“You hear that? They have a calorimeter room! Ideal for our purposes!”
“Good…”
“Fully insulated—we will be able to have absolute control of the climate! With adequate refrigeration and humidity control, it will be perfect for our needs! We can cool one room without heat leaking in from the surroundings. It even has an observation window!”
Arkady smiled and nodded, and Zapad scurried away to ask more questions of Sluchevsky.
“He’ll be measuring for curtains next.”
Arkady turned around. Galina Yelagin was standing at his shoulder, watching her stepbrother enthuse about the clinic’s CCTV.
“He was always like this on holidays,” she murmured. “If we went to a castle or a museum, even as children, he would always follow right behind the tour guide, wanting to talk to them.”
It was the most she had said since they boarded the plane in Moscow. Was she opening up at last? Arkady tried to think of a response that would encourage her to say more.
“I hope he’s not being too indiscreet,” he said at last. “Should I be worried?”
“I’m sure you can just have our host killed, if he is,” replied the surgeon. “Isn’t that the usual solution?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued. “I need a cigarette. I’ll be outside.”
She turned to go.
“I’ll come with you,” said Arkady with a final glance at the other two men, who were now debating the installation’s internal phone network. He raised his voice. “Dr Yelagin wants to smoke. You can find us on the patio when you’re ready to go upstairs.”
They walked back down the corridor to the lobby, Arkady taking the opportunity to appraise his companion anew. She was…not pretty, exactly, but handsome, perhaps, with prominent cheekbones and leonine features. Her perm was growing out, and her wheat-coloured hair needed cutting, but if he ignored that she reminded him of an actress he couldn’t quite place. Not a Russian…someone haughty…Faye Dunaway, perhaps, or Elsa Lanchester…possibly Ida Lupino.
She flinched when he opened the door for her and cold air engulfed them both.
“Christ! Could you not have rented a clinic in Sochi instead?” she complained, pulling on her gloves. “Or Cuba? It must be minus twenty out here!”
“Minus fifteen, according to the car when we were driving up,” Arkady said, waving away the offer of a cigarette. “I don’t smoke. I’m surprised to find that a cardiac surgeon does, in this day and age.”
“You don’t think doctors can be stupid?” drawled Yelagin out of the corner of her mouth while she tried to light one. “We can be as stupid and self-destructive as anyone else, I promise you.”
“I heard you’d had some problems,” confirmed Arkady, wondering as he said it whether he was being too direct. “Issues at work, some—forgive me, but some problems with stress…and substances.”
Yelagin snorted mirthlessly. “‘Stress and substances’? You’re very diplomatic for a government thug!”
She stopped talking to concentrate on lighting her cigarette, raising her coat across her face like Lugosi’s cape, to shield it from the wind. Arkady heard a succession of clicks, then a violent, muffled curse. He reached into his pocket.
“Here—I have matches,” he said, offering her a book of them he had picked up in a restaurant somewhere. “Your lighter won’t work. Butane does not ignite at these altitudes.”
Yelagin scowled at him over the edge of her coat, but took the matchbook. There came the sizzle of a striking match, and a groan of relief. The surgeon emerged from behind her coat once more, tilting her head back and emitting a vast gust of smoke, which the wind eagerly tore to shreds.
“My God—that’s better! Thank you.” She tried to return the matches, but he waved to indicate she could keep them.
“It’s fine.”
“Thank you…what should I call you? ‘Agent’? ‘Mr Andreyushkin’? I don’t suppose that’s your real name.”
“It is,” said Arkady as they resumed walking. “You can call me Arkady though.”
“Arkady, not ‘Agent’…I see. That is what you are though, right? An agent of our beloved FSB?”
“You can call me ‘Colonel’ if you prefer. Should I call you ‘Doctor’?”
She scowled again. He had touched a nerve. “You can, but you may find some people disagree with you.”
Arkady said nothing, but challenged her with his eyes until she sighed and looked away, staring out across the valley.
“A man died,” she said, the wind tousling her hair as they rounded the corner of the building onto the patio. “On the operating table, because of me—because I was high.”
“High on morphine?”
“Yes, high on morphine. It’s…an occupational hazard. Was an occupational hazard.” She corrected herself. “A bad habit, but a very enjoyable one.”
“And one you’ve abandoned,” Arkady sought to clarify. That was the crunch question.
“Regretfully, yes. I’m lucky the hospital decided there was less bad publicity in keeping quiet than in making an example of me, but they draw the line at giving me a reference, so…here I am.”
She looked Arkady in the eye once more, and he believed her. She was no junkie. Damaged, certainly, and encumbered by guilt, but not a user. Not anymore.
“Well,” he said, attempting to change the tone of the conversation, “we are very glad to have you—and it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
He held out his hand for her to shake, but she just looked at him. The wariness had returned to her eyes.
“Let’s not get carried away,” she muttered, pitching her cigarette over the railing and turning back towards the building. “One step at a time, Agent. One small step at a time.”
*
By the time they reached the hotel where they were to spend the night, Arkady’s sciatica was boiling over again, aggravated by the extended drive. He was grateful to lie down for a few hours, stretched out on the bed with his left leg drawn up like the broken wing of a bird. Despite the discomfort, he slept, waking with a start in total darkness with no idea of the time.
He had arranged to meet Zapad and his stepsister for dinner. Their hotel was a small, purpose-built one by the airport. Cheap and utilitarian, it had no restaurant and seemed to have no other guests, either. They would have to drive into Gorno-Altaysk to find food. Arkady’s leg complained at the prospect, but there was no alternative.
He splashed cold water on his face to wake himself up, fingers rasping against stubble. Ana would have insisted he shave before going out to dinner, but he had forgotten to pack his razor. He apologised to her, watching his lips move in the mirror.
It was good to be out of the apartment, or so he told himself. He had spent a solitary New Year and Christmas, reading books and watching old films when not working on the Maslok problem, cooking elaborate meals he couldn’t be bothered to eat. Zolin had invited him to spend the season at Chernaya Dacha, no doubt at his wife’s insistence, but he had declined. He didn’t enjoy being an object of pity, and was unwilling to become a charity case.
“At least you’re not retired,” he said aloud, before tiring of the sight of his hangdog, whiskery face and turning away from the mirror.
Weary and in pain, his mood did not improve when Zapad failed to appear in Reception at the agreed time. Eventually, Galina went in search of him, bringing him with her like an errant child, still clutching the laptop on which he was recreating the layout of the Zubgorai clinic with some kind of draughtsman’s software.
The hotel receptionist had recommended a Mongolian restaurant in town, and Arkady did not put it to a vote, dropping the others outside while he went to find somewhere safe to leave the SUV. Gorno-Altaysk was unnervingly quiet, the streets lined with parked cars but devoid of people, save the occasional, stumbling drunk. It had the feel of a town under curfew, an occupied territory awash with fatalism and resentment.
By the time he limped back to the restaurant,
Zapad and Yelagin were seated by the window, plainly visible from without. Arkady would have insisted on a more discreet table, but he supposed it didn’t matter. No one was looking for them. No one cared what they were up to. They were the only customers in the place, and the waiter hovered nearby all evening, hopping from one foot to the other and grinning like an imbecile.
Galina confined her order to noodle soup and vodka, downing shot after shot of the latter with little apparent effect, eventually telling the waiter to just leave the bottle. The men ordered more comprehensively, and Arkady felt his mood lifting as his blood sugar rose. His meal—mutton boiled in spiced milk, with garlic potatoes and fried millet—was surprisingly good, and a glass of Cabernet Severny helped him ignore the pain in his leg.
Zapad eschewed wine in favour of kumis and salted tea, and raved about the “authenticity” of his food. Once he’d exhausted that topic though, the conversation rapidly petered out, until even the beaming waiter began to look uncomfortable. Galina nursed her vodka and pushed noodles around her bowl, while her stepbrother lapsed into embarrassed silence. Eventually, once the scrape of cutlery and the contagious anxiety of their waiter became too much to bear, Arkady offered Zapad a topic on which he could expound at length.
“So, Doctor,” he began, pushing his plate away and leaning back in his seat. “When we first met, you spoke of our great national tradition of reanimatology. Tell us about that. I should like to know more.”
Galina looked up, surprised, he assumed, by the request. Zapad was taken by surprise too, his mouth full of boortsog. He swallowed, and rinsed his mouth with tea before replying.
“Ah, well…where does one begin?” he said, running his tongue around his mouth to loosen any last crumbs of fried dough. “With the Tsar-Pretender, Dmitrii, who was raised from death multiple times—or so it was claimed? With the Stoglav, and its prohibitions on calling up the dead? Perhaps with Jacob Bruce, descendant of Scottish kings and adviser to Peter the Great, who, it is said, could resurrect slain dogs with a few drops of elixir? There are many such threads running through our history, but the first man to weave them together was, of course, Fedorov, the ‘Socrates of Moscow.’ Are you familiar with The Philosophy of the Common Task?”
“What ‘common task’ is that?” asked Arkady, signalling to the waiter that he needed more wine.
“Ah, a shame. Far too few, these days, have read it. The common task of overcoming death, of course—the universal enemy!”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to educate me.”
Zapad was only too happy to do so, adopting the same professorial tone Arkady remembered from their first encounter.
“The Cosmists—that is, those who follow Fedorov’s principles—believe it is the ultimate duty of the human race to restore life to all those who have died. Each generation, once resurrected, must raise their fathers who came before them, until eventually everyone, right back to the first person to live and die, has been recalled from the grave.”
“That sounds as though it might pose some logistical problems.”
“Oh, undoubtedly. The common task is to overcome those problems, through development of artificial bodies, colonisation of space, and whatever else might be required. However, for man to reach his potential, death must be overcome. Otherwise, he is condemned to nihilism and despair.”
Arkady raised an eyebrow. “You sound as though you may be a Cosmist yourself, Doctor. Are you?”
Zapad smiled and sighed. “I suppose I am, to a degree. Once reanimation is proven possible, its development will be exponential. Imagine the resources that will be devoted to the task of reviving our lamented loved ones. Imagine Lenin, no longer a patchwork mummy sealed in a mausoleum, but walking among us once more! I believe it will transform the human psyche more completely than anything else in our history, and mark the moment of our evolution into beings more noble and enlightened than we are today. In that sense, and to that extent, yes: I am a Cosmist.”
He pursed his lips and tilted his head defiantly, as if expecting to be challenged on the point. Arkady just nodded and took a sip of wine. He was experiencing an unexpected feeling of annoyance. Was it annoyance or resentment? Did he resent the younger man’s optimism? No, he realised, it was more personal than that. He disliked the implication that the grief he’d endured since losing Ana was somehow disproportionate—that it represented a failure of scientific imagination. He didn’t like, either, the idea of the dead men who sometimes haunted his dreams being, one day, pulled from the oblivion to which he had consigned them. It was easy for the young and innocent to be blasé about death, much harder for the guilty and exhausted. Still, he set down his glass and smiled at the doctor.
“You have some confidence, then, that we will succeed.” He injected a note of wryness into his voice.
Zapad demurred, wobbling his hand in imitation of a settling balance.
“Eh…I would say it is fifty-fifty,” he replied. “I am optimistic that we can induce independent respiration. Whether this can be sustained, or consciousness evoked, I have my doubts. Of course, they say Kuliabko almost managed it once, in 1929. Supposedly he induced a heartbeat in a dead man, and maintained it for twenty minutes after his assistants fled in terror. Five years later, Bryukhonenko, too, used his resuscitation apparatus on the body of a suicide. After being re-perfused and warmed for several hours, he recorded a heartbeat and witnessed the man open his eyes and stare around at the surgeons. They became unnerved and immediately disconnected the equipment, but, if all that was possible with the technology of their day, I would hope we can surpass their results by quite some margin now.”
There was silence. Arkady looked at Galina. Her eyes were glazed, the vodka having finally taken effect, but she looked as disturbed by her stepbrother’s predictions as Arkady himself was feeling. What if they did succeed, and Molchanov gave them the encryption key for his evidence? What then? Maslok, and MI6, and everything else, would surely pale into insignificance next to the enormity of their accomplishment. That was Zolin’s problem, he reminded himself: a director-level decision.
He cleared his throat and checked his watch.
“Has everyone had enough to eat? If so, we should go. Our plane departs first thing in the morning.”
They both signalled their assent. He paid cash and led them back out into the darkness.
*
He almost didn’t recognise Sophia Molchanov when she emerged from Arrivals, so different was her appearance. She had cut and dyed her hair, and her nose sported a silver stud which hadn’t been there before. Her ensemble of black, hooded leather jacket and jeans looked as though it belonged on a biker, though on closer inspection it became obvious that both were very expensive, the trousers fashionably distressed, not torn as Arkady had first assumed, the coat’s buttons engraved with entwined Chanel ‘C’s.
He wasn’t sure whether she had adopted the new look as a disguise, or if it was simply one of those impulsive reinventions to which young people were prone. He complimented her haircut nevertheless, and asked how her flight had been.
“Pretty awful,” came the reply. “I had some fat, drunk guy snoring his head off next to me all the way from Moscow. You know, people think being rich must be amazing”―she passed him one of her suitcases to pull—“and most of the time it simply isn’t, but being able to fly first class is definitely the best thing about it.”
“Ah. I’m sorry. All these internal flights are standard class-only.”
“As I’ve discovered. Here, hold this, would you?”
She pressed her carry-on bag into his arms and turned her head away, blowing her nose at length.
“Sorry, flying always makes my nose run. I was half-hoping you wouldn’t be here,” she went on, taking back her bag, wadding up the tissue, and dropping it in a bin. “Maxim is convinced I’m being scammed. Fortunately, the bank doesn’t require his counter-signature anymore. I suppose the fact you are here means we’re really going to do this.”
&nb
sp; She looked at him, watching for a reaction, searching his face for some reassuring sign. He did his best.
“We’re going to try,” he replied. “Obviously, there are no guarantees. We’ll give it everything we’ve got, of course.”
They walked through the terminal, Arkady pulling her suitcase and wondering whether he’d have the strength to lift it into the car. It seemed ignoring baggage allowances was another privilege of wealth. Sophia seemed more cheerful than when he’d seen her in London. Maybe it felt good to be back in her mother country, or perhaps she was just excited to see the project she was funding. Either way, she seemed to have come alive in a way that was gratifying to see.
Almost all the other passengers milling about were travelling alone. Gorno-Altaysk wasn’t a destination that attracted families or couples. The terminal floor was streaked with mud and melt-water, trekked in by travellers and those coming to meet them, the footprints becoming darker and more pronounced as they approached the terminal’s sliding doors.
He led the way to the car, the same one he’d hired the last time he’d been there. His own flight had landed a scant hour before hers, giving him enough time to collect the vehicle and run its heater for a while, thawing the windows and taking the chill from the upholstery. Sophia collapsed into the passenger seat and racked it back as far as it would go, stretching out her legs.
“I might sleep,” she said in English, before reverting to Russian. “How long is the drive?”
“It’s a few hours. Sleep if you want.”
He started the engine.
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