he had was that the crimson paint spilling across the canvas of white snow and ice was rapidly advancing toward him and would soon envelope him.

Lily, I love you ...

4

Chapter 1

February 2016

This was Anne Rossiter’s favorite part of the day. After finishing her hour­ long, after­work routine of stretching, weights and the elliptical, she was ready to start the evening. Time to relax, play, read. She relished these few moments of transition in her daily routine: the winding down, the recovery, the cleansing.

Still breathing hard, elated from the rush, Anne peeled her top and shorts from her sweat­soaked body and caught a glimpse of her radiant cheeks, shapely torso and long, well­toned legs in the full­length mirror on the bathroom door. She was in terrific shape. She had to be. As an Interpol agent, she had to undergo an annual test for physical conditioning. She prided herself on being number one or two each year among female officers in the region. Buying the second­hand machine and a cheap set of barbells for use at home had made it just that much easier.

Anne was now in her third year with Interpol in Vienna and she had been glad to accept the posting to the former Imperial capital. Vienna’s mix of high culture and underground activity made it interesting both personally and professionally. Fluent in both German and Russian, she was equally at home watching a play by Grillparzer in the Burgtheater or eavesdropping on the Russian mafia laundering money through real estate purchases in Kitzbühel.

For all its rediscovered elegance, Vienna had retained its seedy side. It was still an entrepôt for trade in everything from women to weapons. As it had been in the immediate post­war years, it was still a hub of espionage and intelligence operations.

Anne took longer than her usual five minutes in the shower, relishing the sensual pleasure of water flowing over flesh, until she heard the first notes of the Radetzky March from her mobile. She rarely got calls after hours. She grabbed a towel, and wrapping it around her torso, scurried across the bedroom to her night table where she had left the phone.

“Hello. Guten Abend. Anne Rossiter.” A small pool was starting to form around her feet.

“Anne, it’s Adam.” The familiar but unexpected American voice blasted excitedly into her ear. “Sorry to disturb, but I’m glad I caught you.” Adam Kallay was her contact at the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, charged with securing nuclear material across the former Soviet Union.

“Why, what’s up, Adam?” Anne was getting cold. She pressed the speaker button and rested the mobile on the night table.

“Anne, I just had a call from Fazkov. You remember Andrei, the physicist from Mayak, your blind date at the IAEA ball a couple of years back?” Anne recalled the entire embarrassing evening only too well. How could she forget?

“Yes?”

“He just called to say that another fifty pounds of highly enriched uranium cannot be accounted for at Mayak. He didn’t want to say any more over the phone.”

“That’s enough for half a bomb, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I asked him to come to Vienna so we could see where we go from here. He’ll try to get a flight tomorrow. Luckily, his visa’s still good.”

Anne heard Adam clear his throat and hesitate before he continued: “Anne, could I come by now to discuss this?”

To gain time, Anne coughed several times. “Adam, no. It’s not a good time. It’s late.” Though tempted, she did not want to get into another awkward situation with him.

“Well, how about tomorrow morning?”
“Tomorrow’s good. Café Central at nine?”
“Okay, nine it is.”
Anne turned the speaker off and went back to the bathroom. This was

2

serious. Two weeks ago, just less than ten pounds of uranium had disappeared. Again, it was Fazkov who had noticed the discrepancy. And two Chechens had been caught crossing the border into Abkhazia. After some persuasion, they admitted that the nuclear material had come from Mayak.

And now, this. Someone, somewhere, was trying to get their hands on enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb. There were going to be more thefts, that was for sure.

Tomorrow, first thing, she needed to reread Adam’s report on the earlier robbery. The two had to be connected.

*****

Brushing her teeth, Anne thought again of Adam. Maybe she should have let him come this evening. But no, she had to keep to her resolution not to mix the personal with the professional.

She had liked him in the beginning, when she had hoped that their work relationship might develop into something more. He had good genes and great prospects. He claimed to be descended from Hungarian nobility, was in his thirty­fifth year and strikingly handsome with blond hair and piercing blue eyes. An undergraduate degree from Harvard and a doctorate in nuclear physics from MIT, a well­paid job in an international organization—not bad at all. Yes, she had entertained notions of a possible relationship right up until that evening, the night of the IAEA ball in the Hofburg, two Februarys ago, just a few months after she had started her job in Vienna ...