The Kobalt Dossier

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “Now, as to Ryder.”

  “I’m on it,” Baev said.

  Kusnetsov turned on him. “No, Slava, you most certainly are not. I have read the report from Cologne. Both the farm hands you sent scraped off the floor of a certain theater there. I’ve had to dispatch one of my lieutenants to mollify the local constabulary.”

  Baev felt the tickle as a line of sweat ran down the back of his neck. “They were the wrong men to send, I admit. I have changed tacks.”

  “Again.”

  “If at first you don’t succeed, Minister.” He waited for a response. Receiving none, he plowed relentlessly on. “I believe I now have the answer. I’ve decided to use a more … unorthodox … route to ensure Ryder’s termination.”

  Kusnetsov’s eyes seemed to bore into Baev’s skull. “You know, Slava, for some time now I’ve been contemplating a shake-up within the FSB. This business with Anatoly Vasiliev has accelerated my thinking.”

  A jagged icicle slid between Baev’s ribs. The threat to him was implicit and immediate. His elevated pulse trip-hammered in his ears. He desperately wanted to ask a question, but instinct, long honed on FSB politics, kept him silent. He dared not look away from Kusnetsov now, even for an instant.

  “Yes,” Kusnetsov nodded, as if to himself, “the time for change is imminent.”

  He smiled at his subordinate. Baev read all kinds of consequences in that smile. Was it friendly, icy, sardonic, contemptuous? In this mentally hyper-kinetic moment, he could not read Kusnetsov at all.

  Then his boss took up the cleaver, dismissing Baev, returning to swing it again, down through muscle, sinew, and bone. Another bloody piece separated from the whole.

  46

  WENDY/MICHAEL

  “God is alive! His fiery hand is the burning sword!”

  Mikey and I are sitting on a carpet spread on the stone floor of the citadel’s chapel. Mikey is listening to Ana with rapt attention, as if she’s a sorceress. And why not? There’s this ginormous burning sword behind her, I don’t know how many feet long, standing upright on a carved stone base black as a moonless night. Whatever it’s made of is black, too. The flames run up its length. The flames never stop. The sword never burns. Maybe the length of an adult’s height behind the sword is a plain cross, gray, sharp-edged, big as the sword itself. Looks like what they make pavement out of.

  “It is eternal,” Ana is saying, as if she really is this sorceress out of any number of fantasy novels whose worlds I’ve been plunged into, “for it is God’s handmade manifest in our world.”

  Mikey remains wide-eyed, astonished, completely spellbound. As for me, I don’t know. Call me a skeptic—I think that’s the right word; I’ll have to google it when we get out of here. If we get out of here. But, no, I don’t want to think that; I’ll start to cry and Mikey will get scared. I have to make sure he isn’t scared, so I have to hold tight on to my own fear and push it way down.

  The thing is Ana told us she’s Mom’s sister. Come on, what are the odds? But then, I looked at her really close, and, bam! I saw that she actually does have Mom’s eyes. And chin. And I thought, What if she is Mom’s sister. Our aunt, like Aunt Evan. But no one ever said they had another sister, and I don’t know about Mom, I was probably too young, but for sure Aunt Evan would have told me—at least me. I’m a big enough girl now, aren’t I?

  Anyway, if Ana really is Mom’s sister why did she tell us not to call her Aunt Ana? “You must call me Mother Ana,” she said. But she’s not our mother. On the other hand, from what I can gather, she’s running a kind of religious order, and I did read somewhere that the head of female religious orders is called Mother Superior. But then she insists we’re all family: she and Mikey and me. Family. There’s a word I’ve never heard when applied to Mikey and me. Mom surely never said it, and as for Paul …

  “God has plans for us, my darling children. Just as He had plans for humankind when he spoke to Noah. This is what God said, his voice like thunder in Noah’s mind: ‘Now the earth is corrupt in My sight and is full of violence. I see how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth have corrupted their ways.’ And God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark.’”

  Ana’s eyes swing to us—to Mikey and then to me, and I feel pinned in place, just as if she actually is some kind of siren with a golden tongue. “And God kept his covenant with Noah. On the seventeenth day of the second month—all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell, covering the earth for forty days and forty nights, until all the lands were under heaven’s water. All except the crest of Mount Ararat, where Noah and his family made their way, and started humankind again.”

  Her eyes, it seems to me, have turned dark—dark as the stand the flaming sword is set on. But they’re also as fiery as that arrow. How to explain that. I can’t. And now I’ve got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that makes me want to take Mikey and run—run as far away as we can. But I know we can’t. Mother Ana or one of her people will stop us, and that makes the funny feeling in my stomach spread.

  And Mother Ana is speaking. “And God said to Noah when the ark has landed on the top of Mount Ararat, and Noah and all his family are safe, and the water starts to recede, ‘Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’

  “These were God’s very words to Noah, His chosen one, my darling children. But the descendants of Noah have broken their covenant with God. Once again, humankind is full of sin, of violence, of corruption that has entered every soul on earth, eating away at them all from the inside. You and Michael will help me forge the Paradise God promised Noah after he landed on Ararat.”

  *

  To tell you the truth, sitting here next to Wendy, I think Mother Ana is pretty cool. I mean, she said she was Mama’s sister. I asked Wendy about that when we were alone and she said she can see parts of Mama’s face in Mother Ana, so maybe she really is our aunt. Oh, but I’m not allowed to call her that. Anyway, I guess part of Mother Ana’s coolness is that everyone else here listens to her and does what she says. I’d like to be like that someday and, guess what, Mother Ana says I will be. How cool is that? I have to keep that promise—she calls it a covenant, like she says God has with her—close to me, so I won’t be too scared. I mean, I am scared, but Wendy isn’t so I guess things are okay. I’m still confused about where we are and why we’re here, though. Wendy doesn’t seem to know, either. Another thing I can’t think about because I’ll get scared all over again, and I hate, hate, hate feeling scared.

  Now Mother Ana is going on with her story about God and Noah and the ark and the flood. I’m glad Noah is safe on that mountain with the funny name, Ararat. I wonder where it is. Maybe I’ll ask Wendy to google it when we get out of here, but by that time I’ll probably forget.

  So again I tune in fully to what Mother Ana is saying. “… Once again, humankind is full of sin, of violence, of corruption that has entered every soul on earth, eating away at them all from the inside.”

  She’s looking at me now, and even though we’re family, that look makes something inside me squirmy, like I’ve eaten a handful of worms. Yuk! Gross!

  So there’s that sin, and violence, and corruption thing again, and it makes me wonder whether she’s talking about the video games I play. Anyway, she’s saying, “Here in the present, God has spoken to me, His voice like thunder in my mind. He has said, ‘Once again the earth is corrupt in My sight and is full of violence, sin, and corruption, for all the people on earth have corrupted their ways.’ And God has said to me, ‘I have put in your hands the means to start anew, to recreate humans as they were meant to be in the time of Noah. For this you will need children, children of your womb or your sister’s womb. You will be My arc
hitect and they will be the catalysts to people Paradise on earth.’”

  But what about Aunt Evan? I think. I want her to be saved. She’s like Mama, only there. I open my mouth, almost say it out loud, but something—I don’t know what—stops me, and I clamp my mouth shut. I don’t understand. Is any of this real or am I in a dream? All I want is to wake up, but I’ve pinched myself so many times I have bruises all along my arms.

  I look up. Ana’s arms are stretched out at the height of her shoulders, her fingers cupped, as if to wrap me and Wendy like Christmas presents. “And so, my darling children, I have brought you here to be safe within my ark, which is protected by God Himself, so that here with me, with your family, we can start anew.”

  *

  And now she moves, and I see behind her, behind the fiery arrow, is a symbol, its golden skin glittering in the firelight, making it seem as if it’s writhing, as if it’s alive. It’s a kind of round horseshoe with two feet, and after a minute or two I see what it is. I take Mikey’s hand in mind and grip it tight as I can, because now I am scared—real and truly scared, and it takes everything I have not to burst out crying …

  “Tomorrow is the seventeenth day of the month,” Ana’s voice rising like the sun at dawn. “The seventeenth day of the second month as reckoned by the calendar used by God in the time of Moses. In our time, modern-day time, it is the fifth month: May. Tomorrow is when the second flood—which is not a flood, but a method given to me by God himself—will be unleashed. Tomorrow is when all mankind, except the precious few, handpicked by God, will be wiped from the face of the earth.”

  … because I know Greek letters; they’re part of an online game I play. You pick a team symbolized by a Greek letter, but you’re not allowed to pick the last Greek letter. It is Omega, the end of all things. Omega is death.

  47

  BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

  “Here, you are loved,” Rebecca said just before Evan boarded the big helicopter squatting on its circular pad out behind the clinic. “Here you will always be loved.” While Ben spoke with Leonard Pine, the clinic’s night manager, Rebecca embraced Evan, tenderly, fiercely, and Evan drew in her scent. She smelled of the great forest beyond the clinic, clean and fresh and piney, as if she spent hours wandering between the resiny trees.

  Kostya Reveshvili stood very close, his voice low but penetrating through the whup-whup-whup of the rotors. “Now, listen, moya doch’. Your sister Ana is a master at psychological warfare. Beware her every mood, her every word.”

  “I will, Otets.”

  He smiled. Kostya was so close his lips were almost touching Evan’s ear. And, as time was growing short, he kissed her on both cheeks. “Come back to us, moya doch’.”

  Now, as they lifted off and tilted away from the two figures below, Evan sat, noise-canceling headphones on, arms wrapped around herself. Ben wanted to talk with her, at least ask her how she was doing, but he knew there was so much information for her to unpack that he was better off thinking his own thoughts. Besides, the roar of the helicopter rotors made conversation virtually impossible.

  Below them, the countryside gave way as they passed over the seemingly endless forest, into grasslands, farming country, dotted with tractors and stone houses from which thin trails of smoke drifted skyward. Above them, the clouds rolled and tumbled, climbing to airless heights.

  She and Ben were in the clinic’s silver-and-blue Airbus H155 headed southeast. The helicopter was fast; they were flying at over 200 mph. Still, it would take roughly six hours—including a stop to refuel at an airfield outside the Austrian city of Graz—to reach their final destination deep in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

  “Dracula territory,” Ben had said as they took off, his words all but lost in the chatter of the rotors.

  Evan put her head in her hands. Knowing that her parents, her real parents, were alive, that they loved her, had never rejected her, but were merely accomplishing the last part of their remit seemed a larger concept than her mind could contain, like discovering the existence of the fourth dimension. They inhabited the same world as she did, as Bobbi had, therefore she understood them, understood everything they had done as no other child could. The question of forgiveness never entered the picture, which made acceptance, if not exactly easy, then surely less difficult. Still, there was a seismic shift in her world, proof positive of an unknown element—a crucial one—so long withheld from her. With that thought came another wave of hatred for her sister. Bobbi had known, known for years and years, and yet held on to that knowledge for what—spite? resentment? insecurity? malice? All four, possibly. Ah, but what did it matter? Bobbi was dead.

  And yet it did matter. It mattered very much. Even while part of her clung to the rage, another, more mature part, knew that she needed to let the anger go, flow through her, and away, to vanish into the past.

  She felt ripped in half. She was not who she had been before Konstantin and Rebecca had revealed themselves. She had never been aware of a breach in her world, a before and an after, so she had crossed it without even knowing it was there. But now, looking back over her shoulder, she could see it, dark and wide and permanent. She could never go back, never be the person she had been yesterday morning when she had walked into the forest inn and seen Konstantin Reveshvili eating breakfast. She did not know who this new Evan Ryder was. She had been born Evan Reveshvili—she was still a Reveshvili. Russian blood coursed through her veins, as it had coursed through Bobbi’s. Was that truly the reason she defected? Or was it another example of her spite, resentment, insecurity, malice? Knowing her sister, it was probably malice aforethought.

  Her teeth rattled, her spine tingled, the vibrations from the aircraft rising up through the soles of her boots, firing each and every nerve ending. An insupportable weight had fallen on her shoulders, the weight of another universe, of another life unlived. The knowledge of her birth parents, the joyful experience of meeting them, vied with her remembered love of the couple who raised her, who she had always called Mom and Dad, who never corrected her because they couldn’t, because, perhaps, they didn’t want to, pressed down on her with crushing force. She felt squeezed in a vise, heart hammering, breathless. She had to keep repeating, This is not a dream over and over in her head while pinching the flesh of her forearm in order not to lose her shit. Her head felt like it was splitting apart—nothing existed, not Ben, not the pilots, not the helicopter, not heaven above or the earth below. There was nothing in her universe except Kostya, Rebecca, Mary, Joe, and herself, each revolving around the others, a mini–solar system, real and symbols of the earthquake that had her in its grip.

  Then she took her face out of her hands. She looked out, saw the clouds, the sky, the speed at which they were flying, and her mind was filled with Peter Pan. In her mind’s eye, she saw Peter, and beside him Wendy and Michael, their arms spread wide, the wind riffling their hair. She could see the perfect ovals of their faces, their eyes shining, flying toward her, excited smiles wreathing their faces. She felt them in her arms, rocking her back on her heels. She felt her love for them warming her, settling her. They had no mother, no father. But they had her. And now they had grandparents. Such a wrenching turn of events.

  And, all at once, she knew she had to pull herself together. Out of the darkness, into the light. Wendy and Michael were ahead of her, hidden in the Carpathian Mountains, having been abducted by her sister Ana. Ana, the psychopath, the solipsist. The self-proclaimed messiah.

  And, leaning forward, she shouted at the pilots via her mic, “I’m betting you can take this baby up a notch, fellas! Am I wrong?”

  *

  She wasn’t wrong. They touched down in Graz in record time. While the pilots climbed out to supervise the refueling, Evan stood outside the radius of the rotors. The afternoon sun was growing old and tired as it slipped toward the west. A chill was in the air. The wind sent up tiny eddies, but there was no hint of inclement weather.

  She faced the wind, trying to rid hersel
f of the feeling of unreality that had overwhelmed her the moment she understood who the Reveshvilis actually were. But now, in the open air, standing alone on the small airfield’s tarmac, her eyes burning, tears at last overflowing, running down her cheeks, shivering in the wind, she surrendered to the surges of emotions buffeting her.

  She felt Ben’s approach. She stopped herself from cringing away, from keeping herself—what was happening to her—a raw wound, as if she had been shot—at a firm remove from any other human being.

  “Evan—”

  She turned her face away. It must be puffy and swollen. “Not now, Ben.”

  “Evan, I’d like to say I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t say anything, okay?”

  Beyond the copter’s behemoth fuselage there was nothing much to see. A cluster of nondescript low buildings, an ugly radio tower, not a soul to be seen, apart from the tech helping with the refueling. It was like standing at the edge of a windswept desert or looking out at the post-apocalyptic world.

  “But I’m not sorry.”

  Ben had clearly made up his mind, he just wasn’t going to give up. “Frankly, I don’t care whether you’re sorry or not.” She had other things on her mind; Ben was last on the list or on another list altogether.

  “Evan, it’s imperative we talk now.”

  “Oh, Ben, we’re at the end phase of our remit. We’ve got to find Wendy and Michael and get on with it. They’re all I care about. They’re all either of us should care about.”

  “I can’t help caring about you.”

  “Which is why you’re not cut out for field work anymore. Ben, I’ve said this before. You’ve spent too many years being a handler, sitting behind a desk, working out remits.”

  But she saw that it was he whose face looked puffy and swollen, even though his cheeks had hollowed out. The whites of his eyes were threaded with red; the eyes themselves looked haunted. For the first time since meeting her parents her thoughts turned outward beyond herself.