by John Meaney
"You don't want to let anyone hear you say that, or the gulags will be the kinder option, you know?"
"Excuse me, I only meant—"
Then they had rounded the corner and were gone.
Keep calm now.
This was the heart of things, and there were soldiers everywhere, and what a coup if they found an intruder on the very night a GRU officer was visiting! I must be crazy, coming in here.
Slowly...
There was the tiniest of cold draughts, chill against my left cheek. Down a side corridor stood double doors, metal and glass, and beyond them the machine room where tapes whirled, stopped, and whirled again.
Found it.
This was Analysis, as sophisticated a setup as the Soviets could achieve. There was a push-button lock with metal keys, but Manny had drilled us in feeling for the tiny movement. The combination was 1917: how very imaginative. The doors clicked and I pushed my way through. Inside were computers and peripherals, but no human beings, since this was the middle of the night. Behind me the doors swung shut, their black rubber seals scraping as they locked in place. The fluorescent light was very white.
Steel-bound manuals filled the shelves. I checked the lights flickering across the processor. It was a stolen system, a 1710 geared towards process control. In Berlin we had a different model, the 1620, but the match was close, and I could use it. Flicking past manuals labelled SSP, I uncovered a list of application programs with unhelpful names like SHP057; but there was also a crib-sheet, an overview describing each program, because the military mind likes documentation.
There was a batch run that did almost exactly what I needed. First I loaded the JCL cards to control the job, sorting the data for the report.
Whispers...
I stopped dead but it was only the machinery, the overlaid chaos of mechanical noise in the chill air.
The report program could run once the data was prepared, but there was a problem: it was designed to print out on bulky concertina stationery, impossible to smuggle out. There were rolls of inch-wide paper tape, a better medium, but I would need to hack the code before it would divert to the tape writer.
Obviously the locals were used to making last-minute hacks without waiting for the 24-hour turnaround from punch operators. There were sharp knives and tape on a desktop, waiting to be used. I got to work, extracting every card with an instruction like WRITE(5, 70), and taping over a single hole in each. The output would go to device 4 instead of 5.
The pre-sort whirred away, flicking through the cards.
A very long time ago, Uncle Isaak watched me during a picnic on Boston Common, as I stood shyly at the side of a group of children, unable to talk to the pretty girl whose hair was tied back with emerald-green ribbons. It was St Patrick's Day, or close to it.
"You and I are the only non-Catholics here." He took me aside, handing me a Dr Pepper which at first, to my English-educated palate, tasted like Coke laced with cough mixture. "But I guess you fit in pretty well at school."
"I suppose so."
"Hmm. And there are no girls at this school?"
"No, sir."
"I didn't think so. Do you think she's nice?"
My face burned. "Er, who?"
"'Who,' he says, as if he hadn't been staring at the same pretty face all afternoon... Ah, well. Listen, have you learned about acceleration yet?"
I knew about force equals mass times acceleration, and said so.
"Prove it," was his reply.
"Er..."
I wasn't able to, for reasons that became clear years later. Concepts like force depend on even more basic ideas of distance, time and mass. At some level you have to accept them, because you can't define them, not without reference to other intuitive perceptions. Fundamental physics bootstraps itself into existence.
"When you're older," Uncle Isaak continued, "you'll want to read about Einstein's friend Gödel, who's upset the world's mathematicians by proving that every system of maths or logic is incomplete."
"I don't know what that means."
Uncle Isaak's smile was broad. "Neither do most people, especially the ones that pretend to. You know that geometry starts with Euclid's rules, like two parallel lines never meet?"
"I read the book you gave me."
"Well such rules are called axioms, statements that everyone accepts as truth. Then every other true statement – in geometry or any logical system – can be deduced from those rules. Right?"
"Um..." I looked out across the Common, where the other kids were trying to get a green-white-and-gold kite to fly. "Sure. Right."
"Well, wrong," said Uncle Isaak. "And that's Gödel's point. You can always produce a statement that is absolutely true, but cannot be proven. Which is why, even if you could describe that girl's prettiness with an equation, it would be absolutely goddamn pointless."
He looked back at my Aunt Irene, his wife, sitting on a blanket with the other women. She was in her final months of life, though only Isaak and my mother knew it.
"Logic is a tool," he told me then. "Love is the reason for wielding it."
Suddenly the device chattered into life, startling me. Yellow paper tape, punched with random-looking holes, began to spew from the machinery. It seemed like nothing worth risking life for. But logic, as my Uncle Isaak might have said, had little to do with the motivations of our lives, with the reasons for placing myself here in the centre of danger.
The tape writer finally fell silent. I started to tighten up the tape I'd removed from the spindle, a small roll of inch-wide yellow paper, so little to risk my life for.
Then a low, mournful siren began to sound. An alarm.
No one burst into the machine room. It couldn't be anything to do with the computer, that alarm. Or could it? I waited for a moment with the tape clutched in one hand, swallowing, trying to work out what to do.
Just move.
I went out into the corridor, where a group of technicians was running past, too worried to pay any attention to me. There was a white-faced young trooper on guard outside a door marked Archives. He must have orders to remain in place.
"Which way?" one of the technicians asked me.
"Um..."
"Outside the rear door," another man answered for me. "Same as for fire drills."
"That's right." I nodded.
But I let myself fall behind the group, and when everyone turned left I held back, trying to breathe silently, though the blood was pounding. My remaining lifespan might be measured in minutes. Outside there would be someone to check IDs, crossing names off a list.
And what kind of coincidence was it, an alarm sounding with me here?
Skylight.
That was what had caught my peripheral vision, high up: a darkened glass skylight in the ceiling. Behind me rose a wooden rack of pigeon-holes for internal mail, and I dared not hesitate as I swung up, using the rack as a ladder to reach the ceiling. The heel of my hand struck the latch, and then I was pushing up the skylight to reveal cold night.
Someone could come at any moment so I hauled myself through, struggling onto the roof, the cold surface somehow clear of snow. The skylight went back into place silently. I stopped on hands and knees, shivering in the lee of a ventilator housing. Thick snow, luminous in the moonlight, covered most of the roof. My lab coat was white but thin, providing camouflage but no insulation from the chill.
A single shot banged out and I dropped flat.
Not me...
There was silence save for the ongoing siren, then a few raised voices. That damned siren continued – then stopped. There were no more shots.
Trembling, I made myself crawl by careful centimetres to the roof's edge. Maybe the shot might had been an accidental discharge. Unlikely. The sounds of conversation were calm, in control. From the edge of the roof I could see that the emergency had been real.
And it was over.
The corpse lay sprawled and angular on the concrete apron. Dark, viscous-looking blood pooled out from beneath the dead
man's skull. Dyenisovitch stood with his heavy Stechkin pistol in hand, ready to fire again, but he wouldn't have to. Soldiers advanced cautiously in a semi-circle.
My reaction came from the reptilian brain.
He killed someone else, not me.
Lizards don't feel gratitude.
"Your men acted promptly, Captain." Dyenisovitch put away his gun. "You have my thanks."
"Glad to be of help." The soldiers' officer turned toward his men. "He ran as soon he was challenged?"
"Sir." A young soldier stepped forward, swallowing. "The photo on his ID... It didn't match his face."
"Interesting." Dyenisovitch bent over, retrieved a badge from the body. "Well observed, private. Very well done."
"Thank you, sir."
"Hmm... And the name on the ID... Anyone know the real Brezhisnki?"
No one replied, and of course they wouldn't, because I remembered the exact words that Lenin Beard had said to me, minutes before they shot him: "I've a Kowary Podgórze worker's pass, the full ID, in the name of Brezhinski." It was intended for me to use, a fake identity, a new worker somehow added to the checklist, but nobody real.
It had been cold enough before. Now there was a chill like Death breathing over me. There was betrayal, and I needed time to think the implications through, but the first thing was to escape from this place. Now every soldier's nerves would be on edge, and they'd search the place minutely because the dead man might not have been alone.
Dyenisovitch went down on one knee beside the body, as if genuflecting in church, going through the pockets, finding nothing. He rose, muttering something to the captain.
Immediately, the captain swung round and pointed: "You and you, get a heavy van here. Sergeant, form a detail, eight men."
"Sir."
"You'll be taking the body to Katowice."
"Yes, sir."
So Dyenisovitch would be leaving with a military escort and one corpse, and my escape route was blown to hell.
Shit goddamned bloody shit.
Well excuse me, but tucked inside my shirt was this paper tape with its precious encoding, a pattern of punched holes that could maybe save a million lives... and I was stuck on this exposed rooftop facing fatal hypothermia, and no way home.
Dyenisovitch walked over to the Lada, opened the passenger door to withdraw his case, opened that, and pulled out a map. He walked over to the sergeant, asking a question, handing over the map. The sergeant unfolded it, then traced out a route with his fingertip. Dyenisovitch nodded.
He's left the passenger door open.
My heartbeat was firing like a machine gun.
No. Are you totally fucking insane?
But they were going to sweep this place at gunpoint, over and over until they were sure the plant was clear of infiltrators.
Nuts. Mad. Crazy.
And I crawled to the other side of the roof, looking for a place to climb down.
ELEVEN:
KOWARY PODGÓRZE, December 1962
They dropped the body once, putting it inside the van. Then the sergeant slammed the rear door shut, and...
Do it.
...I walked across the concrete towards Fyodor Dyenisovitch's Lada.
Don't stop.
The passenger door remained open, and that was my target. The soldiers' eyes followed me but Dyenisovitch was watching the van. I passed close to him, less than two feet, and he paid no attention.
Absolutely no attention.
For God's sake, Fyodor, don't look.
You know I'm an atheist, right? But reaction to stress is a matter of upbringing, and there's always a part of you that reacts with prayer, denying the inevitable. Right now I was invisible to Dyenisovitch. Maybe you've heard of a neurological phenomenon called blindsight, when blind people show unconscious awareness of images – with a part of their brain that's unable to communicate with consciousness. Dyenisovitch's mental state resulted from the reverse effect, a specific hysterical blindness that psychologists label negative hallucination – the inability to see what's there, just like the last time you couldn't see your keys lying right in front of you – but which Manny Silverberg calls the Ghost Transformation.
(It's funny when you see it on stage, and some poor guy thinks objects are floating by themselves, because the hypnotist carrying the objects is invisible, but only to the trance subject. The audience, seeing everything, fills the place with laughter.)
Dyenisovitch couldn't see me, but twenty guns were a matter of degrees away from aiming at my body. One shout was all it would take, and I might never hear the bullets that killed me, ripping through my spine, exploding in my brain.
Fucking insane.
Well of course, but God, if I survived this, it would be a classic. Only one person wasn't looking at me, and that was Dyenisovitch, but his absence of reaction was the thing that might save me. Who would dare to get into a GRU officer's car other than a colleague?
Or an invisible man.
The van was ready, and a covered jeep was taking up position in front of it, engine idling. It looked as if we were going to form a convoy.
They're going to fire.
My heartrate wasn't just fast, it was choppy, and I could no longer use my voice, so if Dyenisovitch's conditioning was fading there was nothing I could do about it. A disembodied voice would fling him into a state of confusion, and then the gunfire would start. I lowered myself into the passenger seat, and tried to sit unmoving. The upholstery felt cold. I was shaking, though coated with sweat.
Oh Fern oh God oh Fern.
Dyenisovitch slammed my door shut.
Without looking at me, not even once, he walked around the Lada and got in the driver's side, pulled the door shut and started the engine and switched on the lights. Then the van beeped its horn, and we all rolled into motion: jeep, then van, with Dyenisovitch taking up the rear, while up on the roof, a pair of eyes looked down.
Good luck, my friend.
The eyes glinted green as our headlights swung across them and then the cat disappeared in the darkness. Good luck, Ivan. Dyenisovitch accelerated, his eyes never turning towards me, the ghost who sat beside him.
In front of us, a barrier swung up, gates swung open, and we drove out into a night-shrouded wilderness, an eerie snowscape reflecting the moon.
As the journey continued, Dyenisovitch's eyes began to flicker towards my side of the car. It was past three a.m. and everyone was getting tired, apart from me: I had the fear of death to keep my eyelids open. The boot would have been safer.
My favourite memory of Uncle Isaak was a series of events from before my birth, a story I'd heard often. It concerned my maternal grandmother's white cat Snowy, and the time my father and Uncle Isaak tried to kill him. Snowy was a rangy tomcat whose ear began to swell with cancer. My father and Uncle Isaak popped Snowy into an empty potato sack, put the struggling sack inside the boot of Uncle Isaak's old Chevy, and drove from my grandmother's house near Cape Cod, some five miles to a deserted stretch of the Massachusetts coast, where steel waves smashed across the pale beach. Uncle Isaak stopped the car, and looked into my father's eyes.
Both men nodded, then got out of the car, walked around to the boot, raised the lid—
"Jesus Christ!"
"My God."
—and a white demon came spitting and clawing out of the darkness, ripped its way between the two men and tore into the countryside and was gone, leaving remnants of sacking scattered inside the boot.
Uncle Isaak was shaking too much to drive. My father took the wheel, and they returned to my grandmother's house in silence. It was four nights before Snowy showed up at the back door, and my grandmother greeted him with: "Oh, my darling boy! Where have you been?" No one dared to tell her, not even later, when Snowy went growling to his natural grave. For my grandmother was not a forgiving woman: I think she blamed me for having a Jewish father.
(Ahead of us, the truck's brake lights shone red. We were slowing.)
But while my
father and Uncle Isaak made a hard decision, it's the memory of Snowy that I have always admired.
(Slowing now.)
Because he was a warrior-king, fighting back when death was certain, and that's how I intend to go: howling and raging, claws and fangs, ripping the Grim Reaper's eyeballs out of their sockets if he gets close enough.
(And stop.)
Then reality slammed back into place as Dyenisovitch opened his door and half-stepped out, calling out a question about the delay; and that was when I opened my own door, dropped to the snow, and clicked the door shut behind me.
Beyond the van and jeep, a tractor was blocking the road. Snow was banked up high on both sides. To the left, a mountain slope reared up; to my right, beyond the snow bank, lay a wide valley.
Doors slammed.
I wanted to get into the Lada's boot but the van's rear door was opening – hurry – and there was no time – bloody hurry – so I went over the snowbank and rolled into softness.
Oh God, they saw me.
But that was the fear talking because my movements had been quick. Very quick.
After a time, I began my descent of the slope, using a kind of crouched duck-walk. It was too dark to see, and at any moment a stone or hidden dip could pitch me down the slope, breaking my neck. But the darkness worked both ways, and unless the soldiers had a reason to look, no one would see my tracks.
By dawn, I needed to be far away from here.
It's cold.
The air was bloody cold, snow soaking through my clothes to provide a conduction path for my body's heat. As a form of death, hypothermia beats drowning in a sack, but only just. I would have to keep moving, regardless of the temptation to lie down and give up, because that would lead to a long sleep from which there would be no awakening.
At least the air was clear, none of that bastard soot to breathe.
From the roadway, now high above me, shouts sounded – my nerves tightened – and then engines grumbled as the vehicles sorted themselves out, getting the tractor out of the way to let Dyenisovitch and the soldiers continue on the road.
He'd have seen me if I stayed much longer.