David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

Mrs. Dunn patted Mr. Knowling on the cheek. “Good. Now it’s time for you to leave Mr. Knowling,” she said.

“Now? While you — I mean, while Mrs. Dunn is still here? Won’t that compromise security?”

Mrs. Dunn smiled for Lena. “Oh my dear — we are well past that. Now step out.”

Not quite knowing what to expect, Kolyokov did as he was told. As he watched, Mr. Knowling blinked twice, and looked up at Mrs. Dunn, eyes wide in confusion.

“You — but…”

Lena made Mrs. Dunn smile down at him — and Kolyokov’s heart fell as he finally understood what was to happen. “Sorry, Danny,” she said, wrapping her fingers around his throat as she straddled him one last time. “Fyodor was a second too slow — and you saw too much.”

Although Kolyokov did not end the affair at that precise moment, it was that moment — its reverberations and implications; what it said about him, about Lena, and most important, about the two of them together — that finally caused him to quit.

He might have been better off to end it sooner. Things were never the same between himself and Vasili afterward. Vasili stopped inviting Kolyokov for tea and vodka, and after a while would not even acknowledge his presence when the two found themselves alone in a room. Within a year, Vasili had had himself moved out of City 512 to do fieldwork in the European theatre — and after that, he and Kolyokov never had cause to speak again.

Kolyokov, meanwhile, turned away from the foreign work with which he had once busied himself, and spent his days working with the next generation of City 512 students. During those years, he did much commendable work — developing among other things the internal metaphors for new sleeper agents and the three-word mnemonic that could break a program like a stretch of magnetic tape; and, like so many of his colleagues there, building his own network of sleepers that spanned the globe.

Kolyokov and Lena met as often as they could, given the demands of their work. Through the course of their affair, they made love in Rome and London; New York and Nairobi; Gdansk, and Berlin; and Hong Kong, where Kolyokov finally ended it.

“We are craven together,” he said as Lena dressed Wei Yu, a little Taiwanese prostitute who normally did this sort of thing for a clientele of bankers, government and military officials. “Like a couple of unclean puppeteers.”

Wei Yu shrugged for Lena. “So? I do not see why this is a revelation. You just don’t like your body today.”

Kolyokov patted his host’s ample gut. He was in another newspaper man — they seemed to use a lot of journalists for sleepers — but this one was no Dan Knowling. At fifty-three years old, Archibald Lonsdale was a glutton and a drunk and probably wouldn’t survive to see his fifty-fourth birthday the shape he kept himself in.

“That’s not it,” said Kolyokov. “It’s just — look at this fellow. He’s had a life, with a wife and children. And here we take him away from that to fuck a little hooker young enough to be his granddaughter.”

“It’s only flesh, Fyodor.”

Kolyokov shook Mr. Lonsdale’s head. “I make these sleepers, you know.”

“So do I.”

“Granted. But I watch them come up, some of them, from little children. From the cradle. And I can’t help wondering — are we going to take possession of these children someday, to slake our lusts?”

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” said Wei Yu.

“And what about our superiors? We’re squandering the sleepers, Lena! Don’t you imagine there will be an accounting?”

“Fyodor,” said Wei Li in a quiet, reasonable tone. “Which superiors are you referring to? I’m not aware of anyone superior to you or I, in the whole world.”

Kolyokov set Mr. Lonsdale’s lips in a thin, hard line.

“We have to end it,” he said.

Wei Yu put a small hand on Lonsdale’s thick, hairy forearm.

“Don’t leave me, Fyodor,” she said for Lena. “You don’t know how alone I am.”

On Kolyokov’s behalf, Lonsdale took hold of Wei Yu’s hand and kissed it delicately. Wei Yu’s face was a mask — Lena had pulled back from it already, and would soon depart altogether.

“Goodbye,” said Lonsdale.

“Fuck off,” said Wei Yu, and as her eyes changed and Lena receded altogether, Kolyokov cursed.

The little prostitute was back in herself now. Lena — in a fit of spite — had pulled out before they could separate the sleepers. Which meant that Wei Yu had seen Lonsdale. And if Kolyokov were to play by the rules, she would have to die.

She had certainly gotten a good look at Lonsdale by now — her eyes were locked on him as she snatched her hand back.

Kolyokov looked down at Lonsdale’s thick-fingered hands. It would be easy — and it would be according to procedure.

But he didn’t. Instead, he moved the hands to his wallet and pulled out a ten-pound note. He had no idea if that was the going rate — and Lonsdale was no help. He liked his fine food and liquor, but it turned out the old boy drew the line when it came to paying for sex.

“I’m sorry,” he said in his rudimentary Mandarin. “Here.” And Lonsdale put the money down on the bed between them. “Good?”

Wei Yu calmed down at the sight of the money, and looked between him and the cash. Kolyokov didn’t need to read her mind to see what she was doing: piecing together her lost afternoon from the best evidence — that she’d at some point met up with this fat old man, come to this room here, and blacked out, somehow managing to forget the whole exchange.

She nodded. “Good,” she said.

“Goodbye then,” said Lonsdale again.

And at Kolyokov’s direction, he pushed himself to his feet, gathered his jacket and stepped out the door. He wobbled down the stairs to the muggy heat of the Hong Kong afternoon and started back to the press club. Kolyokov stayed with him for several blocks — then left the poor man where he stood, confused and disoriented, ten pounds poorer but none the wiser — and still, blessedly, alive.

Now, his own life slipping away, Kolyokov spun through the vortex and did his best to deafen himself to her increasingly hysterical entreaties.

Fyodor! cried the cloud. You’re dying! If you don’t join me now, you’ll vanish .

Fyodor snorted. “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what lies beyond the lay of our lives?”

Nothing! Nothing but dark and quiet.

“You speak as though you know. Are you alive or are you dead, Lena?”

What are you — a Goddamn philosopher ? The cloud roared around him, tossing him higher and higher until he breached its top and saw stars spread above him. Look — the only life after death is in the Discourse!

“In the Discourse,” said Kolyokov, spinning around so he faced the vortex once more. “Interesting: you do know. Because you’ve died in body too. And the Discourse — is that where you live now? In the lines of chatter between the sleepers and their masters?”

You’ll die without me .

“Let me tell you something. I’ve been living in the Discourse, quite comfortably, for quite a while now. How do I know I’ll die?”

Trust your senses .

He laughed. “My senses are the one thing I know that I cannot trust here. One minute I’m in a metaphor of an old spy school I made — then I’m in the desert talking to Yahweh — the next I’m here in the sky, tossed about like a rag doll. And now — and now—” he squinted down “—there you are.”

Join with me, Fyodor .

The voice came from beneath him — she had coalesced now into her old metaphor; the beautiful Lena, draped in a hooded cloak. Her face uncovered, she was an ice-queen — as beautiful as the face of a glacier. She rose to meet him.