Rasputin's Bastards (16 page)

Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s eyes blinked open. “Oh,” she said, in her own voice. “I’m supposed to stop and wait until you’ve taken care of Mr. Kolyokov — unless you already have?”

Stephen felt himself flush. “He’s taken care of,” he said. “Keep going.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shut her eyes again.

“All done? Good. A couple of other things have no doubt come to pass in my absence. Unless I miss my guess, Shadak will have telephoned you by now. He will have been very angry, I’m willing to bet, but it’s his own fault. He sent a submarine with our cargo — a submarine! — and the cargo we were meant to collect escaped, and took it over. I don’t know what’s happened beyond that. I have been — compromised for the time being.

“I trust you have revealed nothing of my state to Mr. Shadak. That is good — always play your cards close to the vest as the Americans say. But it is time to contact Mr. Shadak again. We need to find out everything he knows about the cargo — where it came from, how many children are in fact involved, who else has had contact with them, and so on.

“And there is one other thing that we must discuss now. This one is . . . difficult. Our operative Alexei Kilodovich is missing. I know you are saying: so what? Kilodovich is nothing, just more sleeper muscle, new in the organization in any case — cannon fodder in the event things became ugly. That is what I led you to believe, and I must apologize for that, because I misled you, Stephen. In fact, Kilodovich’s disappearance is a very serious problem indeed.

“I know you were suspicious when we brought Kilodovich on board. And you were right. We didn’t go to all that trouble to recruit him as muscle. In fact, Mrs. Kontos-Wu is more than capable of taking care of herself. Kilodovich was a part of the exchange. Mr. Shadak was very interested in meeting our Alexei Kilodovich. He believes that there is advantage in having that one. In a way he is right. But whatever the matter — without Kilodovich, there is no exchange.

“To make matters worse, I believe that our . . . cargo . . . has taken possession of Kilodovich. They are clever children, Stephen, smarter than we ever had imagined, and stronger too. Who knows what they will do with him . . . how they will use him. I think it will not be to our benefit, however it goes.

“So. When I’m recovered, and out of this prison they’ve made for me, I will take up the search for Kilodovich. In the meantime, you must lay groundwork. Contact Shadak. Apologize to him on my behalf. Find out from him exactly what happened so far as he knows. Allow Mrs. Kontos-Wu to assist — Shadak likes her — but take the lead yourself. You have worked for me now for five years. There is more in you than you know. And I know that you are ready for this new responsibility.”

Stephen stood a little straighter at that. He
was
ready.

“But Stephen (said Kolyokov through Mrs. Kontos-Wu) — that doesn’t mean you’re ready for the tank. Under no circumstances are you to go in there. The tank is still my dominion.

“And the children — our cargo — are too dangerous to deal with on their own terms. Particularly for you. And particularly now that they’ve got Kilodovich. Goodbye for now, Stephen. Remember what I’ve told you.”

And with that, the voice of Fyodor Kolyokov was gone from Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s lips. Her eyes blinked open. “Stephen?”

“Stephen’s gone to the can,” said Miles.

It was almost a day before the doors to the children’s brig opened again. The little room stank of sweat and blood and shit and the stink seemed to leave too little room for oxygen. It all reminded Heather of a
60 Minutes
segment she’d seen on life in Russian prisons — which, she supposed, was not far from the truth. The Russians were running the show here, and sure as day turns to night, they’d turned Holden Gibson’s yacht into a prison after the old Soviet ways.

And shit — but didn’t those Soviets stick together when it came to the crunch? Alexei the KGB agent stood in the open door. He was carrying Holden’s Glock in one hand, aiming it in the general direction of the crowd. His mouth was cast firm, and his eyes had a cool, empty determination to them that Heather barely recognized.

Christ
, she thought.
Where was he yesterday, when
I
needed him
? “Get up,” he snarled.

“Jesus fuck,” said Gibson, who had been snoring contentedly on the bottom bunk for about an hour. “I am going to tear you another asshole, you fuckin’ traitorous mutinous Russkie.”

Heather smiled in spite of herself. It so often amazed her how Holden Gibson managed to stay alive at all, the way he behaved with the most dangerous of people. Alexei, for instance. He pointed the gun at Holden now — lined him up in its sights. “Get up,” he repeated.

“Je-sus.” Holden squinted at Alexei — and evidently saw the same thing Heather had in his eyes: an absence. Alexei would shoot him if he didn’t get up. Heather felt a quickening of her pulse, a faint hope that Holden would defy her KGB killer.

But Holden saved himself, and stood up with the rest of them. Seeing everyone on their feet, Alexei backed out of the door. “Come,” he said. “All of you. Follow me to the deck.”

“Who died and made him Captain?” muttered James as he passed close by Heather. She gave his ass a tweak and followed close behind as they pushed into the corridor.

“No one yet,” she whispered in his ear, and he smiled a little back.

The two of them had been planning a move on Holden since Dallas. He had been behaving more and more strangely since then — following this “dream” of his; pulling his kids off the routes, and finally, piecing together this bizarre operation. Heather had confided in James from early on, and at the best of times they agreed their boss was abusive, incompetent, self-destructive, had poor communications skills. And sooner or later, needed killing. The Russian Alexei Kilodovich, with his little ballpoint pen brain-smacker and his shady secret agent background had seemed like a godsend. Until, that is, Alexei turned out to be a chickenshit when it came to killing evil old men who had it coming.

It was true that the freak show kids Holden had managed to pick up here on the ocean were a complication. But shit — it wasn’t like she and James weren’t giving him opportunities. Heather could count at least four missed opportunities since Alexei arrived, and a couple more since they got back with the kids. Hell, for one of them she even got James to pick a fight with Simon in here, to give Alexei a distraction. How hard could it be to kill a smelly old bastard like Holden Gibson? Heather’d do it herself — if she thought for a second she could get away with it around this crew. Too many of them still paid lip service to Holden’s insistence on absolute loyalty to hand over the reins of power to an obvious assassin. Heather knew that — and as she’d found out early on in their association, when she approached
him
to do the deed for her, James had worked it out as well. James was a bright boy, all right.

And looking over his shoulder at Alexei, who was now beckoning them all forward with one hand while he levelled the Glock at them with the other, Heather was beginning to worry that her Russian stooge was a bright one too.

Alexei led them upstairs to the lounge. It was four in the morning, so the sky and sea were still dark beyond the windows. And it wasn’t much brighter inside. In the dimness, Heather could see that the chairs had been arranged facing aft, as for a seminar. Normally, Holden Gibson would hold court from behind the table they faced. Now, three of the children sat behind it. Their faces and forms were in shadow, and they were still as statues. Heather shivered. Even outnumbered, they were scary little fuckers.

“Take seats,” commanded Alexei. “Keep silent.”

The crew did as they were told. Gibson motioned for Heather to join him, but she pretended not to see and sat by James at the back.

“All right.” It was the baby’s voice, preposterously deep and serious. “We are nearly at our destination. I must apologize for your incarceration. It was a necessary thing until we completed the journey. We didn’t want to risk — a premature awakening until we were near the safe harbour. I hope that we can put that behind us and become friends in the days and months ahead of us — for there will be much reason to, I think.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, ‘friends’?” demanded Holden, standing up. “And what’s this ‘days and months ahead of us’ bullshit? And — ”

Holden yelled and grabbed his head, and the baby continued. “You are all a part of something — the same thing, in a way, as we children. As Alexei. It will become clearer to you in the next few hours, as we make our way to land, and finally meet the Koldun face to face.”

Gibson rubbed his eyes, and gasped: “What the fuck is a Koldun, kid? Why the fuck are we even up here, anyway?”

This time, to Heather’s disappointment, Gibson didn’t double over in pain. “To prepare ourselves,” said the baby. “We children have been doing so for years — but you Americans . . . you’ve forgotten the ways. So in the hours before we make landfall, I have decided that we shall meditate together. Close your eyes now. It is time to begin.”

“Fuck this,” said Gibson, and turned on a heel. No one stopped him as he stepped out onto the deck.

“Close your eyes,” said the baby again.

You can’t be serious
, thought Heather.

But she shut her eyes like everyone else. She wasn’t about to fuck with this kid — if he could talk in her mind like that, who knew what else he could do? If he wanted her to sit and meditate, that was fine with her. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done weirder shit at Holden’s behest.

In fact, there was a time when they’d done stuff just as weird. It was the late ’80s, maybe three months since she’d joined up with his little team. She’d run away from the stuffy-assed upstate New York boarding school her parents had shoved her into six months earlier because she didn’t like the structure.

And before she knew it, there she was, at a Transcendental Meditation retreat at a rundown summer camp in Northern California, learning her mantra from an old hippie named Pete and watching Holden and Shara, his girlfriend at the time, try their hands at yogic flying. Or more accurately, try their asses at it. Even though she was just eleven years old and fairly gullible, it seemed to Heather that yogic flying was basically jumping with your ass. Which struck her as bullshit. So Heather took her personal secret mantra, which as she told anyone who asked was
mi
, watched the old videotapes of the Maharishi and meditated for ten minutes twice a day for two weeks — until Holden got tired of Shara and jumping with his ass, and hauled them all off to New Mexico for three years of much more lucrative magazine subscription scamming.

What was the camp like
? asked a quiet voice.

It was pretty low-rent, compared with the sort of thing that Heather had been used to growing up. There were a couple of big clapboard buildings in the middle that smelled of flypaper and mould, and surrounding that a dozen little cabins. There was a lake a five minute hike down a trail, but Heather wasn’t allowed there and so she’d never been.

Hippie Pete said —

“Sometimes there are snakes that come from the lake and meeting them can cause stress and discord.”

He was smiling down at her as he spoke, his eyes taking that faraway slightly stoned look that came from spending your days and nights meditating with incense sticks burning at your feet. His breath smelled of oatmeal and herb tea, which was not surprising; that was all they ate and drank there, three times a day.

“We eliminate stress with meditation. Playing with snakes does not aid us in eliminating stress. So we do not go to the lake, where sometimes the snakes come from. This will cause stress, which we eliminate through meditation.”

Heather’s eyes shot open. “Fuck a duck!” she exclaimed. She had forgotten how creepy and irritating Hippie Pete had been. That sing-song voice; that take-you-around-in-a-circle-until-you’re-so-dizzy-it-makes-sense approach to selling things that fundamentally made no sense; that vacant smile that Heather assumed came from not having enough stress or too much meditating or both.

And there he’d been — right in front of her. A guy she hadn’t seen for fifteen years. Clear as day. She shut her eyes again, and took another look.

Yup — there he was. Smiling and nodding, holding his fingers and thumbs together with hands upturned in way that would make him look like a Buddha — if he were sitting cross-legged in a monastery and not standing out in front of the old Arts and Crafts Lodge giving her gentle, meditative shit for wanting to go down to the lake and take a swim.

And shit, but he towered over her. At first, she thought he was some kind of giant — it seemed like he was eight feet tall. But she quickly realized that it wasn’t him that was big — she was small. As small as an eleven-year-old girl from New York would be. She looked at her hands — they were soft and tiny. From the look of things, Holden hadn’t gotten around to starting the aversion therapy that would eventually stop her from biting her nails, because they were gnawed down to nubs and a couple of fingertips were pretty scabby. She was wearing a My Pretty Pony T-shirt, cheap stonewashed jeans and a pair of even cheaper rubber sandals.

“Fuck a duck,” she said again.

“Consider the rose,” said Hippie Pete. “How it has many petals which grow from a stem. Though the petals grow from the stem, it is the stem which also grows, and the petals which grow from — ”

“Oh no,” she said. “We’re not getting into the rose thing.”

The Maharishi used to talk about roses all the time. There was a whole EP video about roses, in fact, six hours of the Maharishi sitting on a cushion in a studio in Calcutta or somewhere, dishing the dirt on roses and consciousness and how one was like the petals of the other. The last thing she needed now was to hear Hippie Pete recite the director’s cut.

“ — and the stem,” said Hippie Pete, as oblivious as ever to Heather’s blossoming boredom, “constitute the consciousness which we — ”