Mercy Killing (Affairs of State Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

A conspiracy? She had never been one to jump to such conclusions. But it seemed reasonable that someone had to know something. They just weren’t saying.
    Shit!
    Mercy ticked off on her fingers the few facts she already knew about the part of the world that had been the USSR before Communism failed there. The immense territory had covered an amazing one-sixth of the Earth’s land surface. It eventually splintered into a handful of smaller countries, always unstable, struggling to find new identities while holding onto what they could of their individual cultures. Ukraine was just one of the mysterious many. After a little more thought, she came up with one more possible source for information.
    After consulting the Federal Central Directory, she dialed the Dirksen Senate Office Building, then the proper extension. A receptionist put her on hold. Of course! Mercy chewed the end of her pen and watched the clock as ten minutes crawled by like days.
    Senator Evan O’Brien had been as liberal as Senator Diane Moxley was conservative. They’d battled each other on bill after bill throughout their careers on Capitol Hill. But no one had comforted Mercy, or her mother, more compassionately than Diane when Evan became ill with cancer and slowly, painfully wasted away then died.
    “Mercy!” the familiar smoky voice barked through the receiver at last. “How long have you been holding, dear? I’ll have to fire the dragon guarding the castle. The girl is new. If it’s important, next time just tell her if she doesn’t put you straight through, I’ll fire her ass.”
    Mercy laughed. “I wouldn’t bother you while you’re shepherding that new education bill through Congress if it weren’t important.”
    “Of course not. What is it, my dear?”
    The woman had to be in her late sixties, but she possessed more energy than most human beings three decades younger. Rumor had it she swam in the Potomac River every morning at dawn. Only the ice of winter stopped her. And then, or so she bragged, it had to be more than an inch thick.
    Mercy sighed, suddenly feeling exhausted, if only in comparison to the older woman’s liveliness. “It’s my mother.”
    “Talia? Is she ill?” Genuine anguish tinged the Senator’s voice.
    “No. At least I don’t think so. It may be nothing. But neither Mark nor I have heard from her for days. She was traveling solo. Shooting photos for a story, we think in the Ukrainian countryside. We’re getting worried.”
    “Where exactly was she last seen?”
    Mercy explained that Talia’s last contact with her editor had been from Kiev. “He tells me that she was initially interested in covering a new market in extreme tourism—the site of the Chernobyl explosion. Sort of like people visiting the World Trade Center memorial, I guess. A government tour agency buses people in, getting between two and four hundred dollars a head.”
    “Good Lord, I don’t believe it,” Diane said. “The radiation levels can’t have bottomed out totally.”
    “Even after more than twenty years?” Mercy asked.
    “I doubt it. I was on a Senate Nuclear Proliferation committee about that time. The magnitude of irradiated particles, water and gases released in an atomic reactor failure. . .” The Senator from Georgia did not sound pleased. “No. It doesn’t just all go away, Mercy. So, that’s the tour? Dragging tourists strapped to roentgen meters around a nuclear wasteland? That's the only reason she was there?”
    “Apparently not.” Mercy reread her notes from Gilmer’s chilling brief. “Her editor told me that Mother had been researching a related story on the new countries formed after the dissolution of the old USSR. This included information about thriving black markets. Such as the sale of items abandoned after the Chernobyl tragedy, in what’s termed an Exclusion Zone. Locals call it The Forbidden Zone.”
    “The idiots didn’t destroy all of that stuff?”
    “Apparently not.” Mercy paused