Rasputin's Bastards (33 page)

“I’m going for a walk,” he said and turned on his heel.

“Good idea, boy,” said Uzimeri. “Why don’t you go on the deck and get yourself some air?”

“Funny Turk,” said Stephen and stepped out into the narrow corridor.

It was maddeningly narrow. And the single deck that was fit for human habitation was crammed with equipment. He couldn’t take more than two steps without having to duck or bend to get around some protuberance. There were, Uzimeri had told him, fifty people on board this submarine. He’d have to take the old man’s word for it. Because there was nowhere on board where you could put all those fifty at once.

It was, thought Stephen, just a bad patch. He couldn’t be completely tone deaf to dream-walkers — because he was, or had been, working an apprenticeship with Fyodor Kolyokov. He’d been to psychic fairs and bought the tapes, and practiced his remote viewing like a kid doing piano scales. Maybe he wasn’t a Chopin — but Stephen wasn’t a failure, either. He walked into poor old Richard’s mind again and again — and Christ! He’d walked into the formidable skull of Amar Shadak, using the telephone lines as a gateway, and seen the ruins of Ankara through his eyes. Over the years he’d had premonitions and visions and on one embarrassing occasion an actual seizure, which old Kolyokov hadn’t completely dismissed as merely an attention-getting device.

Stephen stepped out onto the cramped bridge. There were a half-dozen of Shadak’s Romanian guard here, working the valves and controls like monks at a wine press. These guys weren’t deaf to the words of the Divine. They were so attentive that one touch from Zhanna was all it took to turn them into her slave boys.

Stephen stepped around the periscope, ducking beneath another low-hanging valve. A short, bearded Romanian stepped around Stephen to refer to a chart on the table. Stephen glanced down at it.

“That Gibraltar?” he asked. The Romanian answered with a blandly polite nod. Stephen stared at him — tried to push his way inside his head. For an instant, he thought he might have done so — felt a flow of language, a lifetime of large regrets and little triumphs. But staring into the Romanian’s blinking eyes, Stephen realized that that wasn’t the case. He was just fooling himself. As he always had been, maybe.

“Good then,” said Stephen. He stalked off the bridge.

What if he
had
always been fooling himself, thought Stephen. If he were to go through his psychic history systematically, he’d be hard-pressed to find an actual event where he had unequivocally managed to subvert one of his subjects. He could get into Richard’s head — or so he thought — and he could seem to affect Richard’s actions. But if Stephen were honest about it, he’d have to admit that most of Richard’s actions were entirely predictable. That was one of the offshoots of the psychic damage that brainwashing had inflicted on him.

And as for Shadak?

Stephen hadn’t done anything but piss the Turkish gangster off. And while he’d used the telephone to do that, Stephen had to admit that he hadn’t really needed any psychic powers to do so.

Maybe Zhanna was right — and Stephen didn’t have any psychic powers at all.

Maybe Fyodor Kolyokov was just stringing him along — just to keep him loyal. As Stephen thought about it, an unswervingly loyal psychic deadhead would be a valuable commodity for a man like Kolyokov. None of the old man’s enemies could dream-walk into the little deaf-brained executive assistant and tell him to stick a letter opener in the Fyodor’s eye. They’d have to bring someone like Mrs. Kontos-Wu across the ocean to do it.

Stephen bent down through a circular hatch. Crawled past some more bunks, underneath was almost as big as the bridge — mostly because two of the six torpedoes that would store here had been fired. Stephen hoisted himself onto one of the empty bays and stretched out. Craning his neck, he could see most of the way down the narrow tube that led to the ocean.

He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine what might lie beyond that tube now. Tried to picture the ocean, the sunken wrecks — the trio of ship-sized squid that accompanied the submarine like an escort of jet fighters as it made its way out into the Atlantic.

“Ah, fuck.” Stephen’s voice buzzed and hummed off the metal walls that confined him here.
Giant squid. How rich. How fucking Captain Nemo
.

He really was a fuckup when it came to dream-walking.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was radiant. She looked, thought Stephen uncharitably, like she’d just been laid.

“Get out of the fucking torpedo tube, Haber,” she said. “We’ve got lots to talk about.”

“This isn’t the tube,” said Stephen as he rolled off the empty torpedo bay and clanged noisily onto the grated decking. He pointed to the fore. “That’s the tube.”

“Whatever.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu leaned against the opposite bank of torpedoes. “Lots has been happening since we got on board this submarine, and we’ve decided that it’s not fair you shouldn’t be in the loop.”

“We?”

“I’ll get to that. But first, let’s deal with what we came here for.”

Stephen gave her a look.

“The mystery of the children,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “What happened to them, why we were hijacked at sea, all that.”

“Ah. For a second there I thought you meant why we gave ourselves up to the

Mafia and let ourselves be gassed in Amar Shadak’s fucking headquarters.”

“You’re angry about that, are you?”

Stephen sighed. “What about the children?” he said.

“Well. First off — did you make the connection with Ilyich and Tanya?”

“The connection?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu rolled her eyes. “Here’s a hint: their last names are Chenko and Pitovovich.”

Stephen thought a moment. “Weren’t they the ones involved — ” he snapped his fingers. “They were! Pitovovich is the lawyer from St. Petersburg, and Chenko is her — her man in Odessa. The one who found the kids and set them up in a dormitory. Right?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu nodded. “True as far as it goes.”

“I guess those email addresses are pretty redundant.” Stephen frowned, working it out. “But what are they doing here?”

“They’ve been with the children for many days now,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “The children — they look after their own.” Her eyes batted then, and her face took on an expression that Stephen had never seen before.

“You okay?” Stephen was worried she was slipping back into her metaphor again while a dream-walker stepped inside. He looked around for a weapon.

But Mrs. Kontos-Wu wasn’t going into metaphor. There was no dream-walker. She sniffed, and dabbed her eye with her sleeve.

“Shit,” said Stephen. “Are you
crying
?”

“Fu-fu-fu-fuck off.”

“You
are
crying,” said Stephen wonderingly. “Shit, Kontos-Wu.
Shit
. I didn’t think your tear ducts even worked anymore.”

“Fuck off. All right?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked up, sniffed noisily, and cleared her throat. “Pitovovich and Chenko are both sleepers from way back. For most of their lives, they’d been deactivated. Both were apparent GRU operatives. Pitovovich maintained a secondary cover in St. Petersburg as a lawyer, and Chenko was more open — he was a Colonel, and operated a station in Odessa and dealt with informants and so forth.”

“So wait a second. Chenko was a sleeper agent in the GRU? Isn’t that redundant?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged and dabbed her eyes. “Our missing colleague Alexei Kilodovich was a sleeper in its predecessor the KGB. You don’t think the bureau felt the need to spy on itself from time to time?”

Stephen always marvelled at the layers of paranoia that formed the strata of this organization that had abused and murdered his parents.

“How could I have been so naïve?” he said.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu chuckled. Stephen was amazed: first tears, now laughter.

“Chenko first met the kids eight months ago. It wasn’t exactly as Shadak understood it. A brood of them showed up in an old school bus — at an apartment block that Chenko found himself owning. Chenko had, unbeknownst to himself, taken a sizeable chunk of the station’s slush fund and thrown it into real estate. He’d put a half-dozen of his local muscle to work, clearing the place out and doing what minor repairs were required. Chenko met the kids — there were fifteen of them at that point — out front, and hurried them upstairs to the special suite he’d prepared.”

“Special?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu nodded. “It was sterilized. Had to be. It was going to be a birthing room.”

“What?”

“That was one of the things Chenko didn’t tell Shadak,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Zhanna arrived in Odessa pregnant. She gave birth just a day after they arrived.”

“Pregnant.” Stephen crossed the narrow torpedo room and leaned beside her. “What —
who
did she give birth to?”

“They named him Vladimir,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “He’s a very special baby.”

“Who are these kids?” said Stephen. “They’re like Fyodor Kolyokov is — was. Are they relatives of his? What? Why did he want them?”

“You ever hear,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, “of City 512?”

“No.”

“Me either. At least not — not at first.”

Ah fuck
, thought Stephen.
She’s tearing up again
.

“What is with you?” he said. “You’ve never been this — this close to the surface before.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu smiled weakly. “That’s so true,” she said.

“So what is it? What is it about this City 512?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu took a breath. “Well — as it turns out — it’s the place where I was made.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in Russia. The place is mostly underground — very secret, obviously — and it’s where Kolyokov — where he worked before he came to the United States.”

Stephen nodded. “Okay. That’s where he learned how to dream-walk. Where the sleepers like you came from. It’s also where these kids came from. That makes sense. They can dream-walk like Kolyokov could. So why’re you all misty?”

“Because,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, taking a deep breath, “I’ve known all that. All my life I’ve known all that. If I really concentrated — really pushed it — I could remember that I spent my childhood in a bunker in the Soviet Union. I could remember that these — these men from City 512 — took me and turned me into their puppet. But every time I would do that — it’d slip away. And I’d think about Bishop’s Hall. Where I went to finishing school to be a proper fucking young lady.”

“But you don’t have that problem now,” said Stephen. “So what’s the problem?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked at Stephen. “Do you ever think back to the night your parents tried to kill you?”

“All the time,” said Stephen.

“Is it getting better?”

He thought about that for a second. “You mean less painful? Sure. I guess. Time heals, you know?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, “I haven’t had the luxury of time. This shit is fresh pain for me, because I haven’t been able to look at it squarely until now. So — so — please —
fucking — excuse me — if I’m — a little —
”

Stephen tried to duck out of the way as Mrs. Kontos-Wu lunged at him. She wrapped both arms around his neck, and Stephen prepared for the inevitable
crack!
as she snapped it. The unmerciful end. But all he felt was hot tears soaking through his shirt.

“ —
if I’m a little emotional
!” Mrs. Kontos-Wu wailed.

“Oh.” Belatedly, Stephen raised a hand and patted Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s sobbing shoulder. He felt like it was the creepiest thing he’d ever done — but he kept at it, this
comforting
thing, until she closed her eyes and drifted to sleep.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu cleaned herself up for dinner. But she kept to herself as the five of them — her, Tanya, Ilyich, Stephen, and Uzimeri — sat around the little galley table eating their poached fish and rice. The engines thrummed and made the cutlery rattle where it sat. The mess smelled of fish and oil and battery acid.

“She is going through another phase in her recovery,” said Uzimeri. “Do not worry about her.”

Ilyich Chenko nodded. “We all went through this,” he said. “These children — they’re not like other dream-walkers we may have encountered. They need our help, but they don’t want to keep us tied up and in their unthinking thrall. So they release us. That is good — for it is always better to be a free man than a puppet. But it is also painful at first. Memory comes upon you in a torrent. Quite distressing. I am still sorting mine out.”

Tanya Pitovovich smiled and laughed. “I’ll take the pain of memory any day,” she said around a forkful of fish, “over oblivion.”

Chenko clapped and laughed. “Good,” he said. “We must all be so brave.”

Tanya reached across the table and held Ilyich’s hand. Stephen had to fight to keep from rolling his eyes.

Stephen cleared his throat.

“Tell me about the children,” he said. “Tell me about Vladimir.”

Ilyich disengaged from Tanya’s hand. “Vladimir,” he said. “The baby. You’ve heard about him?”

“Mrs. Kontos-Wu said he was born — in Odessa was it?”

“That’s right. We made a special room for it, in the top floor apartment. Whitewashed the walls and ceiling, tore up the carpets and scrubbed the floors down to the boards. The children brought two midwives with them. Pretty German girls. One had tattoos all up her arms and hair shaved short to her skull. The other one was a yellow-haired girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. I wouldn’t have taken them for midwives. But they knew their stuff. They put me to work soon enough. ‘Boil the water, Chenko!’ ‘Bring the cloth, Chenko!’ ‘Stand here!’ ‘Out of the way!’ I did as I was told. It was good to have work to do, because it’s an incredible, terrible thing when a child is born. A woman comes apart for the occasion — split up the middle — and for a long time, it’s all blood and screaming. The pain is — indescribable.”

“How would you know?”

“I was assigned to be her coach,” said Ilyich. “That meant that I shared the pain of it with her — because of what she is, I shared it quite literally.”