How I Met Your Mother Ch. 09

"Come on, you know what I mean." She said. Andrew's empty look made her laugh. "Every girl has a phase where she goes for men that simply aren't right for her -- eventually they work it out of their system and they settle down with someone who is right for them. Cassie is obviously going through her phase a little earlier than normal."

"But...he's a twenty foot tall fictional, duplicitous robot!" Andrew started to laugh. "I just don't see the attraction."

"I do -- you love Transformers; the kids love Transformers. It's simple." Leah explained.

"Well, be that as it may, Cassie's not allowed to date anyone until she's married." Andrew snorted. Leah laughed as he moved over and examined the sandwiches she was making.

"See, that's what was missing in my life growing up -- a father figure to tell me who I could and couldn't date." She said sarcastically as she playfully jabbed Andrew in the ribs with her elbow.

"Well, it didn't work with my sisters and their boyfriends after Dad died so I can't see it working with my own daughter." He muttered. "Still, hope springs eternal."

"Oh, I found this in Scott's bag." Leah handed a book to Andrew from beside the microwave. He looked at it and his face creased into a frown.

"Aww man, the Encyclopaedia..." He muttered. "Aww look -- there's jammy fingerprints all over the entry for Ghroth the Harbinger!"

"I think it's been passed around his class to be honest with you." Leah said as Andrew tried to clean the page as best as he could. "Why is the name Ghroth familiar to me?"

"I used him in The Siren's Song." Andrew said as he finished wiping the page with a piece of kitchen roll. "He's a bit like an eldritch doomsday weapon; Ghroth floats through space, this great big rust coloured meteor and his song awakens all the Great Old Ones on any planet he passes -- causing widespread destruction and apocalyptic prophecies to come true, especially as far as the Earth is concerned." He rubbed his temples for a moment.

"Are you okay?" Leah asked, pausing for a moment.

"Yeah, yeah I'm fine -- just a bit of eye strain..." Andrew replied unconvincingly.

"You know, I'm going to ask the question when I probably don't want to know the answer, but just what have you been poring over in the cellar for the last couple of days?"

"Something Diana asked me to look over for her -- it's a manuscript entitled The Ghosts of East Berlin." Andrew explained. "It's an...account of sorts of the actions of a group of ex-Soviet paratroopers in the early 1980s and how it spawned a criminal organisation at the end of the Cold War." He paused for a moment. "The scary part is that it seems the Big Bear had something to do with its formation."

"What? Inno?" Leah sounded shocked. Andrew nodded. "I...what? Are you sure? It actually names him?"

"Yeah -- on page one-sixty-five. It clearly implicates him in its formative growth -- plus they may have had something to do with the death of his wife." Leah's eyebrows arched.

"My god -- that explains what happened with his grand-daughter." She said. "He said at the time he thought it was something to do with organised crime -- that they wanted him to pay a ransom he couldn't afford and that he couldn't trust the authorities anymore..."

"Well, when he gets in this weekend I'm going to have a talk with him about it." Andrew said, leaning back against the counter top as he did. "If it's true then he's going to be opened up to all manner of legal complications -- and that's just in this country alone."

"You're just going to ask him outright?"

"Sure -- how else do I go about it?" Andrew explained. "I'm not completely blinkered by my personal relationship with him; I always knew he had a shady past -- and the explanations about the circumstances surrounding his wife's death changed over the years -- but I always rationalised it as being the actions of a patriot, albeit from a different ideological viewpoint from my own. This is different though."

"Are you alright? I mean, you seem abit shook up by all this." Leah said as she slowly resumed making the sandwiches. Andrew nodded.

"Yeah, I think so." He shook his head like he was trying to dislodge something from it. "I'll be fine, I just...can we talk about this more later?" Leah nodded, sensing that Andrew was clearly finding the subject matter a lot to take in. "Okay, I'll go and get the kids ready for lunch."

****

Pakistan Port of Karachi

August 1980

In the humid late evening air, three figures walked from a small compact car towards one of the furthermost warehouses located in the vast commercial port of Karachi. Walking cautiously and constantly looking around to ensure they weren't being observed, they entered the warehouse and secured the door behind them.

The three figures were Lena Marakova, Piotr Ribicky and Boris Karagin. The trio had known each other for nearly ten years and shared a bond that had been forged under the extreme stresses of combat. Lena was the fiery heart of the trio, contrasting to the cool, calm demeanour of Piotr. As the unit commander, Boris was the decision maker of the group -- and right now his mind was racing through all the permutations of the process he had put in motion.

Securing the entrance to the large storage unit behind them, Piotr switched the lights on as Lena and Boris moved over to look through a series of wooden crates in the centre of the room. In doing so, the lights in the room briefly flickered before failing, plunging everything into darkness.

"What the...?" Piotr asked -- just as the lights came back on. Within seconds they realised there was a fourth figure in the room.

"Greetings my fellow comrades!" The salutation prompted Lena to pull a military issue pistol free from inside her jacket and take aim at the figure stepping out of the shadows. As the interloper stepped into a pool of light, all three of them recognised him.

"Annenskij!" Piotr said as Boris tried to get Lena to lower her pistol. "What are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same question." Inno replied as he moved casually towards them. "Just what are three Vozdushno-Desantnye Vojska Blue Beret paratroopers doing in a Pakistani warehouse, surrounded by surplus Russian military equipment and Afghan heroin?" Lena slowly lowered her pistol as Boris stepped forward.

"Look Annenskij, this is nothing to do with you or your cronies in the KGB, just turn around and leave." Inno laughed at Boris' implied threat.

"Oh, you misread my intentions Captain Karagin," Inno said as he sat down on one of the large wooden crates. "Although I have more than enough evidence to bury all three of you if I see fit, I feel it's more beneficial to everyone for you to keep me onside so to speak."

"In other words," Boris surmised as he appraised Inno's demeanour. "You want a cut."

"A crude but succinct summation, yes." Inno added. "However, for the moment I'm content to remain your silent partner in this endeavour."

"How do we know you aren't just setting us up?" Lena asked. Inno nodded.

"That's a fair assumption Lieutenant Marakova. However, don't you think if my aim were to stop you I would have simply apprehended you as you were leaving Afghanistan? Ask yourself this -- how have you been able to get past the border checkpoints without any problems during the last few months?" None of the three military operatives could find fault in the argument. "You see, I've been aware of your activities for some time now, however I decided to keep my suspicions to myself until I was sure we could all work together." He looked at one of the crates to his left, lifting the lid to reveal a selection of assault rifles stored within.

"No, for the moment it suits my own agenda to have your little smuggling operation working in perfect order." The three military officers looked at each other with concerned glances. "Now, I have other matters to attend to, so I shall let you continue with your...endeavours. I will be in touch." Inno turned and melted away into the shadows of the warehouse -- followed a few moments later by the sound of the door being opened and closed. There was a collective sigh of relief in the cold space.

"Great, so what do we do now?" Piotr asked his colleagues.

"I say we kill him." Lena's blunt reply made Boris laugh.

"What? And draw more unwanted attention to our operation?" He postulated. "No, we'll take his help for now and if he becomes a hindrance then we'll deal with him." He looked back at his two sub-ordinates. "Come on, let's get this gear loaded up onto the tanker; it's not going to wait all evening for us."

****

76 Burrow Street

Thursday morning

2:12 am

Andrew sat up in the bed and looked over at the clock. He sighed slightly as he realised the clock had only moved on twenty-three minutes since he had last observed it. As he lay back down and his head hit the pillow, he found his mind drifting back to the manuscript he had spent the last two days poring over. His attempts to arrange to meet the author of the piece of work had been met with a series of dead ends until just under half an hour before he had climbed into bed.

The brief telephone conversation he had with the author -- Kateryna Grenic -- had been illuminating. The daughter of a Russian diplomat who had sought asylum during the 1980s, she had enthused about the fact that Clearwater was actually looking at publishing her work. Her surge in excitement had blossomed when Andrew discussed meeting her to run over some points of her work in relation to the evidence she had listed in her bibliography. As he closed his eyes again for the umpteenth time that night, his wife's words rolled around his head.

I'm coming with you, she said, and we're meeting her in a public place.

****

Kateryna Grenic outwardly portrayed the appearance of a modern, confident woman who was perfectly at home in her chosen profession of a freelance investigative journalist; inwardly however, she was a writhing bundle of nerves as she greeted the man and woman who she had spoken to on the telephone the previous day.

Introducing herself to Andrew and Leah Hargreaves, she gestured for them to sit down at the table she had secured on the back wall of the local Common Grounds coffee shop; Kateryna felt the anticipation bubbling up inside her as they began to discuss her work.

"...so, your father was a diplomat at the Russian Embassy during the Eighties, right? That's how he knew Inno Annenskij?" Andrew asked. "How did you come across this series of...connections you've put together here?"

"My father passed away several years ago from a lifetime of stress and too much vodka -- my mother had a box of paperwork that my father had always been rather too protective of throughout my youth; it was something I was never allowed to look at growing up and it held this near-mythical aura to me; a keepsake of my father's deepest and, as it transpired, darkest secrets. My mother gave it to me just after he died, content that I was old enough by that time to understand the literature fully." She took a sip of her four pound fifty cup of coffee before continuing. "One of the documents amidst all his paperwork was an account from a young Soviet officer called Duraya Ignakov about the events of April to May, 1945, in the town of Demmin in what became East Germany."

"Demmin? Why is that name familiar to me?" Andrew said; Leah could see that his mind was whirling away, processing the information. "Hang on -- isn't that the place where the retreating Nazi's blew up the bridges to the town as they left, effectively sealing it off from the outside world? Wasn't there some sort of mass suicide afterwards as well?" Leah could see that Andrew was onto something by the look of recognition and acknowledgement on Kateryna's face.

"You're a well-read man Mr Hargreaves. With the Soviet forces advancing the Germans retreated, leaving most of the civilian population behind. The Nazi propaganda machine had whipped the town up into a frenzy of anti-Russian sentiment -- when the Red Army entered the town they found it full of burning buildings and the corpses of families who has chosen to kill themselves rather than to submit to the life of occupation by Stalin's troops." Kateryna added with a distinctly grim tone in her voice.

"But that wasn't the whole story...was it?" Andrew prodded.

"Far from it -- according to the documents in my father's possession the truth was somewhat more disturbing. Rather than being greeted as liberating heroes as their British and American counterparts had been in the West, they were met by guerrilla warfare from the citizens of the town. A schoolteacher opened fire on them with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, killing several officers and the local pharmacist poisoned the town water supply. Obviously the Russians didn't take kindly to these acts. After they had executed the remaining Nazi sympathisers in the town several groups of the soldiers looted the local distillery. There are numerous accounts of further looting and rape throughout the next three days that the Soviet forces occupied Demmin. It was some time during the morning of the third day that the first reports fires being started in the centre of the town and of bodies being found in the rivers Peene and Tollense."

"The final death toll was estimated to be anything between seven to twelve hundred men, women and children. Several of the Soviet troops tried to stop the citizens killing themselves -- to varying degrees of success. Officially the matter was covered up -- that the deaths in Demmin were the result of famine or Wehrwolf attacks in the years following the end of the war -- and those that knew the truth and spoke out about the events were kept in check through fear of being deported to the gulags in Siberia." Kateryna removed a small book from her bag and handed it to Leah. Realising quickly it was an English translation of the East German publication "History of the Local Worker's Movement" she could see that one page had a small plastic tag attached to it. Opening it at this point she saw a single line of text highlighted.

...the town of Demmin experienced a mass panic, in the course of which 700 people committed suicide...

"This is all very tragic; however I don't understand how this is connected to Inno Annenskij." Leah said.

"Ignakov's son was an ambitious member of the KGB also stationed at the London embassy under Inno's authority. He discovered through his Kremlin contacts that Svetlana Annenskij had been assigned the task of investigating something an East German journalist had come into the possession of, something that the authorities wanted to keep quiet. It's likely that she passed something on to Inno that incriminated Ignakov's father and posed a threat to his career. After Svetlana's death, Inno began drinking heavily; officially he stepped down from his post in London in order to look after his daughter however I suspect that was just a smokescreen to preserve his dignity."

"Do you think that Ignakov had something to do with Svetlana's death?" Leah asked.

"I can't prove it but I suspect he did. Shortly after Inno stepped aside, Ignakov became the section head at the Embassy. I'm convinced that Marakova had something to do with it as well. Piotr Ribicky told me that Lena had been in talks with a Russian contact within the KGB just after something went wrong in Canada; he made her an offer -- in exchange for her services in resolving something in East Germany he would make any official investigation into their actions disappear."

"I can see how that would be appealing to both of them; Ignakov gets a clear shot at the top job in London with Inno out of the way and the evidence of his father's indiscretions are buried with him whilst Marakova assumes full control of the illegal operations they've been running, safe in the knowledge that their silent partner is no longer in a position to stop her from expanding into whatever business avenues she desires." Andrew mused. "It's a perfect example of Starscream Philosophy in action. Of course, it doesn't explain what actually happened to the Big Bear's wife."

"And how do you intend to find that out?" Leah asked. Andrew smiled at her.

"How do you think?"

****

The Basement of the Sam Kee Building

Vancouver

1982

The room had exploded.

In the space of thirty seconds, everything had gone wrong in the most spectacular of fashions. What had been the beginnings of a simple drug transaction had rapidly gone downhill fast. As Piotr strained to jimmy open the door of an early eighties Cadillac Cimarron, Lena tried to support Boris' body.

"Hurry you idiot!" She screeched. "He's bleeding..."

"I know!" Piotr spat back as he finally forced the door open. Moments later the rear door was open and Lena managed to haul Boris inside. As the sound of the engine roared into life, the sound of gunfire began to bounce around the underground car park again.

"Fucking Triads! What were we thinking trying to deal with them?" Piotr cursed as he powered the vehicle out of the parking lot. He deftly manoeuvred the car around the poorly lit structure. "How is he?"

"We need to get him to a hospital." Lena said, looking into Boris' white face; his skin was clammy and he was trying to mouth something to her. "It's going to be okay Captain...just hang on..."

"A hospital? Are you fucking screwing with me?" Piotr screeched, as the car broke free of the concrete structure. "We can't take him to a hospital! In case you haven't noticed we're not exactly supposed to be in the country."

"I know that -- head towards the Strathcona area -- there's someone there who might be able to help us." Lena said, looking up from Boris for the first time since they had gotten into the car. Piotr twisted the wheel, prompting a cacophony of car horns being blasted as he swung the Cimarron across an intersection in an impromptu u-turn.

"I hope you're right Marakova," Piotr said. "Because we came here on your word and right now it's looking like we walked right into a set up."

****

Two hours later, Alvin Martin was struggling with a small pair of medical tweezers to pry out a bullet out the stomach of Boris Karagin. As he struggled to grip the small slug tightly, he could feel the sweat forming on his brow. With each attempt to snag the bullet he seemed to simply push it further inside the gut of his patient.

"You know, this goes a lot easier when I don't have a gun pointed at my head." He muttered. Lena lowered her sidearm as Piotr tried to keep the small table lamp in place over the bullet wound.

"I thought you could do with some motivation." Lena hissed. Alvin shook his head.

"Believe me, I have all the motivation I need with the fact that I owe you guys money and you're probably going to kneecap me by the end of the month!" Alvin replied. Piotr snorted.

"You save the Captain's life and as far as I'm concerned all debts are paid in full." Alvin's fingers fumbled for a moment, his grip on the tweezers failing him. "I thought you said this guy was a doctor?"

"A doctor?" Alvin laughed as he looked over at Lena. "You told him I was a doctor?" He looked over at Piotr. "I took a year's pre-med and then switched over to veterinary school before dropping out."

"You're...you're a vet?" Piotr almost dropped the lamp. "I can't..." Alvin grabbed the lamp from him.

"Look, I can't do this with you distracting me." Alvin sounded genuinely irritated. "Please, let me work in peace."

****

It was nearly an hour later by the time Alvin came out of his kitchen-cum-impromptu operating room. He walked into the living room, wiping his hands with a towel that was now dripping small droplets ahead of him, as it was soaked with blood. His head was slumped downwards, almost touching his chest and his breathing sounded laboured. Looking up he found himself staring into the expectant eyes of Lena and Piotr.