Sekret (22 page)

Valentin shifts beside me, eyes smoldering behind his glasses. “What happened to all the rest, Comrade Major?”

Big, fat, unbearable tears pour down Major Kruzenko’s face. “We have been trying and trying so hard and it’s just too much,” she says to herself, as the American president’s head deflates over and over. She turns on us and jabs her finger at the screen. “Do not let this happen again. For all our sakes.”

“Comrade Major, that’s enough.” Sergei bounds to his feet and swoops around her. For a moment I see his hockey reflexes come alive, as if he means to tackle her to the ground. “We’re working hard. We won’t let Rostov down.” His thick, corded arms circle her shoulders from behind in a bear hug and he maneuvers her toward the doorway. The stringent stream of vodka wafts behind her.

“Rostov? My dear Sergei Antonovich, you don’t understand.” Kruzenko wheezes laughter at him. “Rostov will soar to great heights for the glory of the Soviet Union, but what about—me—”

The door swings shut behind them, but her words keep echoing in my mind. If the other psychics—like Misha’s and Masha’s parents—are wearing out, or worse … But I take care to seal up that thought in a Shostakovich envelope. Like all the other Soviet games, information is the most precious thing I can possess.

*   *   *

We’re snowed in until the first week of December. The sky is solid slate; as the snowdrifts climb up the windows, I imagine our snow-globe world on the cliff filling up, floor to ceiling. Kruzenko’s henchmen carve a path from the gate to the docking bay, so we always have food and tea, but otherwise we are locked up, only able to see the outside world through our minds.

I’m drawn to the ballroom in the afternoons, when Valentin plays, though I do not meet his eyes during this time. He’s playing a new jazz theme, kneading it over and over into different shapes and styles, though the piano’s quickly coming untuned. I can’t bring myself to forgive him for invading my dreams, but I feel safer surrounded in his notes than in any words either of us could say.

I have taken, too, to lying in Anastasia’s bed sometimes, acknowledging her pain. It reminds me that my own troubles aren’t so great: my mother and brother live, I’m slowly gaining control of my power, and maybe there’s danger beyond these walls and loneliness within, but not so much that it could crush me like it did her. Anastasia’s troubles were the taste of wood clenched between her teeth; Kruzenko’s face peering over her as she’s strapped onto a gurney. “You have not been following our training. Your condition is worsening—”

They filled her with electricity, hoping there will be no room left for her madness. But like the beast of Frankenstein, it only brought a darkness far worse to life.

My project with Larissa offers a distraction, at least, if not much in the way of results. It’s strange to watch her work—looking forward, navigating the branching waters of the future in search of the missing wildlings, even as I reel backward against the currents of the past. Larissa convinced Kruzenko to dedicate some of the KGB’s resources to the hunt, as long as it doesn’t distract us from our
Veter
team mission.

Finally the snow settles enough for us to venture beyond the mansion, and the Americans get a new president, and they kill an American man whom they think killed the president, and there is no new threat of nuclear war because they do not blame us, though we feel the pressure of their nuclear missiles aimed our way like the glare of narrowed eyes. Major General Rostov is too busy for our little troupe as he whispers in the Party leaders’ ears, telling them—Misha and Masha report proudly—that Khruschev is not protecting the Soviet Union enough.

One more name is struck through on the chalkboard, leaving only one wildling at large. Only one name. But it will have to be enough.

“The remaining wildling works at the ZiL auto factory, but his shift leader said that he was missing last night,” Kruzenko tells us at our morning briefing. Missing. I find the word unnervingly vague. “Their records show a British businessman recently visited the factory under a foreign investment visa, but we have caught many spies using this cover.” Larissa and I exchange a look; of course Kruzenko has a secondary goal in letting us run our little mission. She’s hoping to catch a spy in the process. “His hotel room is where you will go, Valya and Misha—” she gestures to the two boys—“and Yulia, Lara, and Ivan will go to the factory. Sergei and Masha, you will stay here with me to observe.”

Larissa bounces beside me on the truck bench as we putter blindly through the snow-walled streets of Moscow. “All the best movie dramas take place in factories,” she says. “I wonder if there’s a dreamy foreman like the cute guy in
I Love You, Life
.”

“You watch too much television,” I tell her.

“I’m all the Russian man you need, my little squirrel.” Ivan nuzzles her cheek; I turn away, staring at the empty bench beside me.

The truck deposits us, with our spider-guards, in the back alley behind the ZiL factory. The cold air carries the smell of molten slag, though the snow has muffled the trash bin stink, thankfully. The factory is flat concrete and glass and, save the smoke stains that rise away from punched-out windows, undecorated. We crunch our way to the rear factory door and listen to the chugging of machinery inside, rattling like a caged panther.

“We can search the factory floor unnoticed,” Larissa declares. “The floor manager is on an extended lunch. Ivan, can you ensure no one looks too closely at us?”

“Not a problem, my sunbeam.” He tweaks her nose, then looks at me. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll retrace the businessman’s steps. See what he’s been doing here.”

Ivan’s guard unlocks the alley door for us, and settles in for a lengthy standing session. “Try not to be seen,” he grunts from under his scarf. “Best if we don’t have to send a team after you kids.”

The stench of oil and tar nearly knocks us flat as we pull open the door. We shake salt and ice from our boots, and strip down to our base outfits: the Soviet standard-issue gray that works better than camouflage in factories and ration lines. None of the workers so much as glance up from the assembly line. I take in the alien contours of machinery, the impossible mechanical arms reaching and grabbing every which way—

And suck in my breath. There is no rattle of seamless automation. The clanging noises come from the workers crawling over the metallic, holey carapaces that might someday turn into Party officials’ limousines. They ratchet valves into place by hand, with comically large wrenches; at a far station, a babushka with a dowager hump wrestles stitched pieces of leather from an uncooperative sewing machine. What good, then, are these Stalinist monstrosities of pipes and hydraulics jutting every which way?

“They really needed a whole factory for this?” Ivan mutters. “No wonder it takes seven years to get a car.”

“Let’s be quick. Ivan? I think the babushkas are looking our way,” I say.

“Of course.” He brings his fingers to his forehead—as if his mind is this great muscle and our work is causing him physical strain—then he motions along the wall. “Move quickly. You’re clear.”

Larissa and I scamper along the wall, hopping over dilapidated crates and metal bins full of tubes, pistons. I keep my hands tangled in my stripped-away coat, not ready yet to sink in. We find a small nook beside a thicket of metal towers. They look like intricate machinery, but there is no telltale hum of electric currents; a cord is bundled in hooks on one side, felted with thick dust.

Larissa slumps against the wall and catches her breath. “This team will be taking their lunch break soon. Start here, then move toward the foreman’s office. He won’t return until after we’re gone.”

I dump my coat at her feet as she twists a lock of hair around her fingers and take a deep breath. I flatten my hand on the cold, silent steel and sink into its memories.

Day after day at the factory, the constant clatter and clang. I see the missing wildling darting in and out of frame, scuffling along as he settles disputes between workers and shuttles to his locker and back. But one day, a white haze blurs the edges of the memories; it pulls me with a familiar, dreaded tug.

The scrubber.

A man is walking the floor, pointing to the various assembly bays and describing their purpose. “The workers are much happier to contribute to the State, you see, than fat cat industry bosses like in your country.”

“I’m not here for politics.”

The voice nearly jars me out of the memory. At once it sounds so typically Russian, perhaps with a southern Baltic lilt—but as soon as I think that, my mind’s infected with doubt. Of course this person is not Russian—he is just well educated. Oxford, probably. Didn’t they say something about an English businessman? Yes, it makes perfect sense.

He rounds the corner and it’s like an atom bomb going off. I am splitting apart, molecule by molecule, scattering into blissful, white nothingness. They say that we are made of stardust, of fragments from the cosmos. His radiance makes me believe. Even with time separating us, his power burns me away, strips me down to raw genetic code.

No, Yulia. Fight past his noise. Concentrate.

“And that is the extent of the factory,” the boy says. In the background, someone swears as a faulty valve slices into his arm.

“I’m afraid it is not.” The scrubber turns, and the boy’s smile fades as the scrubber’s glow falls across him. “There is a worker I would like to meet. Dmitri Shadov. You know him?”

“I’m sorry, comrade, but I am the only person authorized to speak to foreigners—”

The scrubber smiles. I cannot describe how I sense this through his white-hot glow, but the smile fills me with warmth. I can see it in the boy’s eyes. He, too, wants to trust this man; he will walk headlong into whatever the scrubber asks of him.

“I will make you a deal.” The scrubber leans forward. “I will speak to Dmitri today, and you will not stop me.”

“Perfect,” the boy says, flustered. “Yes, I should have thought of this myself. Hey! Dmitri! A visitor for you.”

The missing wildling looks up from the auto body. He’s a strapping fellow, dark-haired and packed with hard-earned muscle. He lowers his mallet. With each step forward, his pace slows. Does he feel the radiation, too?

The blinding scrubber’s face parts with a glossy white smile. “Let’s have a word in here, Dmitri. We won’t take long.”

They duck into the office. Hot noise flashes from the cracks around the door, jolting me backward, nearly breaking my contact with the machine. I grit my teeth against the static storm and wait it out, wait for that door to open, ready to flinch away from the flash burn of the scrubber’s radioactive smile.

Dmitri staggers out first, his head like a ball of shrapnel. His gaze roves the factory, not really seeing it before him. The scrubber—
bozhe moi
, but I can’t look at him dead on—claps Dmitri on the shoulder. “We are agreed, then?”

Dmitri’s eyes water as he stares, unblinking. “Gorky Park,” he says, like he’s reciting it. “Thursday. Noon.”

*   *   *

“Absolutely not,” Major Kruzenko roars. “I am not putting you anywhere near that scrubber. He is targeting us, Yulia. It wouldn’t be safe.”

I clench my teeth as Major Kruzenko paces her office. “But he’s going to do something to the wildling—something more than he already has. Either finish the job he started on his brain in the factory, or…” I can’t finish the awful thought. “It’s our best chance to catch them and help this poor Dmitri.”

Kruzenko pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales slowly. “We will send a team. But I do not want any of you near him. It’s simply too dangerous.”

I can’t argue with her reasons. I know how it feels to be wiped clean, even if only at a distance, by these monsters. But there is something compelling me toward this meeting—no. I am not being compelled like a puppet on the scrubber’s strings. I want to believe this determination is mine alone, my need to protect Dmitri, and not a seed planted in my thoughts. I don’t want to examine it further. I don’t want to consider the possibility that the scrubber has turned my thoughts deeper down; set in motion this need inside me, drawing me to him like a moth to flame.

I will protect the last wildling, and Kruzenko won’t keep me from it.

CHAPTER 28

WHEN I FIND MYSELF
in another vivid dream, the first since I’d learned what Valentin and Rostov are doing, I scream and beg through a soundless throat to wake up. But I am transparent, voiceless, trapped on a train; I feel as pale as the fog beyond the train window that masks the countryside. Papa sits on the bottom bunk in the crowded sleeper car, sipping vodka from the glass and pewter tea mugs—
podstakanniks
—which all Russian trains provide. Moonlight catches the glossy surface of his playing cards, a red glow pulsing between his lips.

“What troubles you, comrade?” Papa asks, in his gruff but quiet voice. I thought that I’d forgotten it, but there it is, hanging in the air, as familiar as his eternal cloud of cigarette smoke.

“A friend.” The figure on the bunk opposite him sits too deep in the sleeper cabin’s darkness for me to see. “She thinks I’ve betrayed her, but she doesn’t know the whole story.”

“Betrayal is a tricky thing. Some might say I’ve betrayed my family. That I sent them down a treasonous track. But I think they know that whatever I do, I have their best interests in mind.” Papa sets one card onto the deck.

“I think the problem is that she resents having the choice taken from her.” The figure counters Papa’s card, and they both take another sip.

Valya?
I whisper, but my voice is drowned out by the alcohol and smoke so thick in the night.

“That’s my girl for you. She’d rather make her own mistakes.”

Valentin leans forward and catches the glint of moonlight on his glasses. “She may never forgive me for doing this—scouring her dreams under Rostov’s orders, sifting through her memories for clues as to where you might have gone.”

Papa takes another drag before answering. “Sounds like Rostov, all right.”