Rasputin's Bastards (21 page)

“We are near Cuba.”

The speaker was silent. Alexei concentrated.

“Okay. I see a boat approaching. It’s a motor launch, pretty small, with what looks like three American college students in it. In fact, though, none of them go to college. The pilot is a man named Harvey Abelson. He’s CIA. He’s thirty-two but looks eighteen, He has two others with him who are also operatives: a woman named Ruth Etterby and a man, Fred Winslow. They’re watching for a particular boat, coming from Cuba.”

“I see. And who — who is in
that
boat?”

Alexei thought about that. Abelson knew a name — Emilio Torres — and he knew a face — a thin, bald man with a long black beard and a patch of nearly white skin in front of his left ear, where a burn had healed badly.

But Alexei didn’t think that was right. He concentrated further, and finally said: “One of ours. Abelson doesn’t know it, though.”

There was a staticky shuffling at the microphone, and a woman’s voice spoke next.

“How do
you
know it, then, Kilodovich?”

“He is nervous, our man. His thoughts are like a horn across the water.”

“Spare us the similes. Keep watching. Tell us when he arrives.”

Alexei waited. He cast his eye across the water, dwelled on a growing mass of thunderheads to the east, white and grey against a stratospheric blue. The ocean had a smell to it, too — one that he, who had never been near a large body of water, had no words for. An alien smell. Alexei let his attention return to the Americans.

Although he didn’t let on to his team members, Abelson had seen more than a picture of Emilio Torres. The two had known one another years ago, at school in Southern California. They’d been good friends — shared beer and crib notes and even, for one intense month, a girlfriend named Sue Denson, who’d eventually left them both for a kid in pre-med. These days, the “kid” ran a successful private practice in San Francisco — which helped him keep up with the staggeringly high alimony payments that Sue won in their divorce.

Abelson kept track of his ex and her ex’s fortunes out of a vaguely malicious curiosity. He kept track of Torres’ comings-and-goings in the course of his job. Torres had been working in deep cover in Havana for the past eleven years — working as a cleaner at the house of Pyotr Oprinchuk, one of Castro’s foreign policy advisors from the Kremlin. He had been reporting for several months now on the movement of ships and submarines from Havana Bay, to a point in the mid-Atlantic — all having to do with something called Petroska Station. He’d also managed to photograph a group of very high-level Russians, who visited Oprinchuk for dinner a week ago. Among them: Vasili Mishin — who’d taken the fall for the failure of the Soviet lunar program — and General Karim Karimov, who was also engaged in the cosmonaut program. Were they building a launch facility in Cuba then? The Russian plans for Petroska Station were a most tantalizing mystery.

But it would be someone else’s mystery to solve. Torres had been compromised. One of Oprinchuk’s maids had begun to suspect, and two nights ago let on to Torres that if he didn’t come up with some money, she’d spill it all.

After disposing of her body, Torres had made a fast radio transmission, headed for a cove at the north end of the island where he kept a boat, and from there, debarked for a rescue rendezvous.

What he hadn’t figured, of course, was that the maid wasn’t just a maid; she was part of a KGB counter-intelligence team on a spy hunt — making sure the top secret Petroska Project stayed secret. She was only fishing when she approached Torres.

With her murder, Torres gave himself away. The KGB team intercepted his transmission, and shortly thereafter, intercepted him, on his way to the boat. Torres was now on his way to an interrogation camp in Russia. And one Jorge Alvarez, a KGB recruit from Havana who bore a passing good resemblance to Torres, was on his way to the rendezvous to try and find out how much the Americans knew.

The motor launch was in sight now — the whine of its engine on the edge of audibility.

“Fred,” said Abelson quietly, “start the motors. Torres is coming in.”

Fred nodded and climbed up to the bridge. Ruth slipped below decks. Abelson lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and focused them on the launch.

“He’s put on weight,” said Abelson as Ruth handed him the rifle. He set down the binoculars, lifted the gun to his shoulders, and peered through the scope. He drew it slow across the horizon, until it lit on the prow of the boat. From there, he pulled it up and onto Jorge’s worried face.

“Oh no,” said Alexei aloud.

“What is it?” said the woman behind the wall. “Say what you see, boy.”

Alexei ignored the question. He’d misapprehended the situation! Abelson was there as part of a hit squad — not to pull in an agent. Jorge was a second away from death.

He had to act quickly!

Frantically, he pulled out of Abelson’s sphere, out of his mind. He had to get to Jorge — to warn him. With all his energy, Alexei flew across the water — fast as a bullet would travel, maybe even a little faster — to warn the unsuspecting agent that things were not as they seemed . . .

That he should duck.

“Duck!” screamed Alexei, as he set a metaphorical foot into the doomed man’s mind.

He was doomed. Because as fast as Alexei travelled, he only arrived a scant two seconds in advance of the bullet bound for the middle of Jorge’s skull. That was enough time to speak the warning — for Jorge to start at the thought, wonder where it came from — for Alexei to apprehend the texture of a life (childhood in Havana, spent helping his mama clean toilets in a hotel owned by a Miami-based mobster known to him only as Brother Jules; a revelation like a touch from God, when he met the lean, handsome Che Guevara for the first time and swore himself to the Revolution; and years, moving into decades, spent in service of that Revolution, filled with loves and slights, triumphs and humiliations).

And then, a bullet — which tore through Jorge and Alexei and the universe all at once and forever.

But it only seemed forever. Alexei blinked awake, bullet-free and alive, in Bed 4 at City 512’s infirmary. Unlike the examination room, which had small, frosted glass windows near the ceiling, the infirmary was completely subterranean. The only light came from wire-caged lamps set into the painted cinderblock walls. There were a dozen of these, two lights for each bed, with additional lamps on long goose-necks attached to the headboards.

“Sorry, Kilodovich. You failed.”

Alexei didn’t recognize the voice or the man who was using it at the foot of his bed. He had black hair, a long thick beard and two thick eyebrows, conjoined into one. He wore an expensive-looking leather coat, and his hands rested in its pockets.

“What do you mean?”

“Failed. You messed up. Got the signals wrong. Took the wrong course of action. You’re out of the program. Do you understand what I mean now?”

Whoever this guy was, he was pissing Alexei off. He’d never seen him before, never even heard his voice through the intercom during a test. And here he was, delivering the news that Alexei had failed.

“I don’t believe you,” said Alexei. “This is still a part of the test. Where are the others?”

“They don’t care about you any more. Like I said — you’re out of the program. Finished. You got no talent as far as they’re concerned. They’ve already wasted enough of the People’s valuable time and resources on you.”

“May I ask,” said Alexei, “what caused me to fail?”

The bearded guy nodded, as though something had just been confirmed in Alexei’s question.

“You fabricated,” he said. “You sensed energies. But they were random, meaningless energies — and you used your mind and imagination to transform them into a narrative. A few simple suggestions from the box, and there you are — floating over the waters off the coast of Florida, imagining something out of a James Bond novel in your head.”

Alexei looked more closely at this man: the cast of his brow, the way his chin bent beneath its beard. He was younger — in better shape — but . . .

“Fyodor Kolyokov,” Alexei murmured.

“You know my name.” The man frowned. “That’s not talent,” he said. “You’ve been snooping. Trying to trick me into giving you a second chance. That’s not a wise course.”

Alexei shook his head, as though clearing hangover cobwebs. He blinked up at Kolyokov — the real Kolyokov; not the one he remembered, teaching him spy tricks from the classroom. And not the strange ghost that had accosted him in the schoolyard.

The real Kolyokov. The bastard.

“You were never my teacher,” he said. “Were you now? You took me from the program here, after they’d written me off. And instead, you put me in — ”

Alexei snapped his fingers — the words wouldn’t quite come. Lies and certainties shifted and melded as his understanding grew.

“There was never a spy school. Not the one I’m remembering. Spy school — school — was — ”
a tiny room, where lights flashed and food came infrequently and when it did come, was infused with narcotics; a place of needles and repetitions and ultimately, emptiness . . . a terrible emptiness, with the power to draw away the soul —

“Shit.”

Alexei jumped off the bed. Kolyokov stepped back, hands still in his pockets.

“Think what you like,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll come with me in the end.”

“I will,” said Alexei. For the path with this man — this younger incarnation of Fyodor Kolyokov — was the path to the truth of his childhood. And it was, Alexei began to realize, a more terrible truth than he’d ever dared imagine.

The dream-haunted corridors of the Murmansk spy school faded and bent under the grass, and in the distance past the apartment blocks and razor-wire fences and machinegun posts, a great, dark cloud began to form. Old Fyodor Kolyokov squinted at its dissolution. It had been a good try, he thought, entering Alexei Kilodovich’s metaphor to pull him back awake.

A good try. But there was only so much he could do.

Kolyokov was beginning to understand his predicament: he wasn’t just having a very long sleep in his tank. He was, in body at any rate, deader than the proverbial doornail. Whatever lived now, whatever his thoughts inhabited, was his ghost. The world he inhabited? A metaphor, true — but not his own.

Briefly, it had been Kilodovich’s. He knew it to be so, because he had been central in constructing it. He recognized the work of his own hand — and he knew it well enough to contact young Alexei, and try and get a warning across.

But Kilodovich had had other ideas — put in him, perhaps, by the Children? Who knew. The important thing was that Kolyokov began to dismantle the metaphor too quickly — and that dismantling threw Kolyokov out. Kilodovich had moved on — to another place; a metaphor no longer of his making, perhaps closer to true memory.

There would be no communication with him here, in this ruin.

Soon, there would be no
here.

Kolyokov started to walk across the ruins. The metaphor was losing its form with each step — the ground shifting between gravel and asphalt and mud depending upon how he lowered his heel. The air was neither cool nor warm. In spite of the growing cloud on the horizon, neither did that air move.

The world was coming undone with stillness.

Stillness everywhere, but in that terrible cloud. Kolyokov watched it for a moment. The cloud spread across the horizon most menacingly: black at its base, but topped by a range of purple and golden thunderheads that stretched over the curve of this world like distant mountains. Would there be tornadoes underneath that cloud? Kolyokov wondered. Lightning strikes? He heard no thunder, felt no wind, but he knew somehow that it would come. The cloud tops churned and twisted discernibly. Weather would accompany them.

But it would not. Kolyokov’s chest hitched at the realization:

I am dying
.

Kolyokov had denied it for as long as he might: but when they’d pulled him from his tank and ingested him into the chaos of their Discourse — of course, they were killing him in the world of Physick. Of course, his body would not survive the ordeal.

Of course —

He was dying.

In the silence of the crumbling metaphor, Fyodor Kolyokov fell to his knees. He knew better than to pray for absolution — for entry into Heaven. Because if ever there was a God to give it, Kolyokov would not find favour with Him.

All he could hope was that the message he planted in Kontos-Wu had arrived — and Stephen had the wit to follow his advice. He hoped Mrs. Kontos-Wu had the strength to break her programming. Even if he died now, Kolyokov thought bitterly, he might still leave some legacy for his kind.

Kolyokov reached down to touch the crackling dry grass at his knees. He could feel it beneath his fingertips — but through a veil of numbness. Soon, that sensation too would be lost to him. His body — or the metaphor of his body — would crumble and blow away like this poor construct he’d made for Alexei Kilodovich all those years ago.

“Oh, Alexei.” Fyodor Kolyokov shut his eyes and wept unsalted tears. “Oh me.”

The storm cloud must have grown nearer as he wept. Because after a time, Kolyokov became aware of a breeze against his cheek, wafting through the long hairs that remained on his skull. A smell, unfiltered by numbness, excited his senses.

“Strawberries,” he said, and opened his eyes.

The storm was not only nearer — now it roiled about him, in dust devils eighteen feet tall and tiny lightning flashes from the belly of the deep ochre cloud that now made his ceiling. Kolyokov wiped the dampness from his eyes even as the rain began to fall.

“Garlic,” he said, sniffing the air like a hound tracing a scent. “And — what is that under-scent?”

Peat
.

The sensation brought about by that word in Kolyokov’s skull was more novel than even the breeze and smells in this place. He had not, he realized, heard a voice speak in his skull like that since . . . since the Soviet. When he had controllers of his own to deal with.