Rasputin's Bastards

THE GAMBLER

Fyodor Kolyokov had never met his real father but he had over the years found a surrogate: Ari Krieghoff, an old Nazi physician who showed up at City 512 after the War, on the lam from the Allied prosecutors and his own betrayed comrades.

Krieghoff was a rotten surrogate — he was a cold bastard when sober — and when he drank too much, he was prone to catastrophic tantrums.

And drunk or sober, Krieghoff liked little boys altogether too much. He had kept trying to feel Kolyokov up in the guise of examinations, and in the dark corners of his mind he plotted far worse intrusions. Eventually Kolyokov would decide enough was enough and orchestrate the old man’s death.

Really, Kolyokov’s years with Doctor Krieghoff were nothing to get misty about. But, Kolyokov mused, one should never underestimate the power of nostalgia. For Ari Krieghoff sat across the table from him now, in a metaphor he had apparently constructed for himself to resemble the old City 512 testing room where the two of them had spent so much time.

Kolyokov was little again — or littler, anyway — and Krieghoff was his old self; whitening hair combed back from a broad forehead, his congenital harelip hidden from the eugenics-mad Reich by a long, bristled moustache.

Krieghoff had a stack of cards in front of him, and he sent a pale, narrow tongue across his malformed lips as he drew one. He looked at it briefly, then looked at Kolyokov. “Well, boy?”

Kolyokov sighed, and turned his attention to the old man’s forehead. “Circle,” said Kolyokov. “Underneath it, a wavy line.”

Krieghoff smiled slightly and shook his head. He scratched a notation on the clipboard by his other hand, and drew another card.

Kolyokov concentrated.

“Square. Circle underneath this time.”

Krieghoff raised an eyebrow. “Nein,” he said and made another mark on the paper.

Kolyokov frowned: this metaphor didn’t jibe with what he knew to be true. He’d scored perfect on the card tests from the first day he began working with Herr Doktor Krieghoff. Nazi draws a circle, little Fyodor says circle; Nazi pulls out a triangle, little Fyodor sees a triangle in his mind. And even the tricky ones: Nazi draws a wavy line, thinks “Circle! Circle!” Little Fyodor Kolyokov says, “You’re thinking circle, but you’re looking at a wavy line.”

“Bullshit,” said Kolyokov now. “There’s a square with a circle underneath it.”

Krieghoff let the trace of a grin emerge from beneath his moustache. “Bullshit yourself,” he said, and turned over the card. It was a star, unmistakably. “Are you feeling well today, little Fyodor?”

“I’m fine,” said Kolyokov stiffly. If he remembered the tests going differently, there was nothing changed in the look of the old man’s eyes today that was any more or less than the lecherous evil he’d spied sixty years ago. “Let’s continue,” said Kolyokov.

Herr Doktor Krieghoff nodded — a little disappointed? Kolyokov couldn’t tell for sure. “Another card, then,” said Krieghoff, and drew from the deck.

Kolyokov redoubled his concentration. The last couple of attempts, he had been confusing imagination with true sight: a common early mistake, he supposed — although not one that he ever recalled making.

But who could say where memory was concerned?

So when his imagination conjured up a square, Kolyokov pushed it aside and continued his push. He felt sweat gather in his armpits, bead at the end of his nose. He screwed his eyes shut, and his breath was forced and ragged in his throat.

“Fyodor,” said Krieghoff pleasantly, “are you trying to read my mind, or take a shit?”

Kolyokov opened his eyes and glared across the table. The extent of the old Nazi’s harelip was revealed grotesquely in his broadening grin.

“It is a square,” said Krieghoff. He drew another line on his chart, and pushed his chair back. “That is enough for today, I think,” he said as he stood.

“Fuck,” said Kolyokov. “This isn’t right.”

Herr Doktor Krieghoff walked around the table behind Kolyokov, and leaned against the door.

“The test is over,” said Krieghoff. “Now, you know what it’s time for.”

Kolyokov felt a premonitory sinking in his stomach. He turned around, to see Krieghoff fiddling with his belt.

Kolyokov got up, and rushed around to the far side of the table. This, precisely, had never happened — Kolyokov was as sure of that as he was of anything. Krieghoff had thought about it enough — Krieghoff’s fantasies about Kolyokov and some of the other boys were an open book to little mind-reading Fyodor Kolyokov — but the Nazi understood too well what would have happened to him had he dallied with any of City 512’s young subjects directly, and had accordingly limited himself to only marginally limited “examinations.” The fear of Stalin and his minions that had kept him at bay had only started to dissolve later on. Kolyokov had taken care of Ari Krieghoff before there was a real danger of him doing any serious damage.

But here — the old bastard was unbuttoning his fly now!

“This isn’t right,” said Kolyokov. Krieghoff’s grin went wide.

“No one will know,” he whispered, and started across the room.

Kolyokov felt a calm come over him. When he destroyed the real Krieghoff, he’d done so using his abilities — the old man’s mind had become supple enough that he could penetrate it like a syringe and fill it with psychic poison enough to wipe the slate clean. Here in the metaphor, however, he didn’t seem to have any abilities. He would have to rely on such objects and circumstances as he could find.

Kolyokov looked at the table. It still contained the cards and the clipboard. But Krieghoff had taken his pencil. Of course it was gone: the only obvious weapon in the room, and Krieghoff had taken it for himself.

“This,” said Kolyokov, the realization dawning upon him as he spoke, “is not my metaphor. It is my prison, yes?”

Krieghoff took hold of Kolyokov, and started to spin him around. But Kolyokov ducked between his legs and rolled under the table.

“You are talking nonsense, boy,” said Krieghoff.

“Funny you should call me boy,” said Kolyokov. He made for the other side of the table, where the door was. “You’re just a boy yourself, aren’t you?”

Kolyokov came out from under the table just as Krieghoff was starting around it. He kicked out and managed to snag his chair. He sent it skittering across Krieghoff’s path. The Nazi stumbled — long enough for Kolyokov to reach the door. He yanked down on the handle — half-expecting to find it locked — and allowed himself a grin when it opened. Without turning to look, he stepped out the door and shut it behind him.

“Ah, shit.”

He was in the same room as before — but a mirror image of the first. Krieghoff stood at the far end, his grin wide and hungry as a fairy story wolf’s as he beckoned Kolyokov to join him.

The little bastards. They’d used the metaphor to make a prison for him — in one of the little rooms in City 512 that he remembered so well, but folded in on itself so that any attempt to escape the room brought it back.

Only it was more than a prison. They’d fashioned City 512 into a torture chamber — a place where he would suffer the horror that he had feared so greatly that he had killed an old man for merely contemplating the act.

He shouldn’t have been surprised: Children are nature’s sadists, he reminded himself.

But they are also unschooled. Kolyokov laughed to himself.

To a six-year-old prodigy, the spectre of a Nazi child molester might be the worst thing imaginable. Take away his psychic abilities, and my goodness! It was enough to make a fellow pee in his pants!

But Fyodor Kolyokov wasn’t six. He was seventy-two, and he’d faced down the real Ari Krieghoff a long time ago. He was the first of many adversaries, and far from the worst. Krieghoff’s resurrection now marked more annoyance than trauma revisited. And damned if Kolyokov was going to keep running away from an annoyance.

“Okay, Ari,” said Kolyokov. “My test is over. Now let’s see about you.”

Herr Doktor Ari Krieghoff threw back his head and laughed with monstrous lechery.

Clearly, thought Kolyokov, he had not a clue as to what was about to happen to him.

“Take off your pants,” said Kolyokov.

From the depths of Bishop’s Hall came a scream, high-pitched and garbled by shocked and dismayed sobs. Mrs. Kontos-Wu put down her Becky Barker book. “Now what on earth… ?”

She said it to no one in particular. She had been alone in the library since the peculiar boy had appeared and vanished again from the book-ladder, and that must have been — what? — hours ago. The sun had fallen below the line of trees to the west, and thereby shifted light from the library’s high windows brilliant gold to a deep purple. Mrs. Kontos-Wu was now reading about Becky’s adventures in France by the greenish-yellow light of the table lamp. She set the novel down so as to save her place, and got up. She walked over to the mahogany pocket doors, turned the brass latch, and slid them open. The hallway outside stretched away from her, long and empty.

“What do you think you are doing?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu started and turned around. Lois was standing behind her. Her arms were folded over her chest, and she tapped one toe on the carpeted floor. She seemed very cross.

“I heard a scream,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “So I went to—”

Lois shook her head no. “You didn’t hear a scream. There was no screaming. Go back, read your fucking book and relax!”

“Lois!” Mrs. Kontos-Wu felt her face flush. “I can’t believe you said that word!”

Lois blinked and smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me. Look — just go back and finish the book. Everything will be fine.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu frowned. “How did you get in here?” she said.

“I was back in the stacks,” said Lois. “You must have been concentrating very hard not to have heard me. What are you reading?”

“Becky Barker.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu went back to her chair and picked up the book. “The Adventure of the Scarlet Arrow.”

“Let me borrow it when you’re finished,” said Lois. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Work?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu smiled to herself. “That’s not like you.”

But there was no answer. Lois was gone — vanished into the stacks. Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged and turned over her book.

It was a good book. Becky and her friends were in France — the foreign exchange program they were on all but forgotten after three men wearing fezzes had kidnapped Antoine, the irritating little Parisian brat whose parents were playing host to the three of them. One thing had led to another, and now Becky was tied up in the mail car at the back of the Orient Express, racing through a thunderstorm towards Istanbul and a rendezvous with the mysterious Scarlet Arrow. She had read all the Becky Barker books a long time ago, but Mrs. Kontos-Wu couldn’t for the life of her remember how this one turned out. Was the Scarlet Arrow a person? An actual arrow from a bow-and-arrow set? Or something entirely different, like an airplane or a gem or a necklace or a decoding machine for the Russians — something just called the Scarlet Arrow so as to throw Becky off the scent? The cover didn’t tell her anything — it was just a picture of a big swarthy man with a fez on his head and a curved dagger in his fist, threatening Becky in front of the Eiffel Tower. There was nothing for it but to finish the thing. Mrs. Kontos-Wu curled up in the chair and started to read.

“Shh.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu rolled her eyes. “I was being quiet, Loi—”

She stopped. It wasn’t Lois. It was a boy — not the one she’d seen earlier, either. This one was taller, a little older than the other one, with badly clipped brown hair and wide, hungry eyes that she was sure she recognized from somewhere. He wore ill-fitting green trousers and a white T-shirt, and he had a bright red gasoline can in one hand. The other hand was at his mouth, forefinger extended across his lips. “Shh!”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu didn’t know why — a strange boy shows up at Bishop’s Hall with a can of gasoline, a girl should really say something — but she did as she was told. The boy smiled and nodded. He unscrewed the top of the can and began sloshing gasoline in a line around the edge of the room. When he came to a bookshelf, he made sure to slosh the gasoline up the spines of the books, but he didn’t bother splashing too high. Mrs. Kontos-Wu supposed that made sense — the paper would burn well enough by itself, after all.

Wait a minute. Mrs. Kontos-Wu set the book down and got up again. Burn?

“Hey!” she ran across the room to where the boy was working. “What do you think you’re doing! This is a library! You can’t burn down a library!”

The boy turned and glared at her. “Shhh!” he said.

“I will not!” Mrs. Kontos-Wu took a deep breath and let out a scream. It was a good scream — better than the one she’d imagined hearing a few moments ago — all high-pitched spooky-movie shrill. She took a breath and screamed again — louder this time.

“Ah, shit, Kontos-Wu,” said the boy, reaching into his pocket. “Do we have to go through this?” He pulled out a book of matches, and before Mrs. Kontos-Wu could recover herself, lit one and dropped it to the floor.

The flame spread fast as sunlight along the trail of gasoline, only at first it was a line of blue, not gold. The gold came an instant later, in an explosion of flame and smoke that engulfed the boy all at once. Mrs. Kontos-Wu felt the ground fall from beneath her feet as the force of the fire threw her back. Roaring flame and the crackling combustion of wood and paper filled her ears as her back hit the floor and the air heaved from her chest. Mrs. Kontos-Wu gasped a lungful of black, evil-tasting smoke, and coughed it back out again. She felt as though she were suffocating — she couldn’t get a breath past her throat.

She felt a hand on her back, and another on her arm. The hands were large, and their grips firm. She looked up through the thickening smoke, and felt a moment of comforting reassurance.

It was Mr. Bishop! Her schoolmaster! He was wearing one of his familiar tweed jackets, the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. And behind them, his eyes —

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gasped — and took in a little air this time. She blinked the stinging smoke away and looked more closely. She’d been right.

His eyes were the same as the boy’s. Older, stuck into a different face. But they were the same.

“Come on,” said Mr. Bishop. “We must leave this place — before they get back.”

With Mr. Bishop’s help, Mrs. Kontos-Wu got to her feet. The fire was spreading quickly. Flames licked across the shelves at the far side of the library in little blue streaks. The wall by the entrance where the fire had started was consumed in a terrible mix of roiling flame and black smoke. The tall windows had shattered, and now the oxygen-rich night air blew in past the billowing, flaming curtains to feed the conflagration.

Mr. Bishop dragged her toward the flaming wall. Mrs. Kontos-Wu pulled against him. She was not going anywhere near that fire.

“Quickly!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here — before they come back!”

“We’ll die if we go there, Mr. Bishop!” shouted Mrs. Kontos-Wu. She squirmed free of Mr. Bishop’s grip and ran toward the far end of the library.

“We won’t!” shouted Mr. Bishop. He started to run after her — and might have caught her all other things being equal.

But at that moment, an immense gust of wind knocked both of them to the floor. The curtains flew nearly straight out from their rods and the flames blew back an instant before returning, brighter and hotter in the fresh outside air.

Lois stood at the window. Her arms were folded across her chest and she appeared very cross indeed. Strange light flickered behind her — green like the reading lamp, but moving across her shoulders like a thick liquid.

“You,” she said. “You bastard.”

“I’m a—” Mrs. Kontos-Wu stopped herself. Lois wasn’t calling her a big bastard — she was looking straight at Mr. Bishop, who had climbed to his feet. He towered over them both — his head seemed to reach as high as the ceiling.

“We are all bastards,” he said. “Rasputin’s bastards, they used to call us? That is our common bond.”

“Vladimir wanted to destroy you outright,” said Lois. The flames behind her diminished as she spoke — out and out vanishing in spots. And where they vanished, the wallpaper and bookshelves and hangings reappeared unblemished. The liquid green light grew brighter. “Maybe he was right.”

“Vladimir is merciful, then. I presume it wasn’t he who devised my reunion with old Krieghoff.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gaped. As Mr. Bishop spoke, the flames started up again — consuming the fresh wallpaper and bookshelves and hanging as fast as they’d been made. Becky Barker and the Adventure of the Scarlet Arrow was forgotten in the face of this new mystery.

“That was me,” said Lois. “You had it coming.”

“I see. I have been very wicked — of course. And who are you, little girl, who judges an old man so harshly for a lifetime of sin?”

There was a series of loud pops then, as a row of lights on the far side of the library blew out. New flames climbed up the rails of the staircase to the library’s second level in brilliant lines of blue and yellow.

And as that happened, another thing occurred, which gave Mrs. Kontos-Wu even more pause. Mr. Bishop — a tall, fit man of about fifty-five, with sandy grey hair and a tweed single-breasted sports jacket — began to melt and change. He grew shorter and his hair receded; his sports jacket melded and extended down to near his ankles, and transformed into a thick, terrycloth bathrobe that had once been a deep, luxurious purple but had faded with washings to a threadbare pink. His belly swelled and his feet grew, and his chin darkened with late morning stubble.

“Fyodor Kolyokov,” she said, nodding. This wasn’t Mr. Bishop. She was not a schoolgirl at Bishop’s Hall. She was Mrs. Kontos-Wu, who worked for Wolfe-Jordan, where she managed offshore mutual funds. Except that there really was no Wolfe-Jordan — Wolfe-Jordan was a cover, a money laundering front, and her real master was Fyodor Kolyokov, who ran his own kind of financial empire out of a hotel at Broadway and 95th, which was called…

“The Emissary,” she said aloud, looking down at her hands. The fingers, which had been small and pink and a little pudgy, narrowed and lengthened and dried out into what seemed by comparison a mummy’s claw but in fact was only the more weather-worn hand of a thirty-six-year-old woman who had not been at Bishop’s Hall for a quarter century.

She looked at Kolyokov, and he nodded to her: Good, he mouthed — and then he spoke some other words to her — not with his mouth, but in her head. They flashed across her mind like quicksilver. And then he mouthed again: Now.

Lois screamed at her to stop, but it was too late. Mrs. Kontos-Wu flung herself into the flames — felt them lick and tear at her clothes and her flesh — felt the illusion of the metaphor burn and bubble away like the skin on her arms and face and thighs — felt the pain of burning nerves and searing flesh — and then felt its absence, as death came to her sure and final, in the crumbling metaphor that was Bishop’s Hall.

It was dark enough, but that was it as far as sensory deprivation went in Fyodor Kolyokov’s tank. In spite of the buckets of cleaning products that had been flushed through the thing over the past several hours, the air inside was filled with old man stink. If anything, the antiseptic made it worse: it made it smell like a geriatric ward. And it wasn’t completely silent, either. Stephen heard the scream from the living room with both hatches closed.

“Piece of shit Soviet junk.”

Stephen muttered it under his breath, but in the tomb of Fyodor Kolyokov’s isolation tank it echoed like the voice of God. He sighed — which sounded to his sense-starved ears like a hurricane hitting a Florida beach — and opened the two hatches. The scream had come three more times before he was out.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “I’m fucking trying to fucking concentrate!” He kicked his feet into his slippers. “Fuckwad!”

“Ste-Stephen? That you?”

Stephen shrugged on a bathrobe and opened the bathroom door. Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked at him from the bed. Her eyes were wide and wet with tears. Terrified. Which was interesting: it was the first spark of humanity in her that Stephen had detected since she’d returned. And the accent was gone.

Maybe, he thought, the dream-walker’s gone too.

Or it could be a trick — like those scenes in The Exorcist where Linda Blair seems okay for a second, to trick the priests to come in close enough so the devil can let loose another green puke whammy and knock them out the window to their deaths.

“It’s me,” he said carefully. “Yeah.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu glanced down at the straps. “What’s with these things?” she said. “Can you undo them?”

“I don’t think so,” said Stephen — Can you undo them? being one of the first things a tricky dream-walker would ask once he’d gotten the knack of humanizing his host.

The door to the suite opened then, and Miles stepped in. He was carrying a Glock at chest height. He gave Stephen a pissed-off look; Stephen had sent him from the suite an hour ago, on the theory that security man’s aura was what was fucking up his dream-walking. Miles had argued — he didn’t trust the straps where Mrs. Kontos-Wu was concerned, and thought Stephen was taking a foolish risk leaving her unguarded while he “sloshed around in Mr. Kolyokov’s tank.”

Stephen had a hard time looking Miles in the eye now. He’d responded by pointing out that he was the dream-walker, Miles was the goon, and while Miles might have nothing better to do in a tank than “slosh around,” Stephen had the capacity to use the tank to its full advantage.

Except that it hadn’t exactly turned out that way. Stephen had spent the last three hours using every trick in the book, several on tape and even a couple he’d picked up off the Internet. And try as he might, he hadn’t been able to invoke even a hint of the dream-walking state that Kolyokov entered so effortlessly in the tank.

“Is everything under control, sir?” said Miles, in a tone that made Stephen want to hit him.

“The straps are holding,” said Stephen. “If that’s what you mean.”

Miles lowered his handgun. He regarded Mrs. Kontos-Wu, and she frowned back at him.

“Miles — Shute. Right?”

Miles nodded warily. Her eyes tracked him as he stepped around the bed, and settled on the bandage on his scalp. “What happened to your head?” she asked.

“Is this for real?” said Miles to Stephen.

“Not sure. She’s doing a good impression of herself. But who knows?”

“Why,” said Miles, “don’t you just get back in the tank and check for yourself? Dream-walk into her. That’s your knack — right, Stephen?”

Stephen looked away, out the window. It was late afternoon in New York City. Central Park was a long vertical sliver of gold-hazed greenery. Stephen couldn’t imagine what the park was like to either side of the sliver. All he saw now was two ugly old water towers, and below that, deep red brick, drawn curtains and the black cross-hatch of fire escapes. It was a shitty view, and there wasn’t anything he could do to change that.

“Who knows?” said Stephen.

“How is Mr. Kolyokov?” asked Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “He said he might be injured — maybe in a coma?”

Miles raised both eyebrows and scrunched his lips. Stephen looked over to Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “‘He said’? You’ve been talking with Fyodor?”

“Look — Stephen. Cut the shit. Undo the straps.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu threw him a full-teeth smile. “What am I going to do? Kill ya with my hands?”

“Wouldn’t put it past you,” said Miles. “Don’t untie her.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Stephen answered. He turned back to Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “If our positions were reversed, you wouldn’t untie me either. Don’t ask again.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s eyes narrowed. “Something happened,” she said. “I pulled some stuff, didn’t I? What did I do?”

Stephen kept his mouth shut, and motioned to Miles to do the same. There was no point in giving Mrs. Kontos-Wu, if that’s who she was, any more information than she already had.

But she was working it out for herself. “I did that to you — didn’t I, Miles? Your head?” Miles stared at her, stone-faced. “Shit, I’m sorry if that’s what happened. Did I—” Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s eyelids fluttered, which Stephen knew to be one of the few signs of real distress that his comrade would show “—did I kill anyone?”

“Save the questions,” said Stephen. “Right now, it’s important you tell me — what did Fyodor — Mr. Kolyokov — say to you?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu considered the question. “All right. I guess holding out won’t go far in convincing you I’m of sound mind and body. Here goes.” She shut her eyes and licked her lips. When she spoke again, it wasn’t her voice — it was Fyodor Kolyokov, speaking as it were, from beyond the grave.

“Stephen my love. If you get this message (said Kolyokov through Mrs. Kontos-Wu) then my ruse has worked and I have succeeded in returning our operative to herself. You may have encountered her in her previous state — she was inhabited by a powerful dream-walker, up to no good — but if that happened, I doubt both of you would be alive — and therefore I doubt you would be hearing this.

“Assuming the best, then, I also assume you have encountered certain truths already. You will — I hope — have found me by now, in a coma or unconscious, in my tank. You will have taken the appropriate steps — yes? — and had me moved to the infirmary on the fifth floor. If you have not done so yet, in hopes that I may return to my corporeal self — abandon that hope for the moment, and put my body in a doctor’s care immediately. I will wait here until you’re finished.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s eyes blinked open. “Oh,” she said, in her own voice. “I’m supposed to stop and wait until you’ve taken care of Mr. Kolyokov — unless you already have?”

Stephen felt himself flush. “He’s taken care of,” he said. “Keep going.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shut her eyes again.

“All done? Good. A couple of other things have no doubt come to pass in my absence. Unless I miss my guess, Shadak will have telephoned you by now. He will have been very angry, I’m willing to bet, but it’s his own fault. He sent a submarine with our cargo — a submarine! — and the cargo we were meant to collect escaped, and took it over. I don’t know what’s happened beyond that. I have been — compromised for the time being.

“I trust you have revealed nothing of my state to Mr. Shadak. That is good — always play your cards close to the vest as the Americans say. But it is time to contact Mr. Shadak again. We need to find out everything he knows about the cargo — where it came from, how many children are in fact involved, who else has had contact with them, and so on.

“And there is one other thing that we must discuss now. This one is… difficult. Our operative Alexei Kilodovich is missing. I know you are saying: so what? Kilodovich is nothing, just more sleeper muscle, new in the organization in any case — cannon fodder in the event things became ugly. That is what I led you to believe, and I must apologize for that, because I misled you, Stephen. In fact, Kilodovich’s disappearance is a very serious problem indeed.

“I know you were suspicious when we brought Kilodovich on board. And you were right. We didn’t go to all that trouble to recruit him as muscle. In fact, Mrs. Kontos-Wu is more than capable of taking care of herself. Kilodovich was a part of the exchange. Mr. Shadak was very interested in meeting our Alexei Kilodovich. He believes that there is advantage in having that one. In a way he is right. But whatever the matter — without Kilodovich, there is no exchange.

“To make matters worse, I believe that our… cargo… has taken possession of Kilodovich. They are clever children, Stephen, smarter than we ever had imagined, and stronger too. Who knows what they will do with him… how they will use him. I think it will not be to our benefit, however it goes.

“So. When I’m recovered, and out of this prison they’ve made for me, I will take up the search for Kilodovich. In the meantime, you must lay groundwork. Contact Shadak. Apologize to him on my behalf. Find out from him exactly what happened so far as he knows. Allow Mrs. Kontos-Wu to assist — Shadak likes her — but take the lead yourself. You have worked for me now for five years. There is more in you than you know. And I know that you are ready for this new responsibility.”

Stephen stood a little straighter at that. He was ready.

“But Stephen (said Kolyokov through Mrs. Kontos-Wu) — that doesn’t mean you’re ready for the tank. Under no circumstances are you to go in there. The tank is still my dominion.

“And the children — our cargo — are too dangerous to deal with on their own terms. Particularly for you. And particularly now that they’ve got Kilodovich. Goodbye for now, Stephen. Remember what I’ve told you.”

And with that, the voice of Fyodor Kolyokov was gone from Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s lips. Her eyes blinked open. “Stephen?”

“Stephen’s gone to the can,” said Miles.