Rasputin's Bastards (7 page)

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.

Now — assuming she interpreted the instructions — assuming there were no completely unforeseen hitches in the coming hours — at least she had a chance.

Kolyokov skimmed across its surface, ran his hands along it as he flew. It felt rough to the touch — if the hand had been Physick, the fog would have torn awayflesh like it was the skin of a shark. As it was, Kolyokov could only maintain the contact for a few moments before he pulled away, and paused, just a few feet above the immense dome. It was unlikely, he thought, that he would find a way in from here. He sighed.

There would be no easy way.

So Kolyokov dove. Not at the dome — the impact of such a manoeuvre attempted so soon after the last one would no doubt shock his sleeping body into cardiac arrest — but at the waves that lapped about its perimeter. He slid through them as easily as did the sea birds, through the mind-fog above.

Kolyokov took a moment to orient himself in the cacophonic din of the ocean. There was too much life here — more to the point, too much life that communicated in the alpha range where Kolyokov walked. The salt water conducted the Discourse of that life like a giant single brain. A dream-walker could lose himself in such a place; fall into the rhythm of whale and squid and plankton, and let that replace his own, more disciplined cadence. The dream-walker thus ensorcelled would live and sleep and eventually die in the deep green song of the sea — unless a comrade knew where he had fallen, and had the wit and skill and inclination to come and pull him free. There were no such comrades these days, though, so Kolyokov had to rely upon himself.

Fortunately, Kolyokov also had his training, and even a little experience — once in the North Sea in 1973, and three times off Cuba, when he was helping hide the Petroska Station project. He dreamed himself a great, Mind-baffling sphere, and the din of the ocean quieted. The thing descended through the deepening green like a bathyscaphe.

“Byup,” said Kolyokov. “Byup. Byup.”

Byup
was a mnemonic that Kolyokov’s masters in City 512 had impressed upon him early — an onomatopoeic metaphor for the sound that a Soviet submarine’s sonar made circa 1962. In an agent trained as Kolyokov was, the mnemonic would trigger a heightened awareness in the dream state, allowing the agent to discern details in dark or clouded conditions that would otherwise seem impenetrable.

Of course, nothing was truly impenetrable in the dream-walk — the “body” which Kolyokov occupied was a mnemonically constructed mirage of its own, and so were its eyes. At the core, Kolyokov knew he didn’t need light and visibility. Dream-walking, he could see anything he damn well wanted to.

But like the bathyscaphe buffer Kolyokov used to dive safe undersea, the sonar was a necessary metaphor for Kolyokov to access his own innate talent — without completely disconnecting himself from his own identity.

So, “Byup,” said Kolyokov again, and the mental sonar map of the sea around the cloud bank became marginally clearer.

The first thing he noted was that the cloud was a sphere and not merely a dome upon the water. No doubt it was as impenetrable underwater as it was above. He’d expected this, so was only a little pissed off. “Byup,” he said.

The ocean floor was not far below the sphere’s south pole — maybe fifty metres in parts. Kolyokov used a second and third “Byup” to determine that the sphere was no longer expanding — the distance between the two points remained the same through all three “byups.”

Metaphors like the “byup” were useful for things like that kind of work. Still, this was a part of his dream-walking Kolyokov didn’t relish. It showed just how long a time it had been since the art was practised by Italian peasants who wandered from their bodies each night armed only with metaphorical axes and spears, to fight the devils that threatened their crops. As with too much of the 20th century, it seemed that mechanization had overtaken the metaphors of dream-walking.