Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

Viktor rummaged through his Army duffel bag, burrowing under what looked like fifty pairs of unwashed boxers—“well, I didn’t exactly have time to do the laundry”—before coming up with a heavy Toshiba portable that had seen better days. One corner was crushed. “My field unit,” he shrugged. “Or rather, Vassily Bondarenko’s. It will have to do.”

He pressed Power and, as the virtual desktop built itself, a message appeared: “For official use/Army of the Commonwealth of Independent States.”

Lara glanced over and observed, “That thing’s an antique.”

“The hardware, maybe. The software’s up to date. Anyway, it’s all we’ve got; can’t be sure the snoops aren’t still watching your iPad.”

Katrina was not to be ignored by the ex-couple. “Tell me again how you know this… this trick … will work.”

“I don’t.” Lara let out a bigger sigh than she meant to. “Let’s just say I have a hunch, a chess player’s read of Nikki, the guy across the table. You should have heard him at dinner; he hates the British and the Americans.”

“Why did he steal the Bible now, this week?”

“To plaster the damning evidence of what the West did to us all over the walls of the Kremlin. With the whole country, the world watching. Anyway, it’s what I’d do.”

“I’m in.” Gerasimov’s ID and password, Romance and Babies, admitted Viktor to the latest version of the prerecorded show. He swiveled his Army laptop around so the women could see the screen as he searched at high speed. When something with a white background flashed by on the screen, Viktor smacked the table with his hand. “Gotcha, boys!”

“What? Really?” Lara searched Viktor’s triumphant face.

He paused the streaming video and hit the Back button. This part of the evening was supposed to be the twenty-five-minute light show playing across the Kremlin’s façade that coordinated with a fireworks display. Running in reverse, the colors danced crazily on the built-in monitor, the Firebird Suite atonally playing backward. After a couple of minutes of running time, though, everything went white, or nearly white. In the middle of the screen was a large leather book, a Bible, open to the flyleaf.

“You were right, Larashka. They uploaded it nine minutes ago, replacing the approved show with this revised one… same file name and number,” Viktor told her. “Cute. Probably took them all this time to shoot the images in a studio somewhere and then cut them in. Figured no one would be rescreening an entire three-hour show this close to airtime. They’re good.” Viktor grinned again. “But I’m better.”

Lara asked, “How long will it take you?”

“An hour at most,” he said. “Let’s go over our cues.”

Of the nearly half million souls gathered in Red Square as night fell, the handful whose fates were about to intersect had conflicting emotions. The US leader and the Russian president, not far from each other on the temporary metal rostrum just in front of the Kremlin wall, were elated. Hours earlier they shook hands on a deal each believed would guarantee personal, if not national, success for years to come.

Viktor Nikolayevich Maltsev, Katrina Petrovna Chernova, and especially Larissa Mendelova Klimt, in a roped-off section for guests of State Broadcasting and other departments, were as tightly strung as violin strings. Their thing tonight had better work. A failure would take place in front of the whole country in real time and on national television.

Meanwhile, the restive Muscovites out there in the cobbled Square were taking the rare opportunity to assemble in numbers without a permit or fear of being jailed as anti-Government demonstrators. There had been warm applause for the G20 leaders as they filed onto the risers, but only whistles greeted their own president. And Lara could count at least a hundred hand-lettered signs starting, “Down With…”

It could have been worse. The crowd tonight wasn’t concerned with politics, just economics. Surfing their phones and tablet computers or scanning the headlines of hastily purchased evening papers in the meager light of the Square’s streetlamps—dimmed to enhance the visibility of the images on the walls—they knew by now the price of a barrel of oil had fallen by 30 percent that afternoon on news that America had all but weaned itself off foreign oil for years to come. And the commentators were saying that, with most US energy traders still asleep in their beds, oil had even farther to fall—threatening to pull Russia’s economy down with it. Making more babies was suddenly the furthest thing from any Russian’s mind.

As the head of a government department, Gerasimov had to seem unconcerned. He was glad-handing the guests inside the rope, working the crowd before going back to the TV truck to oversee the production. When he came up to Lara, he leaned in to give her the traditional double kiss of greeting.

“Why couldn’t you have told me about your family?” she asked in a low voice amid the general hubbub. “I would have understood.”

He pulled back to look at her. “My family?”

“Nikki and Tatiana. Tatiana Ivanova Gerasimova… Tati… your wife. Your son I can understand. He makes no secret of his feelings. But Tatiana… when I saw her Tuesday night, she told me—”

“You saw her? Tuesday night? How is she? Did she… mention me?”

Over the man’s shoulder, she was watching Viktor, in full Army uniform with major’s braid on the visor of his service hat, ducking under the ropes and heading for the production truck. She needed to hold Gerasimov here, not let him return to the truck. “You? I’d only just met you that afternoon and I don’t think she knew about it. Besides, what could I have told her… then?”

Uh oh, wrong thing to say. He was embarrassed and turning away.

“Why did she leave you, Grisha?”

He turned back, angry now. “Irreconcilable differences, they call it.” Lowering his voice he added, “How can there be ‘differences’ if one person loves the other completely, without reservation?”

“Then, she fell out of love with you .”

“Over politics, can you believe it? Nikki’s politics.” He looked around; people in the VIP area were edging closer, trying to hear. “Look, I gotta go, I have a job to do.”

Behind him, Viktor was mounting the two metal steps to the truck. He needed more time.

“Over Nikki’s politics?”

He was angry again. “Do you have any idea what he does, him and his Nashi friends? They beat up people. Legislators who don’t vote to send us back to the Stone Age, to the Tsars, they put in the hospital. Or worse. Two crippled just last week.”

“What about Tati’s politics?”

“What about them?”

“She told me she was working for Kasparov, told me she was an admirer of mine… working for a free press, a more open government. But then I saw the video she made for Putin: it was all a lie.”

Gerasimov tried to pull away. “Sorry, I… I have to get back to…”

Lara had hold of his lapel so he couldn’t leave. She felt all this… angst… coming up, unbidden. “Where do you stand in all this? It’s time for the truth, Grisha. For instance, Tatiana’s job on the newscast… doing the weather… did you get that for her?”

“Why, uh, yes. Are you accusing me of nepotism?”

“No, just of lying. She got you the job, didn’t she? Her godfather was a Party bigshot back in the day, Mikhail Stoichkov… it’s amazing what you can find out from a couple of birth certificates, you know. Stoichkov ran everything in London during the war. Afterward, behind the scenes in the ’70s, he ran Moscow.”