The 14th Colony: A Novel by Steve Berry Read Free Book Online

speaking.
    “My name is Cotton Malone. You must be Aleksandr Zorin.”
    Silence signaled he was right.
    “I’m assuming you now have the truck,” Zorin said.
    He thumbed the mike button, his own mouth dry, and let the man wait. Finally, he said, “It’s all mine.”
    “Head due east from where you are. Come off the lake onto the main highway. There’s only one road. Follow that north until you see the observatory. I’ll wait for you there.”

CHAPTER SIX
    C HAYANIYE , R USSIA
    4:20 P.M.
    Aleksandr Zorin left his clothes inside the rude entryway and stooped low through a fur-clad door. The space he entered was dark and gloomy. A tallow candle burned feebly in one corner, throwing off barely enough light to define a circular room built of hewn logs. The windowless walls were midnight black from the sooty deposits of fires that had baked them for decades. A pile of stones dominated the center, a strong blaze from birch logs burning beneath. A series of pine benches descended from one side like steps. A chimney hole high above allowed smoke to vent, leaving only dry heat from the stones, which made breathing painful and perspiration a necessity.
    “Do you like my black bath?” he asked the other man already inside, sitting on one of the benches.
    “I have missed them.”
    Both men were naked, neither ashamed of his body. His own remained hard, a barrel chest and ridges of muscles still there, though he would be sixty-two later in the year. The only scar was white and puckered across the left breast, an old knife wound from his former days. He stood tall with a face that tried hard to express perpetual confidence. His hair was an unruly black mane that always looked in need of a brush and scissors. He had boyish features women had always found attractive, especially the thin nose and lips of his father. His right eye was green, the left brown or gray depending on the light, a trait that his mother bestowed. Sometimes it was as though he had two faces superimposed, and he’d many times used that anomaly to maximum advantage. He prided himself on being a man of education, both formal and self-taught. He’d suffered for decades through a life of exile but had learned to stifle his needs and habits, accepting his forced descent to a lower sphere, where he breathed noticeably different air—like a fish tossed upon the sand.
    He stepped over and sat on a bench, the slats wet and warm. “I built this to replicate the black baths of the old days.”
    Every village had once provided a banya similar to this one, a place to escape Siberia’s nearly year-round cold. Most of those, like his former world, were now gone.
    His guest was a stolid, brutal-looking Russian at least ten years older with an agreeable voice and teeth stained yellow from years of nicotine. Receding blond hair swept back from a steep forehead and did nothing to strengthen an overall weak appearance. His name was Vadim Belchenko and, unlike himself, this man had never suffered exile.
    But Belchenko did know rejection.
    Once, he’d been a person of great importance, the chief archivist for the First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm. When the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War ended, Belchenko’s job immediately became obsolete, as those secrets mattered no longer.
    “I am glad you agreed to come,” he told his guest. “It has been too long, and things must be resolved.”
    Belchenko was nearly blind, his eyes wearing their cataracts like acquired wisdom. He’d had the older man brought east two days ago. A request that would have turned into an order, but that had proved unnecessary. Since arriving, his guest had stayed inside the black bath most of the time, soaking in the silence and heat.
    “I heard a plane,” Belchenko said.
    “We had a visitor. I suspect the government is looking for you.”
    The older man shrugged. “They fear what I know.”
    “And do they have reason?”
    He and Belchenko had talked many times.