David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

Somewhere in the dark, he heard a wet thud, and another slapping sound. Maybe something moved in front of him, maybe to his side — it was too dark to tell.

He raised the gun, and turned on the flashlight.

And God help him, he nearly fired.

It was the little girl — the “wheeskie?” girl, with the dark eyes and the underfed demeanor. She was standing not four feet in front of him, and she blinked in the light, held up her hand to ward it off. He put the safety back on the Glock and returned it to its shoulder holster, but kept the light on her face.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“ Cee tee five twelf ,” she said.

“What?”

“Cee tee five twelf,” she repeated. “ You are de one .”

The girl stepped backwards, and Alexei started to follow.

He heard a thumping sound from below, followed by a crack! , and a shouting man. Alexei redrew the Glock, and jumped onto the deck below the wheelhouse. There, he caught a glimpse of one of the Romanians — the woman — but she didn’t see him. At that, a buzz moved up his back — almost like the vibration that Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s pager would set off, if the pager had been set directly at the base of his spine. The sensation was a look-out-behind-you kind of prickling, that his mother might have named precognition.

He spun around, nearly losing his footing, as a quick shadow moved in his peripheral.

But Alexei was quick too. Just quick enough to see the smallest child — the boy-girl one, who’d been so fast with the blanket — swinging a boat-hook in a blurred arc through the rain. It cracked hard against his forehead — and before he could even react, the kid brought it down again.

There was a hollow thumping sound, and the little… girl?… jumped down next to Alexei. She moved with a steady care, and her eyes didn’t leave his.

“Baba Yaga,” she said. “Manka. Vasilissa.”

The back of Alexei’s head hit hard against the deck, and the world went dark as his Maglite skittered across the deck and into the sea.

Ah God , he thought with a horrible certainty. They got her. Lured me away, and they got Mrs. Kontos-Wu .

The girl stood over him now, and repeated the words: “Baba Yaga. Manka. Vasilissa.”

And then: “For your own good, cousin.”

And before the full humiliation of the moment could hit, the real blackness crept up to take him away.

The bald man with the van Dyke beard visited Alexei next, but he was only there to bring a mug of chicken soup and a bundle of clothes, and didn’t stay to chat half as long as the last two visitors had. He asked if Alexei remembered anything yet — which suggested that Heather hadn’t spoken of their earlier encounter — and when Alexei said no, he shrugged. “We cleaned your clothes, but there’s still a pretty bad bloodstain on the shirt. So I loaned you one of my sweaters. Take a walk around when you feel like it — the weather’s cleared up so it’s not too bad, and we’ve got a few hours yet.”

Alexei wrapped his blanket over his shoulders and sat up, cradling the soup mug in his hands. It was instant soup from a powder, but still quite hot, and when he swallowed the first mouthful it felt remarkable going down.

A few hours until what, precisely? he wanted to ask.

“It is like coming back from the dead,” he said with some relish — but the bald man didn’t appear to get the joke. He gave Alexei a funny look.

“My name’s James,” he said, on his way out. “Take a walk when you feel up to it.”

The soup gave him a kind of strength, but he still took a moment before reaching over to the stack of clothes and dressing himself. Really, this amnesia game would have to end sometime — if he was a true professional, he would never have attempted it in the first place. Just told the people here what had happened, radioed to the coast guard and told them about the possible homicide on the Romanians’ ship. He finished the soup, slurping back the noodles at the bottom of the cup and swallowing them whole, and set it down on the floor at his ankles. The game was childish, he knew. Pointless, too.

Sooner or later, he would have to stop remaking himself like this.

Alexei unfolded the clothes. The trousers were a mess — they were dress pants, and really should have been dry-cleaned. At least they hadn’t shrunk. The bald man’s sweater was really a bright red sweatshirt, and it had a big logo with the dark blue words SUBSCRIBE! underneath an arch of pale blue laminate. The whole thing looked to Alexei like a monochrome rainbow. When he put it on, he noted with distaste it was also a size too small for him. It stretched across his shoulders, the sleeves rode up his forearms, and the collar grabbed around his neck like a noose. He reached under the pillow and slipped the asp into his pants-pocket. He slipped his bare feet into his shoes and made his way outside.

Sooner or later, Alexei would have to tell someone — besides the woman Heather, who seemed altogether too willing to keep his secret for him — what had happened on the Romanians’ yacht. Mrs. Kontos-Wu might be dead. He might have failed, the drama might be over. But she might have simply been wounded, or still be alive on the boat, on her way to God knows where. If that were the case, his little game was his real failure.

Comfort is the torturer’s first tool .

And sex is the second, and ill-fitting sweatshirts is the third, and a misguided appeal to duty is the fourth , thought Alexei. Score one for Kolyokov.

The cabin opened onto a narrow corridor that was lit only dimly. It felt as though the boat’s motor was directly underneath this spot, because the corridor hummed and vibrated in a way that tickled up through Alexei’s shinbones — like the feather of unease that tickled up through his middle. That made him behave as though he were a prisoner. Or an infiltrator.

Alexei passed by a steep, narrow set of stairs, and he started to climb them. But he abruptly changed his mind. He wasn’t a prisoner here, and he wasn’t an infiltrator — at least not yet. He was still Gibson’s guest.

But Gibson…

Like Heather said, he was a prick.

And he did things to little kids.

When they’d fished Alexei out of the ocean, an instinct had told him to keep his mouth shut. Now, that same instinct kept him from climbing the stairs onto the main deck.

The corridor bent here, and Alexei continued along it. It seemed to bend back in a U shape, so that Alexei was looking at another row of cabins. At the end of it, a door stood ajar.

Alexei started down the hallway. It wasn’t until he made it to the edge of the door, and began to peer around it, that he realized he’d been rolling his feet so as to make no noise and had extended the asp so that it hid ready behind his thigh. Training never leaves us , he thought, as he looked into the empty closet. He was about to turn away, when that training nudged him back, and he noticed the faint light coming from cracks around the edge of the closet’s far wall.

Alexei went forward, and pushed open the hidden door.

“Shit,” he mouthed, looking into the room.

It was a cabin, maybe three times as big as the one they’d put Alexei in. But its portholes had been blacked out, and it was lined with white pine bunk beds and plain foam mattresses. At the far end, there was a little chemical toilet, and a watercooler just like the one outside Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s office in New York. It made a belching sound as an enormous air bubble shot to the top of the tank. Alexei looked at the bunk beds — he counted fifteen, and he wouldn’t have been able to stretch out comfortably on any one of them. They were far too short for a grown man.