Sekret (20 page)

Too much rage floods my veins. I can’t keep this all inside.
Don’t be an empath, Yulia. Don’t bottle it up.
I have to get these feelings out of me, can’t let them swell like Anastasia’s did. I have to find a way to get them
out.

My palms vibrate against the tabletop like the hangover of a dramatic chord after Valentin’s hammered it on the piano. I’m pulled into the wood, an undertow slamming me against it, and just as quickly, my emotions fizzle out. I can’t remember what made me so angry, so frightened, though I remember feeling that way.

Major Kruzenko leaps up from the table like she’s been scalded. Her eyes are ringed in white. Can she feel what I felt? For a second, I can see my anger’s shadow on her face. “Yes! Yes, you have done everything we’ve asked.” She backs away from me. Her fingers tap against her thighs like an SOS. “Your dedication is not the problem. But there are certain difficulties—”

“I will see my brother.” The absence of emotion is like the sky opening wide. I can be as cold, as determined as I need to be. “This week.”

Kruzenko snaps her heels together and nods, jowls wobbling. “Of course. I will do my best. Your hard work and dedication will only add to the glory of the Soviet Union.” That Russian shrug as she backs away, fear burning hot in the whites of her eyes. She leaves in a hurry, a thick slime-trail of gypsy music in her wake.

CHAPTER 25

MISHA, MASHA, SERGEI
, and I are riding in the back of a truck. It sounds like the start of a tasteless joke. Two sociopaths, a ladykiller, and a paranoiac walk into a KGB van. No one walks out. Sergei’s too close to me. He’s finally caught on that I’m giving him the silent treatment, but I don’t like his shoulder so close to mine, skittering with anxious noise cloaked in Tchaikovsky. When I look at him, I taste sticky champagne.

But today I am less concerned with Sergei’s misguided affection and more with the feeling that I’m a tool selected for a specialized task. Colonel Rostov. He brought us into the truck, though the details are hazy. I don’t entirely remember it happening. No matter, we’re here now. The truck slows, and the tires squeal against cement, echoing as if indoors.

Rostov throws open the hatch for us. “Come.” We’re in a circular tunnel, streaked with water stains. Only one guard, the truck driver, marches behind us with his rifle at the ready. The tunnel is dimly lit from overhead, but to either end of the tunnel I can only see darkness. I don’t think it’s near the secret Metro line; no cool rush of air, no rumble in my chest of an approaching train. We are so deep within the earth that there aren’t even rats.

“Calm down. You’re too worked up,” Sergei whispers to me—I feel it more than hear it—as he brushes past. I sink into Shostakovich’s music and Yevtushenko’s words like a fresh drift of snow.
How little we can see and smell … We are denied the leaves, we are denied the sky.

Rostov ducks into an alcove, his shiny boots scraping across the concrete, and unlocks a metal door. Stark yellow and black triangles on its interior mark the tunnel we just left as a nuclear fallout shelter. I try to imagine living there for twenty, thirty years while Russia rots and festers above. I think I’d rather take my chances in the blinding white forever at the moment of impact.

We climb. We climb like clawing from the earth, up a narrow ladder that flakes with rust under our palms. Twice my snow-soaked boots slip on the rungs; stale air weighs down on our shoulders, daring us to fall. Masha huffs and puffs ahead of me, too frail for this work, while Sergei nudges impatiently at my heels.

Finally we reach the top of the ladder and move through double doors into a metal room that makes me think of the hull of a giant ship. “Mikhail, come with me,” Rostov says. Misha sidles up to him. “You will maintain a link to Maria. Maria and Sergei, you will open a viewing where Mikhail and I go. Please be aware of anything in our surroundings that we do not notice.”

Masha’s hand flies into the air. Rostov’s face stretches even longer as he nods to her. “Comrade Colonel. Permission to manipulate the environment?” she asks.

“What, your attempts at telekinesis?” Rostov asks. “Please, Maria, this is a delicate operation. We must minimize our chances of detection. Observe only, please—no interacting.

“Oh. And Yulia.” Rostov whirls on me. His eyes are shadowed wells beneath the brim of his KGB officers’ hat. “You will observe through Maria and Sergei, and then Mikhail and I will indicate what I want you to read. I believe you are strong enough now that you can use your powers through theirs.”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel.” I drop my gaze to the floor. I’ve only linked powers once before, in training. I’m not sure I’m ready to perform under pressure.

Rostov lowers his voice to the guard. “The Hound is where I requested?” The guard gives a tight, anxious nod. “Well done.”

Rostov marches away with Misha, leaving me with Masha, Sergei, and the soldier. “Sit,” the soldier says, gesturing to the corrugated metal floor. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and pats them against his palm while Sergei and Masha sink into their visions.

“We’re … we’re inside the KGB headquarters,” Masha says, eyebrows wrinkled in confusion. “They’re headed into the directorate chiefs’ offices.” Her closed eyelids twitch. “Taking the elevator to the top floor.”

“Why are we conducting a mission in our own headquarters?” I ask. “Shouldn’t we be hunting the
Veter 1
traitors?” But my questions hang thick, unanswered.

Somewhere above us, a KGB general is banishing a dissident to a gulag labor camp deep in Siberia. Perhaps another is conducting a raid on an apartment block, one like Aunt Nadia’s, to round up more people whose neighbors have reported on them for sneaking extra rations or trading at the market. Another chief plans the death of American spies in East Berlin who do not yet know they’ve been compromised. And one more toasts to Secretary Khruschev’s health as they look down from the Kremlin onto Red Square and smile at the snow whipping against the workers’ sooty faces.

I hate these men. But I cannot shake the creeping suspicion that Rostov means them harm—why else would he be conducting an operation against his own people, the KaGeBezniks?—and I would not wish his toxic, jagged thoughts upon anyone.

“Misha’s keeping watch outside one of the offices,” Masha says. “It looks like he’s reading thoughts to see if anyone notices them, while the colonel turns away the thoughts of anyone who does.”

Sergei joins hands with Masha, and reaches out for mine. “Come on, Yul. You heard the orders.” He looks tired; bored, even. Like this is one of countless such operations he’s done. But this mission feels different to me. We’re missing our usual entourage of guards, Kruzenko chirping at us about our progress, heavy documentation, and reporting.

“Why isn’t Kruzenko here?” I ask. “We weren’t given a specific objective.” The soldier’s cigarette smoke gusts away from me as I exhale.

Masha groans. “Rostov does this sometimes. The Soviet Union does not always function perfectly, but it’s the duty of men like him to correct its course.”

Something rattles in my thoughts at that; a broken thought jarred loose. Perhaps Natalya Gruzova thought it her duty to correct the Soviet Union’s course by evening the playing field between America and the USSR in the space race. Perhaps Stalin thought killing several million dissidents was correcting the course. And Khruschev, with his erratic but softer touch, is correcting us once more. What does it make Rostov, to defy Khruschev’s will? A patriot? A dissident himself?

“Yul.” Sergei reaches for my hand. “We have to do this.”

“Something is wrong,” I say. I’m not Larissa, but I know the taste of foreboding, like bile on my tongue.

“Did you hear something, Seryozha? All I hear is a ration rat going
squeak, squeak, squeak
,” Masha says.

I grit my teeth. “Better than screaming my ass off. Do you still check your sheets every night?”

Sergei snatches my hand and yanks me toward him. “Shut up, both of you.” His lax shoulders still look bored, but a shadow of fear crosses his face. I reluctantly lace my fingers in Sergei’s clammy grasp.

I plunge through the surface of Sergei’s and Masha’s viewing. The image is so much sharper than when I just viewed through Masha’s when we practiced; everything is overfocused. The slate gray walls look like impending storm clouds. I could slice myself on Misha’s scowl as he guards the First Directorate Chief’s door. I am standing in the doorway, an apparition, a wraith. I cannot see my hands but I can feel with them through Masha’s and Sergei’s sight.

You are just in time, Yulia Andreevna.
Rostov’s voice slithers through the weeds of my thoughts as he appears in the doorway, standing over the chief’s desk.
Come. Sit in this chair.

What am I looking for?
I ask. The words teeter on the edge between Shostakovich’s symphony, and the untouched, unfenced parts of my mind where Rostov waits, watching, from the shadows.

Rostov taps his fingertips against a thick folder.
Who typed this?
he asks. I shuffle forward and run my fingers over the folder’s cover.

Someone’s coming,
Misha says.

Then you must hurry, Yulia. Show me who wrote the document.

The officer hunches over a typewriter in an empty office, twisting around to look behind him frequently. He cannot trust this report to a secretary in the typing pool. He has to finish before the office’s owner returns. I peer over his shoulder: “Comrade General—I regret that I must compose this report anonymously, but I am sure you will understand. I fear that Comrade Major Anton Sergeevich Rostov is gathering his own army from within the KGB to move against Secretary Khruschev—”

Show him to me.
Rostov grates his thoughts against mine. The gawky, studious young soldier sloughs off of the memory in my thoughts. Rostov grasps his image, glowing as he recognizes him.

The chief is coming down the hall,
Misha warns.
I can’t stop him.

Let him come,
Rostov says.
You have done well.

There is a thud in the hallway.

“Misha?” Masha asks. Her portion of the viewing stretches and warps as she pulls away from Sergei’s. Misha is slumped against the wall, pulsing with the soft thought waves that I usually sense from people in a deep sleep.

Masha screams.

“Quiet!” the guard hisses. My sight darts back to the cramped metal room that smells of stagnant water. Our guard leans over Masha, hand raised to slap.

Sergei yanks both Masha and me toward him. “He’ll be fine,” Sergei tells her. “Rostov will protect him. Focus.” Masha is hyperventilating, gulping down nicotine-laced rusty air; but slowly the viewing returns to its over-sharpened state, and I settle back into their sight.

The chief stands in the office doorway, looking at Rostov. “Comrade Colonel.” His thought pattern changes. I can’t tell if he’s a psychic as well, but he knows the music shielding trick; it grows thicker and thicker. “I was not expecting you.”

Rostov drums his fingernails against the file folder. “I believe that you were.” He bristles with intensified noise and I cringe. Sergei soothes me with his thumb over the back of my knuckles. “I understand you received a troubling report.”

“I receive many reports,” the chief says stiffly, “few of which a colonel need concern himself with.”

“My results are exceptional. You know this,” Rostov says.

The chief tweaks the bridge of his nose. “I don’t doubt your results—only your methods. This report—I can’t ignore such things. You put us all at risk by threatening the supremacy of Secretary Khruschev.”

Rostov’s static hum is drawing dangerously taut. His power is a molten bar of steel, a blacksmith hammering it to a lethal edge. “What you and Khruschev’s lapdogs do is far more dangerous.” His words are whisper-thin. “You spit on Stalin’s grave. You beg the Americans for food, economic support. Dissidents like that damn poet Yevtushenko run their mouths against Marx’s vision and instead of locking them away, we give them medals, treat them as national treasures!”

“We couldn’t carry on like Stalin forever!” the chief cries. “You saw how many died under him. Starved, executed, diseased—the system is broken. The West cannot be our enemy. We can no longer stare each other down like we did in Cuba, fingers on half-pulled triggers.”

“What is broken? Only you. Secretary Khruschev. And everyone in between.”

“I keep the state safe—”

“You keep us weak! You are weak!” Rostov slams his fist on the desk; Sergei and I jump. “Only I can clean it out. I must trim the fat.”

The chief’s eyes narrow for a moment as he prepares a retort, but then he eases and his eyes glaze. Too quickly, for an old spymaster. My stomach sinks. Rostov must have drilled through his mental shield.

Something moves in the hallway, drawing my gaze. There is a third figure lurking there, though he keeps to the shadows concealing his massive form. My gaze slides off of him when I try to look at him directly. Is this Rostov’s Hound that Valentin warned me about?

But before I can look closer, the young soldier who wrote the report staggers into the chief’s office, arms smacking against the doorframe, legs bending unnaturally. He’s burning up, he’s warped with a white glow that washes out our viewing. I try to pull away from Sergei’s hand but he holds firm. The soldier’s actions are puppetlike, jerky and unreal, and his mind,
bozhe moi
, it’s full of Rostov’s noise. I know too well how it feels to be bound to Rostov’s strings. The soldier reaches into his holster, fighting with himself as he does it, and rips his pistol free—

Colonel Rostov knocks us back with his static, white hot, blistering my brain as the remote viewing is severed. But he is a split second too late. I feel two gunshots in my marrow as Sergei’s and Masha’s viewing tears to shreds. The chief’s chest. The soldier’s temple. Like the afterimage of a bright light, I see the shooting even after the connection is lost.