Collection 4 - Kolya's Son

by LRH Balzer

  "The KGB."

  "That's ownership. They controlled him."

  "Alexander, then."

  "That's ownership, as well. I see no love in his actions. He simply made a business transaction."

  "We have no claim on him, Trish. He's not a child, he's a man."

  "I claim him. He's Kolya's son. Kolya's dead and I claim him." She let her fist pound against the table, emphasizing her words, her jaw defiant.

  "You don't care what his file says, or what we are potentially letting ourselves in for?" Norm turned so he could see her.

  Trish's dark eyes flashed. "Despite Jack's very eloquent words, I do see in Ilyusha a man who never had a childhood, who has a little boy locked away inside of him because there was no one to love him. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let that little boy die."

  *****

  He was aware of movement, of being carried, and of fresh air brushing against his fevered skin. He turned his face to the breeze, but it was gone and he sighed deep within, far from the mask of his face or the determination of his mind. Somewhere, locked inside the part of him that had almost disappeared, he wished the breeze would come back.

  Strong arms laid him back against cool sheets. His senses were drifting, unfocused; hearing, sight, taste, smell, and touch impacted his brain with sensations that he couldn't quite grasp or comprehend. When he finally realized there was a gentle motion rubbing his chest, it had stopped. A deep pungent odor was left behind to burn the over-sensitive skin. It tickled his nose. His body shook, racked in cough spasms and he was put on his side, circular motions on his back attempting to calm the convulsions. There was nothing between the sensations; they were just isolated peaks poking up through the clouds.

  His body had no bones, collapsing inward as he was raised upward to lean forward. The fit of coughing that tore at his heart stopped at last and, still upright, he rested against something firm as he tried to breathe normally.

  A damp cloth was put over his face and he recoiled, but was held firmly in place. Slowly the message reached his brain that he was not suffocating. Not choking. Not strangling. There were just cool cleansing strokes, lightly wiping from forehead to exposed throat.

  Then cold metal on his tongue. Liquid in his mouth, sweet and burning, trailing a new fire inside him, but already smoothing the rawness as he swallowed.

  He was shaking and there was no way he could stop it. His body hung suspended from whatever was bracing it and he tried to first pull away, and then when that failed, to withdraw, turning his face away from the enticing warmth and the male voice and the female voice. The man and the woman.

  What did they want? He bit his bottom lip to keep from making a sound. They were dangerous now, when he couldn't think properly. The thought pushed on his consciousness that he should find a way to stop them. He wanted his gun to blow them away, to stop the words he didn't understand and the dangerous feelings the couple coaxed from within him. The longing that had no focus. The hunger that had no name.

  His head was eased back onto a pillow and blankets were drawn up over him. The cool cloth was placed on his forehead. Fighting every step of the way, he fell asleep.

  *****

  From the well-used wooden rocking chair in the corner, Norm Graham watched the young man sleeping in Misha's bed tremble and twitch in fevered dreams. The medication should have kicked in, but Kuryakin wasn't letting it. This wasn't some plot to get you, you know. You're just sick. It happens. It probably would have happened anyway even if you didn't fall in the river. Why won't you let yourself be cared for?

  "He doesn't know how."

  Norm looked up to see his wife framed in the doorway, not bothering to question how she knew his thoughts. "Maybe. And maybe he's just stubborn. Maybe he doesn't want to be cared for. We might be trying to force on him something he doesn't want and doesn't need."

  "Look at him and tell me that he doesn't need to be cared for."

  Norm shook his head, declining the gambit. "I'm not sure that seeing is believing here." He changed the subject before she could retort. "How's Misha?'

  "He's fine. Happily bedded downstairs in the guest room."

  "Will he be okay on the main floor all alone? Maybe we should have put him in Tanya's room, and Tanya downstairs."

  "Misha thinks it's all a great adventure."

  "I'm not sure I like it. What if he needs us in the night?"

  "He will come upstairs." She moved over to the bed, adjusting the cloth and feeling the hot forehead. "How ironic... Kolya left his son alone in a country torn apart by post-war chaos, an ocean away, to survive as best he could. And you are worried about Misha sleeping just downstairs."

  "I'm not Kolya," Norm growled.

  "I know. That's why I knew you couldn't turn Ilyusha away."

  "Don't bet on it. This is temporary, Trish. I haven't made a final decision."

  "He needs us, Norm. No differently than Misha or Tony. He just hides it better, denies it, because he's never had anyone to depend on. We have to earn his trust. Did you think he would fall into our laps like a baby puppy? After all," she smiled wryly, "he is a dangerous KGB agent."

  "At last, she admits it," Norm said, his smile flickering briefly as he rolled his eyes affectionately at her.

  "I'll admit I'm tired. it's been an exhausting day, for all of us." She turned off the light and approached Norm. "Come to bed. Let him sleep. I'll check him again in a bit."

  *****

  His eyes opened in the fuzzy darkness, heavy eyelids drooping. A droning hissing sound. Shadows. Unfamiliar, indistinct shapes. Not the basement room. Not the infirmary room. He clamped down on the weary shudder at being moved again. His head was heavy, but not as bad as when they had drugged him in Vladivostok when he had returned from the assignment in Japan. That had been…

  There was no word to describe what that had felt like. A thousand words would not describe it. He had truly believed his head would explode from the pressure, or be ripped from his shoulders by its very weight.

  He wondered why he should think of the Soviet seaport now. I was on the dock when they caught me before Ic ould get back to Raskachevskiy.

  I was on the dock here...

  It was quiet in this place. As his eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, he could make out the nebulous shapes and shadows that lined the walls in varying degrees of black. A darker line indicated a door left partially open, through which he could hear a faint snoring sound. A guard who had fallen asleep? But there were no lights except for the equipment...

  He drifted until the soft glow on the wall to his right caught his attention. He carefully turned his head toward it expecting to see some sort of medical or security apparatus monitoring him. Instead he slowly focused on an illuminated face staring back at him. A bodiless head with a grinning face. Two big round eyes. Two huge black ears. A big black nose.

  A shining rat. Startled, the shudder broke through his weakened mental restraints, followed by an audible gasp. He stared transfixed at the ghastly phenomenon, unable to fathom its purpose.

  Footsteps. His name called quietly. The woman.

  A bed lamp was turned on, revealing more depictions of the monstrous rat dancing on the wallpaper, dressed in red shorts with big yellow buttons. Stuffed versions of it lined one shelf. A poster of it posing with a female rat hung from the wall. It was even on the red curtains, its leering hideous face peering from the folds.

  The woman sat down on the edge of the bed and felt his forehead and the sides of his face, then put a thermometer in his mouth and went away. A few seconds -- or minutes -- later, he wasn't sure which, she was a back with a damp cloth. "Your fever doesn't seem to have broken, Ilyusha," she said softly, checking the thermometer, "but it's not as bad as it was. How are you feeling?" She placed the coolness across his forehead.

  Was she not aware of the rat? Or was this all a hallucination from the drugs they had fed him?

  She followed his eyes to the bookshelf. "You're in Misha's bedro
om. We brought you here so we could take better care of you. There's a vaporizer on, that's the sound you can hear. It is so the air will be easier for you to breathe. And since it muggy out tonight, the air conditioner is on as well... That's Mickey Mouse you're looking at. Have you never seen Mickey Mouse before?"

  "Misha... mish?" he asked in Russian, his throat aching from the words.

  "No, not Misha's mouse. Mickey Mouse. He is a cartoon character that my little boy loves. Have you heard of Disneyland?"

  He nodded, still staring at the various renditions of the rat/mouse throughout the room. How could a child sleep with all of this? -- Why am I in the child's bedroom?

  The woman pulled back the covers a little and boldly unbuttoned his night shirt. There was a folded cloth beneath it, over his chest. She lifted it, too, and he shivered as the cool air made contact. She reached to the table by the bed, opened a jar, then removed some salve and put in on his chest, rubbing it in the slow circles he vaguely remembered from earlier. He watched her hands, but the scent made his eyes water and she tilted his head up to look at her.

  "This will help you breathe easier, too. Your lungs are congested." She put the cloth back and buttoned the shirt, then drew the covers back in place, tucking them around him until he was warm again.

  The cloth on his forehead was drawing the pain away. He let it pull him away, too.

  *****

  Monday, June 26

  Norm Graham lost himself in the affairs of U.N.C.L.E. and the world during most of the day. He could hardly help it. Not only did he have to deal with intelligence involving major world crisis -- the problems in Berlin, the threats of the Soviets to resume A-bomb testing, the problems with Japan, China, and South Korea -- but just today a query had come across his desk from the White House after the President had become ill with a 'mysterious' virus within twenty-four hours after the Soviets had sent the Kennedys a fluffy white dog.

  Pushinka, the offspring of Strelka, the famous Soviet space dog, had arrived at the White House on Wednesday, delivered by Soviet Ambassador Menshikov. She was the result of a request from Jacqueline to Khrushchev in Vienna during a lull in conversation when the First Lady frankly admitted she had run out of anything else to say.

  By Thursday, the President had become ill, with a temperature of 101.6. Now the CIA wanted to know if U.N.C.L.E. was aware of any research on toxic viruses the Soviets might have planted on the dog to infect the President.

  Graham tossed the report across his desk disgusted at all this Soviet paranoia. Of course, the Soviets were investigating biological warfare -- so was the U.S. for that matter. But it seemed to have escaped them that the children, Caroline and John-John, had played with the dog without any ill effects. Not to mention that the rest of the White House staff had been exposed to it.

  According to Mercer's investigation of the physician's reports, the President had a mild respiratory virus that had caused him to cancel his appointments on Thursday and most of them on Friday. Probably the same virus that had been making the rounds of Washington for a week, that Misha had brought home from day camp, and that Illya had come down with on Sunday. It had nothing to do with the damn dog. Sometimes his colleagues across town needed a swift dose of reality.

  Mid-afternoon brought an unexpected visitor to the door of his office. While Waverly may have had no intention of coming until Thursday, he apparently had sent another emissary almost immediately.

  "This should be a surprise," Graham shook the hand of U.N.C.L.E.'s chief physician and psychologist, well aware of what the man's presence indicated, "but somehow it isn't."

  Sam Lawrence grinned as he released the hand. "Naturally. You know our boss pretty well."

  "If you're here for what I think you're here for, he didn't waste any time. I only spoke with him yesterday. Kuryakin?"

  "What else? He thought I might be some help."

  "Well, I won't say no to any help I can get. Did you evaluate him in New York?"

  Lawrence shook his head, his eyes roving over Graham's office. "No, and that itself is interesting, don't you think? Waverly never let on he was there. You'd think a brand new potential agent, fresh from the Soviet Union, scared to death and under all kinds of stress, could use a little medical attention, but I never knew he had Kuryakin until yesterday afternoon. He gave me a short briefing and let me see a surveillance film of when Illya first arrived at headquarters, plus I looked over the reports sent in from your office."

  "The intelligence tests?"

  "Those, the psych tests, and the ones from your armory. And the simulator film -- which looks like an interesting exercise, by the way. I'd like to check it out before I leave. We don't have anything like that at the main office yet. Did one of your boys design it?"

  "The research boys built it, but O'Connor had much to do with the design."

  "How does it work? -- Oh, never mind. I won't understand it, anyway. Back to Kuryakin -- I've never seen nor spoken to your guest in person."

  "My guest," Graham said, a trifle sarcastically. "I suppose you could call him that."

  "I've been told you've had some doubts about the danger he might be to your family."

  "Do you think he's dangerous?"

  "Hard for me to answer that without seeing him in person, but based on his tests, Waverly's evaluations, and the films I've seen, I'd guess that the risk, while certainly there, is minimal."

  "What makes you say that?" Graham asked with interest.

  "Mostly his reactions -- there's no denying he's a trained gunman. I expect he's extremely dangerous with the right provocation, but he's not proactively aggressive."

  "Pardon me?"

  "Sorry. When he's startled or frightened in personal situations, be doesn't react aggressively. He doesn't react with offensive moves, even in a defensive situation. Look at the way he reacted when the crowd moved in on him in the simulation room. He withdraws, he pulls back, he yields. I think you'd have to push him pretty hard to get him to make an aggressive move in a personal situation, as opposed to a combat one. He's been trained to respond instantaneously in those cases, as you could see from that combat film -- I've never seen such hair-trigger reactions. It's almost as if he has a switch inside him."

  Lawrence finished his survey of Graham's office and leaned back in his chair. "Fight or flight is the name of the psychological response to fear. It looks like most of the time Kuryakin has that switch set to flight."

  "But watch out when it's set to fight, right?"

  "You could say that." The doctor stretched his long legs and nodded his acceptance of the drink Graham was pouring.

  "Somehow that's not very reassuring."

  "It shouldn't be. He shouldn't need that switch at all in personal situations. He can't function that way for any prolonged period -- it's very high stress. I don't like to think of the kind of environment he must have been in to produce that coping mechanism. But, it's obvious he hasn't been able to survive without it for quite a long time -- long enough that he's having trouble letting go of it. We need to get him past that fear of ordinary situations, to the point that he trusts his personal environment."

  "We've tried to do that. It hasn't worked." Graham rubbed his forehead in weary frustration, dropping into his chair. "I almost feel like it's a lost cause, Sam. We've talked to him, we've told him he's safe --"

  "And I bet you feel you could talk to him all day, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

  Graham sat up, his eyes wide on Lawrence, surprised the psychologist actually understood him. "Exactly. He sits there, this neutral expression on his face, nods his head, and doesn't believe a word I'm saying to him."

  "Naturally. You're approaching this all wrong."

  The Washington U.N.C.L.E. chief froze, and then slouched back in his chair. "Thank you very much."

  Lawrence laughed. "Sony. I can see you have the best intentions in the world. Unfortunately, good intentions aren't going to get you very far here. It's going to take some work to get Il
lya past his problems. If you want to do this, and have the time, I'll go over the game plan."

  Graham sighed, glanced at his daybook and the heavy schedule waiting for him, and sighed again, closing the folder. "I like the young man, so far as it goes, but I won't risk my family's safety for him. I don't count the swing he took at me on the dock. Hell, I backed him into a corner and demanded that he obey me, when he was scared and not too rational. I know now that he was feverish. But this insecurity he has, this constant mistrust? We can't seem to get him past it, and I don't think there's anything we can do that will get him past it, Sam.

  "I think it's time to call it quits, but Trish," Graham shook his head in exasperation, "she won't hear of giving up on him. He's the son of an old friend of hers, and she has a soft spot for the boy." He met Lawrence's eyes frankly. "I don't know... If the KGB hadn't gotten their hands on him, if we'd come across him when he was younger, I wouldn't have had a qualm about taking him in." He shrugged. "But it's a moot point. My reservations aside, he's going to have to do something far more incriminating before Trish could accept sending him away. I've agreed he can stay with us until he is well enough to move to the Safe House, but I'm not comfortable with any commitment past that."

  "That's why I'm here, to offer some suggestions."

  "Shoot."

  "First of all, you're going to have to change the way you treat him."

  Graham frowned. "We've treated him fine. Been very open and up front with him. Given him complete freedom to go or do whatever he wants. Asked him to tell us whatever he wants. Why the hell are you laughing at me?"

  "Because you've been so blind. What do you expect him to do with all this freedom?"

  "How the hell should I know what he wants? He certainly hasn't told me."

  "How could he? Has anyone given him that kind of freedom before? Does he even have the vaguest idea what to do with it? Has he even let himself want anything beyond personal survival? Does he know what you think he should be doing? What you expect him to do? What he wants to do? You've thrown him a tremendous responsibility and he doesn't have a clue how to handle it."