Rasputin's Bastards (73 page)

As Alexei spoke, the towers around them began to fade and crumble. The golden light that pervaded this place began to fade, and was replaced by a relentless grey — and then darkness. Alexei could see nothing.

He let the tentacle extend. “You see,” he said, “how ridiculous your fantasy is.”

Somewhere behind him, he heard a deep chuckling then. “Oh,” said Babushka — her voice now an old woman’s, “Kilodovich. How you have miscalculated. The metaphor,” she continued, “has not been for my own benefit for many years. It is for my children. You don’t need to convince me that it’s a stupid lie.”

And with that, the darkness turned into a night sky. A night sky of perfectly paired stars — a million eyes, maybe more, looking out on vistas that were not fantastical at all: highways and offices and houses, and television screens. “See,” said Babushka. “These are just the beginning. Now that you are here.”

And to his peril, Alexei looked — and fell into the soft discourse that Babushka had crafted.

Leo Montassini was always pretty fast, and it was a good thing, because if he was any slower the baby could have taken a serious tumble down the stairs of the lighthouse when Alexei’s arms went limp and he fell to the floor.

He dropped the rifle, which by a miracle did not go off, and managed to catch the baby under his arms before he’d even touched the floor. The baby didn’t cry, which was good because Montassini was no good with crying babies, as his cousin Tina was fast to point out — but the kid sure looked worried.

“I don’t blame you,” said Leo, jostling him up and down. “Should never have gone to that fuckin’ hotel — ’scuse my language.”

The baby looked at him, frowning. Leo could feel a faint ache at the back of his jaw. He went over to check on Alexei. The guy had a pulse — Leo could feel it at his neck. But he wouldn’t move or respond.

“It is too late,” said the Koldun from his chair. “She has him. And now — now she can convert the rest of the world.”

“Convert,” said Montassini. “To what?”

“To one mind,” said the Koldun.

And at that, Leo Montassini felt a tickling at the back of his skull — and a scent in his nostrils that made him think of New York, and the strange concoction inside Fyodor Kolyokov’s tank.

“Whoa,” he said, as much to himself as anyone else, “the sea.”

The Empire of New Pokrovskoye reassembled itself as quickly as it had collapsed. It spread like a stain across thin fabric — remaking the lands of Labrador into a great rich agricultural land, the breadbasket — turning New York and Washington into the Dark Provinces; redrawing the maps, stronger than ever. For now the Babushka flew with Alexei Kilodovich. And every set of eyes he peered through now saw others, and turned them instantly. The Empire spread like an oil slick through the world from its birthplace in the north.

Stephen looked at the girl, as the sky swirled and bent overhead. Zhanna hung behind him, eyeing her with suspicion. Mrs. Kontos-Wu didn’t lower her gun, but she seemed slightly less suspicious.

The girl had greeted them at the main pier when the Zodiac came up to it. She wore her hair in faux-Rasta beads and looked only a little older than Stephen. She shouted “Hello” in Russian, and called Stephen by name. Stephen thought about that — thought about the squid that now hung still and waiting beneath the water of the harbour — and ventured a guess.

“Fyodor Kolyokov?” he said.

“That is correct,” she said in a voice that aside from its pitch sounded remarkably like Kolyokov’s. She squinted, regarding the assortment of Romanian thugs still in the Zodiac. “It is good to see you, Stephen. I take it that you did not manage to find Kilodovich.”

“A lot has changed,” said Stephen. “for one thing — ”

“I died,” said Kolyokov. “I know this now. You are no doubt surprised to be talking with me here.”

Stephen shrugged.

“Not really,” he said. “You’re just like the Mystics.”

“The Mystics?” The girl’s eyebrows raised up. “You know about the Mystics. Things have changed.”

“I also know,” said Stephen, “what you did to me.”

“And what was that?”

“You — you cut me off,” said Stephen. “You buried what talent I had.”

“That is what you think I did?”

“Yes.”

“Are you looking for an apology?”

Stephen thought about that. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

“All right,” said Kolyokov. “I apologize. But not for that.”

“For what then?”

“For this,” he said, and then he said: “Manka. Vasilissa. Baba Yaga. One three four seven.”

Beside him, Zhanna’s eyes widened.

“The code,” she said.

The blonde girl smiled. “Why else,” said Kolyokov through her, “do you think you had such a difficult time reading him? I would not leave such a device in the open.”

Stephen felt his eyes widen as a sliver of memory opened to him, and his sense of his life unspooled before him.

“You bastard,” he said. “I’m a bomb!”

Stephen Haber, a bomb. He knew as he said it, that wasn’t precisely correct. He was not, precisely, a bomb.

In addition to not precisely being a bomb, Stephen was not precisely a great many other things he thought he might be. He was not the natural child of Mr. And Mrs. Haber the sleeper agents. He had lived with them as their child, but he had another origin — another lineage. They were sleepers, true. But he slept more deeply than any of them.

Because he was that most dangerous of things: not a bomb, precisely — but for the purposes of Discourse, the great psychic computer that they all lived in, he was something worse.

He was a switch.

If the KGB’d found him, they’d have destroyed him.

Luckily for him, Fyodor Kolyokov had found him first.

He became for Kolyokov an insurance policy. If the other sleepers ever came too close — if they ever decided to attack Kolyokov, reveal him, or just send too many killers after him, he had one way out.

His switch.

As Stephen’s timer counted down, he recalled so many other things. He recalled killing the attaché in New York with a small gun — but for no other reason than Kolyokov needed him out of the way. And he recalled the New Jersey Psychic Fair: the fortune that he’d gotten from Lorelei Jones herself.

“I’m getting a sense that you feel like people use you,” she said.

“Amazing.”

“I’m not getting a sense that you are angry about that though. More — ”

“Yes?”

“More grateful. Gratitude? Does that make sense?”

Stephen wasn’t sure that it did. But as he thought about it, he could see how it might. After all, Kolyokov kept him in comfortable living circumstances and didn’t make any sex demands on him. As he thought about it — yeah. Sure.

Stephen nodded.

“I’m getting — a woman,” said Lorelei. “A woman is using you.”

Well no. That wasn’t possible. But Stephen didn’t say anything — just to see where she went.

“All right. Maybe not a woman. Women. You’re a pretty young boy and women like you. But they use you.”

Stephen shook his head. The boldest of rationalization couldn’t carry that. “No women trouble,” he said.

The psychic put her hand on her forehead. “Hmm. It’s cloudy right now. Hard to see. Are you resisting? Because it doesn’t work if you’re resisting.”

“I’m not resisting.”

“Well I’m definitely getting exploitation,” she said. “Maybe not a girl at all.”

Getting warmer, thought Stephen.

“Maybe,” said the psychic, “your father?”

Stephen felt his ass clench shut. He bunched his hands. He looked past her, over to the table behind her, where a little display of cassettes was propped. “How much are those tapes?”

Later, Stephen listened to the three tapes that outlined Lorelei Jones’ Ten Steps to Psychic Oneness. They were comforting in their way. Lorelei had a way of talking that made everything seem all right — and her methodology had a certain dream logic to it that seemed to mirror Fyodor Kolyokov’s methods. At least those few methods he would share with Stephen.

Still, a part of Stephen knew that those tapes were as creaky as Jones’ ham-fisted attempts at psychic readings. They weren’t going to teach him how to dream-walk — they weren’t going to help him take control of the minds of the unwilling and bend them to his own will — they weren’t going to give him access to the real powers that he knew lay just beyond his grasp.

But they hinted at them — they promised them. And Stephen found that promise, that idea of absolute power so compelling that he couldn’t resist.

Then he thought about that power — its true exercise, in lies and deception and cruelty. Was that worth preserving in any way? When people like Babushka and Kolyokov and others exercised it with such evil in their hearts?

One of the clean things about running a giant squid was all that room. Squids had great big brains and high-bandwidth nervous systems. What they didn’t have was a complex mind. There was no need to trick a squid into giving up the controls. No need to cajole the squid into lying to itself. It just welcomed you inside, let you along for the ride, and if you wanted to take the controls — there was no problem.

It was a compelling line of thinking — made no less so than by the fact that it might have been as falsely implanted as a scripted part of his end-game. Scene Twenty-Four: Stephen Haber convinces himself of the rightness of this course, just as the countdown reaches zero.

But ultimately, Stephen thought, the choice was his own to make. He wasn’t a squid. If Fyodor Kolyokov or someone else had put a bomb inside him — the choice was his own.

“Maybe your father?”

The choice was his own.

Stephen Haber’s consciousness, wound tight as a spring for his entire lifetime now, came loose. The light of it was blinding in the consensus metaphor of New Pokrovskoye. The Imperial Palace, built of stones that were quarried by hairy and belligerent dwarves from the provinces of Motavaria, dissolved into dust. The great ramparts surrounding the harbour saturated with the sea and slid and fell and returned to the muck. To the south, the Province of Cloridorme revolted, and when the occupying Imperial Army turned out to be nonexistent, returned to its status as a township in a remote part of Canada with a surfeit of abandoned automobiles. The millions of blinking eyes that saw the empire and moved on its behalf blinked, and fluttered, and extinguished. A million hands reached over to their tape decks and compact disc players and radio stations, and with a huge, simultaneous flick, even the heartfelt rumblings of Ivan Rebroff were ended.

Quiet fell on the land like new snow.

And in the quiet, a baby wailed.

“Shh,” said Alexei. “Hush.”

Vladimir only wailed more loudly as he flailed in the straps of the carriage, the thick madhouse padding of the little blue snowsuit he was in. It was night, and freezing cold — cold enough to make everything brittle. It seemed as though Vladimir’s shrieking would be enough to shatter glass. Alexei rubbed his hands together, and noted ruefully how small they were. He peered across the icy plain in front of him: sure enough, not a quarter-kilometre distant were the low buildings of the Murmansk spy school that never was.

Alexei swore.

He was back. Back at the beginning — enmeshed in the vicious lie that had been his childhood. “This place doesn’t exist,” he said. “Right, Vladimir? All bullshit.”

Vladimir bunched his fists together and turned his wail up a notch.

Alexei turned the carriage around to face him and knelt close to the kid. He met his eye. There was still an intelligence there — the kid knew who he was, there was a spark of that. But only a spark.

“He is spectacular — is he not, my old Comrade?”

Alexei started and turned. Behind him stood an old man in a bathrobe and slippers — his hands jammed into the pockets for warmth. Whips of hair fluttered in the light Barents Sea breeze.

“Kolyokov,” said Alexei.

The old man nodded, and knelt down. He tucked a finger under Vladimir’s chin. “There, there, little petrushka. Do not mourn. Do not cry. Shhh, shh . . .” He turned to Alexei. “Little Vladimir is losing his mind,” he whispered. “He is losing all the connections with all the people he has met with — losing their memories, the computing power of their brains. Now — ” Kolyokov patted Vladimir’s head “ — soon, he will just be a baby again. In a sense, he shall be free of them.”

“Kolyokov.” Alexei looked around for a rock — something heavy to bash the old bastard’s brains in.

“Do not bother,” said Kolyokov. “It would not make things any quicker than they are to be anyway.”

“I do not want to make things quicker for you necessarily.”

Vladimir was inconsolable, so Kolyokov sat back in the snow and looked at Alexei. He didn’t say anything, but after a time, he started to smile.

“What?” said Alexei. “What?”

“I am just,” said Kolyokov, “looking at you. Cannot a grandfather admire the children?”

Alexei shook his head, as his mouth half-opened to spit some angry rejoinder. Christ! The old bastard had robbed Alexei of his childhood — of his life, his memory — had coerced him to do terrible things for no cause greater than the persistence of Kolyokov’s great spiderweb. He had sold him out, in a deal with Amar Shadak! To purchase Vladimir and his siblings — like chattel, like slaves!

“Why?” said Alexei.

“
Why
.” Kolyokov inflated his cheeks. “What a question. I don’t know that I can say why — but I will tell you some reasons why not. Not because I wanted to live forever as a parasite in the hindbrain of the human race. Not because I wanted to turn Vladimir and yourself and everyone else into my slaves in some elaborate crime ring to con people out of their retirement money, or a group to aid sceptical secret agents in their quest to win the intelligence war with the United States. Why don’t we go indoors?” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “It is Goddamn freezing here.”

Alexei stood up too and followed Kolyokov, pushing the carriage over sheets of ice and little drifts of snow, while Northern Lights flickered like ghosts overhead. They came upon the school quickly. Kolyokov fumbled in his bathrobe for a key, opened the large sheet metal-covered door and led the way inside.