The quantum solution, p.29
The Quantum Solution, page 29
“I assume then you’ve met Colonel Ferranov.”
Kusnetsov grimaced. “I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“A pleasure only a masochist would enjoy.”
“That bad.”
“Worse.” Kata turned to him. “He’s like a whipworm.”
Kusnetsov’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s like a tapeworm only more frightening. The female lays thousands of eggs in your intestines.”
“Well, then,” Kusnetsov said, “we’ve got to get that fucking whipworm out of the system.”
“Really?” She put her fists on her hips. “And how d’you propose to do that?”
“Not me. Ferranov will make sure I won’t be able to get within ten feet of him. Besides, I have to be elsewhere.” He dug in the pocket of his astrakhan, brought out a ring with an enormous square-cut emerald. It was the one that Kata had taken off her namesake when she had killed her. The original Kata Romanovna Hemakova, a fearsome assassin of the first rank whose name Kata had taken several years ago, used that very ring to slit her targets’ throats. He held it out to her. “But you—you’ve met him. He’s already lording it over you.”
“He dissolved my directorate—the one you created for me.”
“Irrelevant. You’re on a new path now.”
“And what happens after? I get shot by three or four of his black-uniformed goons?”
“Leave that to me.”
She gave him a level gaze. “So it’s a matter of trust.”
“It’s always been a matter of trust.” A thin smile played across his lips. “But I like you, Kata. Very much. We understand each other, don’t we? So I’ll tell you this much: I’ve made a deal with the devil. Two years gestating.”
“In my experience,” she said, “making a deal with the devil is never wise.”
“Ah, but at least this is my devil.”
At this, she acquiesced, and why not? She very much wanted her shot at Colonel Ferranov, fuck you very much. If this was what Kusnetsov was offering her, she was bound and determined to grab it with both fists. First step: she took the ring from him.
“Make it last, will you?” he said.
The ring—Kata’s ring, the emerald of violence and death—felt heavier than she remembered, heavy as a Valkyrie’s battle-axe.
46
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
The impact with the silica-laced basalt hit Evan hard, the force of it magnified by her wounds, juddering from her knees through her whole body, setting a new round of pain streaking through her. She released the pain through a steady hiss between her teeth, then moved off from the ruined helo.
She turned, hating the loss of peripheral vision the gas mask caused her, but she couldn’t afford to take it off. For the moment, at least, she needed the edge that being hidden from Korokova and her people lent her.
Her first order of business was to shoot out the damn spotlight; she wanted to set the landscape back to its eerie black and red. This she did with precision, down on one knee, her right wrist steadied by her left forearm. But she paid for it. A shout echoed off the side of the helo and she heard the shots an instant after a plume of pumice spattered her thigh. She felt the heat of the bullet’s passage even through Bugrov’s uniform.
She spun rather than rising up, squeezed off two precious shots in the direction of the soldier who had fired at her. Then she moved, bent over, taking short, quick strides that would allow her to zig and zag as needed. Moving very fast, she leapt over one fissure after another, the heat instantly agonizing, but at least the gas mask allowed her to move freely through the eruptions of toxic smoke. She came at the sniper from the side, saw him sprawled on his stomach, the barrel of his rifle perched on an outcrop of basalt, a ridge that snaked downward from his aerie. Slowing her pace, she crept up on him. Gripping his gas mask as he began to thrash, she ripped off the canister in front, pushed his face down into the ridge of basalt. Again and again until his face was a bloody pulp. She pulled his rifle out from under him, moved off to her left until she sighted another of Korokova’s Spetsnaz cadre who was following Bugrov’s line straight toward the rent opening in the helo, probably wondering what happened to him. Evan sighted, put two bullets in his back. The dual impacts jerked him forward, smashing his head into the torn lip of the opening.
Now to find Major Korokova. A good thought, but as almost always happens in the field good thoughts evaporate in the space of a heartbeat. Up on one knee and in the process of rising to her feet, she heard a soft clatter behind her and, whirling, saw a figure holding a pistol on her.
“Hardly Bugrov, scarcely Dmitry,” the figure said in a voice muffled by her mask. “You might be a good shot, but you’re too fucking short.”
The figure squeezed the trigger. One, two, three. Evan felt the impacts in her chest, deeper reverberations that sent a numbing kind of shock as she stumbled backward. Her fall seemed to go on forever.
47
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Afterward, Kata had no taste for going back to HQ. Besides, the intel on Ferranov that Kusnetsov had sent to her phone gave her six hours. “Timing is everything,” Kusnetsov had told her. So instead of retracing her steps she turned left at the corner, headed for a small park some three blocks distant. What had been snow was for a time sleet and now rain, pattering on her shoulders, the sidewalk, the streets where vehicles hissed in their passing, when they weren’t at a standstill. Another of Moscow’s endless traffic jams.
She could have stopped at a café, but for some atavistic reason she felt the need to be out in the open. As an adult that ancient inner voice had served her well, and she followed it now. The park was small, almost always empty despite the red plastic children’s slide at one end. There was something ineffably sad about that abandoned spiral—UV-resistant, rust-and decay-proof—a signifier for the sad state in which Russia and Moscow in particular found itself. She felt as if the country were drowning, going down for the last time. But was it much better in America, where she had spent her formative years? It came as something of a surprise to her that she had accepted the FSB offer to defect as the most effective way to hide—hide from the husband she had come to despise, from the children she had never wanted, from the DC inner circle that was suffocating her. She had thought of Russia as an adventure—a brave new world where she could start her life over. But it had turned out to be the same damn thing—a society whose rules were unbendable let alone unbreakable. Inside FSB she had thought she would be beyond the law—but FSB had its own set of laws, within which she found herself trapped. With the world burning there was nowhere to go where she would be free of her past, her memories of her sister. Every moment of her life she was haunted by Evan, by how both of them had screwed up their childhood. How they had never been there for each other, never sisters to one another. Shit! She turned her face skyward. The rain had morphed back into snow, large watery flakes landing on her cheeks like tears.
She entered the park and felt immediately calmer. The space was special to her. It was here in this out-of-the-way space that she often met Alyosha Ivanovna to be together without being observed, judged, ostracized, hated, with a judgmental stare, a swift turn of the head.
Tonight a lone figure sat on a bench near the slide—a man of indeterminate age, the collar of his greatcoat turned up around the lower half of his face. Though his head was down as if he was staring at the pavement between his feet, there was something familiar about him. Kata paused. It was the way he held his head.
Slowly, hands in the pockets of her coat, she crossed the park, sat down on the bench he occupied—not close, but not far away either.
“I suppose I should be surprised to see you here,” she said as she stared straight ahead at the red plastic slide, “but in fact I’m not.” When he made no response, she said, “I imagine you’ve spent enough time with Major Korokova.”
“Too much time.” Rodion’s voice was rough, hoarse as if he had been shouting for a long time.
“Corrupted, are you?”
This dragged a laugh out of him, but it had a ragged edge. Buried in there somewhere was a sob. “Only in the worst way.”
She waited for him to go on. The snow fell, thickening like paste.
“You’ve become her messenger now.”
He turned his head, looked up into her face. “Alyosha Ivanovna needs to pay for your sins.”
Kata felt a deep-seated chill like ice-slicked iron slide through her. “Is that how she put it?”
“She’s enraged. She and Ferranov. She gave me an ultimatum. Kill Alyosha Ivanovna or be killed.”
Kata ignored that. “Where is the major?” She made to rise, but Rodion put a hand on her forearm. She stared at it and he withdrew it immediately.
“She’s not here, not in Moscow. She flew out yesterday.”
Kata subsided, perched on the edge of the bench. “Where?”
“She didn’t tell me, but I sneaked a look at the flight plan. La Palma. Canary Islands.”
“What is she doing there?”
“Where is Alyosha Ivanovna?”
Kata sat back. “Safe from you, anyway.”
Rodion sighed. “There’s no way out of this—not for me, not for you, certainly not for Alyosha Ivanovna.”
“I love her, Rodion. She’s the first person I’ve loved since I lost my sister—and that was a long, long time ago.”
“Still…”
“You cannot have her, Rodion.”
He closed his eyes. “It seems I can’t have anything.”
A movement on his left side—the side away from her—alerted her. Jumping up, she moved in front of him. He was holding a pistol to his temple.
“Rodion. What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”
“You know,” he said. “You understand.”
Like a snapped whip her hand reached out, gripped the barrel of the pistol. For a moment or two, they fought each other, the muzzle of the gun moving one way or the other, a life-or-death tug-of-war.
The snow continued to fall; the city sounds were muffled, then ceased to intrude upon the park altogether. At that moment across from them a child and his mother hand in hand entered the park. The mother could not see the silent struggle between Kata and Rodion. She smiled at them, said, “I know it’s late, but it’s his birthday. He’s too excited to sleep and I don’t have the heart to reprimand him.” Her smile faded. “His father promised him a ride on this slide where he used to take him in summer.”
They came closer, and Kata moved to block the weapon from their sight.
“His father is gone. Another woman. Forgotten all about his son, so now…” She shrugged, pointed at the slide.
Kata and Rodion watched as her son climbed the ladder, kicking aside the thin layer of snow that had accumulated on each tread. When he reached the top he looked back at his mother.
“Go on, brave boy,” she said.
Her son, solemn as a judge, nodded almost imperceptibly, let go. Down he went along the spiral, pushing the snow before him. When he reached the ground he laughed and his mother laughed with him.
Kata felt the loosening of Rodion’s muscles and she took the pistol from him, palmed it into her pocket.
The mother frowned. “Is something the matter? Are you two all right?” She colored. “Excuse me for prying but I could sense the tension from here. Please be all right.” Her face seemed a manifestation of the loneliness inside her. “Whatever you two have you must fight for it. I didn’t and now…” Her voice drifted off, her gaze returning to her son.
Kata could not help reflecting that this woman’s very real sorrow seemed to put her concerns in perspective. Whatever her problems she would never experience the sadness crushing this woman, and that was a good thing, wasn’t it? Once, she was perfectly sure, now not so much. She thought of her children, whom she hadn’t seen in five years, and a strange and terrible pang went through her.
“You see, the thing is,” the mother said, “I never really saw him until after he left. I didn’t imagine he could betray me like that but he had it in him all along.” She lifted her hand, let it drop. “Oh, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Two strangers in a park in the snow. On my son’s birthday.” Her hand lifted again, fell. “But you know sometimes it’s easier talking to strangers. Strangers never seem to judge you or if they do it doesn’t matter because you’ll never see them again.” She gave them more of a smile, but it must have tasted bitter on her lips. “Apologies. Again.”
“None needed,” Kata said.
The mother turned, looking at her son climbing the slide again. He slid down with an exuberant yell. His cheeks were pink with life. “I remember being here as a little girl,” she said, her tone wistful. “I loved the slide. It was metal then. It rusted and fell apart.” She went to her boy, scooped him up, lifted him to her shoulder. “Come,” she said to him. “Now it’s time for bed.” They began to move off, back the way they had come.
“Good luck,” the mother said to them over her shoulder.
Kata nodded. “Better days,” she said, and much to her astonishment meant it.
“Happy birthday!” she called cheerfully to the boy as he and his mother departed.
He turned his head, grinned at her, his face already a white oval, dissolving into the night.
Rodion stood up. He was quite close to her. For a time they said nothing. Then, “What will become of me now?” he asked.
There was only one answer she could think of. “Come home with me.” Only one answer that mattered. “We’ll find a way out together.”
48
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
Right here, in the very spot where Evan lay on her back, the heat and smoke would have killed her had she not been wearing the Spetsnaz outfit and gas mask. As it was, she lay stunned into immobility. She found herself staring up into the face of Major Juliet Korokova. She seemed huge, built like an Amazon. Her naked face, however, was as stunned as Evan felt.
“Who the hell are you?” Korokova staggered backward. “How are you still alive? I pumped three nine-millimeter bullets into your chest.”
Evan felt her heartbeat return to its regular rhythm; her breathing, temporarily interrupted by a second or two of blackout, resumed oxygenating her system. She knew she had to gather herself, to regain her feet as quickly as possible, to take advantage of Korokova’s shock. She rose, keeping the trembling in her thighs under strict control, and as she did so a providential geyser of carbon and sulfur dioxides erupted just to the right of where Korokova stood. The major’s arm went up reflexively while her other hand scrabbled to bring her gas mask down over her face.
In that moment of chaos, Evan launched herself, every muscle in her body screaming, the places where the three bullets had struck the tactical body armor that Lyudmila had found and that Evan had strapped on under Bugrov’s outfit screaming like hell, as if a red-hot poker had been laid to them. But that was all in her body. Evan had shifted her awareness to her mind. Her body was simply taking orders, working strictly on muscle memory.
Evan’s leading shoulder struck Korokova full in the chest, sending her hurtling backward onto a cross-ridge, which would have knocked the air out of every one of her cadre still alive. Not Korokova; she was made of sterner stuff. Though coughing, she was taller, heavier, and stronger than Evan.
From her position flat on her back she slammed the hard canister of the gas mask across Evan’s already swollen cheek. Blood spurted as a cut opened up. Evan drove an elbow into the spot just below the major’s sternum. Korokova’s mouth opened spastically and Evan struck it so hard the back of the major’s head slammed into the basalt.
They rolled over and over, each one trying to get into a dominant position. Closer and closer they came to a rivulet of lava, choking Korokova. With an animal cry she snatched off Evan’s gas mask. Now they were both choking on the fumes, eyes watering, lungs laboring in the searing heat. Evan felt the moisture being sucked out of her face, the skin feeling tight, brittle, ready to crack apart like a thrown vase. Her throat tried to close up against the caustic sulfur dioxide, and she was assaulted by a nauseating vertigo. The ground seemed to tilt away from her; she felt herself falling, tumbling across the solidified lava field.
* * *
She must have blacked out then. The next thing she knew Korokova was on top of her, bearing down with her intolerable weight, her forearm across Evan’s throat as she pushed her with her thick thighs along the basalt toward the twisting stream of superheated lava.
Evan could feel it on her hair, her scalp. A moment more and she would be fried to a crisp so quickly her flesh would start to melt before it caught fire, her blood literally boiling in her arteries and veins. A terrible, filthy way to die. She looked up into the major’s eyes and saw in the red firelight the heady triumph of victory, the sure knowledge of causing an enemy’s death, the pure pleasure of it.
She remembered her recent exchange with Lyudmila: “But we’ve been through this before.” “Not really. Not completely. Not here at the end.”
And here she was at the end, done in by this Amazonian bitch, the very person who terrified Lyudmila, who Lyudmila had sent her to kill. And now she really did forgive Lyudmila everything. She hadn’t meant it before, not really, had said it because she thought it was what she was meant to say, because it was the right thing. But in this terrible moment everything between her and Lyudmila was reset, all the lies, the deceit, the scheming, crisped in this fiery, lethal landscape.
Part of her was burning; she could not tell which part but above her Korokova, with the strength of her outsize physique, had redoubled her effort to push Evan into the lava flow.
… here at the end …
And then Inessa’s voice echoed in her mind: “There’s something else you should know about Korokova. She was shot just below her left shoulder; it never healed correctly. It’s a weak spot.”
