Rasputins bastards, p.5
Rasputin's Bastards, page 5
“Okay,” said Alexei, and started toward the door. “See you later,” he said to the yacht’s former pilot.
“Screw the good-byes,” snapped Holden. “Vite, Russkie, vite!”
As soon as Alexei got close enough, Holden grabbed his arm and all but hauled him up the stairs.
“These fucking Russians,” he muttered to Alexei, “are taking over my ship. Listen to what they say, and tell me after.”
“I will listen,” promised Alexei. “And keep my mouth shut, yes?”
“Da,” said Holden. “You’ll do fine.”
Less than ten seconds on the bridge, and Alexei wasn’t so sure.
“Hey!” shouted one of them as Alexei and Holden climbed up into the room. The men were all lean and athletic — they looked to Alexei like commandos more than anything. But they seemed completely at home on the bridge of an American motor yacht. “No one here but us!”
He was speaking English, but even so — he didn’t sound Russian at all. Alexei looked at Holden with a question in his eye, but Holden’s face was granite. Alexei felt his own stomach twist, even as one of the others muttered something in his native tongue.
No, it was not Russian — not even close to Russian.
He was speaking Romanian.
And Holden Gibson — Heather’s prick, who’d taken over this child labour ring and come here on the urging of a dream — this American couldn’t tell the difference between Russian and Romanian.
Alexei should have let on to Holden; the same way, he supposed, he should have worked a little harder to radio in some kind of a distress call over Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s disappearance. He could barely even speak Romanian — he remembered a couple of words, from a language course more than a decade ago, but languages had never been his strong suit.
“Get off! Or deal is done!” shouted the Romanian. He actually lifted his AKM from where he’d leaned it against a cabinet, and waved it at the two of them. Holden recoiled at that.
“Hey!” said Holden. “This is my ship! And — ” he paused “ — and Jimmy here doesn’t know jack shit about navigating boats! Do you, Jimmy?” He nudged Alexei hard in the ribs.
Alexei shook his head.
“So he’s staying up here! Like a guard!”
“Like a guard,” said the Romanian, and turned to his two compatriots. They whispered among themselves in Romanian, and Alexei struggled to listen. “Deal,” and “injury,” and possibly “water.” These Alexei could make out. Otherwise, he didn’t have a clue.
“No,” said the Romanian finally. “Don’t want to let us alone to drive boat, you turn around, go home. Deal off.”
Angry colour stained the capillaries of Holden’s face, and he stepped forward — unmindful, for the moment, of the assault rifle between him and the Romanian. “Fuck you!” he screamed. “Fuck — ” and he jabbed his finger at the Romanian’s chest “ — you!”
Alexei put his hand on Holden’s shoulder, and gently pulled him back.
“Maybe you don’t go home,” snarled the Romanian. “Off the bridge!”
Holden raised up his hands and backed down the steps, and when another of the Romanians motioned to Alexei, he followed. At the bottom of the steps, there waited two other Romanians. Holden didn’t argue when they ordered him back to the lounge, where the rest of the crew had been marshalled. It was there, explained one of the Romanians, that they would just have to wait.
“They said that you should stop meddling,” Alexei told Holden. “They said that you were a fat ugly fuck who could as easily be drowned. The one guy said, ‘Why doesn’t he do as he’s told?’ The other guy said, ‘Why don’t you just shoot him. He is a real prick.’ Then the guy with the rifle said, ‘Let me deal with this.’”
Of course, not having understood more than a couple of words of the Romanian’s conversation, Alexei had made it all up — but Holden seemed to swallow it as word-for-word Russian-to-American translation. And Alexei had read Holden correctly — the invective seemed to convince him more than anger him. Holden’s eyes wrinkled distastefully, but he nodded.
“All right,” said Holden. “All right, I was half-expecting some shit like this. These are the kind of people we’re dealing with. Right, Russkie? Hey Russkie, what kind of guns were those fucks waving?”
“AKMs,” said Alexei. “Like the AK-47, but a little better.”
“Hah!” Holden grinned broadly, and slapping Alexei’s shoulder. “You’re remembering shit! You remember where you come from any better?” He dug his fingers savagely into Alexei’s shoulder, and his grin turned feral. “Like maybe you recognized some people? Your comrades up there? For instance? Is this a fucking double-cross, Russkie?”
“Hey!”
Holden grunted as Heather grabbed his arm, and pulled it away from Alexei. “Leave him alone!” she hissed.
Holden turned to her, and for a second Alexei was afraid he was going to hit her. But he didn’t — instead, he reached around her with his other hand and patted her ass. She glared up at him, and he laughed.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m just yanking his chain. We’ll be done with this whole thing in a couple hours.” She let go, and glared at him as he made his way up to the podium. The rest watched him too, but without the same rancour; their heads swivelled like sunflowers marking the passing of hours. “Don’t worry,” he said to the group. “This is part of the plan — these guys are just super-cautious, all right? We’ll be ready to load up in a couple hours, tops.” And he raised his hands slightly, like a maestro at the ballet.
As if Holden had cued it, the motor yacht’s deck shifted to port.
He’d grabbed her ass. Alexei thought about the empty barracks down below with their tiny beds, and the slim likelihood that fraudulent magazine subscriptions were as far as this apparently highly profitable racket went. As they began the long, lazy turn, Alexei looked at Heather, then at Holden Gibson, and then something turned in his stomach. And he made his decision.
THE GAMBLER
Fyodor Kolyokov hadn’t needed the isolation tank for a long time: not since the early days when all needs Physick were safely defined by the razor-wire fences of City 512. But need and desire often mingle to the same effect, and so as soon as he found a way, Kolyokov moved the tank from Russia to America. The tank was as much a part of his life as his eyes and his lungs and his heart.
The tank was an early prototype, baffled against sound with a set of casings pressed inside one another like nested Russian dolls — dolls made of iron and steel, concrete and horsehair, ceramic and lead. Sealed inside the tiniest doll, it wasn’t hard to imagine weathering a nearby nuclear detonation.
The Cyrillic notations stamped on the outermost doll indicated expectations falling just short of that. Kolyokov had at various times tried to fill those letters with different types of cement — but the cold steel of the tank sucked moisture from the air like a thirsty whore, and Kolyokov’s attempts at camouflage crumbled within days of their application. There was no making it into anything beyond what it was: an old KGB sensory isolation tank, that to anyone but Kolyokov would stink like an open sewer.
To Kolyokov, who had first swum in its briny middle three decades ago, it merely smelled . . . comfortable.
For the last of those decades, the isolation tank had gathered dust in a large storage locker in New Jersey. During that time, Kolyokov never visited — not in person. But he kept a watch on it all the same and once a year, he would send a sleeper to see to matters of cleaning and maintenance in person. There would come a day, he was sure, when such things as this tank did not matter to the intelligence community and its existence would no longer need be secret.
In 1997, with the Soviet Union half a decade in the grave, Kolyokov deemed that day to have arrived.
So now, the tank occupied most of the en suite bath to Kolyokov’s rooms on the Emissary’s 19th floor. The bath had at one time contained an immense Jacuzzi tub set in pink marble. But that luxury had been sacrificed to make room, so the tank had only to share the space with a low-flow toilet and a shower stall.
The floor was a thick slab of concrete underneath the tile, but Kolyokov had wished to take no chances and so had constructed a second floor, just inches above the original. It was more of a platform, really, made to distribute the tank’s immense weight beyond its own dimensions.
The platform creaked as he placed a bare foot upon it now. Kolyokov was still groggy from shattered REM sleep, but he had to piss something fierce. The pissing, he thought, was why the dream had gone so badly. The reason that it had turned nightmare on him, and driven him awake.
This wouldn’t have happened in the old days. The tank had been fitted with an assembly from the old Soyuz spacecraft — but the pump had failed years ago.
So Kolyokov hopped on one foot and the other, bladder twisting and wringing as he moved. He splashed brine all over the bathroom’s two floors, as he made his way around the tank to the toilet. A thick stream of urine made a roar in the bowl that was deafening to Kolyokov’s silence-calmed ear.
The door to the bathroom slid open as Kolyokov was finishing. He looked over a shoulder.
It was of course Stephen — his helper, his prize, and his great secret, Stephen Haber — who had been attending in the sitting room since the operation began. When was it? Kolyokov glanced at the wall clock. Thirteen hours ago. Just thirteen hours.
“Sir? Everything all right?”
Kolyokov sneered. “If everything were all right,” he spat, “I would be still inside. I would know what was happening to my people. I would not be pissing in a toilet when there was work to be done.”
“A bad dream,” said Stephen with a little grin.
“Hah.” Kolyokov shook himself off and moved back to the open hatch of the tank. He sat down on its rim and regarded Stephen. “Have you received any word?”
Stephen frowned. “Me? Oh. You don’t mean over the phone?”
“Yes. By telephone, by fax, some e-mail. Anything?”
Stephen’s eyes widened. “Shit,” he said. “You did have a bad dream. You lost the scent, didn’t you?”
What a little shit, thought Kolyokov. That’s what a lifetime in America does for you — a couple of decades of MTV and situation comedies and rap music turns you into a smart-assed little shit like Stephen. Not even good, purebred parents make a difference.
Kolyokov had only found Stephen two years ago after looking up those parents. The two of them had been on the lam for nearly three decades, after the Weather Underground cell they’d infiltrated had broken up in ’72. His search had ended not with them — they’d died in ’91, in an unfortunate police standoff at a rented house in Michigan — but with Stephen, their only son, who had been living on the streets and turning tricks in Manhattan since he was twelve.
The parents had done their job, he supposed. Kolyokov could use Stephen and even trust him — despite the matter of his obstinate mind. But there was enough of America in him — including a dangerous amount of heroin that was easily expunged, and a percolating dose of HIV that wasn’t — to make the young man something of an annoyance; much more so, certainly, than the farm-bred boys and girls he’d worked with over the years in City 512.
“Dogs pick up a scent,” said Kolyokov. “Are you calling me a dog?”
“No,” said Stephen. “You’re not a dog. You lost the scent all the same, though.” He smirked. “Have to show me your tricks some time. Before it’s too late.”
Kolyokov ducked back into the tank. “You spend enough time sleeping,” he said. “Check the fax machine.”
Stephen came over to the hatch. He leaned on it. “Something happened,” he said. “I can see it in you. Tell me what it is. Did the ocean get you?”
“No. I know better.” Kolyokov squinted at the circle of light as he sloshed back into the brine. “I lost the Goddamn scent,” he said. “I had to piss. Don’t you ever have to piss, boy?”
Stephen shrugged, and lifted the hatch cover over the light. And it was dark again. Kolyokov took a breath of the dank air in the tank. And he began to sleep.
For someone else with Kolyokov’s problem, falling asleep would be a problem; restlessness would intervene and the night would stretch from minutes into an eternity. But as a rule, Kolyokov didn’t fall asleep. Sleep was his avocation — and the word “fall” implied a clumsiness, a lack of forethought — an amateur mistake. Kolyokov approached sleep methodically. “Red,” he whispered. “And orange and yellow. And green, and blue . . .”
And with the words, his eyelids fluttered shut, his breathing slowed, the spectrum flashed through his mind. The water numbed his flesh, and then all other sensation in his body was gone. There was a familiar rushing feeling, as of a body moving swiftly through a tunnel of chilled air. At the end of it, Kolyokov looked upon a brilliant, stratospheric light.
A less experienced dream-walker might have imagined himself dead — staring at the brilliance of his Creator, waiting to welcome him into the glories of the afterlife. But Kolyokov had been around long enough to tell the difference between Heaven and seven thousand feet. He rotated his gaze from the sun, and looked down through thinning clouds, at the grey-green waves of the Atlantic.
The fogbank was the last thing he’d seen before being driven out of his dream. It was still there. It had grown in fact — now it squatted on the ocean like a pus-whitened sore, miles across.
It was not a real fog, though. Kolyokov could see through a real fog, at least well enough to find his people and move in them. This one was as impervious as lead.
Kolyokov took a breath, and let himself descend to its crown. The last time he had tried to penetrate the dome, he had done so without preparation — he had underestimated its strength.
And so it had thrown him from sleep, left him bug-eyed and shaking in his tank, clenching his bladder and gasping like an old man at the top of a stairway.
This time, he would prepare himself for the descent. He would not underestimate his opponents again.
So Kolyokov began to study the fog. As he did so, he began to apprehend certain flaws in its camouflage. It was white, but it was a white too pure — it bore no shadow, even though the cloud overhead was beginning to break and yellow sun was punching through. While wisps of vapour came off the fog, as Kolyokov studied it more closely he saw that by and large the vapour clung to it, as though made from a solid dome of dry ice. He fell slowly towards it, thinking that this was what the form of the fog must in fact be: a solidified dome — solidified to beings such as himself, that is — covering an area of the Atlantic of perhaps a dozen square miles.
Kolyokov laughed to himself. An old trick, that. It was the same thing he used on the hotel; the same thing the others had used on Petroska Station, to hide when hiding was needed, all those decades ago. But this one — this was the true thing that the Party had hoped for: a dome of psychic energy that would cover Moscow, so powerful that spy satellites would be confounded by its opacity and ICBMs would bounce off its hardy surface.
This artefact was still not such an encompassing defence — as Kolyokov contemplated it, he saw a flock of sea birds disappear within its folds to the south, penetrating the fog as easily as a cloud bank. To the world of Physick, it was nothing but a blind.
But it was enough, to convince him that the trade they were arranging was a good one. And it had been more than enough to drive him from his one remaining sleeper’s mind.
Kontos-Wu had been dozing in her cabin on board the motor yacht when it began — in that semi-dreaming state when the two of them might confer directly, without the impediments of the conscious cover to intervene. As with all his sleepers, the conversation occurred in a metaphorical classroom. Kontos-Wu’s was in a boarding school that she understood to be located in Connecticut.
Kolyokov was there to discuss a crisis. Alexei Kilodovich had gone missing just a few minutes before. Kolyokov didn’t think he’d been killed — he’d have been able to tell that through other means. But the signal was lost all the same — and that was serious. Kolyokov had gone to great trouble to bring Kilodovich back into the fold. His presence in the upcoming exchange was crucial. His disappearance needed to be investigated.
Kontos-Wu sat at her little desk in the middle of the empty classroom. Outside the window, snow swirled and darkened the east coast American sky. The fluorescent tubes overhead flickered. She had a notebook in front of her and a thick pencil in her hand.
“In a moment,” said Kolyokov, standing at the front of the classroom in front of a chalkboard, “you will awaken and step out of your cabin. You will proceed first to Kilodovich’s cabin, and determine if he is there, and his state of well-being. If you are satisfied that all is well, you will return to your cabin. If you do not find him, you will search the ship. You will do so under the guise of a walk on deck to get some air. If anyone challenges you during this search, you will immediately become seasick, and vomit over the side of the ship.”
Kontos-Wu raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“Sir, what if the vomit fails to convince?” The metaphor that Kontos-Wu constructed for herself here — a plump, short-haired child — took on an expression that Kolyokov recalled from the hand-to-hand combat exercises. “May I — ”
“No killing,” said Kolyokov, before she could finish. “We wish to retain Shadak’s goodwill for now. And there is the matter of your cover. You are an investor — engaged in unseemly business, with unseemly people, yes. But not a killer. If vomiting doesn’t work — maintain your cover. Which, as far as you understand, is the unvarnished truth. You are even less a liar than you are a killer. And if the truth doesn’t work — get out of there. Any way you — ”
The fog had begun as a singularity, an atom of Mind, then exploded, driving him away as if it were the edge of a shockwave. It may not have been impervious to Physick; but to the probing of a dream-walker, it was solid as neutronium. Kolyokov was worried that the instruction might not have taken — but in the end, he was glad to have given instruction rather than risked dream-walking her himself. Because the fog would have made a perfect block — and had he been dream-walking her, she would have fallen.
