Michael Bunker - WICK

Some people would hate the things that they’d heard and would reject this old man and his ramblings, and would curse the things that Clay now thought about the world and his countrymen and this life and the way of it. Some might want to lock Volkhov up and others would want to embrace him or stone him or ignore him with the hope that he would just go away. After all, the dialecticians had done their work. Journeys, in the end, are individual things no matter how many people come along on them. His journey had led him to this place and time, and he accepted where he was despite the danger, and he saw in Volkhov a fellow pilgrim on the pilgrimage of truth. Perhaps they had just started too late. Procrastination tends to be the genesis of almost every journey.

This old man with him in his cell had carried burdens and had walked a path that, prior to meeting him, Clay had only read about in books. He’d lived a life of adventure and danger. More importantly, perhaps, the man had lived a life of the mind. He had lived within himself and within his worlds, whichever one he found himself in, in a search for knowledge and truth. His face was lined with intrigue and despair and excitement and frightful loss. He wore a beard that most, even those who lived in a Russian village today, would consider “unkempt” or wild. Despite his higher learning and his brilliant mind he could easily be mistaken for a homeless drunk or an insane philosopher-poet.

Clay could imagine Volkhov as Diogenes lying in the sun when Alexander the Great rode up and said something akin to “I am the great King Alexander!” to which Diogenes had replied, “I am the great dog Diogenes.” Alexander had promised Diogenes anything he wished in the whole world, to which Diogenes had only replied, “I wish you’d get out of my sun.”

He had the look of that. The face of Lev Volkhov aged in wisdom and worry and want, had had enough of king’s shadows.

In the fullness of time, Volkhov wanted to talk, so Clay let him.

“Clay, what I said in that gymnasium was the truth, but it didn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things it was just an old man railing against the darkness of a life lived by lies. Solzhenitsyn, my honored countryman, said ‘Live Not By Lies’ and it took me way too long to heed him. I should have read more Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy and less Marx and Lenin.

Had Clay been in the other world he would have thought about the books in his backpack, of his own influences, of the writers who gave him hope, but he was not, and he didn’t.

“America is more divided than it was before the Civil War… why? Because the third side has presided over a century’s long plan to dumb down the people and to colonize them into thinking that the only answer to every problem must come from government. In my last ditch effort to save a system that really doesn’t want… no more… it doesn’t need saving, I tried to tell the Americans the truth of what is coming. But, like Golitsyn before me—”

“Stop.” Clay interrupted. “There’s that name. I don’t know who he is…”

The old man waved him off and kept talking.

“The Americans believed everything—bought the whole story—except the most important part! They claimed not to believe what is called The Long-Term Deception Strategy . I told my new masters that the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960’s had been faked. I told them that the Perestroika and Glasnost were faked. I told them that the plan was—” he stopped, as if searching for a word, “—that the plan had always been , to break up the Soviet Union and feign a collapse in order to rake in Western aid, weaken the capitalist west, and to eventually destroy America.

“Golitsyn told them this in his book New Lies for Old , written before the collapse in ‘92, and they believed everything but that . So many other defectors told them this, but they would not believe it.”

The old man looked at him, sadly and spread his hands, holding them palms upward as if in prayer.

“Volkhov told them this too, and they could not accept it.”

Clay looked at him and continued to listen.

“But I’ve learned that there are some in the halls of power who are one with those who are in the halls of power everywhere. They are the ones who forced America’s leaders to disbelieve the truth. Because the third side wants the war.

“They want the planet to lose six and a half billion of its inhabitants. They want to save the environment by destroying it, or they want all of the gold, or they want to continue to be the masters of history… I don’t pretend to understand the why completely. I don’t understand why, but in just a couple of decades from now what once was America will be a collection of independent fiefdoms, a balkanized mess of warring kingdoms like medieval Europe. That is what comes next.”

As Volkhov paused, the door opened and Vasily came in slowly with another case of bottled water. Though this cell had a sink, the water system was not currently operating due to the power outages. Clay smiled at him, and Vasily smiled back weakly.

Just before Volkhov and Clay were ushered into the cell they’d been standing in the cluster day room when Mikail came in to give instructions on their care. Mikail, speaking in English, probably out of habit more than anything, had ordered Vladimir to have Vasily oversee the two prisoners as their caretaker. He had given Vladimir specific instructions that no one else should be admitted to the room to see them.

“Vasily is young and stupid and doesn’t speak English,” Mikail had told Vladimir.

They smiled and nodded but Clay had seen a change in Vasily’s face. It was subtle, so subtle that no one else noticed it. His jaw had tightened and his eyes had narrowed only slightly and his gaze had met Clay’s. There had been an invisible communication between them. Vasily understood English. He was a book that had been judged by his cover, but they had misread him. He was not stupid, although he was indeed young. Clay had decided that perhaps he had an ally.

Now, in the cell, as Vasily dropped off the water, Clay looked at him and pointed to the ceiling and then to his ear asking Vasily silently if the room was being monitored. Vasily shook his head ‘no’ then spoke in perfect English, “The whole electronic security apparatus is down right now. The entire facility is on minimum power, and since you two are the only prisoners, they have shut down everything but the emergency lighting.”

His words hit Clay like a rocket. What is this place, where even those who seem the meekest are so competent? To the two adults in the cell, the boy had just summed up a mountain of information in the most efficient way possible. He was like a co-conspirator or… a spy.

He went on. “They’ve ‘appropriated’ several homes in town for themselves, and there are only four guards placed at the entrances of this building for security.”

Volkhov looked at Vasily with concern and care on his face and asked, “What will you do, Vasily Romanovich?”

“What would you have me do, grandfather?” Vasily asked affectionately.

Clay wondered whether this term was a sign of respect or an indication of lineage. He was finding it hard to see, in the big picture, who was on which side in this vast game of chess, but he knew in his heart, as well as he had ever known anything, that the three of them in this cell were of one mind in that moment.

“You must escape here, Vasily. The attack, if it comes as planned, will start in three days and if you are still here, things will get very bad very fast.”

Volkov turned to the cinder-block wall and drew a map of the east coast with his finger. “It will start in the areas currently blacked out, and the attack will focus first on Washington D.C. and the rest of the eastern seaboard. News will be sketchy, and any government information will be lies. The rest of the country will just hear about the continually plummeting stock market, and the major power outages. They will say that information is unreliable because of the lack of power and fuel.”