Traffyck (58 page)

Ukrainian Village, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Business had been good this evening at Humboldt Ukrainian Restaurant. The main room was filled, the back room reserved for The Hornet’s Nest Reunion. At least this was what Lazlo Horvath, who lived across the street, had insisted on calling it when he’d reserved the room. Several from the main room inquired about the sign outside the door, but the owner and staff simply shrugged their shoulders. The Hornet’s Nest Reunion was a private party, and that was that. Now, near closing time, when the headwaiter for the reunion came out with the paid check and a generous tip, staff began preparing to leave and the owner closed the till, entering the last paid check and logging off the restaurant’s computer system.

Inside the room labeled The Hornet’s Nest Reunion, Lazlo stood, somewhat unsteadily, and proposed a final toast in Ukrainian. “To all who worked so hard… To all who survived… To the parents of the missing … To the Chernobyl refugees in their new home in Ivankiv … To Lyudmilla and Lena and Nadia in their new home with their new grandmother … To Guri, who came to work and lived in Chicago … To the violin and the AK-47 and Opus Dei and the SBU and even to those like Ivan and Vakhabov’s mercenaries, who made it to their true home in prison … To Vasily, who will get out soon and become normal. There were so many victims. Vasily told me of one, a woman named Katya who cared for Chernobyl victims from the beginning … To Ukrainian Orthodox Christmas … To Mariya teaching Janos how to ride his bicycle… And, especially, to Eva Polenkaya for making a special trip to visit me.” Lazlo paused, still holding his glass high. “But most importantly, to the memory of Eva Polenkaya’s grandson, Alek, who, like Katya and so many others, have gone to God …”

Janos and Eva both stood and drank, but they also held Lazlo up so he would not tip over backwards while draining his glass of vodka. Lyudmilla, Lena, Nadia, and Guri, who had been laughing, went silent and took a sip. Mariya went for Lazlo’s coat and helped him into it. The young people went out the door and into the street first. It was snowing large flakes, and Nadia twirled around with her arms extended. Janos stayed on one side of Lazlo, while Eva stayed on his other side. But once out on the sidewalk with fresh, cold air in him, Lazlo was steady.

“Be careful, you girls, and you, too, Guri. Watch for traffic.” Lazlo turned and hugged Janos and Mariya in turn. “Enjoy one another tonight, and we will see you tomorrow.” Lazlo grabbed Eva’s arm. “Come, La Strada woman, let us cross and go up to my room.”

Everyone laughed and scattered into the neighborhood, the young people to their dance club, Janos and Mariya to their hotel room, and Lazlo and Eva to his apartment. Suddenly, Lazlo stopped in the middle of the street.

“What is it?” asked Eva.

“I forgot to toast Jermaine. We are standing where he died, and I forgot to toast him.”

“You toasted my grandson. We are both in our sixth decade. I am a widow, and you are a widower. We forget names, but not memories.”

As if planned somewhere in city hall or higher up, the timing of stoplights left an opening and there were no cars on the block in front of Lazlo’s apartment. He held up an imaginary glass, and Eva, seeing this, did the same.

“To Jermaine,” said Lazlo. “And to all others who break free and fly with the angels.”

Both Lazlo and Eva drank from their imaginary glasses just as the stoplight to the north changed to green.

“That was the purest vodka I’ve ever tasted,” said Lazlo.

Eva laughed and pulled Lazlo’s hand as they continued across the street. “Come, Lazlo. I read recently that to be in one’s sixties is now the new forties. Therefore, let us go to bed.”

Traffic was coming, and they ran the rest of the way. After they jumped up onto the curb, they turned and laughed and stood on the sidewalk to kiss.

The two Chicago detectives in their unmarked car held paper coffee cups as they watched the group exit the Humboldt Ukrainian Restaurant. While the others scattered, they stayed and watched Lazlo Horvath and Eva Polenkaya make their way across the street and finally enter his apartment building. They both stared up and waited for a light to come on in his apartment.

“So what’s the story on watching this Gypsy guy and his wealthy La Strada widow?” asked the detective in the passenger seat.

“The alderman and the chief want to make sure no one comes around for a while. The chief said something about these two stepping on some trafficking and Russian Mafia toes. He’ll never admit it, but the order to protect them came from the Feds.”

“No kidding? I guess the old man and old lady are pretty tough.”

“I guess.”

“The Russian Mafia are rough fucks.”

“Yeah, they are. The chief’s even got Desmond and Havlik watching our backs.”

“Inhuman is what they fucking are … Not Desmond and Havlik. I mean traffickers.”

“I agree.”

“You want more coffee before that place closes up?”

“Sure.”

“Michael Beres skillfully leads us into the fragmented, frustrating world of the injured brain, giving us an engrossing story that blends violence with compassion, and an outcome that suggests hope is something worth clinging to.”

—David J. Walker, Edgar-nominated author of
many novels, including the
Wild Onion, Ltd
. series.

Retired government agents in Florida cling to a decades-old secret that threatens to wreak havoc on the American political system.

A right-brain stroke victim related to a high profile mobster dies mysteriously at a Chicago rehabilitation facility.

A fellow rehab patient with a left-brain stroke who was a detective in his former life launches his own investigation.

The detective’s wife, desperate to help her husband connect to his past, joins the investigation, makes very large waves, and is kidnapped. An environmental activist is murdered while driving his hybrid vehicle to a clandestine meeting. An aide at the rehab facility, who stumbles into the plot while ripping off the health care system, becomes yet another victim. Saint Mel in the Woods Rehabilitation Facility, aptly nicknamed Hell in the Woods by residents and employees, is the last place you’d expect violence on this scale.

The mob, family legacy, health care scams, a troubled environment, crooked politics, and federal agents authorized to commit murder … Why is it all zeroing in on a rehabilitation facility?

Final Stroke. The ultimate in stroke rehab … Figure it out, or die trying.

ISBN# 9781932815955
Hardcover Thirller
US $24.95 / CDN $33.95
Available Now
www.michaelberes.com

“Chernobyl Murders
is a page-turner of the highest order: from the compelling characterization to the vividly described landscape of a devastated Ukraine to the stunning cover art, Beres has penned himself a winner.”

—
Paul Goat Allen
,
Chicago Tribune
(September 13, 2008)

1985, a year before the Chernobyl disaster. Hidden away in a wine cellar in the western Ukraine, Chernobyl engineer Mihaly Horvath, brother of a Kiev Militia detective Lazlo Horvath, reveals details of unnecessary risks being taken at the Chernobyl plant. Concerned for his brother and family, Lazlo investigates—irritating superiors, drawing the attention of a CIA operative, raising the hackles of an old school KGB major, and discovering his brother’s secret affair with Juli Popovics, a Chernobyl technician.

When the Chernobyl plant explodes scores of lives are changed forever. As Lazlo questions his brother’s death in the blast, Juli arrives in Kiev to tell the detective she carries his brother’s child. If their lives aren’t complicated enough, KGB major Grigor Komarov enters the fray, reawakening a hard-line past to manipulate deadly resources.

Now the Ukraine is not only blanketed with deadly radiation, but becomes a killing ground involving pre-perestroika factions in disarray, a Soviet government on its last legs, and madmen hungry for power as they eye Gorbachev’s changes.

With a poisoned environment at their backs and a killer snapping at their heels, Lazlo and Juli flee for their lives—and their love—toward the Western frontier.

ISBN# 9781933836294
Hardcover / International Thriller
US $25.95 / CDN $28.95
Available Now
www.michaelberes.com

BLOOD
EAGLE

Robert Barr Smith

A single pistol shot in the night, and an attractive young woman is dead, a suicide. A passing thing in 1931 Munich. Except the dead woman was Adolf Hitler’s niece and mistress, the lovely Geli Raubal. The pistol was Hitler’s. And the location was Hitler’s sumptuous flat.

More than half a century later, despite the facts surrounding Geli’s death, surely no one should care. But western intelligence learns someone does care. Very much. Both the KGB and a well-financed neo-Nazi organization. And both are willing to murder to uncover a long-buried secret connected to Geli’s demise. A secret important enough to torture and kill to find three elderly Germans.

American Tom Cooper and Englishman Simon Berwick, agents of U.S. intelligence and British MI6, are given the mission to find the three before the Russians or the Nazis. Both men have scores to settle. Both lost their families to terrorist bombs. They have killed for their countries in the twilight war of espionage; they will kill again.

More than one person has already died in the desperate race across Germany. More will die before the search ends in a blinding snowstorm above Hitler’s former residence high on the Obersalzburg in Bavaria. And the only reward for the agent who makes a mistake will be a nameless grave.

ISBN# 9781933836102
Hardcover Suspense
US $24.95 / CDN $33.95
Available Now

A special presentation of

FORTY-EIGHT X: THE LENURU PROJECT
by: Barry Pollack

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
.

—Robert Oppenheimer,
watching the first atom bomb test, July 16, 1945

T
here are staccato moments that are life changing, sometimes world changing—a single step taken, a yes, a no, a signature, a nod, the swift pull of a trigger. Lawrence McGraw’s life had been full of such moments. Now was to be another.

His special troops were trained to complete their assignment in eight minutes. Not a minute more. Since beginning his mission, he’d focused on time. Success was a matter of discipline, training, and precision. All had been rehearsed—a hundred, no, a thousand times. Little Boy, the first atom bomb, took less than one minute from “Bombs away” on the
Enola Gay
to its detonation over Hiroshima. One minute to change the world. Link McGraw was going to do it in eight minutes, but it would be no less momentous.

Colonel Lawrence “Link” McGraw crouched on a wooded hilltop, careful to remain unseen. Behind him, a purple hue still hung to the tops of the Hindu Kush Mountains as a setting sun buried itself. Below him, only a few flickering kerosene lamps still illuminated a dozen mud huts in a no-man’s-land village along the porous frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Smoke drifting from the chimney of one of the houses creased the black night sky. A few derelict vehicles lay scattered about, mechanical vegetation in a barren terrain. The night was dark, overcast, moonless. He had chosen it that way.