Page 5 of Winterveil

Klaudia ascended the courthouse steps precisely the way Siegel had instructed her: gaze fixed forward, face impassive. Behind her sunglasses, her eyes revealed nothing.

(The sunglasses, as it would turn out, were a mistake. Some fashion-minded internet sleuth would discover that they were Prada. Several Aurapix accounts dedicated to “Klaudia Shimonova’s Court Looks” would surface in the next week. Siegel probably should have advised her against the fur-trimmed Burberry coat, too.)

When she reached the top of the steps, Klaudia couldn’t help but pause. Having been out on bail since her arrest in May, she’d had plenty of time to reflect on her circumstances, research every aspect of the case, and develop a formula that predicted her chances of victory. But she could not account for all statistically significant factors; there were too many variables. She had gotten mired in a tangle of conditional probability equations.

She had not, for example, managed to predict that a Soviet DDOS attack would crash half the government servers on the Eastern Seaboard a week before her trial. Someone at the NSA must have beseeched Auric—the West’s premier tech company—for help, because the servers were back online in a matter of hours, with a reassuring press conference where Auric’s CEO stood preening beside the lectern, flanked by Secret Service agents.

But the public was still in a residual state of panic. The French magazine Thermidor, one of the seven daily periodicals that Klaudia read via a translation app, warned that America was staring down the barrel of a third Red Scare.

So the circumstances were less than ideal. Klaudia glanced up at the courthouse facade. Carved on the lintel above the colonnade was the phrase THE TRUE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IS THE FIRMEST PILLAR OF GOOD GOVERNMENT.

Weather and time had faded the words. Two docents opened the double doors to the courthouse and Klaudia stepped through. The roar of the crowd dulled to a murmur, then cut off.

The relative silence and emptiness of the corridor was jarring. The docents led her down the hall and handed her off to the bailiff, who didn’t so much as blink at being delivered a fifteen-year-old girl who was tottering slightly in her stilettos. Another one of Siegel’s miscalculations. She should have worn kitten heels.

Inside the courtroom itself, the gallery was packed. Dozens of members of the press, identifying themselves with lanyards and laminated badges, immediately surged to their feet. Pencils scratched furiously against notepads. There were no cameras allowed inside, which Klaudia had determined was actually to her detriment. She was now at the mercy of the reporters’ subjective impressions and the dubious talents of the courtroom sketch artist.

Klaudia used the cover of her sunglasses to discreetly probe the crowd. She was searching for only one familiar face. Against her better judgment, she allowed herself, for a moment, to hope.

But Irina Kokoshkaya was nowhere to be seen. The hope flickered out as quickly as it had been kindled.

Siegel had been the one to impress upon her the importance of her mother being in attendance. “We need to remind the jury that you’re just a little girl,” he said. “If you could cast some teary-eyed looks back at her every now and then, that would be superb.”

Much as Klaudia had resisted the idea at first, she had decided she would try it, if things seemed truly dire. Now she no longer had the option. And she was certain that it had not been her mother’s choice to be absent.

As she approached the table, Ivan Shimonov’s gaze swiveled and pinned her to the wall.

Siegel had advised her to ignore him completely. But Klaudia, for all her characteristic discipline, could not. Not in that moment, not when her father’s gray eyes bored into her mercilessly, their almost colorless color identical to her own.

She tried to discern the sentiment in them but failed, as she almost always did. Ivan Shimonov was not a man to be easily read. His gaze tracked her as she walked to her table, and only when she was seated beside Siegel did he at last look away.

As soon as she dropped into her chair, Siegel leaned over and whispered, “I’m afraid we might be cooked, my dear.”

“What?” Klaudia ducked her head. “Why?”

“The ADA dropped out of the case at the last minute. The DA is prosecuting now. And he’s up for election at the end of the year.” Siegel grimaced. “After the Morningside Six fiasco, he’s going to need to come down hard on crime. Especially on . . .”

Especially on someone surnamed Shimonova. The Morningside Six, as they had been dubbed, were a group of Columbia computer science PhD students who were found to have been KGB recruits, passing secrets about the development of new cyberwarfare methods to Soviet intelligence. Two of them had been killed during a shoot-out with the NYPD, but that wasn’t the most embarrassing part. The decisive blow to the DA’s reputation was dealt when it was discovered that the other four had managed to smuggle cyanide capsules into detention. They were found dead in their holding cells before they could be tried.

It was a mistake the US could hardly afford, given the outcome of its last two proxy wars, and the DA had taken the brunt of the public outrage, including several acerbic statements from hawkish senators. Here was an opportunity—albeit an abstruse one—to redeem himself.

Klaudia was surprised to learn that she still had a flicker of hope left to be extinguished.

“That seems like it could be grounds for a mistrial” was all she managed to reply.

“Maybe. Maybe.” Siegel wrung his hands, knuckles cracking. “Let’s see if we can make it through day one, huh?”

The trial of Klaudia Shimonova unfolded over the course of weeks. Everyone, from the doorman of her building to her teachers at Trinity, was brought in to testify. Videos both defending and denouncing her proliferated across social media. Felix Fox’s viewership numbers tripled. A satirical courtroom sketch of her wearing the latest Chanel suit set with a snake draped over her shoulders went viral. Wharton offered her automatic acceptance into the class of 2039—should she avoid a prison sentence.

It wasn’t until the third of January, when the court reconvened for the first time in the new year, that Klaudia noticed the white-haired man in the gallery. He had been there the whole time, she would later learn, sitting unobtrusively among the press but without a lanyard or a badge of his own. He took no notes; his hands remained steepled across his chest, his expression tepid and unchanging. Klaudia found him almost as unreadable as her father.

And then, on January 14, after a particularly damning testimony by her former desk mate at McKinsey, the man rose from his seat. He approached the bench, the bailiff too taken aback to stop him. The audience, too, was stunned into stillness.

The man conferred a moment with the judge, their voices both taut whispers. Then he turned, gaze resting on Klaudia, and smiled a very slight, enigmatic smile.

“Ms. Shimonova,” he said. “I have a proposal.”

Three