The quantum solution, p.21
The Quantum Solution, page 21
“Settling in then, are we?”
Rodion turned to confront a man with, unless he missed his guess, Lenin’s mustache and goatee, Trotsky’s round small-lensed spectacles and electric hairstyle. There was a lupine cast to his face. Rodion thought of the fur on the major’s coat standing at attention.
“I am seeing to it, Ludovico Aronovich,” Korokova said. “Captain Molchalin and I just returned from the cold room.”
“Took care of Morokovsky, did we?” Ludovico Aronovich wore a tailored black uniform with gold piping. A gold sigil was affixed to each epaulette.
“The captain and I shared that honor.”
At Ludovico Aronovich’s entrance the major had set aside her vodka. Rodion wanted nothing more than to finish his, sink into the carpet, and become invisible.
“We are pleased to hear it.”
The royal “we,” Rodion thought, just as Kata had. Is this guy joking?
But of course he wasn’t. He stepped forward now, his long legs annihilating the distance to where Rodion stood. He held out his hand, which was thin and white and very strong, once Rodion gripped it. Like a vampire. He was so terrified he seemed to have lost control of his thoughts. He resisted the temptation to giggle.
“Colonel Ludovico Aronovich Ferranov,” the Vampire, as Rodion was now fated to call him, intoned while Rodion’s hand was still held captive. “The major has told me all about you, Captain Molchalin. You have been of great help to her.”
“Thank you, Colonel.” Rodion could think of nothing else to say; his mind seemed held in stasis by his terror of this man.
“No reason to thank me.” Colonel Ferranov’s eyes cut to Korokova and she excused herself.
With a sense of foreboding Rodion watched her as she stepped into the dining room, crossed it, and vanished down a hallway.
“So.” Ferranov went to the sideboard, opened a door, splashed a fistful of ice into an oversized glass, poured a clear liquid into it.
Rodion could not read the label, so had no idea what the colonel was drinking. This disturbed him. What people chose to drink said a lot about them that they would never otherwise reveal. He consoled himself by drinking the vodka Korokova had poured for him, even though it was now more room temperature than ice-cold.
“You have been part of Kata Romanovna Hemakova’s band of outsiders.”
Rodion looked at Ferranov quizzically. “An odd way to put it.”
“Hm.” The colonel downed some of whatever was in his glass. “We can put it any way we want now that we have disbanded the Directorate O. Kata Hemakova works for us now.” Was there a twinkle in his eyes? Surely not! “As do you, Captain.”
“So you have culled me.”
“We beg your pardon.”
“Cut me out of the herd, so to speak.”
Ferranov smirked. “Not so much of a herd, was it, Captain.” He drew more of the liquid into his mouth. “No. In fact, it had become a dead end. Your remit regarding Directorate KV was null and void almost from the beginning.”
By a herculean effort Rodion was vanquishing the paralysis of terror that had grabbed him by the throat. “The powers that be wouldn’t tolerate it.”
“Precisely.”
Now there was a twinkle in Ferranov’s eye; Rodion was sure of it. At that moment, Korokova reentered the living room. So transformed was she that he almost gave her a double take. She had changed into the same kind of tailored uniform in which the colonel was clad—black with gold trim and a sigil—though a different one—on her boards. She had slicked back her hair with pomade so that it glistened like a glass helmet. Her full lips were curled in a half-smile.
“Well,” Ferranov said with a host’s sweep of his arm, “now that we are all here, shall we go in to supper.”
The glass-and-steel dining table was set for three. The walls were a forest green, and a chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling, its crystals twinkling like stars Ferranov had ordered up from a celestial broker. Two walls facing each other were adorned with what seemed to Rodion to be the preliminary pencil drawings of two of the paintings in the living room. For some reason—perhaps because they were starker—these were more off-putting than the finished output. Unlike the living room, strewn with rugs, this room had a floor of polished concrete, bare as a priest’s pate. In this floor, Rodion realized the emptiness at the core of the apartment. There was nothing of value here, just a dark pit about to suck him in, and it was at this very moment that the loneliness that had been haunting him all his adult life, that he’d expended so much energy pushing away, rushed in; in its wake he found a nothingness too vast to be comprehensible.
He could not calm himself. He dragged his eyes from the floor between his feet, but that was of no help. He found himself in a standoff with the food served: a salad with fresh foraged mushrooms—Rodion could not abide mushrooms; thick slabs of meat, bloody as if from the butcher’s cleaver, ribboned with translucent veins of fat, the melting runoff mingling with the blood, turning it viscous, opalescent. Rodion picked around the mushrooms in his salad as if they were the white fly agaric varietal, beautiful, tempting, deadly. Some years ago, one of his fellow recruits, mistaking them for champignons, had gorged on them while he and Rodion were foraging on a weeklong field exercise. Rodion could still see the young man, vomiting, bloating up like a dirigible on the floor of the forest, screaming while he knelt beside him, filled with a helpless paralysis. Already nauseated, he sawed into his meat, placed it in his mouth, swallowed without chewing. Chasing it down with the last gulp of his vodka, he contrived a circus barker’s painted smile.
“Delicious,” he said.
“There’s more where that came from,” the colonel said, not looking up from the meal he was busy demolishing.
“I couldn’t.” His voice was thin, attenuated. Korokova all but choked on the wedge of meat in her mouth. She glanced at him and winked—actually winked!
“I agree with the captain,” she said, much to his amazement. “I think it’s high time we got to the heart of the matter.”
Ferranov looked up from the battlefield of his meal, wiped his glistening lips on a large linen napkin. “Always eager to get on with business, this one.” Tilting his head toward the major. “Indispensable, she is.” He nodded. “And she is quite correct. But for this part of the evening we shall require a cigar.”
With this pronouncement, the person who had served their meal entered with a lacquered wood humidor, opened it for his master. He also wore the black-and-gold uniform. Ferranov looked over the contents as if each cigar were different, selected one, held it beneath his nose, inhaled. “Yes,” he said to no one in particular.
They repaired to a smallish balcony on the other side of the apartment where, in the distance, the Moskva River gleamed dully in the haze of the city’s light pollution. The familiar sounds of the city came to him then, but strangely muted, distorted as if they emanated from another dimension, and he felt even more cut off from his life before stepping inside the apartment. Rodion and Korokova stood, waiting, while Ferranov went through the protracted procedure of lighting his cigar. He stared fixedly at the burning end until the ash was of a length he found to his liking; then, quick as a fox, he looked up, directly into Rodion’s eyes.
“Captain, we have for you a new remit. If you are as intelligent as Juliet Danilovna claims, you have already guessed that this remit is the reason why she brought you here, why we are present, why we have invited you to dine with us.” He drew on the cigar, inhaled, let his lungs absorb the smoke’s properties, exhaled in a blue cloud.
“We hear, also from the major, that you are somewhat attached to Kata Hemakova. This must cease. We are now in a new order.”
“An order in which she has a diminished place,” Korokova interjected.
Something akin to a smile crept along the lower half of the colonel’s face without so much as touching his eyes, which were hard as marbles. “Or none at all.”
Rodion was once more rocked to his core. This day, starting with the abominable trip to the GRU morgue, arriving at this place of deformed reality, the inedible meal, and now this, had shredded any sense of equilibrium he still harbored within him. Instead he felt cast adrift in this place, alien, implacable, disastrous for Kata and—he strongly suspected—for himself. But what was he to do? He was here now, in these people’s service. As Ferranov said, it was a new order. Either he was in it or he would be swept aside, disappeared like so many others in the history of his country’s political purges.
“Colonel,” he said now, his face set and resigned. “My remit, if you please.”
Ferranov nodded as if pleased by Rodion’s direct response. “Major, you’re on,” he said, continuing his enjoyment of the cigar as he opened the glass door, stepped into the apartment, and disappeared from view.
Korokova turned to Rodion. “Kata Hemakova was explicitly ordered by the colonel to terminate her personal relationship with Alyosha Ivanovna. Alyosha Ivanovna is Kata’s subordinate and therefore forbidden territory, as the regulations state.”
Rodion knew of no such regulations and, even if there were, he knew full well this was not the real reason for Ferranov’s order. He could not count how many such relationships were currently in progress, but they were all heterosexual. Kata’s of course was not. Her relationship with Alyosha Ivanovna was considered deviant, hence the colonel’s order.
“Not only has Kata not complied but she has flagrantly disobeyed the order by taking her inamorata out in public, to restaurants and nightclubs. This behavior cannot be tolerated.”
Damn Kata, Rodion thought. What is she thinking? Well, Korokova was doing the right thing coming to him.
“I’ll talk to Kata,” he said. “She will listen to me.”
“Unfortunately, Rodion, the time for talk has passed.” She gave him her most penetrating look. “You will find Alyosha Ivanovna and you will terminate her.”
“I don’t—” Rodion’s heart jumped in his chest. A terrible pounding took up residence in his temples. The shock split his mind in two. His instinct was to fight, but his rational half shut that down almost immediately. Korokova was ruthless; she had demonstrated a contempt for human life. And all at once the clouds parted. It now became clear to him why she had taken him to the morgue, shown him in what low regard she held a human. Part of him—the part that had been loosed by his forced participation in the horror of what happened in the cold room—was primed to kill Korokova, but then what? He’d still have to face off against Colonel Ferranov. Instinct gave him pause. Not only had he been trained not to contemplate such mutiny but he also now completely understood Ferranov’s unsettling paintings and drawings. They were trophies all right, but the postmodern kind. Taxidermists could preserve the bodies of the animals, but only an artist could capture their souls. He shivered, but there had been no gust of wind, and he thought, God help me. But there was no God, only him and the major, face-to-face, will-to-will. He looked across her shoulder. Beyond the building he could just make out the leading edge of the skyscrapers of Oligarch City. The oligarchs were all gone now, either fled to the West or caught up in the all-too-Russian sawmill of denunciation on a trumped-up charge, show trial, prison, world without end, amen. Despite the lights here and there—or perhaps because of them—the buildings of Oligarch City were empty as burned-out husks.
Korokova took a step toward him. “You don’t what, Captain?” She used his rank deliberately; whatever friendship they might have had had been shelved.
“I … I think that’s a terribly drastic step.” He knew he’d already lost the battle of wills.
“Do you?” She put her hands on his shoulders, drew him closer so that he could smell the dead animal on her breath. “You know Kata better than I. Do you think she will obey orders? Do you think she will cast aside her lover?”
He felt every sharp angle of her; every shadow that cut across her face was a tear in his universe. He didn’t answer her; the Rodion she was looking for did not exist and she knew it.
“Well, then, let me suggest another possibility: I shove you over the railing, as the coward you are, a traitor to the new order, and your cowardice will force me to turn Alyosha Ivanovna’s brain to mush.”
It might have felt as if he were coming face-to-face with a buzz saw, except she was empty, empty, empty.
Abruptly she grinned at him, took him by the hand. “Come.” Opened the door for them to step back inside. “You must try on your new dress uniform. Black and gold are your colors. You’ll look so handsome!”
As he allowed her to lead him back into the dread apartment where surely Colonel Ferranov lurked like a bear in its den, he knew he was well and truly lost. He had fallen in love with a monster.
35
WASHINGTON, DC
At approximately 6 P.M. on an unsettlingly balmy winter evening, George Wilson, chief of the US Defense Threat Reaction Agency, sat in an anonymous conference room along an anonymous corridor in the Pentagon listening to the drone of reports from his heads of departments, as he had been doing for the last three hours. Really, there is no end to it, he thought. He wondered only half-jokingly whether he had been transported bodily from the Pentagon to the center of a beehive. Honestly, the oral reports meant as much to him as a bee’s buzzing. At least he knew what the bee was after. Not for the first time, either today or in the past, he wondered what the point was. The truth was he hated conferences, hated listening to oral reports. He far preferred oral digests or, even better, written ones. But those had been deemed too insecure. These days, because of the hacker tsunami that was inundating them all, nothing of import was ever sent through the DOD servers—emails, texts, or anything in between. We’re back to the era of town criers, he lamented to himself. It’s a fucking tragedy, is what it is.
Truth to tell, even if he were more inclined to absorb what was being said the last place he wanted to be was here inside this windowless monolith that had always seemed to him more prison than think tank. Anyway, he thought morosely, wasn’t “government think tank” an oxymoron? It certainly seemed so to him.
He wanted out in the worst way. And finally after years of searching he had found his path out of the government maze: Zahra Planck. Zahra was smarter than anyone else around this table—apart from him, of course. He’d been canny enough to intuit who she really was under all the façades she had fashioned for herself. No one else had, which was all to the good. His clandestine partnership with her around the quantum project would get them both out from under the government’s thumb with untold billions in profits lining the horizon as far as they could see.
In fact, it was with Zahra he wished to be at this moment. He imagined them strolling westward hand in hand along the National Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial. They would stop midway, stare into the placid water of the Reflecting Pool before moving on at an even more sedate pace. Neither of them would want their time together to end.
Plunged deep into this daydream, it took moments for his mind to register the pain. Then the first explosion inside his brain detonated. In response he rocked back and forth in his chair, hands pressed against the sides of his head.
Around the table all talk ceased, all eyes rotated to him as if by an intense gravitational pull. No one moved, however; no one believed that any kind of physical human crisis could happen within the hallowed bunkered fortress of the Pentagon. They were all safe here, weren’t they? It wasn’t until the chief jumped like an electrocuted frog, the third detonation turning his brain to jelly, that someone finally broke stasis, called for the guards.
By then, of course, it was far too late.
George Wilson had slumped over, cheek against the tabletop, heart and mind stopped dead in their tracks. Goggle-eyed, hands over their mouths, terrified even to whisper among themselves, everyone else backed away as if from the plague. As one, they stampeded through the open door. No coherent thought, no backward glance. His colleagues, his team, didn’t even give him the courtesy of a last goodbye. There was no loyalty in death.
Besides, in their minds he was no longer a human being; in that instant he’d become a statistic.
36
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
“Do you think she’ll do it?” Tribe asked.
“Yesterday I would have said no.” Evan stared at her bowl of soup, knowing she should eat. The trouble was she wasn’t hungry. She glanced up at him. Every muscle in her body throbbed with pain. She took a sip anyway, swallowed. “Today, I think so. Yes.”
“But you’re not sure.”
She shrugged. “With human beings you never can be, until the end, when it either happens or doesn’t. It’s especially true of Inessa.”
They were seated at a round café-style table in the area off the kitchen where Tribe took his breakfast and, if he wasn’t too busy, lunch. His first two meals of the day were unchanging: Grape-Nuts with fresh fruit and oat milk for breakfast, a salad of seaweed and Japanese mushrooms with sesame seeds and a ginger dressing for lunch. The space was cozy; above them puffy clouds rode in an azure sky across the barreled ceiling. No cherubs, though.
