Page 67 of Mastermind

Mayya puts her finger on a spot twenty miles to the northwest of the other sighting.

“Do you know what time he was brought in?”

“A-bout ten o’clock,” Mayya says in halting English. “Night.”

“What do you think was medically wrong with these men?”

Mayya thinks it over, then speaks to her daughter for a full minute, pointing to her feet and her chest occasionally.

“She says it’s quite odd. They had blisters on their feet and what looked like bedsores. These men appeared to be on the verge of death, but they were healthy enough to walk great distances. She didn’t get to thoroughly examine the man, but she did see some surgical scars. There was another thing . . .” Olena asks her mother for clarification. “She says the man wasn’t quite there. Not drugged. Not crazy, but not fully present. Like he had some kind of brain damage. Mother said when she was an intern, she met older patients that were similar. They’d been given . . . what’s the word?”

Mayya points to her temple. “Lobotomy.”

“That’s curious,” I reply.

“That’s disturbing,” says Jessica.

“There’s also an odd connection here,” I say. “António Moniz, the man who pioneered lobotomization, got the idea after watching a talk by a neurologist who severed the frontal lobes of a chimpanzee, making her docile and easy to work with.”

“Too bad the people at the Thai research facility didn’t do their homework,” Jessica replies.

“Or maybe they did—the ones that abandoned it, at least. The Thai facility may have tried chlorpromazine on the chimpanzees to keep them calm, but I’m sure human-level dosages wouldn’t nearly be enough.”

“Lobotomies . . . patients escaping? What are they up to?” asks Jessica.

“I don’t know, but if we can find the facility, that would be a start.”

After thanking Mayya and her daughter for their help, Jessica and I plan our search. We don’t have a lot to go on, other than two sightings twenty miles apart. The radiation from the syringe package was strong enough for me to draw a perimeter around where its origin point could have been, but that still leaves several hundred square miles.

Jessica is using her phone calculator to track on the map the range the men could have walked from. Both of their paths lead back into the Chernobyl protective zone, which is fenced off and patrolled—loosely. The security doesn’t mean there aren’t people coming and going from there on a regular basis. Within the zone there are a number of research facilities studying the effects of radiation on the wildlife around Chernobyl, as well as testing treatments and technologies for mitigating the threat of radiation.

Working within large parts of the zone doesn’t pose much more of a radiological threat than being an airline flight attendant or working in a coal mine. That doesn’t mean there’s zero effect, but it’s not enough to keep researchers away.

When I saw the syringe wrapper with Cyrillic, my instincts were to check for radiation, because the Chernobyl zone had been on my list of locations for possible clandestine operations. I didn’t expect the Geiger counter to go off, but I wasn’t terribly surprised when it did.

Having a facility in Ukraine would give the people behind the project access to highly skilled researchers in a depressed economy . . . scientists accustomed to keeping secrets. There’s also the possibility that the project has, at least in part, some support of the Ukrainian government. I’m fairly certain they have no idea of the full scope of what is going on, though. This could be an offshoot of a research study where the researchers are doing something else entirely.

Jessica glances up at me from the map. “You ready for a road trip?”

“Da,” I reply.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

WANDERERS

Mickey, the guide we hired to get us through the checkpoints, is an enthusiastic physics student we found through a contact of mine at the University of Kiev. Since Mickey works for one of the state-licensed tourist agencies that give tours of Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the other areas inside the radioactive zone, he has the right documents to get us through the checkpoints.

“What do you want to see first?” Mickey asks as we pass the first guard station. “The amusement park? The high schools?”

“I’d like to see what research facilities are still open,” I reply.

“Okay. They’re not as exciting, and they’re a little farther out,” he explains.

“It’s fine,” I tell him.

Jessica is sitting up front, making small talk, while I sit in the back of his old Mercedes with a laptop, scanning for Wi-Fi signals with a directional antenna that’s letting me build a map of possible points of interest.

Some of them match up with buildings and institutions on the map. Other signals appear to be unlisted and, in a few cases, in locations that are supposed to be undeveloped.