Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  They had seemed to believe he was a spy who had infiltrated the Soviet Union to make contact with Andrei, one of their most eminent scientists, in an effort to convince him to defect so that the West might plumb his brain and steal the secrets of Soviet advancement. His spying, they said, went back to his and Andrei’s shared years at Oxford. He was, they seemed to believe, an agent of the British government, in league with the Americans.

  He had the sense, even as his interrogators alternatively yelled and coaxed, kicked and stroked his psyche, that there was far more going on here than he was aware of. He wondered what the hell Andrei had done, what plans had been made, what contingencies put in place, before he tipped that goddamn chess piece over on the board.

  They had put literally hundreds of pictures on the table in front of him, grabbing his hair and forcing his head down to them until the images blurred beyond recognition. It was years of him and Andrei, the annual meetings on the border, the travels they had taken to various places around the globe. More than a few made him recoil, for they had been taken at very private moments with various women. He had been nauseated after that, wondering if any moment of their friendship had been free of the stain of surveillance. There were, he had to admit, some photos that compromised his protests of innocence—with the British Foreign Minister, with various high-ranking politicians both British and American. Useless to try to explain that he himself was a politician and these people were in his natural milieu as a man of wealth and head of a company with far-flung interests.

  Then the bald man with the badly scarred face who had been his main interrogator slid a picture of Pamela in front of him and said, ‘She is spy too.’ It hadn’t been a question, but Jamie had denied it nevertheless. She was safe in Ireland. They could not touch her there. At least he prayed they could not. The picture had been taken outside his own home, when the two of them had been working in the garden together, in those autumn days while she had waited for Casey. Still, the idea of them watching her made his blood thick with rage.

  When they had not received the answers they wanted, they had become more inventive. Time had stretched itself out to unbearable lengths, the nights as long as a month. But he did not have the answers within him and could not give them what he did not have.

  He had been dumped in the camp, secured behind machine guns and high, barbed wire tipped fences after a full two weeks of ‘persuasion’. By that point, he could hardly tell up from down and thought he might well die if he wasn’t allowed to sleep.

  It took time to get his bearings. He had needed sleep first, and food, and then to get through the shock of what had happened. He wasn’t a big enough fool not to have a realization at the back of his mind that this was always a threat, that both he and Andrei had known they were playing with fire. Still, the reality was far different from the most vivid of imaginings.

  There had been no way to tell where the camp was, for he had been unconscious for the duration the journey. As best as he was able to make out, they were some distance south of the Karelian Isthmus—and not so far from the border then, leastwise not as the crow flew. The Karelian Isthmus was originally Finnish Territory, but Finland had lost part of it to the Soviets during the four month Winter War that began in November of 1930. The closest city was Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, the Venice of the East, raised from bog and forest by Peter the Great. But ‘close’ in Russian terms was measured in hundreds of miles across unforgiving terrain and weather that could turn on a dime from blisteringly hot to a cold that could shatter bones.

  The camp had been built around the remnants of an ancient monastery. The chapel had been all but destroyed under the godless regime of the Soviets, but the huge bell tower that rose from one corner still loomed over the camp like a dark specter. The monastery was hollow, some walls entirely gone, leaving behind cobwebbed cells through which the wind howled on chill nights.

  He and Andrei had played their game one time too often. Knowing the risks, he had played the fool to a very high cost. Because one day you could be anchored securely in the world with home and friends and family, anchored by love and tradition and familiar roads and pathways both literal and figurative, and then the next day, without warning to either yourself or those who loved you, you could vanish like smoke upon the air, leaving no trace in your wake. It wasn’t as though this was a thing peculiar to Russia, for every country, every town, every lonely forest road had that same ability to swallow people whole, telling no tale on its unmarked ground, in its silent buildings. But Russia had swallowed millions entire, held the bones and mute cries of untold numbers who would never be found, who would sink into the soil, whose bones would become porous sieves and leave no trace for those who might one day seek answers.

  It was how he felt himself, porous, made of some amorphous material, as though he were slowly ceasing to exist in the real world. Locked away here, surrounded by a dark fairytale wood, as though he and all who lived here were under the enchantment of a dark sorcerer. Except this was Russia, and therefore the fairytale would not have a happy ending.

  His one stroke of luck was the sort of camp to which he had been assigned. It was a logging camp, immured in the dense boreal forests that covered northern Russia. Many years before, Jamie had spent a summer working in the coastal forests of British Columbia. It had been hard, dangerous work, and he had loved every minute of it. He was no stranger to hard work, had found in the past it served the dual purpose of keeping his spirits on an even keel and allowing him to escape the mind for the brute pleasures of the body. He had always been an avid sportsman as well, so that his muscles and flesh were not averse to hard, long hours. Here in the prison camp he spent twelve hours of his day in the forest, felling trees by hand, partnered with an old man who wielded a crosscut saw like it was a tinker toy. He kept up that first day through sheer stubbornness, his muscles screaming in protest and his flesh exhausted beyond comprehension. At least he knew the work. Still, it had taken two weeks of cutting above quota to gain even a nod from the old man.

  The old man was also his bunkmate, along with a Georgian dwarf named Shura and a man named Volodya, who reminded Jamie forcibly of the dormouse in Alice, if the dormouse had been a clerkish entity of the Soviet Empire. They had all eyed him with great suspicion, as well they might, and had been doubly disturbed when they discovered that his ability to speak Russian was the equal of theirs.

  The huts in which the prisoners were housed were long, low buildings built of native logs, roughly hewn, chinked with moss and settling into the soil. He had been put into one of the smaller buildings, meant to contain eight inmates. There were only four of them on bunks that were nailed to the walls and fitted with thin mattresses that must have been there since the ‘30s. A cast-iron potbellied stove sat at the center of the hut, it too a relic of days gone by.

  It was here he had awakened after being thrown into the back of a truck—to find that two days had melted away. This information was received from the dwarf, who upon his awakening was standing over him with a cup of hot tea. Jamie drank it gratefully and would have even had he suspected it contained arsenic. It wasn’t any sort of tea he was familiar with, but it had been hot and fragrant and warmed the ice that had settled in his core. It had also eased the pain in his legs and arms, which made him think it was medicinal in purpose.

  Shura was the first to speak to him, and Jamie realized quickly that it was more because Shura could not keep his tongue still than from any trust of the stranger in their midst. Shura’s coloring was classic Georgian: black hair, black eyes, swarthy skin. His nature was pure Georgian too, filled with music and merriment. His was a soul that not even the camps could break. Through Shura he learned who ran the camp and who the real power was, he learned what to expect, what would earn extra rations of food and what would bring punishment down on his head like a hammer. According to Shura, the power did not lie with the camp administration, but in another dire
ction altogether.

  “Is not the camp commanders that run this place. It is Gregor. He is vor y zakone—are you knowing this term?”

  “Thieves in law,” Jamie had said, nodding his head to keep Shura on the conversational track.

  “Yes, he is real power here. Gregor says jump, we all take off our shoes and ask how high and for how long—except Nikolai—Nikolai is exception to every rule here in camp. He has been here so long he has no memory of life before, and he is hard like Siberian ground. Gregor fears no one, but he respects Nikolai and keeps his distance. The camp governor and guards fear Gregor too and so they do as they are told.”

  Jamie knew who Gregor was from the first day. He was hard to miss. Gregor was a large man, built like a predatory animal, all muscle and sinew but with flesh enough to know he was getting more than his assigned share of food. He stood firmly atop the pyramid that comprised the thieves’ society here. He was called nayk behind his back—‘the spider’—because he sat at the center of the camp’s web, feeling every shiver and tug on the strands and reaching out to strike and bite when least expected. Jamie could feel the man’s eyes on him several times a day, sending fine, primitive threads of danger down his spine. He was a man to be avoided until one could not avoid him any longer. Jamie was no fool, and so he knew that the time would come when he would have to reckon with Gregor in one fashion or another.

  He had absorbed the environment quickly, observing the various groupings and camp hierarchies, knowing that if he was to survive with his skin intact he needed to get the lie of the land as quickly as possible. The camp OC was a small, slightly oily personage with sly, lurking eyes that always looked for some infraction or misdemeanor for which he could punish one of the unfortunate inmates. Those who were not under Gregor’s keeping, that was. Those were victims of an altogether different sort of punishment, one which Jamie strove not to think about too deeply.

  The work, as hard and mind-numbing as it was, seemed to be the one thing that kept them all going, because it induced such exhaustion that one didn’t have the wherewithal by nightfall to dwell too long on the accumulated misfortunes of the day.

  Jamie asked about the old man when Shura was shaving his head. It was a necessary evil, Shura told him, to avoid the plague of lice. On the subject of Nikolai, he had shrugged in his eloquent Georgian manner and said, “Nikolai will only speak when it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise he gets by with grunts. Even the guards let it pass. Nikolai is like big oak tree that has been here so long, and is so immune to pain and fear that everyone just walks around him.”

  “And what about Vanya?” Jamie asked, curious about the beautiful youth who came each day to the forest with them to look after the horses that were used to haul the logs away and helped to serve the two-legged beasts their lunch ration. Vanya, who was disturbingly androgynous and had eyes the color of smoked violets, was also shunned by most of the inmates. He did not speak when he handed Jamie his bread, but there was something in his eyes that looked like a question, or an appeal, depending on the day.

  A funny look passed over Shura’s face and he shrugged. “Vanya is peederaz. You understand?”

  Jamie feared that he did indeed understand.

  “Peederaz is like camp whore. He is chosen by the long timers. He is at their mercy, to use as they please, to rape, to humiliate. The peederaz sleeps on the floor, he’s not allowed at the table to eat, nor in the showers when others are there. He cleans the hut and he’s forced to have sex with anyone who wants it, any time. If he refuses or complains, then he’s beaten or stabbed and then those long timers,” Shura spit to the side in disgust, “will simply move on to another victim.”

  Jamie felt sick to his core for the boy, though the situation did not surprise him. A young man who looked like Vanya was always going to attract the very worst sort of attention. To a certain extent he understood, for all his life his own face and form had brought him attention which, at times, he had been ill equipped to manage. There had been a period during his late teens and early twenties when he had been propositioned by older men on a weekly basis, merely because his beauty had made them lose their normal sanity to the point where they no longer cared what they risked. But his inclinations had not led him that way and he had broken at least one heart very badly over it.

  “Any other advice?” he asked, trying to ignore how naked his scalp felt now that Shura was done shaving it.

  Shura ruminated for a minute, mobile mouth drawn down. “Just this—ne veri, ne boisia, ne prosi.” With that he collected his tools and tucked them away under his mattress.

  It was sound advice, Jamie thought, if a tad bleak.

  “Don’t trust, don’t be scared, don’t ask.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  March 1973

  Prince of Thieves

  Jamie’s first encounter with the vor v zakonye was less than pleasant, though he had never expected tea and civility.

  He had been here six weeks and had acquired the rhythm of camp life soon enough. It was as unimaginative as the food. But under the daily routine, under all the head counts and quotas and the unvarying diet, under the exercises and obedience to regime there was a tension that simmered like the cauldron over a witch’s fire, waiting to boil over and wreak havoc.

  He had been noticed. He had expected it. One could not be a new quantity in a prison setting and not be an oddity, but when one was foreign and fair, as Shura had so succinctly put it to him, one was in for more than a normal share of attention. It was not possible to skim beneath the radar in such a place. Their lives were lived within breathing distance of each other and sometimes not even that. Privacy was a commodity that came at a very high price. One he did not have the coin for at present.

  He was walking back to his hut one evening after choking down the thin soup and hard, crusty bread that constituted supper. Though it was still bone-chillingly cold, he thought he noticed a slight warming in the temperature. The compound was long and narrow, with the vor hut sitting in the center so that one had to pass it to get from the dining hall and administration to all the other huts in the compound. There was no avoiding it, nor the harassment of Gregor and his minions if they felt so inclined.

  Rounding the corner of the long hut, it was immediately apparent that some sort of commotion was taking place. He cast a quick, surreptitious glance at the guard posts but none of them seemed to have noticed—or they were being selectively blind and deaf, because it was something to do with Gregor. Shura had been completely accurate in his assessment of the camp hierarchy. Gregor ran things and anyone who didn’t like it wisely kept his opinion to himself.

  He took in the scene in front of him. A crowd of men had the boy Vanya cornered, a dove surrounded by wolves and, like a true dove, there was nothing he could do to prevent what was going to happen. The camp whore he might be, but Jamie could see clearly that the boy was terrified.

  Vanya looked at him, desperation tightening the fine skin over his high-planed bones, and he held Jamie’s eyes for a second before he was shoved through the door of the hut. Jamie took a deep breath, trying to ignore the adrenaline that flooded through his body.

  He knew he ought to let it alone. Vanya had a role to play in the camp and earned extra bread by it. Shura had told Jamie that it was little different from how the boy had earned his bread before the gulag. It might make no difference to him how many or who. And yet… the look on that delicate face and the dense appeal in the violet eyes said otherwise. Jamie sighed and swore softly under his breath. There was no choice in the matter and little use standing out here in the snow telling himself there was.

  He strode forward and hit the door hard, braced for what he knew he would see. Jamie was no stranger to the world’s darker pleasures, nor to the odd turns lust often took, but he knew this act had little to do with desire and much to do with a violent domination that Gregor sought to impose
on each person in the camp.

  Vanya was bent over one of the rough-framed beds, his shirt in tatters on the floor, his face shoved into the reeking mattress to the point of suffocation. His pants were down around his knees, and the fragile line of his backbone stood out in sharp relief against his pale skin. Blooms of red washed the surface of his skin where he had been manhandled.

  No one turned around at his entry for they were too intent on the spectacle in front of them. Jamie moved further into the hut, steeling his senses against the reek of male lust.

  “Let him be. Surely even you can find someone more willing,” Jamie said loudly, though his knees were fully aware of the fool his tongue was making of him.

  Gregor turned, his large frame gleaming with menace, a blaze of white-hot lust smearing his features and Jamie understood at once the magnitude of the mistake he had just made. Behind him, he felt the men close ranks, blocking off any escape he might have imagined making.

  Gregor took his hands off Vanya, who immediately scrambled into a corner, huddling into himself in a pitiful effort to cover his naked form. Gregor stood and stepped closer. The heavy scent of the man’s brute carnality hit Jamie full in the face.

  Instinctively, he stepped back but was shoved forcefully forward by the men at his back. Gregor grabbed him and spun him round, shoving him up hard against the rough wall of the hut. His left arm was hiked up excruciatingly high against the ridge of his spine. It would take no more than another inch to break it. He gritted his teeth and pushed his forehead hard into the wall. There was no room to move, no space to draw a breath between him and the man that held him with such terrible force.