Skandal

by Lindsay Smith

  I never noticed, chalking the sensation up to living with two scrubbers, but I’m impressed. We didn’t have protection like that in the KGB. “What does it do?”

  She gestures to the box in each corner. “By stringing them together, I can make a circuit—like a fence—that keeps psychic powers in or out. Very little can pass through.”

  The screws inside me loosen by a fraction. I like knowing there are places Sergei can’t look—here, at Headquarters, at Papa’s home. But whether they’ll keep me safe from this mole, if there is one, is another matter.

  “So!” Cindy clasps her hands together. “We’re still investigating the attempted breakin at your home, senator, as well as the other attacks on NATO delegates. We’re going to need more information from you, however. As well as some … personal effects.” She gives a slight nod toward me.

  Saxton leans back in his chair, propping his chin on his fingers. “It’s not enough you’ve got your suited gorillas combing every inch of my townhouse?”

  “I guess I’m just confused, senator.” Donna twists her ponytail around one finger. Her arm presses against mine and her shield parts, inviting me to link into her thoughts again. “The KGB playbook says that they attempt to recruit someone to spy for them first. Then, only if that doesn’t work, that’s when they resort to brute force.”

  I nearly choke on my own tongue—I’ve never heard about any such “playbook” before, and I was part of the damned KGB. I eye Donna, hoping my face doesn’t look too incredulous.

  Her expression is the picture of round-eyed innocence as she says, “But … you never reported that you’d been approached about spying for the Russians.” And I realize that’s exactly Donna’s point. She knows that he doesn’t know that. She just wants to get him thinking about any time he might possibly have been approached by someone who could have been an enemy spy—whether he reported it or not.

  And it works. Through my link with Donna, we hear it in his wobbling musical shield, laying his thoughts bare for a split second, like a glimpse of a holstered gun under an agent’s coat. When he says “Of course not,” we know he’s telling the truth.

  Donna cracks her gum and leans away from me, breaking the link. “Oh, well. The Russkies are always changing up their tactics.”

  Cold. Ruthless. I thought I knew the meaning of those words when I worked for General Rostov. But I’m finding the translation carries subtle shifts, a cultural nuance that can’t be matched up one to one. Perhaps even the same weapon can take a new form.

  “Were you at the NATO convention in Brussels when Royal Admiral Jackson was attacked?” Cindy asks.

  Saxton nods. “I was. Didn’t get a good look at the woman, though.” He eyes Donna and me warily. “I understand someone tried to interrupt a London meeting, as well, though I didn’t see it for myself.”

  Cindy thins her lips like she’s trying to keep any hint of emotion at bay. “What was being discussed at both of those meetings?”

  “Let’s see … Well, everyone’s concerned about these rumors that Khruschev’s about to get forced out. Word is, the Communist Party wants to replace him with someone more hardline. Our sources indicate Leonid Brezhnev, the current Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, is being groomed for the position.”

  I shiver involuntarily. Rostov would certainly approve of someone more willing to face the United States head first.

  “Nobody’s happy with the civil war in Vietnam, of course—the commie northerners have to be contained. We don’t want the Red Tide sweeping even further across Asia, but we’re not keen to fight another Korean War anytime soon. That was a waste of time and money and lives, and we ended up back where we started from.” He sighs. “What else is there…?”

  Saxton drones on, discussing the minutiae of the NATO proceedings. I hear Cindy’s and Saxton’s banter as though I’m a remote viewer, watching through Yulia’s eyes. The strife in Vietnam—Papa made a comment, the other day, that it’s just the sort of situation a man like Rostov loves to exploit. The Viet Cong have taken a broken government and tried to piece it back together with blood-soaked red tape. When Rostov sunk his claws into my mind, I saw his lust for strife and for the glory he thought could only come from a world consumed in the Soviet ideals. Wherever revolutionaries seek power, Rostov’s shadow is sure to stretch behind them.

  “Yulia? Can you read the courier’s documents?”

  I glance around the table—they’ve been carrying on and I fell behind. Me—they’re talking about me.

  “Maybe you can glean something from the documents—see if someone’s been pursuing them—”

  Her words dissolve into a static buzz like the disrupters she placed. We’re grasping for answers, hunting for these scrubbers. They want me to hunt for them by sifting through layers and layers of red tape, one shadow-thin coating of a memory at a time—

  “Senator Saxton.” I sit upright as all eyes snap to me. Like my improper outfit, there’s no use in hiding who I am or what I’m doing. I might as well wear it with pride. “Your secretary—has she been trained in mental shielding?”

  “Yes,” Donna says, as if she was just going to make this point herself. “We noticed something odd—”

  “Of course we didn’t train her.” Saxton’s gaze fixes on me as he speaks, like now that my accent has revealed me as the outsider, he must keep me in sight at all times or I’ll vanish into the night. “She doesn’t know enough to warrant it—she doesn’t have a clearance or anything. If we train too many folks, they become targets.”

  I take a deep breath. If I’m wrong, I might undo all my efforts to become a part of this team, but I have to take that risk. I have to stop these scrubbers. I look the senator square in the eye. “Then who did?”

  Senator Saxton gapes at me. “Young lady, you’re not seriously suggesting I’ve been harboring a spy in my own office—”

  The locked door handle rattles. “It’s Anna! I have your sandwiches!”

  “Wait,” I say, though Cindy’s already halfway standing. I need to prove it to him—to everyone. “Please. Let me see if I am right. Donna, can you listen to her thoughts from here?”

  Donna throws me the sort of withering look I imagine she’s thrown many a would-be suitor. “Of course I can.”

  “Good. What about you, Cindy?”

  She hesitates, mouth open. “My powers don’t quite work that way, but—”

  “Well, if you can, listen closely.” I force a smile to rival Cindy’s. “Trust me.”

  Cindy unlocks the door for Anna. Anna works around the table, depositing wrapped sandwiches, plastic utensils, and uncapped glass bottles of Coca-Cola with vicious precision. When she reaches me, though, I swing my hand wide as I grab my bottle, setting it on a trajectory to spill all over her fuzzy sweater.

  Anna shrieks as the brown syrup sloshes onto her stomach—but as my arm swings against her, her circuit loop of thoughts keeps rolling. Not so much as a blip of panic as she rights the bottle before it can spill further. She grabs for the napkins as her thoughts complete the sentence.

  Pause.

  One, two, three.

  And then, her thoughts acknowledge what happened, carefully controlled and fully worded, where any other person’s thoughts would be skittering like a seismograph’s needle in an earthquake.

  Or on a lie detector test.

  Donna, Cindy, and I all stare at Anna—I don’t know the exact nature of Cindy’s powers yet, but there’s no way she could have missed that eerie, inhuman wave of thought. Anna slows her frantic dabbing at her sweater until her measured motions match the steady beat of her thoughts. Then she stops altogether.

  She looks around the table at us, soaked napkin slipping out of her fingers.

  And runs from the room.

  CHAPTER 8

  BY THE TIME the phone operators connect Senator Saxton with the building security desk, Anna is long gone, and Cindy and Saxton both occupy about three telephones each while they coordinate phone calls with the Capit
ol Police, the CIA, Saxton’s protective detail, the FBI agents combing through his house, and other assorted entities, agencies, and personalities.

  Donna and I sit at the conference table, waiting for the adults to finish talking/shouting/screaming into their octopus collection of phone receivers. I’m buzzing with frantic energy. But we can do nothing until orders trickle down from above. Following the rules—like Valentin and I agreed, like Winnie reprimanded. But each time one of the phones lined up on Saxton’s desk rings, we both jump, muscles firing like pistons to launch us into action.

  “So, Jules.” Donna fidgets with her jewelry. “You know, it’s okay to, like, talk. You don’t have to pretend you’re a statue.”

  I give her a granite stare. She only ever seems at ease when she’s filling a perfectly good silence with the sound of her own voice. “What am I meant to discuss?”

  “The weather, or what you’re thinking about, or—or anything, really, is better than sitting there looking like you think I’m gonna pull a knife on you.” She smiles, lopsided. “Are all you Russians so unemotional?”

  “Why would we show our emotions?” I ask.

  She groans and bonks her head back against the wall. “This is what I mean! Okay, I know how to get you talking.” Her grin twists into my ribs. “Tell me all about you and Valentin. How did you two meet?”

  And she wonders why we Russians don’t share much of ourselves. “When we were both prisoners of the KGB,” I say.

  “Oh. Right.” Donna shuts up for a minute, but then she’s at me again, prying me with a new conversational tactic like I’m a lock she’s trying to pick. I wonder what she’s trying to pry out of my mind. “It must be great being back with your dad again, huh? My father—” she draws it out, like she’s suddenly affecting a British drawl—“is a movie producer in Hollywood. I hardly ever get to see him now that I’m on the opposite coast.”

  “What about your mother?” I ask. If she’d rather talk about herself, then I’d rather not field unanswerable questions.

  Donna’s gaze sinks down to her hand. “Oh, she’s around enough. You know—here and there.”

  Thankfully, Cindy interrupts our conversational stalemate, sinking into the chair across from us with a sigh. She pops open her clutch and pulls a slender deck of cards. They’re not playing cards, but have strange illustrations on the faces unlike any playing cards I’ve seen. “A moment, girls, before we go.” After shuffling the cards, she fans them out faceup on the table and drums her nails. I can hear her blues song through the table, though it’s nearly swallowed up in the electrical currents’ static, like a distant radio station. After a long moment she selects one from the heap.

  “Four of wands,” she says to no one in particular. She pinches the bridge of her nose, then stuffs the cards back into her clutch and turns to Senator Saxton. “Sorry, senator. It would appear that I’ll need a few more favors from you.”

  He groans. “I have to sleep in a hotel room under armed guard tonight because of your damned meddling as it is. What more could you possibly want from me?”

  Cindy’s smile doesn’t so much as twitch. “Miss Willoughsby here will conduct an interview with each and every member of the American NATO delegation, starting tomorrow morning. Tell them she’s your niece and she’s writing an article for her school paper. Tell them she’s the queen of England, I don’t care—just don’t tell them she works for us.”

  Saxton groans. “All right. I’ll make it happen.”

  After he all but shoves out the door, Cindy hisses a few terse words to a burly pair of men stationed farther down the hall, who must be Saxton’s armed guards. They had no way of knowing that his secretary had become a wanted spy when she fled past them. Cindy’s fingers tremble as she wrestles with her clutch’s clasp.

  “Are you all right?” I ask her.

  “Never better.”

  She presses her hand to my forearm as she leads us down the hall. A shudder courses through me as if I’ve taken a swig of spoiled milk. A skeleton, astride a pale gray horse, trots down the hallway toward us in stuttering steps, a putrid fog following it like a shadow. One moment, it’s there, then it winks out, only to return a moment later. A lightning bolt sears through my mind. It strikes a castle, its pearly sides hidden in a dense fog. The images evaporate as Cindy lifts her hand away.

  “Is this what you see?” I ask Cindy, keeping my voice low. “Is this your ability?”

  “I’m—” Cindy trips over herself. “I think that we…” She straightens her hat and strides into the harsh spring afternoon. White burns off the sidewalk and the marble buildings all around us, scorching the shadowy images from my eyes. I yank open the passenger door to Cindy’s car and slide onto the sticky seat beside her, leaving Donna alone in the backseat.

  “What does it mean?” I ask. “What kind of psychic are you?”

  Cindy props her elbows on the steering wheel, cradles her face in those perfect dainty gloves, and lets out a wretched sob, squeaking like a wet sponge on tile. When she sits back up, black mascara and rouge smear her gloves’ knuckles. Cindy swallows, then turns to me with sudden exhaustion in her face. Is this her unmasked state? Suddenly, I can see what tremendous work every moment of the day has been for her up to this point, how hard she fights to become flawless, cheerful, precise. Because now every last ounce of it has drained away, leaving a weary woman barely older than Donna and me.

  “I’m afraid we may be too late.”

  *

  “Have you lost your mind?” The voice of Frank Tuttelbaum, the PsyOps team chief, carries straight through the door of his closed office to the break room where Valya and I sit. “We can’t launch a manhunt for this secretary on the suspicions of a couple of teenagers and your stupid cards!”

  “How can he not think there’s a threat?” Valentin asks me in Russian. He slips both of his hands around one of mine and turns it over, tracing my veins with a calm melody.

  “Great question. Anna’s scrubbed-clean apartment was, what’s the phrase?” I switch to English. “The icing on the cake.” I wince, remembering our stop at the cramped basement flat on our way back to CIA headquarters. Nothing looked out of place through the windows, but as soon as I touched the door handle, I knew there was no point looking inside—we would find no memories, nothing but abrasive emptiness. A scrubber had already purged it clean. Leave it for the FBI to comb through for physical evidence.

  “Did Cindy mention seeing anything? With her powers, I mean,” Valya says.

  “She showed me something, but I didn’t understand it.” I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling myself melt into him with sudden-onset exhaustion. “What is she, anyway?”

  “I think she’s like Larissa—she can see the future, or a probable version of it. But it’s not straightforward with all the possibilities laid out, like Larissa’s was.” His voice hitches on that past tense, that syntactical euphemism, and I find myself flinching, too. We still don’t know what happened to her after she stayed behind in East Berlin while Valya and I escaped, but we have to assume the worst. “I think Cindy’s vision of the future is symbolic. Murky.”

  My mother has the same kind of power, though I don’t know what form hers takes. If she shrugs it off, like Larissa did, or dives into it with a deep breath, like Cindy.

  There’s a lot I don’t know about my mother. A lot I’ve forgotten.

  Valentin presses his lips to my temple before speaking. “It feels as if hardly any of us have a firm grasp on our gifts. We’re always fighting through the murk and grayness.”

  “And the ones who are confident in it, like Papa, perhaps shouldn’t be.” What changed in Papa? Has he been stripped down like a clarified solution, burning away everything that hid this part of him? Or has something so potent been added that it overtakes all the rest?

  Valentin grimaces. “I don’t want to end up like that, Yul.”

  “Like Papa? No. You treat your power with respect.” Rather, he treats it like a massive dog on
a too-small leash: with extreme caution. “I’ve never seen you exploit it without good reason.”

  He shakes his head, red flashing on his cheeks. “You don’t know the temptation to meddle that’s always lurking, the power … It’s always a struggle, Yul. It’s exhausting.”

  “But doesn’t it get easier?” I ask. “You’re always working at it.” I rub my hands together, unthinking; practice, control, yes, these are important, and I’ve neglected them for too long. But Valya has Papa to instruct him, despite the dubious source. I have no guide, no instruction manual.

  “It never feels like enough.” Valya shakes his head. “It’s always there, pulling at me, coaxing me to twist the world to my favor. I’d rather be without my abilities entirely than surrender myself to them. I don’t want to be like—like Rostov.”

  Or like Papa, I can’t help but think, though Valentin would never say it. “I wouldn’t let you lose control like that. I’ll steady you.” I try to smile, but it feels false and creaky. Valya’s always serious, but rarely this heavy, this raw. I don’t know how to balance him out. I suppose psychic emotions aren’t the only kind of emotions I’m clueless about.

  “You wouldn’t let me?” He buries his nose in my hair; his breathing is slow, but I feel the nervous energy crackling along the surface of his skin, the fear of another sleepless night. “I wish it were that easy. What I worry is that ‘letting’ me has nothing to do with it.”

  Mole. Sergei’s word rings through me, taunting and blunt. What Rostov did to Valentin—whatever left his mind raw and seeping—what if he found some way to control Valentin, even from here?

  No. It’s a ridiculous thought, one I don’t want to entertain. I should tell Valentin about Sergei’s warning. He’ll know what to do; he’ll know who we can trust; he’ll tell me not to fret and that Sergei only wanted to throw me off balance. It’s what I need to hear. But the what-if spreads like a rash, demanding to be itched.