Not that Kusnetsov had ever believed in the devil. His mother was reviled and finally thrown out of the house by his uncle for refusing to renounce her faith. She died in the arms of her family, the only ones to come to her funeral. His uncle never told him of her death. Only later, when Kusnetsov gained the wherewithal to search for her, did he discover the truth. At her grave. Yet now, in this moment, she was resurrected. The visage of Kusnetsov’s mother rose before him. She was staring not at him but at the Sovereign. Her face was as pink-cheeked as it had been in the full bloom of her youth, but her eyes were black as fists of coal. She did not blink—of course she didn’t blink! But Kusnetsov, who was still living, for the moment at least, did, and she was gone.

  “We’re here,” the Sovereign said, so close to Kusnetsov’s ear that he flinched and was immediately humiliated when the man beside him turned, gave him a penetrating look. The Sovereign was neither tall nor broad and yet his presence filled up the elevator to the point where Kusnetsov nearly choked. He wore a pitch-black suit, cream shirt, gold tie pierced by a tie pin that looked like a sigil. Perhaps, Kusnetsov thought, the color of the suit was meant to downplay how bloated the Sovereign had become. His face was both pallid and feverish, rounder than the last time Kusnetsov had seen him and yet somehow misshapen. The Sovereign had been secluded and alone for more than two years, during which time, rumors were, he sat brooding, planning the Russian takeover of Eastern Europe, his natural paranoia ballooning to outsized proportions. These days, it was said in whispers, he trusted no one—only the phalanx of doctors attending him for God alone knew what ailments real and imagined. At least some of them must be real, Kusnetsov thought. The Sovereign’s neck looked as if he’d swallowed a baby python.

  Thankfully the elevator door opened. They stepped out and Kusnetsov found himself standing on what could only be a subway platform. And yet it was nothing like any other he’d used in all of Moscow. It was narrow. Clearly not made for crowds but for a single man, who was now striding through the open door of the train that sat, clearly waiting upon his whim. The Sovereign took him on a tour just like any billionaire showing off his new multimillion-dollar toy. And yet this train was no toy, Kusnetsov sensed that right away. It consisted of three carriages: the first contained the parlor—divided into living quarters and office spaces. Behind that was the dining room and kitchen. The third carriage was for the Sovereign’s bedroom, though, from what knowledge Kusnetsov had of him, he rarely if ever rested; sleep was out of the question.

  The living quarters in the parlor car were decorated and furnished as if for a tsar—polished teak and mahogany fittings, gold leaf filigree, silk upholstery. An ormolu clock sat atop a marble mantel, below it a trompe l’oeil fireplace, complete with cords of stacked wood and double eagle andirons, above a blowup of a photo of the Sovereign on horseback. He held a shotgun aloft, the stock on one thigh, while he gripped a dead wolf by the furred scruff of its neck. The highly polished teak floor, the walls sheathed in porphyry and marble, a crystal chandelier depending from the center of the car’s coffered ceiling all lent the interior a disturbingly claustrophobic feel. Kusnetsov imagined he had descended into a crypt, or—even more disorienting—that he was inside the sarcophagus of a Venetian doge.

  The moment they settled into opposing chairs the train began to roll. There were only three stations, the Sovereign told him. He looked around but saw no sign of the Sovereign’s ubiquitous retinue of bodyguards, advisors, assorted apparatchiks—not even the assorted physicians. These forty or so members of the Sovereign’s inner circle usually surrounded him like a swarm of bees surrounding its queen. Only this queen wasn’t reproducing anything; he was Sovereign for life. After him, the deluge, Kusnetsov thought with a sour inner twitch.

  The Sovereign’s hectic gray eyes stayed on Kusnetsov, the dark half-moons under them standing out more starkly in the car’s lights. Kusnetsov was a tall man, commanding in his own right, and certainly more pleasing to look at than the Sovereign. Like Napoleon, the Sovereign was sensitive about his height. He compensated for it by being demanding, inflexible, delighting in the ills and travails he impressed on others, especially the oligarchs who had grown rich as Croesus by his leave but failed to back him in times of unrest. Too busy on their megayachts plying the Mediterranean, the backyard of international billionaires everywhere. More than once Kusnetsov had heard the Sovereign opine bitingly that their wealth had overpowered their loyalty to Russia.

  Had the Sovereign’s guest been anyone other than Kusnetsov he would have considered asking why he had been summoned, what he was doing here. But the minister knew it would be a sign of weakness. The Sovereign was famous for deriding American presidents for their weakness, the foolish ways they confronted him, the arrogant way they assumed they knew him. Neither they nor their unjustifiably renowned clandestine services knew the Sovereign’s mind in any conceivable manner. But Kusnetsov knew his mind—at least better than any of the oligarchs and apparatchiks fluttering around him. He knew the deep-seated rage the Sovereign husbanded like a deformed child at the slights and indignities he was convinced were thrust upon him and on Russia when the Soviet Union was disbanded, the Motherland’s territory severely truncated.

  The Sovereign rubbed his bloated face. “Darko Vladimirovich.” He sighed, seemed to waver just slightly in his seat, sighed again more deeply. “Tell me, my friend, why did you divorce your wife? Was she cheating on you? Or did she find out you were cheating on her?”

  Kusnetsov shrugged. “You’re overthinking it. We lost sight of each other, that’s all.”

  The Sovereign’s eyes burned in his face like coals in raw dough. “But she was on your arm even while you attended your comrades’ weddings?”

  “Especially then.”

  “Appearances.” The Sovereign nodded, indicating he understood completely. “It is far better to take a girl for a night—never more than one—and then forget her. To get tangled in feminine wiles is to court disaster, don’t you agree?”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “Mm.” When the Sovereign closed his eyes he reminded Kusnetsov of an effigy, a mummified ruler, as if he were already dead. “Wars were started over a woman,” he continued. “One need only look to the Trojan War for confirmation.” He lifted a finger. “But the Romans—ah, the Romans—knew how to keep their women at arm’s length. Well, most of them, anyway. Augustus and Julius Caesar being notable exceptions and look how they ended up—the one poisoned, the other stabbed to death by his own senators.”

  As the train traveled deep into the tunnel, the Sovereign opened a drawer in a table by his right side. From its depths he withdrew a crystal decanter and two slim vodka glasses. The decanter did not, however, hold vodka, but rather a deep ruby-red liquid, thick and slow-moving as it was being poured. It filled the carriage with the fumes of torture and death.

  “Women are the root of all evil, my friend, never forget that. If you do you’ll be doomed to make decisions not in your own interest. But you’ll make them just the same, for your brain will have been turned off and then where will you be, hm?”

  Without another word, the Sovereign handed Kusnetsov one of the glasses, took up the other, without ceremony tipped his head back, drained the liquid. Kusnetsov hesitated only a moment. Even before the contents of his glass touched his lips he knew what it was. The Siberian natives held that the blood from the antlers of the local red deer, ones young enough that their antlers were still growing, alive with blood and nerves, possessed miraculous healing powers. The antlers were cut off the living animals, the blood drained and sealed in airtight containers.

  Kusnetsov had never tasted deer antler blood, had hoped never to do so, but now his time had come. He knew what an honor was being afforded him. Following the Sovereign’s lead he tipped his head back, drank down the blood, nearly gagging in the process. The taste was sweet as well as salty, reminiscent of the minerals in icy water and Siberian granite, which were used in lieu of ice cubes in a number of Moscow’s high-end restaurants. But unlike those it also filled his mouth with musk—animal musk that lingered on his palate, bringing with it like voices from a faraway place the clash of battle, the rigor of a steep climb through snow-covered forests, the stink of sweating hide, hooves through a crust of snow. Kusnetsov sat back against the violent draw of vertigo. At some point he became aware of the Sovereign studying him with the smallest smile he had ever seen.

  The train was slowing, pulling into the next station. When it stopped, the doors to the carriage slid open and in stepped Colonel Bohdan Sergeyevich Petrov, head of First Division, overseeing intelligence and field agents in the Moscow region. He was a middle-aged individual, long, lean, hatched-faced. He wore his steel-colored hair short in typical miliary style. It made him look like a half-starved hedgehog.

  “Colonel Petrov,” the Sovereign said, “good of you to join us,” just as if Petrov were responding to an invitation to a tea party. He did not rise from his chair; Kusnetsov followed suit, nodded briefly to the colonel, his face impassive, giving away none of his curiosity as to why the high-ranking GRU officer had, like Kusnetsov himself, been ordered to what was starting to feel like an internal summit. It seemed strange to him, not to say out of order, for the FSB and GRU to be asked to agree on anything. The organizations’ mutual antipathy was the stuff of legends.

  The door closed behind Petrov but the train remained in the station.

  The Sovereign gestured. “Colonel Petrov, if you would be so kind as to unroll that carpet set against the wall behind you.”

  Say this for Petrov, he knew an order when he heard one. Turning, he reached behind him, pulled off the tape that had been keeping the carpet tightly wound.

  “Good,” the Sovereign said, as if addressing his child who had just returned from boarding school. That simile sprang to Kusnetsov’s mind because the Sovereign had for many years exhibited the same symptoms as children educated at posh British boarding schools. He, like they, learned to be both defensive and protective of themselves. To do so they became stone-faced, emotionless automatons. They survived by dispensing orders, assuring dominance over the weak. They developed a deep-seated loyalty to their institutional tribe—in the Sovereign’s case the FSB’s forebear, the KGB, which had both nurtured him and indoctrinated in him an acute suspicion of outsiders. He, like they, was inculcated in the art of being a bully, completely fixated on winning every argument, every confrontation, every conflict.

  What’s next, Kusnetsov wondered now, was the Sovereign going to offer Petrov a cookie? But, no, of course not. “Now spread the carpet on the floor where you are standing.” His most affable tone set Kusnetsov’s antennae to quivering.

  As the colonel complied, rolling out the carpet, Kusnetsov saw what at first sight looked like a fine Persian carpet, but upon closer inspection turned out to be a cheap imitation. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought, still maintaining his impassive façade.

  The Sovereign gestured again, this time to a vacant chair. As soon as Petrov was seated the train pulled out of the station, gained speed, and went rocketing through the tunnel. To where? Kusnetsov wondered. There was a long-standing rumor that an underground system had been built below the dreaded Lubyanka prison as the chosen method of disappearing dissidents and oligarchs alike who displeased the Sovereign.

  27

  LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS

  “It’s the Syrians you’re concerned about, the immigrants,” Marsden Tribe said. “I appreciate that.” He bit into a colossal shrimp after having dipped it in ketchup, not cocktail sauce—and not just any ketchup, but Red Duck, which illuminated his Portland upbringing. “Not to worry; the ones already in Istanbul are being taken care of. Those still in Syria will make the trip but under far better conditions and when they arrive they’ll be given food, shelter, and a job—most of them at Alila International, the import-exporter I bought from Abd-El-Kader.”

  “That’s a relief.” Evan moved her shrimp around, wondering distractedly how the oxymoronic phrase “colossal shrimp” came into being. Why didn’t it make people laugh when it was spoken aloud?

  “Evan?”

  She glanced up to see that Tribe’s face had darkened. They were seated in the villa’s dining room at a table far too large for the two of them. His brows were knit together. “I should have had your dinner served to you in bed. You’re still recovering. I didn’t think—”

  “I’m fine, Marsden.” Except for my muscles aching and the headache behind my eyes, she thought. She smiled. “Really.”

  “But something is wrong. You need to eat. You haven’t eaten real food in days.”

  “I’ll eat,” she said. “But…” She sighed. “You need to see something.”

  “What?” He laughed, trying to lighten the mood, but the laugh was shallow and fell flat. He put down his fork. “Right now?”

  She nodded. “We need a computer…”

  He rose from the table and she followed him to a work room where there was a computer with a large monitor. She plugged in her phone, went online—every communication device at Parachute was quantum-encrypted, which by definition made it absolutely secure. She navigated to the site where Ben had left the enormous files.

  Before she pressed the Enter key she turned to Tribe. “There are people high up in the administration—powerful people—who believe you’re responsible for United States Secretary of Defense Thompson’s sudden death.”

  “Curious.” Hardly anything moved in Tribe’s face. “Didn’t he die of a heart attack?”

  “Spin-doctor story for the press. In fact there was nothing wrong with him.”

  “Then…?”

  “Havana syndrome.”

  “Is this a joke?” But she wasn’t laughing and neither was he.

  “I wish. It was murder, Marsden. Brady Thompson was murdered.”

  “Not by Havana syndrome, surely.”

  “Well, no. And yes.” She cleared her throat. “There’s a theory floating around the small group in charge of investigating his murder that he was attacked by qubits that have been weaponized.”

  She expected him to exclaim or proffer both surprise and denial, but he said nothing, made no move. Had he been expecting this? she asked herself. Were his chickens coming home to roost, so to speak? Was she so wrong about him? It wouldn’t be the first time she’d misjudged someone close to her, but, she had to admit, it would be the most bitter betrayal she had experienced. Aside from Bobbi’s defection to the SVR, of course. But Bobbi was dead; she had put that betrayal behind her, making sure the passing years covered over the wound layer by layer until, in the increasingly infrequent moments when she still thought about it, it seemed as if it had happened to someone else.

  “Okay, well, look at this.” She pressed Enter, and the first of the images filled the screen.

  Tribe peered in. “Brady Thompson’s brain just after he died, I take it.”

  “Right.” Evan said. “Note the three anomalies deep inside the brain. Now note the time stamp.”

  “16:31. Okay.”

  “So here’s image number two.” She continued. “Time stamp?”

  “16:36, five minutes later.” He shrugged. “Why would someone—?” He stopped abruptly. “Good Christ.” His breath was hot on her cheek as he leaned in. “Is there another?”

  “There is. Number three, taken at 16:41.”

  “Another five-minute interval.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now put them up side by side,” he said.

  When they were all up at once, he looked from one to another and said, “Thompson had been dead for how long when these were taken?”

  “Two and a half hours, more or less,” she responded. “Brain death was immediate according to the doctors at Walter Reed, where he was first transported.”

  “And yet…” He tapped his lower lip with a fingertip. “And yet the three anomalies, which almost assuredly caused his death, kept expanding after brain death.” He gestured at the images. “Look, Evan, on each image, taken five minutes apart, the anomalies are larger.”

  “I see that. Which means?”

  Tribe huffed. “Which means they’re still alive independent of their target.”

  “What on earth could cause that,” Evan said, “apart from quantum qubits?”

  Tribe shook his head. “Not qubits.”

  She frowned. “If not qubits, then what…?”

  Though he spoke to her, his eyes never left the screen. “Everything in the universe is subject to entropy, that is, the decay of life to death.” His hands gripped the edge of the desk so hard his knuckles shone white, as if the bones were about to burst through his skin. “However, I was speaking just now in received wisdom, taken as gospel by all forms of science. There is something that has been discovered inside a quantum computer that’s fast enough to defy that wisdom. It’s called a time crystal, so called because for whatever reason it’s not subject to entropy. It moves from one state to another and back again—let’s say a hexagon to a decahedron—without losing any energy. Because of their unique nature time crystals can be transmitted instantaneously over long distances.”

  She felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. “So you know about these time crystals.”

  “Of course I do. I’ve been experimenting with them.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Anyone else?”

 

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