Disposable Asset Read online

  She gave up, went back to the Minsk, wheeled it out of the pines, climbed on board. Leaving the shotgun where it lay, she gave the dead men a last flat look and then kicked off.

  Minutes later a helicopter appeared far off to the west. She hid again inside the forest. The chopper swept patiently back and forth, following lines someone somewhere had drawn on a map. At one point it flew directly overhead, so close that she could see a man in harness and aviator sunglasses hanging from an open bay. After a final pass it turned north, leaving her alone with whining wind and the coppery taste of fear in her mouth.

  She drove on. The old Minsk’s 125cc stammered and muttered. The gas gauge lowered steadily, but was not yet scraping bottom.

  As twilight deepened, she reached the clearest indication yet of imminent civilization – silhouetted factories, houses, and a railway station breaking the line of the horizon. She came to another stop, letting the engine idle. Close now, she thought. Perhaps very close.

  Time to risk the highway again. It would carry her quickly into the city. In an hour, she could be melting safely into anonymity on a busy street.

  She eased around the town’s perimeter, past dormant smokestacks, over spurs of railroad track. Beyond a low hillock she found the M-10, four empty lanes beneath the setting sun. She opened the engine. As she swung into a northbound lane, she switched on the Minsk’s headlight.

  On the paved road she bent low, trying to reduce the surface area presented to the brutal wind, and pushed the motorbike up to eighty kph. Power lines and signage and low buildings proliferated, blocking out the spokes of sunset fanning up behind the forest. Yet thanks to the strange vastness of Russia, she remained for a time the only vehicle in sight.

  Then she passed a Skoda, then a Toyota. Then there came a sudden glut of cars, and she was forced to slow. A mixed blessing: her pace was compromised, but the wind chill decreased commensurately.

  Threading her way between a Tiguan and a Vito, she registered the crunch of broken glass beneath the tires. After all the miles of rocky countryside, a flat now would be poetic justice. But the scrappy little Minsk met the challenge. The tires held. Pulling out of a clot of traffic, she gained speed again.

  Clear sailing ahead. The city drawing ever closer. She gave her brave little chin a small uptick.

  She was going to make it.

  From twenty thousand kilometers above, a Persona satellite relayed an image etched on silicon to a Ministry of Defense sub-building on Arbatskaya Square.

  The image was black and white, with an imaging resolution of five centimeters. It depicted a bird’s-eye view of a north-western tributary of Lake Seliger: a wandering finger of ice, a fringe of black pine, and two prone figures sprawling in bloodstained snow.

  The version relayed six minutes later to Tsoi’s mansion on Serebryany Bor had been enlarged, with the prone figures tagged. Three men leaned close to study an image writ in over two million pixels. They could clearly make out two corpses, one face up and one face down, and a trail of gory snow where the second had been dragged a short distance.

  ‘A hunting accident?’ mused Tsoi.

  The Inspektor looked at the timecode in the image’s corner and shook his head. ‘It’s no hunting accident. These men had the bad luck to find our pretty before we did.’

  ‘He’s right.’ Ravensdale indicated a smudged line. ‘A rifle. Plausibly dropped by this one when he fell. But over here …’ Another grainy smudge. ‘A shotgun. Couldn’t have ended up this far away by itself. And look at the body. Someone tried to drag it into the trees, and then gave up.’

  Over the next four minutes, they examined twenty-two other images collected by FAPSI. One, taken in Chudovo, south of Petersburg, portrayed checkerboarded houses, factories, streets, railroad tracks – and a small figure on a motorbike easing between them. Scowling, they could discern the make of the cycle, the mud caking the license plate, the auburn bell of the rider’s hair.

  ‘The Minsk,’ murmured the Inspektor. ‘The parka … Only, the hair is not right.’

  ‘She dyed it again,’ suggested Tsoi.

  Ravensdale glanced at the grandfather clock, then back at timecode. Eighteen minutes had passed since the image’s capture. ‘Nearest checkpoint?’

  ‘Thirty-five kilometers.’ Vlasov lit a fresh cigarette. ‘Outside Petersburg. Assuming she continues north, she’s heading right into it.’

  The hollow thud of the helicopter’s rotors came again.

  This time the metal bird flew directly overhead, searchlight striking off a tractor trailer to her left, briefly igniting the metal with white fire. She almost obeyed a preconscious instinct to turn off the road, hide again in the forest. But the memory of the freezing night, hard-wired into her bones, kept her on course.

  Just ahead, an orange construction barrier blocked the right-hand lane. Funneled into a single channel, traffic slackened precipitously. As vehicles crowded close, she chewed on her lower lip … but still she continued forward.

  Inside the parka she found a crumpled five-hundred-ruble note, stolen from the purse in Sergiev Posad. Left my license in my other coat, officer. No big deal. Little something for your trouble, if you wouldn’t mind letting me through …

  The single-file line rolled slowly ahead. She breathed, trying to gather the cool mist around herself. Up ahead she saw a chain of fifty-five gallon steel drums, further narrowing the lane. Traffic slowed again. A broken muffler a few cars ahead rattled her eardrums inside her skull. Her tongue wet her lips. Still not too late to pull out of the lane, she thought. Bounce across the sunken median, turn back the way she had come. But she was nearly out of gas now. There would be no turning back.

  When she finally saw the blockade her stomach uncoiled in her belly, poking at her insides like jagged bedsprings.

  A scowling policeman was waving some cars through, directing others to pull into a holding pen created by traffic cones. Some vehicles allowed through were stopped at a second barricade, where passengers were forced outside at gunpoint. Parked off to one side: six Zhigulis and an army half-track. Even from a small distance she could make out a dozen soldiers wearing their requisite Kalashnikovs, another dozen politsiya, and a handful of men wearing the black berets and green-and-black camouflage of the OMON, the elite Interior Ministry counterterrorist unit which had as its motto ‘We know no mercy and do not ask for any’.

  The line moved forward.

  Stay easy inside. She could do this. No big deal. If she believed it, they would believe it.

  Ten cars remained between her and her fate.

  In just a few moments more, the scowling militiaman would direct her to pull over. He or one of his partners would demand identification. Cassie would hand over the folded-up bill and her lame excuse. And she would radiate calm, confidence, nothing-to-see-here-officer.

  The line moved again. Looking down the queue, preselecting which cars to wave through and which to flag down, the glowering militiaman noticed her. He did a small but unmistakable double take.

  The cool fog descending, cocooning her.

  With a small gesture, the militiaman summoned an OMON agent to his side. Concentrating, she focused on his lips.

  Once you get used to it, Quinn had said, Russian is an easier language than English, and a far more logical one. In English, the five hundred most common words have an average of twenty-three meanings each. Ever seen a sign that says ‘Slow Children at Play’?

  She had chuckled. Seated in front of the crackling fireplace in the red-brick colonial, aching pleasantly from a hard workout in the gym, it had all seemed entirely academic.

  The Russian language is more precise. Its alphabet has thirty-three letters to English’s twenty-six. Some letters in the Cyrillic alphabet sound just like their English counterparts: K like kitten, M like man. Then there are the tricksters, which look the same but sound different. B like V in vest. E like Ye in yes. Unlike English, where it might take two letters to make one sound – sh – Russian has one letter f
or each sound, period. Thus you can pronounce a sentence correctly even if you’ve never seen the words before. Don’t look so distraught, my dear. A new language is like a hot bath. The trick is to settle in slowly …

  ‘Pasmatrl,’ the militiaman was saying without turning his head, using his chin to point out the Minsk – look.

  Russian is also a far easier language to speech-read. English is full of homophones and sounds made in the back of the throat. Shoes, shoot, juice, chews, June, Jews – the lips form precisely the same shape in each case. Russian words, on the other hand, tend to be unique. Even better, they’re spoken toward the front of the mouth, where you can see them.

  The OMON agent replied, something she missed. Then the militiaman spoke curtly, and she caught it clearly: ‘Patarapis’!’ – hurry up!

  His compatriot trotted off, waving to a group of soldiers.

  She looked behind herself. Only a few centimeters of space separated her from a UAZ truck.

  She looked back at the militiaman in his crisp blue epaulets. He waved the line forward again. Now seven cars remained between her and the checkpoint.

  No weapon; no escape.

  The line rolled forward again.

  Her instincts were screaming. She would not even get the chance to offer her folded-up bill and her lame excuse. As soon as she rolled forward another few meters, the trap would be sprung. They would come out with guns blazing, and that would be the end of Cassie Bradbury.

  She tasted the concept, trying to titrate out paranoia and fatigue, to leave only the truth.

  The militiaman directing traffic gestured: Pull forward.

  For a moment more, panic gnawed at her with sharp fangs. Then the cool gray fog smothered it.

  She turned the handlebars, pointing the Minsk out toward the median.

  Hesitated for a final instant.

  Twisted the throttle.

  She clipped the car in front of her, shattering the Minsk’s headlight, and snapped out of line, the snarl of the engine rising around her. Kicking up plugs of frozen grass, fishtailing as the rear tire struggled to find purchase, she rocketed across the icy dip of the median – the pit and roof of her stomach briefly swapping places; her teeth clamping together, narrowly missing the tip of her tongue – and spun back on to the macadam across the way, facing south.

  The militiaman was yelling. Soldiers were running, holding automatic weapons. A first ugly rattle of machine-gun fire sounded. But by then Cassie had opened the engine again; the plucky old motorbike delivered, and within seconds the militiamen and the soldiers and their checkpoint and their ambush had all become pinpricks in the mirror mounted on her handlebar.

  The engine whined. Her heart raced. The old bike rattled, felt as if it might fall apart at any moment. But it still performed, the trooper. Throttle pinned to maximum. Traffic in this direction was sparse, and she whipped easily around obstructions: a blue Volga, a compact black Zaporozhets, a Citroën van.

  She careered down the highway, half-blind in the dusk with no functioning headlight, past slender birch and blunt oak, looping with dangerously little room to spare around a Pathfinder. Her fear behind the cool gray fog had become a kind of giddy ecstasy. If she hadn’t turned, she thought, she would already be dead. It had been that close. That fucking close.

  But now what? Heading away from the city, into open countryside, she would find nowhere to hide. She was almost out of gas. And they would come in force.

  She was still holding the sweaty five-hundred-ruble bill, pressed tight against the throttle. Her cramped fingers loosened; the bill fluttered away in slow motion.

  Ditch the road. Head back into the woods on the fleet little Minsk. But the sun was nearly gone. She would not survive another night in the wild.

  Pushed to its limit, the 125cc engine was laboring. And another sound was climbing through the buzz – a sound which would haunt her dreams, the lazy whonk-whonk-whonk of helicopter blades.

  In the mirror she found it. Military attack chopper, spotted with jungle camouflage, rising up from behind the checkpoint. Two bubble canopies glistened beneath a sky the color of fresh scar tissue. The thing was fully decked out, bristling armaments affixed to wings on the fuselage midsection. In a single desperate glance she saw eight AT-6 ATGMs, two fifty-seven mm rocket pods, and a machine gun turret.

  The quality of the rotor’s noise changed, speeding up – whut-whut-whut-whut-whut – as the chopper gained altitude. Taking a bead, she thought, and collateral damage be damned. To a country which had survived famines and public assassinations and pogroms and mass graves and systematic repression and crippling five-year-plans, what was a little more innocent bloodshed? And any second now another sound would climb over that of the rotors: the high keening scream of a rocket being fired, and that would be the last sound she would ever hear.

  She heard the strident whistle of the rocket coming free.

  She twisted the handlebars again, drilling back across the median as the whistle grew and grew. She caught air and for a moment was lost in exultation. Finally, a simple equation, two plus two equaled four, either she made it or she didn’t, and her knuckles were white against the handlebars, and she was grinning a lunatic grin, and they said your life flashed before you at moments like this, but all she saw inside her mind was the little girl from Turygino. Otkuda vy? the girl had asked. Where are you from?

  I’m an angel. Go back to sleep, honey.

  The explosion lifted the bike almost gingerly, moving it a half-dozen meters through the air before setting it crudely down again. Behind her erupted a geyser of fire and steel and human beings, all screaming in agonized unison.

  A boiling wave of flame; Cassie ducked, still twisting the throttle ruthlessly, adding her own scream to the chorus, struggling to maintain control. Then she was out of the worst of it, entering clear cold air. Road opened to the right, and she took it as all around debris pattered down like infernal rain.

  The military attack chopper gave chase.

  She raced down the highway, driving against traffic now, swerving out of the way of oncoming headlights. The pursuing helicopter suffered no such obstacles and stayed with her effortlessly, whut-whut-whut-whut-whut, trying to draw another bead with its remaining rocket. She twisted the handlebars sharply again, jounced back across the median. Overhead the copter wheeled, realigning itself. As she crossed two more lanes and hurtled toward dark forest

  (this is how it ends)

  another whistle began to rise

  (I regret nothing!)

  and climaxed in a huge gout of flashblind white fury.

  She felt a strong hand made of air pushing her, flipping her. The sky and the ground and the sky rolled crazily. Lungs emptying, brain rattling. Her nose smashed against something, cracking audibly and unleashing a torrent of blood. The bike vanished from beneath her. She registered stuttering images: blood, flipping dark landscape, blood, a black cloud of smoke shot through with bright vermilion flame, blood. Her blood.

  Somehow it ended, and she was upside-down, ass-over-teakettle, coughing violently, sirens cawing from somewhere, something dripping, and beyond it all, patiently, the idiot refrain – whut-whut-whut-whut-whut – of the hovering helicopter.

  She began righting herself. Blood coursed into her eyes, stinging. The air was filled with thick rancid smoke and the stench of singed flesh, charred and sickly appetizing, the smell of backyards and Fourth of July cookouts.

  A fusillade of secondary explosions ripped through the distance. The sirens grew louder, then cut off abruptly. She could not stop coughing. There were sharp pains and dull pains, racking coughs and blood, blood, blood. She managed to haul herself to her feet. She tried to run, and the world see-sawed tremendously, falling out from beneath her. She ended up face down again in cold dirt.

  Another explosion; another blast of hot air; another coiling python of flame snaking up into the nightfall. Beneath the parka, downy hairs on her forearms stood on end. As quickly as it had risen, the explosio
n retracted, as if sucked back into the earth. Then there was a pillar of smoke and a dozen burning fires, small things that reminded her of birthday candles, and crackling everywhere, and below the crackling, the thin moaning and sobbing of wounded.

  Fire extinguishers hissed. Rough hands wrenched her arms behind her back – another sharp flare of pain – and secured them there.

  Boots and gun barrels and hoarse Russian surrounded her. The helicopter kept hovering. A veil of blackness descended, mercifully dark and quiet, creeping inward from the borders of perception, snuffing even the fog.

  She reached for the darkness, drawing it close around herself, sinking gratefully into the abyss.

  TVERSKAYA ULITSA, MOSCOW

  Fletcher pressed the small parcel into Ravensdale’s hand and then walked briskly away, footsteps rapping off decorative mosaics like gunshots.

  After glancing at the plain brown paper wrapping, Ravensdale slipped the parcel into a side pocket and walked in the other direction. He passed a tiled triptych, a cluster of huddled bomzhi, a busker holding an acoustic guitar. He rode an escalator up, past windows stocked with perfume, cigarettes, flowers, jewelry, and phones. Stepping out from the Metro station beneath teeth made of icicles, he turned toward the floodlit onion-shaped domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral.

  Even past midnight, Tverskaya Ulitsa was packed with crowds: couples passionately kissing, teenagers laughing and catcalling, a priest in a white collar vomiting into a gutter; punks and misfits, armed soldiers, and someone handing out leaflets while dressed, inexplicably, as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. All rushing to the next trendy café or underground casino, the next tapas or sushi bar, the next love affair or fist fight or business deal, determined to squeeze in as much life as possible before whatever dark tomorrow came careening around the corner.

  Again came the odd sensation of doubling, of the old him and the new him moving side by side. He remembered these kiosks lining Tverskaya Ulitsa selling whitefish and cucumber salad, fermented kvas and hot vatrushki. Now they sold Diet Pepsi and prepaid calling cards and international editions of American news-magazines. But the deprivations and degradations which had lingered after the Soviet era, he reminded himself, were nothing to mourn. Nor was the confusion immediately following the fall of the Wall, when during the mad scramble to pick the flesh from the bones of the USSR he had seen the worst of people – including himself.