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“How the hell did he manage that?” asked a disgusted Whit.
Mallory answered. “Stalin sent in troops and secret police and they took all livestock, poultry, food, seeds, and tools, with particular emphasis on the Dnieper River region, long known as the breadbasket of Europe. Then he sealed the borders to prevent escape and replenishment of the stolen articles, and also to stop the news from getting out to the rest of the world. No Internet back then, of course. Entire towns starved to death; nearly a quarter of the rural population of the country perished in less than two years.”
“Stalin rivaled Hitler in the atrocity department,” said Liza Kent pointedly. In her late forties, she looked very old-fashioned in her long skirt, clunky shoes, and white blouse with a frilly collar. Her light blonde hair, interlaced with strands of silver, was very fine and cut to her shoulders, but she wore it back in a tight bun. Her face had no memorable features and she kept a penetrating pair of amber eyes mostly hidden behind thick lenses housed in very conservative frames. She would blend nicely into virtually any crowd. In reality, she had served with British intelligence for a dozen years, ran high-level counterintelligence ops on three continents, and had a Romanian-manufactured rifle bullet perilously near her spine. This injury had forced her premature retirement on a modest government pension. She’d quickly tired of puttering around her small garden before joining the professor.
“Why did he do it?” asked Dominic.
“You ask why Stalin killed?” snapped Mallory. “Why does a snake bite? Or why does a great white shark devour its prey with nearly inconceivable savagery? It was simply what he did, on a larger scale than almost anyone before or since. A madman.”
“But Stalin was also a madman with a motive,” i
nterjected Reggie. She looked around the table. “He was trying to wipe out Ukrainian nationalism. And also to prevent the farmers from resisting collectivization of agriculture. It is said that there is not one Ukrainian living today who did not lose a family member through the Holodomor.”
Mallory smiled appreciatively. “You are an excellent student of history, Reggie.”
She gave him a stony gaze. “Not history, Professor. Horror.”
Whit looked confused. “Am I missing something? Because all that happened as you said in the 1930s. If he’s only sixty-three, Waller, or this Fedir Kuchin bloke, wasn’t even alive back then.”
Mallory made a steeple with his hands. “Do you think simply because Stalin died that the genocide stopped, Beckham? The communist regime persisted for several more decades after the monster breathed his last.”
“And that’s where Fedir Kuchin comes in?” said Reggie quietly.
Mallory leaned back, nodding. “He joined the army at a young age and rose relatively quickly. Being uncommonly bright and unflinchingly ruthless, he was fast-tracked early on for intelligence work, ending up in the secret police, where he rose to a position of despotic power. This was around when the Red Army was meeting both its match and downfall in Afghanistan. In addition, other Soviet satellite countries, like Poland, were making a hard push for liberation and would continue to do so up until the fall of the communists. Kuchin received orders directly from the Kremlin to do all in his power to crush any opposition. While his superiors largely reaped the historical credit, he became, in essence, the man in the field who would keep Kiev in line with Moscow. And he very nearly succeeded.”
“How?” asked Whit.
In answer Mallory opened his file folder and motioned for the others to do the same. “Read the first report and then look at the series of pictures accompanying it. If that doesn’t answer your query I’m afraid nothing will suffice.”
For several long minutes the room was silent, except for a few gasps whenever someone encountered the photos. Reggie finally closed the folder, her hand shaking a bit as she did so. She had faced many monsters that stood on two legs, and yet their depth of pure evil still managed to astonish and even unnerve her at times. She was afraid that if the day came when it didn’t, she would have lost all trace of her humanity. Some days she worried she already had.
“His own version of the Holodomor,” commented Whit in a subdued voice. “Only he used aerial poisons, toxins placed into water supplies, and thousands of people at a time forced into pits where they were burned alive. The foul bastard.”
“And Kuchin carried out the sterilization of thousands of young girls,” added Reggie in a hushed tone, the spiderweb of lines around her eyes deepening as she said this. “So they could never bear males who might fight against the Soviets.”
Mallory tapped the file. “On top of a hundred other such atrocities. As is often the case with cunning men like this, Kuchin saw the fall coming long before his superiors. He falsified his death and fled to Asia, from there to Australia, and then on to Canada, where he built a new life with forged documents and a charisma that managed to conceal his underlying sadistic nature. The world thinks he’s a legitimate and highly successful businessman, instead of the mass murderer and war criminal that he actually is. It took three full years to piece this file together.”
“And where is he now?” asked Reggie, her gaze holding on one photo she’d slipped from the file. It depicted the remains of an unearthed mass grave where the skeletons were small because they were all children.
Mallory puffed his pipe to life and a pungent cloud of smoke rose above his head. “This summer he will be traveling on holiday to Provence—to the village of Gordes, to be more specific.”
“Then I wonder what it will feel like,” said Reggie to no one in particular.
“What will what feel like, Reg?” asked Whit curiously.
She looked once more at the photo of the small bones. “To die in such a beautiful place as Provence, of course.”
CHAPTER
7
THE LONG MEETING had ended, the morning had given way to dusk, but Reggie still had work to do. She slipped outside of the dilapidated mansion and took a few moments to study the grounds in the dwindling light. Ever since the headquarters of Miles Mallory’s organization had been established here, Reggie had read up on the history of the place. Originally a feudal castle had stood on the footprint where the mansion did now. The surrounding lands had been the fiefdom of the wealthy lord of the manor, who ruled his people encased in a suit of armor, ready at a moment’s notice to cleave in a skull or two if necessary with his battle-axe.
Later, the castle had fallen and in its place the mansion had risen. The fiefdoms had dissolved and the squires had replaced armor and mace with the threat of debtor’s prison if the farmers renting their lands did not pay their bills. The property had remained in the same family for many generations, finally descending to distant cousins of the original owners whose income had never approached the level necessary to maintain the estate. During the two world wars Harrowsfield—Reggie had never discovered a definitive account of where the name came from—was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. After that it lay abandoned for several decades until the government had been compelled to take it over and make minimal repairs. Mallory had discovered the place and finagled the use of it. To the outside world it was merely an informal gathering place for eccentric academics whose work was as esoteric as it was innocuous.
Reggie passed by columns of ragged English boxwoods, their urine odor sweeping over her. Even though it was very late in the spring, a chilly breeze nudged at her back as she trudged along. She zipped up her worn leather jacket, which had belonged to her older brother. Though he’d only been twelve at the time of his death, he had been over six feet tall and the jacket enveloped her, even as his death had shattered her. She still felt emotionally brittle, like a pane of cracked glass that would disintegrate with the very next impact.
After a walk of a quarter mile she pushed open the door of what had once been the estate’s greenhouse. The smell of peat and mulch and rotting plants still drifted into her nostrils even though there had been no gardener or gardening here for decades. She passed by broken glass and loose boards that had dropped from the ceiling. Shadows were cast in all directions as the sun continued its descent into the English countryside. The chilly breeze turned still colder as it was funneled through the small openings in the windows and the walls, fluttering spiderwebs and rustling the disintegrating remnants of a horticulturist’s paradise.
