Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

The book was lying there on the cobblestones. Lara picked it up. There was a 9mm hole shot completely through it, obliterating any wormhole that had once been there.

They started walking toward the ambulance again.

Viktor turned to Lara. “We still have twenty days left to our marriage. Can we use them to try again, Mrs. Maltsev?”

“I will if you will, Mr. Maltsev.”

Then husband and wife walked away together into the night.

T he Bookworm is the second novel I’ve written that blends fact with fiction. Some people who read this manuscript before publication have wondered which is which. Here’s a sampler, starting with the Prologue.

Legend has it that Countess Matilda of Tuscany, who was born exactly 900 years before I was, dropped her gold wedding ring into the waters at the Belgian town of Orval. She prayed for its return and, at once, a trout rose to the surface with the precious ring in its mouth. Matilda exclaimed, “Truly this place is a Val d’Or! ” and proceeded to establish a monastery in her Valley of Gold. Then the unfeeling French burned it down in June of 1793.

In 1935, Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe , or Ancestral Heritage Organization, based on the claims of the founder of the Theosophical Movement, ‘Madame’ Helena Blavatsky. She posited that humans had evolved through various stages, each of which had ended in floods. An elite priesthood had escaped from the lost continent of Atlantis and fled to the Himalayas, and their successors were the Aryans. Others, too, proposed these Aryans, or Nordics, were descended from godlike men and had once lived in the icy north. Go figure.

In 2005, Sergey Ivanovich Morozov, Governor of the Ulyanovsk region 800 kilometers east of Moscow, declared September 12th as Procreation Day and suggested giving couples time off from work to produce the next generation. The first Grand Prize went to Irina and Andrei Kartuzov, whose baby was born the following June on Russia Day. For their troubles (?) they received a UAZ-Patriot, a sport utility vehicle made, not coincidentally, in Ulyanovsk. Other contestants won video cameras, TVs, washing machines, and refrigerators.

What else? Garry Kasparov was one of the prime movers behind a broad coalition of political parties with a single goal: ousting Vladimir Putin from power. The Other Russia chose Kasparov as its candidate for the 2008 presidential election but couldn’t get him on the ballot. Seven years later he published Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.

A month before he died, Noël Coward sat for a filmed interview in which he discussed his work as a spy for England during the war, training with his friend Ian Fleming in secret at Bletchley Park. “Celebrity was wonderful cover,” he said. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot… a merry playboy.”

Nashi, an “anti-oligarchic-capitalist movement,” was founded by senior figures in the Russian Presidential administration. By late 2007, it had grown in size to some 120,000 members between the ages of 17 and 25. Western critics have compared its deliberately cultivated resemblance to the Hitler Youth as Putinjugend.

On August 2, 2007, a Project Arktika submersible dropped a titanium tube containing the Russian flag on the ocean floor under the North Pole in support of their territorial claims to the Arctic. The International Seabed Authority, established under the United Nation’s Law of the Sea, repeatedly has rejected the claims.

And yes, John F. Kennedy’s major at Harvard really was International Relations.

Finally, my parents had several floral bath salts in seed packets. When I was seven, I emptied all of them into my bath, and the house smelled of Lily of the Valley for a week.

I made up almost everything else.

First, I want to thank Martin Cruz Smith. I don’t know him, but his book Gorky Park is so wonderful, and wonderfully imagined, that he made me want to set a novel in Moscow, too.

Thanks also to the people at Pegasus Books. Publisher Claiborne Hancock and his team of (in alphabetical order) Charles Brock, cover designer; Jessica Case, publicity director; Bowen Dunnan, editorial assistant; Maria Fernandez, interior designer/typesetter; and Sabrina Plomitallo-González, art director, took my manuscript and brought it to the life I’d hoped for it.

Thanks as well to my family and friends who read the book, made useful suggestions, or simply suffered through the writing with me. My wife, Ellen Highsmith Silver, is, naturally, foremost among them.

Lastly, thanks to the late literary agent Wendy Weil, who saw enough in this book to take me on shortly before her untimely death.

In Secret Service

THE BOOKWORM

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright © 2018 Mitch Silver

First Pegasus Books edition February 2018

Interior design by Maria Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-68177-641-5

ISBN: 978-1-68177-708-5 (e-book)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

www.pegasusbooks.us