Rasputin's Bastards (12 page)

Stephen moved to the foot of the bed. He felt like that guy in The Exorcist — the priest with faith problems facing down the devil in the little girl, with the Exorcist himself dead in the other room. Stephen wasn’t in the same situation exactly — he was no doubter where dream-walking was concerned, and Fyodor Kolyokov was no Exorcist.

He also had more to worry about than driving the Devil out of Mrs. Kontos-Wu. There was the matter of Kolyokov in the bathroom —

— and the ringing telephone.

Stephen snatched it from its cradle. “Richard!” he snapped. “What the fuck did I tell you? Upstairs!”

“What is upstairs?”

Stephen’s blood turned to ice. It wasn’t Richard on the other end of the line. It was the call he’d been dreading most of the day.

Amar Shadak.

“Stephen? Have I caught you at a bad time?”

Stephen took a breath and forced his voice to modulate. The world may be collapsing, but Stephen couldn’t afford to let Shadak in on that little morsel of information. Just because he was across an ocean and a third of a continent further didn’t make Amar Shadak any less dangerous.

“No. Things are fine, Amar.” The line was secure, but Shadak insisted on keeping things on a first-name basis anyway.

“I am pleased to hear that things are fine, Stephen. Very pleased.” Shadak cleared his throat. “I was wondering if I might speak with Fyodor? Is he available just now?”

Shit. Stephen glanced at the bathroom door, took a breath.

“Unfortunately, no. He’s not available just now.”

“In a meeting is he?” Shadak laughed mirthlessly. “I think he can speak with me. We’ve an urgent matter to discuss.”

Stephen took a breath.
Shit shit shit
. “I don’t, ah — ”

“Why Stephen,” said Shadak, his voice taking on a tone, at once edged like a butterfly knife and soft as honey. “You’re hiding something from me. Something’s got you so scared, you’re hiding something from me. Fyodor’s not in a meeting, is he?”

Stephen didn’t answer. Something was up — something that included Mrs. Kontos-Wu, Kolyokov’s death, the thing that Kolyokov was investigating — the anomaly at the yacht. It was something that also evidently included Shadak. What was it? Stephen still had no idea — so kept his mouth shut.

“I think,” said Shadak after a second, “that there are two possibilities here. Either he is dead, or he is fucking me.”

When it was clear that Stephen wasn’t going to bite, Shadak continued. He was rolling now, relishing his big-time-player-versus-nervous-executive-assistant gambit. “Either possibility explains this nervous little bum-boy I’m talking to now. He’s got a corpse in the hotel room, and he doesn’t have a fucking idea how to tell this to Fyodor’s honest business associates and not fuck things up. If that’s what’s happened, I understand.

“But I’m afraid it’s not that at all. I’m afraid that Fyodor is fucking me. And I’m afraid that you are in on it, little bum-boy.”

Until now, Shadak’s voice had been the deep, confidence-inspiring rumble that Stephen had come to recognize in their telephone sparring matches over the years. But as he continued, his voice grew louder and more shrill. And as this happened, a peculiar calm came over Stephen.

So what if Mrs. Kontos-Wu was tied up on the bed making like Linda Blair? So what if Fyodor Kolyokov was dead in the isolation tank, which was so full of piss and shit it would take a Home Depot full of cleaning products to make it right again? So what if Miles was bleeding in some corner of the hotel and Stephen’s only prospect for some help was a 63-year-old computer engineer good for nothing but manning the front desk at Kolyokov’s hotel? And yeah, so what if Amar Shadak — the cool fucker from eastern Turkey who normally played Stephen like a mandolin — was so freaked out about something he was ready to scream?

In this sea of calamity, Stephen would be the one signpost of serenity and control. He thought back to the tapes he’d purchased from the psychic fair. The telephone mind-reading trick.

Stephen cleared his throat.

“Amar,” he said, “would you stop talking for a moment?”

As he said the words, Stephen imagined himself climbing the spiral staircase inside the wire of Amar Shadak’s telephone. He got to the metaphorical door to his brain, and metaphorically booted it in. He turned on the two TV screens behind Shadak’s eyes.

“Fuck you, you little piece of shit!”

Stephen opened his eyes. This really worked best with a cooperative subject —

“ — the fuck did you do with my boat? And my 641! You used your fucking tricks to send a fucking torpedo! My people are killed!”

— but a cooperative subject isn’t always available. Sometimes, you have to learn to make do with what’s at hand. He shut his eyes, and willed the words away.

It seemed to work. He ran up the spiral stairs, pushed open the door once more, turned on the television screens and looked —

At mountains. Shadak was operating out of an old caravansary he’d remodelled near Silifke these days. It was older than Jesus, as Kolyokov liked to say. Now it had electricity and running water and floors redone in fine Italian tile, and an army of Romanian mercenaries who ran the thing like Castle Dracula.

It’s working
.

In the background, he could hear the muffled noise of a diesel engine, and a voice. Stephen leaned forward, to better hear. “ — Hzekul’s dead? I think you fucking KILLED HIM YOU FUCKING LITTLE — ”

The voice quickly mutated into a high-pitched yowl, and as the pitch rose higher, the television screens exploded into prismatic fire.

Whoa. Feedback
.

Stephen blinked and sat up. The phone was on the floor beside him. The back of his head was sore, but not from any impact.

“Feedback,” he said wonderingly. The combination of his words over the telephone and the words coming from Amar Shadak’s head had created a feedback loop that had blown Stephen’s empathic link like a cheap pair of bookshelf speakers.

Stephen picked up the phone. Shadak had hung up. Stephen wondered if the feedback had hit him in the same way.

And what
, Stephen wondered,
did he mean by torpedo?

Before Stephen could wonder any more, the hotel room door swung open. Richard stepped in. To Stephen’s relief, Miles followed. He was limping, with a bright red handkerchief pressed against his forehead, the handkerchief matching the bloody red blotches on his shirt. From the cast of his eye, he was pissed off beyond belief. But he wasn’t dead.

“That’s the bitch,” he said as soon as he stepped in the room. He limped menacingly toward Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Let me go to work on her.”

“No,” said Stephen. “That’s not why you’re here.”

Richard gave Stephen a helpless look. He brushed a long white strand of hair from his eyes. “You-ou said the-ere was an emergency, sir?”

“Right,” said Stephen. “Mr. Kolyokov has . . . taken ill. I need the two of you to help me remove him from the tank and get him to the infirmary.”

Richard sniffed the air — no doubt he was smelling the stink of the tank, which had now wafted out from the bathroom.

“Shou-ouldn’t we perhaps call an ambulance?”

Miles and Stephen shared a look. Poor, brainwashed Richard — he really did think he was a desk clerk in a Manhattan hotel, and that the reasonable thing to do when Fyodor Kolyokov fell ill was to ship him off to the Sisters of Mercy in a city-run ambulance.

“Ah, no Richard,” said Stephen. “The infirmary will be fine.”

Miles gestured to Mrs. Kontos-Wu, who was grinning malevolently at him. “You want me to call housekeeping then?” he said.

“Not housekeeping,” said Stephen. When a death was involved, the Emissary’s housekeeping crew consisted of a tightly knit Croat family, with a cart full of sulphuric acid and a bone saw. “But you might want to call a maid up here once we’ve got Mr. Kolyokov downstairs.”

Miles raised his eyebrows in a question.

“The tank,” said Stephen. “I’m not getting in that thing until somebody gives it a good cleaning.”

As far as Holden Gibson was concerned, Alexei Kilodovich was a big hero. He was, Holden said, the kind of guy Holden wished he had twenty of: “A guy who sees a bullet coming and gets in the way of it. No ifs ands or buts: he doesn’t waste time figuring the percentages, sussing the odds. Just steps right in the way. Without even thinking.”

Alexei, of course, had done nothing so heroic as taking a bullet for Holden Gibson. He had simply pushed Holden Gibson over, an instant after deciding to postpone his murder — while not far off an old Russian torpedo hit a yacht and blew it up.

But to Holden Gibson’s way of thinking, that was enough. So far as he was concerned, the torpedo explosion was immense — just shy of thermonuclear in scope, sending tons of razor sharp debris whizzing through the air at about neck height, aiming for Holden Gibson. When Alexei tackled him, he had saved him from untold mayhem. So Holden Gibson imprinted on Alexei, in the manner of an orphan duckling imprinting on a passing turkey vulture. Alexei had never felt so complete a piece of shit as he did the moment he climbed on board Holden’s motor yacht.

“You could take a lesson from Mister Fuckin’ KGB here,” Holden told Heather as she climbed up the ladder from her own raft.

Heather rolled her eyes to indicate the half-dozen small children in the raft below her.
Language
, she mouthed.

“Oh. Right.” Holden nodded. “But you get what I mean.”

“Oh yes,” she said. When Holden turned away from her, she shot Alexei a look more venomous than all previous looks combined.

Five of the crew-members had gathered around the rope ladders to help hoist the children on board. There were a few children too small to use the rungs and they had to be passed up by hand. And the ones who were big enough were slow and timid as children can be. Finally, the last of them were on board and the Romanians cast off.

“Good riddance,” muttered Holden. “Those fuckers gave me the creeps.”

Alexei shrugged.

“Well — ” Holden turned to Heather “ — the sooner we get these little darlins locked up below decks, the sooner we can go home.”

“Right,” said Heather. Out of Holden’s sight, Alexei nodded glumly.

Of course. The children would be locked below in Holden Gibson’s smuggler’s hold, and they would all return to the United States where Holden would put the children into what amounted to criminal slavery, playing out some elaborate magazine sales scam in the far-off lands of Ottawa and Mississauga.

That’s right —
that
was why Alexei had decided to kill Holden Gibson. Because he was an evil son-of-a-bitch bastard who exploited little children. In the pit of self-flagellating misery he’d made for himself, Alexei spotted a darker corner still and headed for it.

Meanwhile, Heather had put on her game face — a vapidly happy grin topped with wide, sparkling eyes that was probably her idea of how a kindergarten teacher looked.

“All right children,” she said, “who wants to have a little nap?”

“No time for napping,” chirped a little voice from their midst. A chorus of other voices murmured assent.

“Well,” said Heather, “we’re going to have to go downstairs anyway. So come on — ” she clapped her hands merrily “ — let’s all go!”

She started for the door into the lounge, but stopped when the children didn’t follow. They stared at her wordlessly.

A silence had fallen onto the ship — the only sound was the blustering sea wind and the low thrum of the engines under their feet.

Heather’s game face started to crack.

“Come on.” She said it in the kind of voice that would send a kindergarten class into spasms of tears. “Let’s move it, gang!”

“No,” chirped the little voice. “Let’s not.”

The children looked down to their feet then, and slowly moved apart to make way for the speaker.

Alexei’s eyes widened. “Holy fuck,” whispered someone nearby.

The speaker was an infant — not much more than five months outside the womb, if Alexei were any judge. It wore a little blue jumper — so Alexei guessed it to be male — and had a gossamer-thin curl of black hair, the same colour as the rest.

He crawled forward on his hands and knees, and stopped in front of Heather.

“We are not going downstairs. I have had my nap already today. The rest of the brothers and sisters are likewise well rested. I think instead we will go up to visit your pilot. We have more brothers and sisters to collect before we do anything else.”

Holden’s crew stared slack-jawed at the marvel of the baby’s impossible speech. Holden himself lumbered over and lowered himself to his haunches.

“Well look at you,” he said. “She wasn’t kidding when she said you were special.”

“P-pretty fucking special,” said Heather. “This is impossible. Somebody’s playing a trick. Babies can’t talk — their mouths . . . aren’t well enough developed.”

Holden’s eyes narrowed. “Good point,” he said.

“It is,” said the baby. “Do you see me using my mouth?”

The baby’s lips were pursed shut as he spoke.

Holden grinned then. “Of course not. Because one of you other kids is doing a ventriloquist trick, isn’t that right?” He laughed and stood up. “Which one? Let me see you. We can always use someone who can throw their voice. Which one’s lucky?”

“Me,” said the baby. “My name is Vladimir. I am throwing my voice. Into your heads. Now how about I throw something else into your heads?”

Alexei clutched at his forehead. He felt as though he’d just swallowed too much ice cream on a hot day. His forehead and sinuses screamed in pain and he felt himself slipping.

And he shook his head. The pain was gone. Everyone around him — the adults at any rate — seemed to have experienced something similar.

“Now,” said the infant Vladimir. “Who will take me to the pilot?

“You?”

Vladimir looked up at Alexei.

“Yes,” he said. “Kilodovich. Pick me up — gently, with your thumbs hooked in my underarms.”