From behind, someone grabbed my right shoulder, and before I could turn around, the guy had jerked my left arm behind my back.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” Before I could suggest the guy let me go a knuckle slugged me in the kidney. I grunted as the pain sparked in my spine and then my chest.
They tossed me into the back seat of a boxy car. Annie turned around in the front seat, as I gasped for air.
“What the hell?” I spat the words.
One of the guys, the short one, punched me in the ribs. I grunted.
“I’m so happy you joined Fairmont Industries as a free, unpaid consultant,” she said, smiling.
This lady—hell, none of these guys—had no idea who she was messing with.
“Where’s Viktor? Ivan?”
“I’m afraid they aren’t available.”
“What the hell?”
“You’re going on a trip to Mandaree.”
“Hell no,” I said. “I told you I’d gather the kids, but I’m not working for you outside of that.”
I tasted blood. I must’ve bit my lip when they punched me, and it pissed me off.
“You’re coming to work with us. You’re too valuable, and you’ll be a great asset. More powerful than you can even imagine.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” I said, reaching out to touch her shoulder.
She turned and stabbed a needle into my arm, and her face stretched like she was in one of those funhouse mirrors. I cussed, but my lips were putty, and though I concentrated like I always did, willing poltergeist on demand—nothing happened.
9
Katerina
I had already memorized the route to Dr. Carrillo’s dilapidated place because, after all, she was the target. My mission early on had been to get close to this quirky little scientist.
After Dr. Strong and I were sent to SRI, Dr. Carrillo began to warm up to me as planned. One night she served me a terrible TV dinner and poured vodka shots for us. She opened up with relatively little effort from me. Lonely, she told me stories of her life as an orphan, of the disappointment of never being selected by new parents because of her clubfoot. She was peculiar, with a penchant for carving bars of soap into little animal shapes. They dotted an antique glass case in her house. Elephants. Turtles. Bears. Rabbits. All in pinks and blues and greens and white. Her house smelled like soap.
I learned a lot about Dr. Carrillo during the visits that followed. I learned that she had a fortitude that embodied the American spirit. She managed to go to college on scholarship and pursued her academia with vigor. She’d become fascinated with the idea of extrasensory perception after reading books about it as a teenager.
I grew to like her, and her demeanor became softer with me than it was with the others. I wondered if sometimes she wished she had been a mother, because that’s how she treated me. Like I was her daughter and she needed to look out for me and worry for me and fuss over whether or not I was eating.
I hoped she would open her home to me after surviving the killer hands of Viktor and Ivan.
When I did find her at her flat again that day, the blood on my blouse felt dry and cracked, like chips of paint. I smelled like metal and sweat and death, and while I’d trained for this, been prepped for this, I felt shattered and nauseous.
“Katerina, dear, what happened?” She sunk onto the plastic-covered sofa.
I told her everything—the KGB, the spying, the magic tricks, and how I’d given it all up.
Her words poured out slowly. “I didn’t … know … any of this.” For a few moments, she sat nodding with a look of consternation. But after a few moments of silence, she bounded off the sofa, as if she had been pinched by a thorn.
She moved to the window, silent for a long while, surely replaying the past several months over in her head.
For being a female scientist—not to mention an unmarried one at her age, which her colleagues found peculiar—she certainly possessed grit and determination. She had to work harder to prove her intelligence than her male counterparts would. She knew that if she wanted to do her work, she needed to accept the CIA’s funding and allow for their involvement. I saw the way she bent her ethics, allowing the Department of Defense to manipulate her experiments, let them stand in and direct sessions for their own means—such as how Cord was sent to investigate Russian bases.
But she didn’t know that she was surrounded by the enemy. That Dr. Strong was a fraud and had his own agenda. That he orchestrated Charley’s test with the photo of the cabin that took her to the underground U.S. base, that Annie wanted to see firsthand their abilities—or for that matter, that Annie’s firm even collaborated with the enemy. Dr. Carrillo knew nothing of this.
She allowed me to assist in the lab, giving me unique access to crucial information. She did the same for Dr. Strong. She trusted us implicitly—until she did not. Academic intelligence brimmed in her head, yes, but she’d had tunnel vision in achieving her own prestige and pursuits.
I sat quietly on her sofa, every inch of my body throbbing, a delayed ache from my life-and-death battle in the parking lot. I watched her gaze out the window for several minutes, quiet, pensive, unresponsive. She would determine my fate, and my heart pounded.
Finally, she turned to me. “You can stay with me. I will help you.”
So I did stay. While Charley worried and Strong hunted me, I hid in Dr. Carrillo’s flat. She went to work as normal at SRI, and I shuffled along the floor without shoes, to not alert anyone of my presence. I sat on the sofa with curtains drawn, with no television, and only her physics textbooks to keep me occupied. I became madly alert at any sound, eager to hear the phone call Dr. Carrillo made each day to check on me. Three rings and she would hang up. Then she would call again. Two rings on the next call would tell me it was safe to pick up. Of course, anyone could have called between the signals and I would have been discovered, but I hoped that wouldn’t be the case. The calls were brief.
She would update me with information about the Army. She said they asked me to document what I knew of the Soviets, in exchange for freedom. To me, the calls were welcome. It was the sound of someone’s voice amid dark and lonely days. The one person who knew I was alive. I trusted her; I would tell the Americans everything, and they would protect me. At least, that was my hope.
10
Sabrina
In person, Julia still looked like a little girl. But I didn’t remember much about the time I spent with her when she was small. I just recalled long braids that draped down her shoulders. Someone at my heels, reading my books, asking questions in a voice like a kitten. I also knew she was different, more like me than anyone else in the family.
When she had climbed out of that man’s boxy car, she ran on tiptoes. It looked as if she were dancing across ice. I couldn’t believe she actually made it there.
When she had wrapped her arms around me up on the road, the physical embrace felt strange. People rarely touched me, and Julia squeezed me so hard that she tugged on my long hair.
And it irritated me.
Still, everything fell into place. Julia would be the perfect prize for the Party. She was blood, and if my own course there meant anything, Julia would do well there. Gifted beyond others.
Now, through the window of her cell, I watched her grimace and rock back and forth on the ground, holding her ears. She glanced up, saw me and screamed, “Why? Why did you lie to me?”
She hadn’t learned that every lie is born from truth. Yes, I had been treated poorly. But that was early on. Before I’d had the privilege of truly understanding the Party’s objectives.
Marxism-Leninism was a science with a sound economic and philosophical foundation. The Soviet Union and its allies would free the world from the scourge of capitalism.
Mankind had evolved from bad to worse: slavery to feudalism to capitalism. Rich owners—my father—exploiting workers for production. Marxism would guarantee the happiness of all human beings despite their innate cap
abilities. The Soviet Union and its allies would allow the working class to fulfill its destiny in overthrowing capitalism.
I assumed her experience there would go like mine. My training had moved faster than others who were far older than me. Some of them took years, but mine took only months. That’s because I wasn’t just a spy. I was a weapon. Something special, something unique.
I could easily crush the Americans. The KGB knew this, and so did I.
Julia did not immediately understand the depths of my abilities—at least not at first. I used my psychic gifts to vibrate her eardrums one more time before she took me seriously. I was just down the hall, eating lunch, when the alarm went off, telling me she was trying to use her powers. Let’s just say I ended that one pretty quick.
I’d added this ear-ringing to the repertoire of skills I’d developed at Fairmont Industries: fire-starting (or pyrokinesis), psychokinesis, telepathy, remote viewing. Julia would be capable of all these things eventually, and she would soon be able to master mind control, the ultimate resource. Outside of Henry, I’d rarely seen anyone capable of it.
When I returned to her room the next morning, Julia was in a mood. Her jaw was set, her eyes narrowed.
“Would you like some tea?” I held out a cup of hot liquid, knowing it could easily be thrown in my face. But this was the small first step toward appealing to her, taking care of her.
Julia didn’t answer, turning her head away to gaze at the wall. It would take time to convince her to understand and embrace our reasoning.
She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in eighteen hours, and I knew we had to keep her healthy to protect our investment. I did worry about her. Perhaps we could be close again.
I pulled up a wooden chair and sat across from her. She refused to look at me. Her hair hung like curtains along the sides of her downturned face. I really hadn’t anticipated her fortitude. We’d thought she was passive—that is, until she showed up at SRI. Now she was stubborn, stuck in thick mud.
Looking at her felt like gazing into a mirror, but from a decade ago.
“You remind me of myself when I was younger, Julia,” I said. She didn’t look up to see me. “I was just a few years older than you when I first arrived at Fairmont Industries, and I faintly remember feeling and looking like you do now.”
I didn’t recall the torture, though it had happened. I’d witnessed it on others since. The loud music piped into rooms for days on end. The prolonged periods of darkness. The arms and legs bound in the same awkward position for days. The beatings and the Communist mantras repeated on the loudspeaker for weeks on end. The only thing I recalled was that moment when everything became clear to me.
“Eventually, I saw that everyone in our family was a shell. I realized that capitalism made my father into the monster he was, made your mother that way. I saw that the good fight was in Communism. It was like a light bulb went off for me here.”
She looked up at me slowly, blinking. “So suddenly you thought kidnapping psychics was a good idea?” She spewed contempt. “You know they lock people up in Russia for speaking freely. Isn’t that the opposite of what you believed in?”
“I saw the purpose of a greater good.”
“No, you were better than that,” she said. “You believed in empowering women. You believed in the freedom of choice. In freedom, period. The Soviets don’t value freedom.”
This was my chance to bend her and to show her how big my heart was. I was supposed to woo her. She’d understand, but it would take time. She looked up at me with that full face, and for a moment, I saw her as a child. The round face that looked like a little heaping of sugar. The eyes that looked like it was raining. The dark hair that would always be in place with a bow or a headband. She fit the Cavanaugh way.
She shook her head wildly, like an animal, and yelled. “Greed is bad, but so is tricking and lying and tying up your niece and burning her eardrums!”
The volume of her voice made me flinch. Hang on. She was not a Cavanaugh anymore. She was an untamed animal with a mind of her own, and for a moment, a brief moment, I envied her. She was like I used to be, raw and purposeful, defiant and powerful. Now I was purposeful and powerful, yes, but maybe not so raw and defiant.
After a moment, her mood dipped to silence. Sullen, she looked at me. “Why did you trick me? Why didn’t you just send me here in the first place?”
“My father doesn’t know about this place. He only knows of U.S. research institutes.”
“Yeah, he does. I rode his train here. They have an entire passenger car dedicated to kidnapping for Fairmont Industries.”
I rolled my eyes. She thought she understood the world. She didn’t know anything. Of course, my father surely knew something wasn’t right. He’d had tips, and the operation nearly got shut down two years ago. But he didn’t know, not really. He chose to look the other way, though surely, he wouldn’t have agreed to Julia coming here on her own.
“Henry took everyone else for Fairmont. Why didn’t he take me?”
“Because Henry used mind control, Julia. And you didn’t bite. You were the only one who didn’t seem affected by it. But we knew we had to have you.”
“You say we like you were always part of this. You were taken too, Aunt Sabrina.”
I didn’t like the way she called me Aunt. She wasn’t what she seemed in the beginning, and I felt like I’d been betrayed by her original submissive nature.
I left the room, letting the door slam tight, a reminder of who was really in charge.
11
Katerina
The room was cold and stuffy, and it felt so very strange to be on this side of things. After years of being trained to view the United States as the enemy, I sat amongst them. Dr. Carrillo and her team of Army generals. Four of them sat at tables, a bank of black telephones and pads of legal paper in front of them. One of them held a phone to his ear. He said something about the 39th Signal Battalion and how it operated and maintained a network that spanned eleven countries and twenty remote sites. The other picked up the phone and I listened intently. He mentioned the words Special Forces.
“What are the Special Forces?” I asked Dr. Carrillo, who sat close to me with a gentle hand on my forearm.
“The elite forces. Superstars when it comes to hostage rescue and any kind of combat search and rescue,” she said.
“Rescue?”
“Fairmont Industries. We’re running an extraction.”
A shadow fell over me, as if I were stepping into a cold, dark cave. I knew about Julia. I knew about Fairmont. I knew the dark song playing in the background of my assignment at SRI. I had done nothing to stop it until now.
Now all of my friends were at risk. I had understood this all along, but now it seeped through my skin and plunged into my heart. “Katerina,” Dr. Carrillo’s voice startled me. Her boxy body blocked my view of the floor. “We’ll get them out safe and sound.”
I nodded slowly. Her words offered a tiny sliver of light in my cave of guilt. I didn’t know if she had really forgiven me for lying to her.
For the next two hours, I answered questions from two men in green uniforms: one was bald and the other wore gray, short-cropped hair. Their faces gave nothing away, whether they trusted my information about the Soviets and what my job entailed in spying on SRI, whether they would offer me leniency for my information and defection. My heart, however, told me this was the right thing.
“Please, Miss Bachev, tell us how this third-party company … Fairmont Industries operates.”
“They operate under the guise of a government contractor, providing lab services and staffing, but really they’re scouting and finding test subjects for the facility in Mandaree. They also used the facility to test viral weapons on human subjects. Annie Holmes and Henry Hook work for them. My own affiliation was loosely connected, because my boss—whom you know as Dr. Strong—had a unique intent to uncover SRI and CIA secrets.”
Dr. Carrillo’s brow furrowed, and one o
f the generals wrote something down on a piece of paper. He folded it and handed it to a bird-like woman standing behind him with wire glasses. She scurried off with the piece of paper.
“And this facility in Mandaree, on U.S. soil, is run by the U.S.-based Fairmont.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But it’s benefiting the Soviets.”
“Yes, sir. Using an American intermediary makes it easier to collect people. No visas, no long transportation, less suspicious. They have similar operations in other countries.”
The two men conferred quietly and then began asking questions about the layout of the facility. I told them about the area in which they broke the will of the candidates, and then the remote viewing surveillance areas.
I drew a map, and the generals took over from there. My armpits felt damp, and I worried about what was next. My heart closed up at the thought of being thrown back out in the city, where my fellow comrades could find me. Knowing I was a traitor, they would treat me accordingly. I could be thrown into a trunk again, tortured, or hauled off to forced-labor camps. Unlike the other students at SRI, I had no real psychic ability. No secret weapon. I could only hope these men would choose to give me immunity, as well as a new name and identity and a job with the U.S. government.
“Sirs, I would like to tell you that I love America very much. And I would be so very good at a job within your organization. I understand how my people think, and I know—”
The bald man threw a hand up. I felt a physical pain, a sort of panic that burned inside me. I had given up my power to these people. And now I would see whether they, too, were liars or whether they would use this information to help my friends, who were indeed in terrible trouble.
Extraordinary Lies Page 27