The quantum solution, p.10
The Quantum Solution, page 10
But not, she thought in wonderment, as sweet as being with Alyosha. The rest of the world with its eternal enmities, fears, sorrows, regrets ceased to exist.
Now with dinner ordered, more vodka drunk, the prospect of a string of clubs afterward, she settled in to a niche shiny as a Christmas toy, a respite from the fraught spiderweb of her life.
13
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
She heard them coming then, their clawed feet skittering over the floor, drawing nearer. Was she dreaming or…? Her eyes popped open, blessed sleep having lasted mere seconds, and all the pain rushed back at her like a tsunami. A powerful shudder went through her. Her limbs felt stiff, but her hands and feet had ceased their tingling. She made fists a couple of times, wiggled her toes. She struck her shins to reassure herself her legs were more or less back to normal. Her trousers were still wet and had begun to stink. They clung to her thighs with an icy clamminess. Briefly, she thought about shimmying out of them, but a concerto of squealing was rising to a crescendo, so not a dream after all. Clearly, the rats had finished with their comrade, had scented her within her hiding place. By this time, her legs were burning from the rat bites, the pain spreading like wildfire.
Looking around her hiding place between the wall and the plywood boards, she found a stash of old tools: bent screwdrivers of several sizes; a nonworking slip wrench; two pairs of pliers, one rusted beyond usefulness; and a battered claw hammer, speckled in old paint.
She curled her fingers around the hammer’s wooden handle, waited as long as she could to allow her limbs to get used to blood flowing through them again. Then she crawled painfully out and methodically, relentlessly went to work on the rats.
It was in the middle of this grisly work that the sound of the door lock opening came to her. The door began to swing open. Taissa made to enter, but instead stood in the open doorway, dead still; she’d seen the blood, the unraveled hemp, she smelled the reek of urine, the mess of deaths on the floor. But she didn’t see Evan.
Slowly, she backed out, disappearing for a few seconds, only to return with a pistol in one hand, a hunting knife with a wicked eight-inch serrated blade in the other. No time for thought or consequences. Evan drew her arm back, threw the claw hammer straight and true, knocking the pistol out of Taissa’s hand and breaking two of Taissa’s fingers as well as fracturing her wrist.
But that was it, that one last use of the hammer all her weakened body was capable of. An agonized cry was forced out of her, and she sat back down, half-dazed, blackness rimming her vision. Taissa dropped her knife to grab her shattered wrist, but still she ran at Evan. She came very fast, lips drawn back in silent shock, teeth bared like a wolf. Black lips, yellow-white teeth, elongated canines, courtesy of her barbarian forebears.
She hit Evan like a force of nature, slamming Evan onto her back. Her weight, directly on the spot where Evan had struck herself in order to break the zip tie, was a sunburst of pain. Taissa, making the most of Evan’s weakness, lodged her knees on top of Evan’s shoulders—another rip of pain in Evan’s right shoulder. With Evan’s right hand incapacitated, Taissa was a lethal adversary. She elbowed Evan in the throat, bent low over her.
“I don’t know how you managed to free yourself,” she said in Turkish-inflected Russian, “but it makes no difference now. I have you, American. I have you where I want you.” Her eyes glittered like a wolf’s in the forest. “My sister gave me permission to kill you any way I want, and now I will. Know why? I don’t give a shit about you, American.” She shook her head, beads of sweat flying off the ends of her hair. “Why should I care whether you live? Tell me, you bitch. No, don’t bother; nothing you say can save you.” She appeared to be carrying on a conversation with herself while Evan, mute and helpless, looked on. “Like all your kind you’re beneath contempt. You’re not human, an animal at best, at worst a cockroach crawling through the world excreting entitlement and excess wherever you go. You think you’re destined to inherit the earth, as if you’re descended from the pharaohs.” She spat into Evan’s face. “It’s so lovely that you have developed the ability to indulge this delusion.” Snarling now. “The reality is the world is better for your death. One less hustler shilling the monetization, the commodification of everything no one needs and all you Americans want.”
Respite. This diatribe, seeming ripped straight from Russian anti-West agitprop, had given Evan a chance to regroup. It wasn’t enough, not nearly, but she knew it was all she would get. Arching her back, she jackknifed her legs up and over, scissored them, trapping Taissa’s head in a vise. Before the woman could fully respond she jerked her legs to the left. Taissa toppled over onto her side.
Evan rolled with her, racked with pain in every part of her body. She needed to expend a great deal of energy to keep herself from panting, keep her muscles from tightening up, going into spasms that would immobilize her. She forced herself to take slow deep breaths no matter how much pain they caused her.
Taissa was up, reaching for her, when Evan delivered a sharp kite with the edge of her left hand to the other woman’s shattered wrist. Taissa howled, made to grab her damaged wrist—a clever feint—instead struck a blow to Evan’s right shoulder.
The pain was blinding. Evan sucked in her breath; her entire shoulder was aflame, nerves shooting hot needles down her arm and into her hand. Leaning in, Taissa dug her fingers into the shoulder like the talons of an eagle. Evan’s head was thrown back, the tendons of her neck standing out, veins pulsing.
“That’s it,” Taissa crowed, “die slowly. Die thinking of all the expensive treasures you’ve amassed. What good will they do you now?”
Evan felt as if her pain were crushing the life out of her one cell at a time. Half-paralyzed, her sight black at the edges, her lungs laboring, the shadow of death appeared to her. It was Taissa, of course; the rational part of her mind was sure of it, because Taissa wouldn’t shut up. She kept on a tattoo of anti-West cliches, a woodpecker attached to the side of Evan’s head.
In fact, it was this incessant chatter that brought Evan back from the abyss toward which the shadow of death was relentlessly shoving her. Twisting her torso in another wave of agony, she slammed her left elbow into Taissa’s ear. Taissa screamed like a banshee, grabbing her ear, trying to stanch the blood drooling out of it.
Evan had opened up her defense. Rising, she stamped down hard on Taissa’s fractured hand. She went for the knife lying not eight feet from where she stood. She was kneeling, reaching down for the weapon, when Taissa landed on her back, slammed the back of her head so hard Evan must have blacked out for a moment, for an instant later Taissa had the knife, was turning it in her hand in order to hold it properly. The blade slashed through the air. Steeling herself, Evan ignored the knife, concentrated on the length of hemp that had been used to bind her legs. She felt the sear as the knife blade buried itself in her arm. Ignored that too. Grabbing up the hemp, she twisted until she was behind Taissa, then wrapped the hemp around her throat and hauled backward with all her remaining strength. Taissa fought her, dropped the knife after a couple of ineffectual slashes missed Evan completely. She tried to dig the fingertips of her good hand between the hemp and her flesh, but Evan had already drawn it mercilessly tight. She hauled backward again, keeping the hemp right up against Taissa’s throat. She heard a soft crackle like a fallen branch beneath a stag’s hooves. The cricoid bone had shattered. No air was getting into Taissa’s lungs. Her resistance became frenzied as she neared death. Her legs spasmed, her heels beating a spastic rhythm against the floor, sending up tiny dust devils.
Taissa’s breathing became labored, stentorian, like a ninety-year-old woman’s. Then all at once it ceased completely. All that was left was Evan’s deep painful breathing and the settling of dust over them like a shroud.
* * *
To defend and protect: that was one of the human mind’s prime directives. It was hardwired from millennia-old ancestors who hunted creatures three times their size, took them down, either alone or with others, skinned, butchered, and ate them over an open-pit fire. Sharing their largesse with the women and children. Sometimes it was the women who did the hunting, more skilled at finding their prey than the men. Sometimes they were eaten by their prey and never came home. Sometimes they got lost and were presumed dead by those who loved them the most.
Sometimes—but very rarely—they were found.
Evan’s dreaming mind took her to such a time, when she was certain that she and her sister Bobbi would never meet their birth parents. The only mother and father they knew were the Ryders, who lived and worked their land and mines in South Dakota. Childless until a nameless couple appeared on their doorstep with the two-year-old girl and her just-born sister.
Evan on her knees, staring from the photo taken in the Black Hills of South Dakota to Frau Doktor Rebecca Reveshvili’s tearstained face. As she took in the photo, of herself at five years old, Bobbi at three, she thought of the dream shadows, moving across the walls, the floor of the farmhouse in which she and Bobbi had grown up. Not a dream then? Were they memories?
Two years ago, through Lyudmila’s intervention, she had found her parents, Kostya and Rebecca Reveshvili, at their psychiatric clinic in Germany.
Rebecca had placed her hand on the crown of Evan’s head. A benediction or a welcome home? Both. The prodigal daughter at last returned to the mother and father who had created her. Home, and yet a very alien place, with two people who had left her and Bobbi with an American couple as the first part of a long-range FSB plan to grow sleeper agents inside the enemy’s culture.
That was the moment when she realized that she wasn’t American; she was Russian. Bobbi wasn’t American; she was Russian. This was the truth that Bobbi had known about their parents, their real parents, the secret she wouldn’t share that night in the caves of South Dakota when they had been teens. This was why Bobbi became a spy for Russia.
Rebecca holding Evan’s hands in hers. “From the moment I first held you—beautiful pink baby, close to my chest, feeling your heartbeat against mine, your tiny fingers curled around my forefinger—all the defenses I had built against loving you crumbled to dust. That dust tried to choke me, bring me back to where I had begun, but that place was gone, dead and buried. I was no longer the woman I had been passing through immigration in New York, to begin this mission in America, on our way to South Dakota.
“You … you changed everything for me. Giving you up ripped out a part of my heart. Now it beats more softly, more erratically. There have been times I thought it would stop altogether. Ask your father; he will tell you. Or perhaps he won’t. Kostya is more secretive than I ever was. He holds his secrets close, hoards them like a Tolkien dragon its gold. But, make no mistake, he loves you fully as much as I do.”
Evan could not stop the tears rolling down her cheeks. Reaching up, she took her mother’s hand in hers, rose to face her. She placed a hand on her mother’s cheek, wet also with tears.
“Tell me this isn’t a dream.”
Her father’s eyes were shining as Rebecca gathered her into her arms. “This isn’t a dream, Evan.”
* * *
Dream. Memory. Sometimes they were one and the same. So it was for Evan as she opened her eyes, staring blindly at the ceiling, wanting nothing more than to be back with the Reveshvilis—watching Kostya’s kind face, wrapped in her mother’s arms. But, inevitably, the dream-memory faded. She found herself staring up at the rafter and thick brass hook that still held the threaded remnants of the rope that had bound her, then downward tracking to take in the carnage of blood, rat bodies, stains of dried urine, and Taissa’s swollen tongue pushed out between bare teeth. Above, eyes protruding as if trying to peer into a future that would never now occur.
Evan tried to move, groaned. She felt drowned, cast up on an alien shore where all life had fled decades ago. She was alone in this void, somewhere she had never been before and to which she wished fervidly never to return.
She might have stayed like that, immobile, hardly putting two thoughts together, had it not been for the sound of footsteps at the door, which impelled her gaze to turn in that direction.
A figure stood in the doorway, someone familiar, and a sense of warmth, of being found flooded through her. Until the figure stepped into the room and what light there was fell upon the face, eyes burning like beacons in the night. Had she the strength she would have screamed then, recognizing Taissa’s twin sister, Inessa, and with her the shadow of Evan’s own death.
14
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
“Yes, it’s true,” General Philip Johnstone Reade said. “Tonight we have become recruiters.” He gestured to the men around the green baize table. “Wilson, Connerly, myself.”
Ben was also there, of course, sitting across from Connerly. Reade was on his left, Wilson on his right. Midnight. As he was being driven here it had been all too clear that Langley and the city just across the Potomac were major contributors to the light pollution leaking everywhere, disturbing the natural biorhythms of birds and insects.
“We can tell you—now that you’ve had your six hours to think—that only we three are in this. All correspondence is handwritten, delivered by a single courier.”
“Let me guess,” Ben said. “Daisy.”
“Daisy is her operational name,” Connerly said in his annoyingly officious way.
“Her real name is Margo,” the general continued.
“I see that her duties also extend to chauffeuring.”
“Yes,” Wilson said. “She drove you here tonight.”
“If I may,” Reade said with a generous degree of sarcasm, to return the conversation to the topic at hand, “any and all correspondence between us is folded into envelopes which are then sealed with wax.”
“No chance of your private affair being hacked,” Ben said. “Niccolò Machiavelli would be proud. Not to mention Armand Jean du Plessis.”
Connerly’s face screwed up. “Armand de what?—Who the fuck is that?”
“Cardinal Richelieu,” Ben told him. “Best known for, among other coups de main, ordering the destruction of the Huguenots; reforming the French navy and army; crushing any rebellions and advancing royal absolutism. Also, delightfully, he raised money by any and all means. I’m sure you gentlemen understand that sort of thing.”
“Looks like we continue to host a hostile witness.” Connerly trying too hard to recover.
“He’s just showing off,” the general said, shifting in his chair. “Making a fool of you, Wes, by presenting his superior knowledge.” He turned to Ben with the ghost of a smile playing across his lips. “Very Richelieu, wouldn’t you say, Butler.”
“I pluck only the best kernels from the best, General.” Then, turning to Connerly, “The rest I leave for the chickens.”
Connerly lurched out of his seat, jaw clenched, the muscles on either side of his mouth pumping like men frantically bailing a sinking ship.
“Down, boy,” the general ordered. “He’s just messing with you.”
“Why me?” Connerly protested. “Why always me?”
“I don’t like you,” Ben said without inflection. “You’re a fucking bigot.”
“Right.” Reade nodded. “Take the rest of the week off, Wes.”
Connerly looked at the general, neck flushed, skin raised in bumps. “Why are you—?”
“You don’t need to understand why I give you an order.”
“Yes, sir.” Connerly pushed back his chair, overturning it, punishing it because he couldn’t retaliate against the man who was now his nemesis. He gave Ben the death stare before stalking out of the room. The door did not fully close at his departure. Daisy was standing in the doorway.
“Trouble in paradise?” she asked.
By way of answer, the general beckoned her in. She came across the room. She was dressed all in black, apart from a wide white belt with twin buckles that accentuated her hips on one end, and what rose above it on the other. A short jacket with three-quarter sleeves over all. She sat down at the table, though not in Connerly’s chair, which caused Ben to wonder whether she somehow had been monitoring the meeting from the beginning. In here, I am surrounded by electronics, he thought, all cleverly hidden, all waiting to entrap me or anyone else who sits in my place.
Daisy—or Margo, if he preferred—smiled at him with all the innocence of a deb at a tea party. “The men treating you well? Have any compliments, complaints?”
She was expert at wrong-footing him, which, he supposed, was the point. “My only complaint has been dismissed.”
“Excellent.” She enlaced her fingers. “So…”
She let the single word hang in the air so that he could absorb every layer of its meaning. He got it now. They’d started with the hard man, switching midstream to the soft man—in this case, woman. He’d bested the hard man. Perhaps they hadn’t expected that, but in any event they pivoted to plan B without the slightest glitch. Smoothly run human machinery always impressed him. Possibly they knew that, too. It was difficult to know how much they really knew about him.
Margo leaned forward. In a female of her genetic makeup the change in posture could be interpreted as a provocative gesture. “So, Ben, which will it be? A chocolate egg cream? Or a cup of slow-acting hemlock?”
She had a way with words, that was for sure, Ben thought, smiling to himself. But he didn’t allow the smile to spill over onto his lips, let alone his face. He’d made up his mind before he’d stepped into the car they had sent for him at precisely 11:30 P.M. as promised.
