David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

It was maddeningly narrow. And the single deck that was fit for human habitation was crammed with equipment. He couldn’t take more than two steps without having to duck or bend to get around some protuberance. There were, Uzimeri had told him, fifty people on board this submarine. He’d have to take the old man’s word for it. Because there was nowhere on board where you could put all those fifty at once.

It was, thought Stephen, just a bad patch. He couldn’t be completely tone deaf to dream-walkers — because he was, or had been, working an apprenticeship with Fyodor Kolyokov. He’d been to psychic fairs and bought the tapes, and practiced his remote viewing like a kid doing piano scales. Maybe he wasn’t a Chopin — but Stephen wasn’t a failure, either. He walked into poor old Richard’s mind again and again — and Christ! He’d walked into the formidable skull of Amar Shadak, using the telephone lines as a gateway, and seen the ruins of Ankara through his eyes. Over the years he’d had premonitions and visions and on one embarrassing occasion an actual seizure, which old Kolyokov hadn’t completely dismissed as merely an attention-getting device.

Stephen stepped out onto the cramped bridge. There were a half-dozen of Shadak’s Romanian guard here, working the valves and controls like monks at a wine press. These guys weren’t deaf to the words of the Divine. They were so attentive that one touch from Zhanna was all it took to turn them into her slave boys.

Stephen stepped around the periscope, ducking beneath another low-hanging valve. A short, bearded Romanian stepped around Stephen to refer to a chart on the table. Stephen glanced down at it.

“That Gibraltar?” he asked. The Romanian answered with a blandly polite nod. Stephen stared at him — tried to push his way inside his head. For an instant, he thought he might have done so — felt a flow of language, a lifetime of large regrets and little triumphs. But staring into the Romanian’s blinking eyes, Stephen realized that that wasn’t the case. He was just fooling himself. As he always had been, maybe.

“Good then,” said Stephen. He stalked off the bridge.

What if he had always been fooling himself, thought Stephen. If he were to go through his psychic history systematically, he’d be hard-pressed to find an actual event where he had unequivocally managed to subvert one of his subjects. He could get into Richard’s head — or so he thought — and he could seem to affect Richard’s actions. But if Stephen were honest about it, he’d have to admit that most of Richard’s actions were entirely predictable. That was one of the offshoots of the psychic damage that brainwashing had inflicted on him.

And as for Shadak?

Stephen hadn’t done anything but piss the Turkish gangster off. And while he’d used the telephone to do that, Stephen had to admit that he hadn’t really needed any psychic powers to do so.

Maybe Zhanna was right — and Stephen didn’t have any psychic powers at all.

Maybe Fyodor Kolyokov was just stringing him along — just to keep him loyal. As Stephen thought about it, an unswervingly loyal psychic deadhead would be a valuable commodity for a man like Kolyokov. None of the old man’s enemies could dream-walk into the little deaf-brained executive assistant and tell him to stick a letter opener in the Fyodor’s eye. They’d have to bring someone like Mrs. Kontos-Wu across the ocean to do it.

Stephen bent down through a circular hatch. Crawled past some more bunks, underneath was almost as big as the bridge — mostly because two of the six torpedoes that would store here had been fired. Stephen hoisted himself onto one of the empty bays and stretched out. Craning his neck, he could see most of the way down the narrow tube that led to the ocean.

He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine what might lie beyond that tube now. Tried to picture the ocean, the sunken wrecks — the trio of ship-sized squid that accompanied the submarine like an escort of jet fighters as it made its way out into the Atlantic.

“Ah, fuck.” Stephen’s voice buzzed and hummed off the metal walls that confined him here. Giant squid. How rich. How fucking Captain Nemo .

He really was a fuckup when it came to dream-walking.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was radiant. She looked, thought Stephen uncharitably, like she’d just been laid.

“Get out of the fucking torpedo tube, Haber,” she said. “We’ve got lots to talk about.”

“This isn’t the tube,” said Stephen as he rolled off the empty torpedo bay and clanged noisily onto the grated decking. He pointed to the fore. “That’s the tube.”

“Whatever.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu leaned against the opposite bank of torpedoes. “Lots has been happening since we got on board this submarine, and we’ve decided that it’s not fair you shouldn’t be in the loop.”

“We?”

“I’ll get to that. But first, let’s deal with what we came here for.”

Stephen gave her a look.

“The mystery of the children,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “What happened to them, why we were hijacked at sea, all that.”

“Ah. For a second there I thought you meant why we gave ourselves up to the

Mafia and let ourselves be gassed in Amar Shadak’s fucking headquarters.”

“You’re angry about that, are you?”

Stephen sighed. “What about the children?” he said.

“Well. First off — did you make the connection with Ilyich and Tanya?”

“The connection?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu rolled her eyes. “Here’s a hint: their last names are Chenko and Pitovovich.”

Stephen thought a moment. “Weren’t they the ones involved—” he snapped his fingers. “They were! Pitovovich is the lawyer from St. Petersburg, and Chenko is her — her man in Odessa. The one who found the kids and set them up in a dormitory. Right?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu nodded. “True as far as it goes.”

“I guess those email addresses are pretty redundant.” Stephen frowned, working it out. “But what are they doing here?”

“They’ve been with the children for many days now,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “The children — they look after their own.” Her eyes batted then, and her face took on an expression that Stephen had never seen before.

“You okay?” Stephen was worried she was slipping back into her metaphor again while a dream-walker stepped inside. He looked around for a weapon.

But Mrs. Kontos-Wu wasn’t going into metaphor. There was no dream-walker. She sniffed, and dabbed her eye with her sleeve.

“Shit,” said Stephen. “Are you crying ?”

“Fu-fu-fu-fuck off.”

“You are crying,” said Stephen wonderingly. “Shit, Kontos-Wu. Shit . I didn’t think your tear ducts even worked anymore.”

“Fuck off. All right?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked up, sniffed noisily, and cleared her throat. “Pitovovich and Chenko are both sleepers from way back. For most of their lives, they’d been deactivated. Both were apparent GRU operatives. Pitovovich maintained a secondary cover in St. Petersburg as a lawyer, and Chenko was more open — he was a Colonel, and operated a station in Odessa and dealt with informants and so forth.”

“So wait a second. Chenko was a sleeper agent in the GRU? Isn’t that redundant?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged and dabbed her eyes. “Our missing colleague Alexei Kilodovich was a sleeper in its predecessor the KGB. You don’t think the bureau felt the need to spy on itself from time to time?”

Stephen always marvelled at the layers of paranoia that formed the strata of this organization that had abused and murdered his parents.

“How could I have been so naïve?” he said.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu chuckled. Stephen was amazed: first tears, now laughter.