by Tigner, Tim
“You weren’t afraid of a trap?”
“Of course we were afraid of a trap, at least at first—working these kinds of jobs you’re always afraid—but we figured we were clear when the fantastic four didn’t use their AKs to improve our Pajero’s ventilation. So, Mehmet and I made the trek over the rocky terrain to the cliff-side plateau that housed the abandoned monastery.
“The small, windowless stone building to which we’d been directed looked like the sheltered entrance to a cellar, presumably the larder where the monks kept their food protected from the merciless sun. As we approached, we heard the pounding of feet and turned to see—,” Alex looked up at her expectantly.
Anna just gave him the go-ahead nod.
“To see two Caucasian wolfhounds barreling toward us from the direction of the Range Rover.
“Mehmet and I ran to the building and jumped inside to put the door between us and those murderous fangs only to find ourselves falling into darkness. The building didn’t cover a stairwell, but rather a water well. We splashed down after a five-meter drop. By the time we surfaced, the wolfhounds were barking above, furious that we had denied them instant gratification.
“Can you picture it, Anna? There I am, treading water, as shocked, scared and demoralized as is humanly possible. Then my eyes adjust and I look over at Mehmet to see that he’s smiling. He looks back at me and his smile turns to laughter. I’m thinking that he hit his head, or the heat got to him. “What’s funny?” I ask. And do you know what he says?”
“Surprise?”
“No, but that’s a good guess. He says, ‘Alex, we’re in the middle of nowhere, trapped five meters down an abandoned well, with night falling and couple of the meanest creatures on God’s green earth waiting above to devour us if we miraculously find a way to climb out of here before we drown. Absolutely nothing is funny.’
“‘So why are you laughing?’ I ask. And then Mehmet gave me the power to change my life. He said to me, ‘Alex, we’re probably going to die today. I want to enjoy myself while I still can.’”
Anna stopped to stare at the table and think about what she’d just heard. Alex let her think. Finally, she looked up at him and said, “Better vibrant than vulnerable.”
“Exactly. Of course, I didn’t get it at the time. There in the well I thought Mehmet was crazy.”
“What did you do? How did you get out?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s classified.”
“Alex!”
“Just kidding. We dove beneath the black water and discovered that the well went down another ten feet or so, which was deep enough to drown us, but not so deep that we couldn’t reach bottom. We searched through the muck and found an old rope there, presumably used to bring up water in a pail.”
“And you used it to climb out?”
“No. We put our backs together, locked elbows, and walked up the well. We used the rope to lasso the dogs. Actually, we only got one. After three slippery tries, we got the rope around its neck and then just dropped back into the well, pulling it after us. We both got pretty scratched up, but we managed to drown it.”
“Fascinating.”
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the word I would have used at the time, but Mehmet agreed with you. He just kept laughing and laughing about the ridiculousness of our situation. There we were clawed, cold, and still stuck at the bottom of a well with a monster above. It was nearly dark and we were bleeding to death. Yet all he could do was laugh as though we were a couple clowns.”
“So what happened?” Anna was impatient. It was like watching a thriller for the second time. Alex was there before her, so she knew how it ended, but she found herself tense and curious nonetheless.
“We tried the rope trick again with the second wolfhound, but that dog had learned from the first. Our legs were too tired to stay there near the top indefinitely, so after five unsuccessful attempts, we decided to leap out and fight while we still had some strength and there was a bit of light left. It wasn’t much of an option, but it was better than going back down to bleed to death below.”
“Alex, I’m trying to picture how, back to back, you leapt out of a well?”
“Well, if you’re going to get technical I suppose it was more of a lunge. That was no big deal, kind of like touching your toes but grabbing the rim instead. The tough part was figuring out what to do next. We tried to think of a way to get out without one of us becoming dinner and the other desert, but the best we could do was limit the meal to one course, hopefully an appetizer. We each wrapped our belts around our necks a couple of times to act as armor and then pushed off on “three” toward opposite sides of the well. It was fifty-fifty with the furry fangs for each of us. Mehmet drew the short straw.
“The wolfhound made a mess of him. Of all the things I’ve been through, nothing has come close to the fear I felt diving on top of Cerberus as he shook Mehmet around like a rag doll. Fortunately, there was no time for feelings. I held on until I got the rope around the wolfhound’s neck, then its mouth. My hands still have scars, but that’s it.”
“What about Mehmet.”
“The belt saved him. He outlived the wolfhound but was rapidly losing blood from a dozen deep wounds by the time I strangled the beast. You’ll recall that we were a good hike from the jeep and a long way from anywhere. As I carried Mehmet back to the Pajero, he was joking about what I should put on his tombstone: ‘All’s well that ends in a well,’ ‘but for a bowl of kibble,’ silly stuff like that. The last thing he said to me was, ‘It’s been a hell of a ride Alex … a hell of a ride.’
“He died smiling, Anna. He died a terrible way in a terrible place, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. Ever since then, when things get really tough and I’m most vulnerable, I remember Mehmet and adjust my attitude to vibrant instead. There’s no sense going out with a frown.”
Chapter 51
Academic City, Siberia
Alex awoke the next morning to the sound of the shower. He opened his eyes but the residual image of Anna’s lathered-up body remained sharply focused in his mind’s eye. He felt a tingle he hadn’t felt in … years. He sat up on the side of the cot and rested his bare feet on the cool parquet floor. The chemistry between them had been obvious from the moment their eyes met. What was he waiting for?
He stood and walked quietly to the bathroom door. Anna had left it cracked. First she had put her hand on his knee, then she had left the door cracked. He paused with his hand on the knob while the battle between right and wrong raged within. Consenting adults, carpe diem, the healing power of love: He had hurled the arguments against his conscience all day yesterday and into the night. Exploitation, false expectations, broken hearts: His scruples had deftly reflected each assault. The wall had held then. It would hold now. Alex took his hand from the knob, and retreated to his cot.
When Anna joined him in the kitchen half an hour later she was all smiles. At least his defense hadn’t hurt her game.
“I got your map.”
“That’s great. How did you manage it so early on a Sunday morning?”
“My neighbor is a geologist.” Anna unfolded the top of her tiny kitchen table, turning it from a two-seater to a four-seater. Then she rolled the map open, securing one end with the saltshaker, the other with the pepper.
Alex took a minute to get oriented. He wanted to be sure of himself. It was not the same type of map he had seen scanned onto an acetate in the Irkutsk Motorworks boardroom, and the scale was different, but the distinctive landmark gave him his bearing nonetheless. “That’s where I have to go,” he said, pointing to the right of Lake Banana.
“Oh, Alex, that’s not going to be easy. It’s not only the regional KGB headquarters, it’s within the same fence line as an abandoned power plant. It’s dangerous there, so there’s lots of security—a high fence and patrols.”
“But people do go there to work?”
“Hundreds work at the KGB headquarters. The power plant, however,” she traced her fin
ger a couple kilometers north to another complex, “Nobody in their right mind would go there.”
“Hum,” Alex thought. The words “nobody goes there” smacked of a clue, but before he could process it he noticed a sadness in Anna’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”
Anna blinked and a silent tear dropped onto the map. Then she told him about her brother Kostya, and the others who lost their lives to the radiation leak. “Sometimes people still climb the fences, ignore the radiation signs and wander back there to hunt or scavenge. They end up dying in my hospital if they don’t go straight to the morgue. If you wander into the wrong place back there, Alex, it’s, it’s beyond horrible.”
“Why would the KGB keep its office so close to a radiation zone?”
“They just finished building it a month before the accident, a beautiful new facility. I thought it was strange myself that they didn’t move it, but apparently the radiation is very contained. There are a couple of kilometers of what they call a green shield between it and the offices. It obviously works since none of the employees has had a radiation problem. We monitor them closely.”
“Green shield?”
“A forest.”
“I see.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” she suggested. Alex smiled, and before he knew it they were back in chitchat mode again. The hours flew by.
After lunch her eyes began to sparkle with a hint of intrigue and she said, “I want you to take a nap now.”
“Why?”
“Well, for starters, you’re not fully recovered yet, but the main reason is that we have a big evening ahead of us.”
“Big evening?”
“It’s a surprise. Now get some sleep.”
Chapter 52
Novosibirsk, Siberia
“Good morning, General”
“Good morning, General”
“Good morning, General”
Vasily tried to meet everyone’s eye, if only for a second, as he walked through the corridor at SibStroy. The newspaper had recently compared his glance to the green flash you sometimes see when the sun sets over the ocean. He thought that was a bit much, but it sounded good to him. Other politicians could shake as many hands as he, but he alone could recruit votes with his gaze.
Vasily was ostensibly at SibStroy for a dress inspection, but his actual intention was just the opposite. Vasily had come to SibStroy to be inspected.
He had been spending a lot of time there lately, a fact that was not lost on the workforce. They were proud that General Karpov, a man who had dozens of factories under his purview, chose to spend so much of his precious time with them. It must be personal, they reasoned, since all they made were bricks. If they only knew.
SibStroy had been making bricks for decades. They had gone through a few minor product line modifications over the years, adding designs with slightly better insulative properties or a different look, but they had never witnessed a transformation—until six months ago. That was when the Head of the Industrial Security Directorate began coming around. Vasily brought them a very different recipe—one that used a large proportion of sand and created honey-colored bricks that shimmered in the sun—and he taught them a new style of cooking.
The workers could not care less what SibStroy’s bricks looked like, so long as they were paid to make a lot of them. The new recipe was trickier than the others, and his quality control parameters were exceptionally tight, but once they put in the time it took to work the kinks out, Vasily rewarded them with a second shift. From midnight until eight a.m., seven days a week, SibStroy made Karpov bricks.
This increased productivity probably seemed odd, especially to those who learned from the railway workers that the Karpov bricks were not going to building sites, but rather to an enormous stockpile one town down the line. But the paychecks kept coming, so what did they care? After a few months of this, however, everyone understood that something big was on the horizon. It was in the air. Vasily was there today so that when he finally revealed his secret, there would be no doubt that they had him to thank.
“Good morning, General”
“Good morning, General”
At other factories, it would be most unusual for people to be working on a Sunday. At Karpov factories, however, it was the rule. Everybody still got two days off each week, just not all at the same time. This was one of Vasily’s many efficiency improvements. Like his other changes, Vasily’s modified workweek encountered resistance at first. Once the benefits of the superior productivity kicked in, however, that resistance converted to enthusiasm. The State got its quotas, the people got the surplus, and Vasily got the credit.
Vasily often used shaking-things-up as a manipulative technique. He knew that change stirred up strong emotion, and that emotion, once generated, was easy to sculpt. Therefore, he routinely riled up a whirlwind of strong emotions around himself and his projects. The formula was simple: generate passion, associate it with his name, and then ensure that the results were positive. It was a masters’ gambit, and thus far, he had made it work every time.
Throughout Siberia, General Karpov now enjoyed the popularity of a sports superstar and the admiration of a religious figurehead in a world of believers. They said he was competent, creative, and caring. Stories like the green flash didn’t hurt either. People needed their heroes.
“Good morning, General”
“Good morning, General”
Vasily picked up a freshly cast brick, a Karpov brick, and felt himself begin to glow. He held the future of the world in the palm of his hand. For now, however, he was the only person at SibStroy who knew it. Unlike Irkutsk Motorworks and RuTek, where sophisticated product lines forced him to bring management into the Knyaz loop, here at SibStroy ignorance remained his asset.
That was about to change. Soon the whole world would know that you simply needed to connect Karpov’s bricks with Karpov’s mortar to transform your building into a power plant. Be that as it may, the electrifying secret would remain grounded until he was ready to flip the switch. To figure out that Karpov bricks were solar cells and Karpov mortar a conduit, you would need to see the other half of the puzzle.
That other half was located six hundred kilometers away at a factory in Krasnoyarsk called RuTek. There, one line over from MicroComp’s latest microchip, a group of skilled workers was cranking out Karpov Controls. Karpov Controls were the power-management and storage systems that would harness and direct the energy his photovoltaic bricks collected. Yes, the pieces were all in place…
The photovoltaic brick was Vasily’s favorite project, which was why he had given his name to it. He liked it for its elegance and its simplicity. The active ingredient in the photovoltaic formula was silicon: sand. That was the genius of the PhotoZ invention. Once you knew about it, it seemed blindingly obvious. Anyone who had ever walked barefoot across a hot beach could grasp this concept, could get a feel for the power he would harness. Bill Gates might control computing power, but Vasily Karpov would control the power of the sun. He held the cheapest, cleanest, most revolutionary power source on Earth, right there in the palm of his hand. Screw Dubai, to hell with Texas; Russia would be the new Baron on this ball of dust.
“Good morning, General”
“Good morning, General”
Vasily completed the inspection of the brick plant and moved across the street to the asphalt production site. As mind-boggling an opportunity as the Karpov bricks presented, he could hardly believe that there could be more. Yet there it was—right next door. Just as homes and offices would collect their power from Karpov Bricks, so cities and towns could harvest the sun with Karpov Roads.
For all it represented, the solar asphalt wasn’t much to look at. Nor could you hold it like a brick in the palm of your hand. But the zeros would be there, and no less than ten.
Money was but a means to an end for Vasily. It didn’t interest him, so his thoughts began to wander to what did. Soon “Good morning, General” would be replaced with “Good
morning, Mr. President.” Then the real change would begin.
When he launched the new SibStroy, RuTek and Irkutsk Motorworks, the conglomerate Vasily had quietly privatized under the Knyaz AG umbrella would provide him with two of the key elements of a strategy that would guarantee him residence at the Kremlin. The first and most obvious of those was the financing necessary to run an unbeatable campaign, both in the public view and behind closed doors.
The second result of those launches, and arguably the more important of the two, was the creation of an extensive support base. The workers and families at Vasily’s factories, and the citizens and associates of the three major cities they resided in, would form the core of his base. They would seed a swell of grass-roots popular support that would blaze across the country. In no time, everybody in Russia would know that people who worked for Karpov lived better and felt better about themselves. At the end of the day, that was all anybody required of a politician. All he needed now was a dead president, and Victor was about to create one.
The Russian constitution called for the election of a new President within six months of an incumbent’s death. When Gorbachev died next month chaos would break out: the Prime Minister was not popular. Presidential wanabees would come out of the woodwork and a nasty battle would ensue, further dividing the country and adding to the mayhem. After a month or three of that, after the people and the reporters tired of the speculation and the mud slinging, Vasily Karpov would launch his product lines on the market, and spring onto the world stage. By the time the elections rolled around a few months later, he would be the very symbol of Russia’s future, a living legend, a favorite prince virtually forced to be king. If the people got their way.
Vasily had analyzed all his competitors’ possible moves and attacks with the mind of a chess grandmaster. He had every counter covered. Sure, there were secrets in his past, lots of them, but nothing that he could not deny or deflect until the election was over. It didn’t matter if they came out after that. Once he restored Russian pride and prosperity, all would be forgiven and forgotten.