The Poison Master Page 36

  The familiar thoughts crowded into her head. And then we're out of here. Moscow first, and then Canada. Yuri told me it was madness. What chance will I have of ever working in a space program again if I leave the country? But what's left here? I'd rather wait tables in Montreal than sit pining for an opportunity that might never come.

  Money was a good enough reason to do anything these days, Elena thought, then corrected herself as she watched Atyrom haggle with the pawnbroker. But not good enough to trade tragedy for a few miserable dollars. She wondered briefly how much the gold would fetch, and how a person would extract it from the teeth in the first place. Meditating on Aristotle seemed preferable.

  So what was the primary cause of her present circumstances? Mikhail Gorbachev deciding nineteen years ago to drop his trousers and bend over in the direction of America? Mikhail Gorbachev being born? Elena knew, deep within her bones, that the architect of perestroika was the single reason why she was here now, sipping treacly tea in a dingy room in the back streets of Tashkent when she should have been sitting in her office at Baikonur watching rockets reach the bright skies above the Soviet Union.

  She should have been what she had trained to be: an astrophysicist. Or something other than a dealer in black market goods, anyway. At least Atyrom's videos weren't pornographic. It wasn't hard to see the funny side to the whole thing, but then, she'd always had a black sense of humor; she was Russian, after all.

  Elena sighed, cradling the deceptive fragility of the little sphere, and waited for Atyrom to finish haggling.

  THE POISON MASTER

  A Bantam Spectra Book / January 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-48963-0

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