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“My name is Cotton Malone. You must be Aleksandr Zorin.”
Silence signaled he was right.
“I’m assuming you now have the truck,” Zorin said.
He thumbed the mike button, his own mouth dry, and let the man wait. Finally, he said, “It’s all mine.”
“Head due east from where you are. Come off the lake onto the main highway. There’s only one road. Follow that north until you see the observatory. I’ll wait for you there.”
CHAPTER SIX
CHAYANIYE, RUSSIA
4:20 P.M.
Aleksandr Zorin left his clothes inside the rude entryway and stooped low through a fur-clad door. The space he entered was dark and gloomy. A tallow candle burned feebly in one corner, throwing off barely enough light to define a circular room built of hewn logs. The windowless walls were midnight black from the sooty deposits of fires that had baked them for decades. A pile of stones dominated the center, a strong blaze from birch logs burning beneath. A series of pine benches descended from one side like steps. A chimney hole high above allowed smoke to vent, leaving only dry heat from the stones, which made breathing painful and perspiration a necessity.
“Do you like my black bath?” he asked the other man already inside, sitting on one of the benches.
“I have missed them.”
Both men were naked, neither ashamed of his body. His own remained hard, a barrel chest and ridges of muscles still there, though he would be sixty-two later in the year. The only scar was white and puckered across the left breast, an old knife wound from his former days. He stood tall with a face that tried hard to express perpetual confidence. His hair was an unruly black mane that always looked in need of a brush and scissors. He had boyish features women had always found attractive, especially the thin nose and lips of his father. His right eye was green, the left brown or gray depending on the light, a trait that his mother bestowed. Sometimes it was as though he had two faces superimposed, and he’d many times used that anomaly to maximum advantage. He prided himself on being a man of education, both formal and self-taught. He’d suffered for decades through a life of exile but had learned to stifle his needs and habits, accepting his forced descent to a lower sphere, where he breathed noticeably different air—like a fish tossed upon the sand.
He stepped over and sat on a bench, the slats wet and warm. “I built this to replicate the black baths of the old days.”
Every village had once provided a banya similar to this one, a place to escape Siberia’s nearly year-round cold. Most of those, like his former world, were now gone.
His guest was a stolid, brutal-looking Russian at least ten years older with an agreeable voice and teeth stained yellow from years of nicotine. Receding blond hair swept back from a steep forehead and did nothing to strengthen an overall weak appearance. His name was Vadim Belchenko and, unlike himself, this man had never suffered exile.
But Belchenko did know rejection.
Once, he’d been a person of great importance, the chief archivist for the First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm. When the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War ended, Belchenko’s job immediately became obsolete, as those secrets mattered no longer.
“I am glad you agreed to come,” he told his guest. “It has been too long, and things must be resolved.”
Belchenko was nearly blind, his eyes wearing their cataracts like acquired wisdom. He’d had the older man brought east two days ago. A request that would have turned into an order, but that had proved unnecessary. Since arriving, his guest had stayed inside the black bath most of the time, soaking in the silence and heat.
“I heard a plane,” Belchenko said.
“We had a visitor. I suspect the government is looking for you.”
The older man shrugged. “They fear what I know.”
“And do they have reason?”
He and Belchenko had talked many times. Nearly every person they ever knew or respected was dead, in hiding, or disgraced. Where they all once proudly called themselves Soviets, now that word bordered on obscene. In 1917 the Bolsheviks had cried with pride All power to the Soviets, but the phrase today would be regarded as treason. How the world had changed since 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved. What a magnificent state it had been. The world’s largest, covering a sixth of the planet. Over 10,000 kilometers from east to west across eleven time zones. Seven thousand kilometers north to south. In between lay tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, mountains, rivers, and lakes. Tartars, tsars, and communists had ruled there for 800 years. Fifteen nationalities, a hundred ethnic groups, 127 languages. All ruled by the Communist party, the army, and the KGB. Now it was the Russian Federation—which had evolved into barely a shadow of what had once existed. And instead of trying to reverse the inevitable and fight a battle that could not be won, in 1992 he and a hundred others had retreated east to Baikal, where they’d lived beside the lake ever since. An old Soviet dacha served as their headquarters and a cluster of homes and shops not far away became Chayaniye.
Hope.
Which seemed all that remained.
“What of the plane?” Belchenko asked.
“I ordered it shot down.”
The old man chuckled. “With what? British Javelins? MANPADs? Or some of those ancient Redeyes?”
Impressive how the old mind remained sharp for details. “I used what’s available. But you’re right, what we fired was defective. It still managed to accomplish the task.”
He bent down to a pail of cold water and tossed a ladleful onto the hot stones. They hissed like a locomotive, tossing off welcomed steam. The candle across the room burned bluer through a deeper halo. Temperatures rose and his muscles relaxed. Steam burned his eyes, which he closed.
“Is the pilot alive?” Belchenko asked.
“He survived the landing. An American.”
“Now, that is interesting.”
In decades past they would have spread their bodies out on the lowest of the pine benches while attendants doused them with hot water. Then they would have then been scrubbed, rolled, pounded, and drenched with cold water, then more hot, their muscles pelted with bundles of birch twigs and washed with wads of hemp. More long douses of cold water would have ended the experience, leaving them cleansed and feeling disembodied.
The black baths had been a wonderful thing.
“You know what I want to know,” he said to Belchenko. “It’s time you tell me. You can’t allow that knowledge to die with you.”
“Should this not be left alone?”
He’d asked himself that question many times, the answer always the same, so he voiced it. “No.”
“It still matters to you?”
He nodded.
The older man sat with his arms extend
ed outward up to the next level of bench. “My muscles feel so alive in here.”
“You’re dying, Vadim. We both know that.”
He’d already noticed the painful breathing, deep and irregular. The emaciated frame, the rattling in the throat, and the trembling hands.
“I kept so many secrets,” Belchenko said, barely in a whisper. “They trusted me with everything. Archivists were once so important. And I knew America. I studied the United States. I knew its strengths and weaknesses. History taught me a great deal.” The old man’s eyes stayed closed as he ranted. “History matters, Aleksandr. Never forget that.”
As if he had to be told. “Which is why I cannot let this go. The time has come. The moment is right. I, too, have studied the United States. I know its current strengths and weakness. There is a way for us to extract a measure of satisfaction, one we both have craved for a long time. We owe that to our Soviet brothers.”
And he told his old friend exactly what he had in mind.
“So you have solved Fool’s Mate?” Belchenko asked when he finished.
“I’m close. The documents you provided last year were a great help. Then I found more. Anya is in Washington, DC, right now, attempting to locate a critical piece.”
He could see that the ancient archivist seemed fully conscious of his remaining influence. And forty years of keeping the KGB’s secrets had definitely empowered him. So much that the Russian government still kept watch. Which might explain their visitor.
But an American?
That puzzled him.
For twenty years he’d fought time and circumstances, both of which had tried hard to turn him into a corpse. Luckily, that had not happened. Instead, vengeance had kept him alive. What remained unknown was how much hate still lingered inside his guest.
“I thought Fool’s Mate a dead end,” Belchenko said.
He’d not been sure, either. But thankfully, his dominant characteristic had always been boundless energy and an immovable will. And if exile had taught him nothing else, it had crystallized the value of patience. Hopefully, Anya would be successful and they could move forward.
