Sekret (10 page)

“I’ll be fine.” I swallow, my throat parched. “I lost her trail. She has to be nearby…”

Sergei shakes his head. “You’re pushing yourself too hard. Take it easy, all right? There’s no hurry.”

Easy for him to say. If I don’t find her, then I won’t get to see Mama and Zhenya, and then—and then …

Her image flutters over my fingers, slipping up my coat sleeve like winter chill. She plays a game of her own. She lugs the bag behind her, a black market barter for her freedom. There she was, just minutes ago, along the concrete risers behind Vladimir Lenin’s tomb.

“It should be here.” I sink onto the bench, palms grinding into the concrete. “She dropped the briefcase here.” I see her leaving it behind, but immediately after is the electrified fence of a missing memory. Rostov? It couldn’t be. Why would he block me from finding the traitor?

Sergei sits down beside me. “It’s all right. You can describe her for Rostov. He’ll understand.” He claps me on the shoulder, like I’m his little sister, like I’m keeping him from whatever he’d rather be doing—sleeping, or practicing at the rink.

“Finished?” Pavel asks.

I nod, swallowing down my rising frustration. I let them guide me through the crowd once more. The line of—mourners? pilgrims? thrill-seekers?—winds around Lenin’s ziggurat. I wonder what I might see if I touched that waxy face. Is a man like Rostov, calling for war, just what Lenin had in mind for the future of his great communist experiment?

Sergei frowns. “Do you hear that?”

As soon as he says it, a wave of static crushes me, sending the world spinning. “Rostov,” I say. The noise needles at my brain.

Sergei’s curled over, wincing. “No. This is … different. Stronger.” He exchanges a look with Pavel. “We need to leave. Now.”

Pavel moves behind us to usher us along. The woman’s thoughts lash out again, clawing at my skin as I push through the crowd. They resemble Kruzenko’s after she’s been around Rostov—that crackling live wire. She can’t be far from us.

They aren’t coming. Oh, God, it didn’t work. How dare he use me as bait? Where are they? He swore they’d come!

I scan the crowd, but her frenzied thoughts force everything through a shattered-glass view. I can’t focus; I can barely see through the black spots darting across my eyes. A hand shoots out. Snatches me by the wrist.

It’s one of them.
Bozhe moi
, I’ve found them. Come quickly, she’s here—

The woman stands before me, jumbled thoughts crackling around her. Blond curls spill out of her pale blue scarf and chalky lines cut through her too-young face. She stares at me with eyes guilty, haunted, dark.

Her mouth works silently.
Wait
—she thinks, grip tightening on my wrist.
The Americans are hunting you, little girl. Stay right here. It’s you they want. You can set me free—

Sergei steps between the woman and me. “Is there a problem here, comrade?”

Come with me!
She screams at me, static sparking over her words.
Don’t you get it, little girl? This isn’t a game!

But Sergei breaks her grip, throwing a nasty glare over his shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asks me, rubbing my wrist where her nails left little crescents of red. “Where’s that awful noise coming from?”

Hunting us. Her American allies are hunting us. The words stamp into my skull. “I—No. She’s not—” But I don’t know what to say. I want to turn her in to Rostov to earn a visit with Mama. But if there’s a man like Rostov controlling her … The only thing that scares me more than Rostov might just be a man like Rostov who
isn’t
on our side.

A dreadful new hypothesis comes to me: Rostov and Valentin aren’t the only ones who can wipe things clean.

CHAPTER 12

“MASHA, HAVE YOU SEEN
my gray sweater?”

I tear through my duffle bag of laundry once more, then dig into the pile at my feet. My wardrobe is only what the KGB has provided for me—five sweaters, three wool skirts, a pair of trousers, and cream blouses to wear underneath. But now there are only four sweaters. A small problem, I know. But the ration rat in me is panicking, parceling out future clothing options, budgeting survival under new constraints. The gray one was the warmest—a necessity for fleeing into the face of oncoming winter.

I try to keep the hysteria building in my lungs from rising up and choking me. It’s too soon to run, but after what I saw yesterday in Red Square … I have to be ready. The Americans offered that woman a trade—the
Veter 1
design plans in exchange for a way out.
A way out
. They can be reasoned with. Bartered with—just like my black market games.

Masha shrugs, flipping through an old issue of
Pravda
. “Maybe someone mistook it for a dishrag.”

I roll my eyes. “Larissa? How about you?”

“It happens,” is all Larissa says. She keeps doodling in her notebook.

Wonderful. I toss one last look at Masha and scan her bunk for potential hiding places. I’m sure she’s taken it, but if I dig through her belongings, she’ll go crying to Kruzenko. There are worse things she could have taken from my stash. Military rations I won from Sergei in a card game. A heavy blanket swiped from the linen closet. I scoop my laundry into my arms and storm toward the basement to use the washbasin and drying racks.

*   *   *

“Yulia Andreevna. Just the young lady I was hoping to see.”

Major Kruzenko blocks the rickety basement stairs as I climb them after leaving my laundry to dry. Light spills around her so she is only a dark form. I stop a few steps beneath her, arms folded across my chest.

“Colonel Rostov would like to speak with you. We need to follow up on yesterday’s Red Square mission.”

My blood cools, though I’ve improved my musical shield enough that she shouldn’t notice. “Sure.” I follow her to the study through its double doors. The guards stay outside, which somehow frightens me more. I hear Rostov’s awful churning sounds before he even turns to face me.

“Major Kruzenko’s care is agreeing with you, I see,” Rostov says. His polished boots click together at the heels, and he tucks his red-banded hat under one arm. “You are no longer a starved dog, hmm?”

“It’s more food than we need,” I say. Though I could use some extra padding for my escape. Winter’s already laid an icy base coat on the ground.

“Nonsense. Growing girls and boys … and we must feed the mind, too. It is our greatest treasure, isn’t it, comrade?”

Right now my mind is shredding apart from the sound and feel of him—his thoughts, his focus, his
power
—but I manage a pitiful nod and sit in the lumpy armchair he offers me. Kruzenko stands watch at my side.

“So.” Rostov sits opposite me, wispy fingers laced on his knee. “In your report, you state that you were trailing someone you believe belonged to the
Veter
engineering team, but you were not able to locate him, and when you reached the location where you believed he dropped the bag full of documents, it had already been removed.”

“That’s right,” I say, my ribs knitting together. I can’t breathe. Shostakovich’s music crashes around me, Yevtushenko’s voice rumbles; Rostov can’t possibly miss my panic right now.

“You said that the location of the documents had been wiped clean? That you believe the Americans have someone like Valentin and me. A ‘scrubber,’ as you called it.” He shares a tiny laugh with Kruzenko, like he’s flattered by the name.

I manage to jerk my chin in a nod. “A segment of time had been blanked out. Just like you did with my mother’s necklace.”

Anger flashes across his face, lightning striking and then gone. “You deduced all this from a few seconds of missing memories?”

“N—no. There were thoughts, too, with the same sound to them. The sound that you make…” I’m cringing, inward and out. But I would be anyway. Just being near him is enough for that.

He leans toward me, breath heavy with cabbage stew. “But you did not see this person. This … traitor.” I shake my head, sinking back into the chair. “But I am not convinced of this.”

Rostov’s noise blasts through me like warring radio frequencies. “Anton, you promised—” Kruzenko says, but her voice fizzles out. I can’t help it—the blond woman leaps out of my thoughts, graceful as a deer leaping from the birch trees, and I can’t force her back in. Brass blaring, strings sawing back and forth, Yevtushenko’s words ringing across the forest.
Oh, my Russian people; those with unclean hands have made a joke of your purity.

I have to protect her. She stares at me with frightened fawn eyes and her panicked words knit themselves into the music. I can’t tug them free without the whole symphony crashing down around me. She’s stolen documents, she’s trying to escape. She made a bargain with the Americans and they sent her to find
us
, the psychic team. Her darkest secret ossifies, it is clay and bone, it’s there for Rostov to see, jutting from my brain, waiting for the harvest.

“There she is.” Rostov isn’t angry. He doesn’t even sound surprised. “I thought she might be in there somewhere.”

I’m trying to cram her back into a drawer much too small. I won’t let them use me this way. I try to stand, but my legs are numb. Major Kruzenko holds me down as bile singes my throat.

“You should be happy. You are helping the State. And you are paying your debt.” Rostov reaches for my chin, and his touch is glass shattering inside my brain. Deeper, deeper—an icepick lobotomy, every note of my musical shield splitting apart like atoms. He reaches right through the wall of Shostakovich and wrests the traitor out of me. Notes, fragments of words, images crash down on him. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. He’s brushed aside my only trick like sweeping snow from the windowsill.

I slump back into the chair, my thoughts tender and bruised where something’s been pried out of them. My heart pounds like I’ve been running for hours through a blizzard.

Kruzenko clears her throat. “Well? Is she part of the
Veter
team? We’ll have a sketch made. Compare it to the
Veter
scientists’ records.”

Rostov stares through me. Veins dance on his forehead; his Adam’s apple strains against the collar of his shirt. “I’m more interested in her handler. Another ‘scrubber.’ That fraying around her thoughts…”

“And this other scrubber is hunting us?” Kruzenko asks.

I manage a weak nod. A look passes between Kruzenko and Rostov: a hasty widening of the eyes, quickly stopped. “I will deal with this scrubber myself,” Rostov says.

Kruzenko rocks on her sensibly low heels. “Shall we send a team for the traitor woman once she’s identified?”

“No, not yet. If these American spies think they are hunting us, then let her play bait a little longer.” He stands, hands swinging to his sides. They’re too long, even on his tall frame—his fingertips nearly reach his knees. He’s too wiry, too intense; he’s a man boiled away to his base part, that awful, powerful brain. A scrubber. The word itself rubs me raw. “Surely Khruschev himself cannot ignore so blatant an American violation of our truce as this. And if he does…” Rostov looks back at me, oozing a cyanide-sweet smile. “Well done, Yulia Andreevna.”

Major Kruzenko pats me on the shoulder. “You mustn’t hide things from us. This is how we maintain order and keep you safe from our enemies.” But she’s breathing too sharply; when she touches me, I sense her unease as well.

Rostov’s spindly fingers pull something from his pocket—Mama’s necklace. My throat clamps shut as he hands it to me. “Funny that you should mention this,” he says, curving a serrated smile. “I thought you might like to have it.”

My fist clenches around the medallion. Of course it’s been wiped clean. It feels less like a reward, coming from him, and more like a warning.

CHAPTER 13

I MAKE MY WAY OUT
of that room somehow—I don’t remember what combination lock of pleasantries get me away from them. Yevtushenko and Shostakovich rage in my head, my own shield scolding me for my failure.
I am but one soundless scream above the thousand thousand buried here.

I charge for the staircase, nearly plowing headfirst into Sergei. “Watch it!” he cries, catching me by the shoulders in his solid grasp. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I want to be alone,” I growl.

Actually, what I want is to grab the supplies from my stash and scale the walls of this prison. But then I think of the American scrubber coming for us and remember those walls keep him out as surely as they keep us in.

“Come on, Yul, you’ll feel better if you talk about it. Right now your head sounds like an angry … storm cloud. Of anger.”

Distant piano music fills the silence between us as we stare at each other. Finally, I crack a grin.

“Okay,” Sergei says, “so I’m no Pushkin.”

“I’m sure Vitaly Davidov isn’t much of a poet, either.”

“Good, maybe I’ll join him in the Hockey Hall of Fame someday. Really, though—what’s wrong?” He takes his hands off my shoulders, but their warmth lingers.

“Nothing.” I crumple into the banister, which groans back at me. “Everything. I don’t know.”

Sergei starts back up the stairs. “I know just the place to cheer you up. Somewhere not on the official tour.”

That piques my interest. Do the guards know about it? I am Yulia the ration rat, after all. I’ll stash away every crumb of knowledge that I can.

He leads me deep into the house’s bones: an inner hallway somewhere within the second floor. He opens the door to a narrow linen closet, reeking of mothballs and dust. “The nobles who lived here in tsarist times built this passage,” he says, fiddling with the sidewall of the closet. “Supposedly, they hid here when the first wave of the communist forces swept through the city.” There’s a soft click and the wall pops back. A hidden panel. Sergei squeezes through—no mean feat, given his bulk—and I follow through with more ease.

“That’s a better history lesson than I’d expect from a hockey hooligan,” I say with a smirk.

He rolls his eyes before slipping deeper into the darkened passage. “I’m not all muscle, you know. Not that anyone believes it. Even my parents…” He trails off, tension rising in him like steam, and Tchaikovsky’s
War of 1812
overture marches through the air. I feel a pang of embarrassment for my selfishness. I’m not the only one kept from my loved ones.