Again, surprise flashed across Karmanov’s face, this time because Corman knew about the safe house. “Prime Minister Gundarovsky.”
Corman sobered. “You know where he is?”
Karmanov hesitated, then nodded slowly.
“In that case, Mr Karmanov, considering the present situation, I think we have much to discuss.”
* * * *
“We’ll phone Alexander to pick us up, when we reach the station,” Valentina said, as the train approached the last stop.
“Our phones will be bugged by now,” Fenenko said. “If we contact Karmanov, they’ll know where we are.”
“What choice do we have?”
Fenenko made a show of locking the door to the guard’s compartment. “I know who the informant is.”
“You do?” Valentina said, astonished. “How?”
“I helped Demidoff. He swore me to secrecy, because we were worried about a leak,” he said, carefully repeating the script Nogorev had given him. It was part of the ruse to trick Craig into revealing how he planned to access his Swiss account.
“You know what happened to my father?” Craig demanded.
“I know who does, but he may not speak to me.”
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Valentina demanded.
“When Demidoff was killed, I thought it safer if no one knew.”
Valentina nodded understandingly. “What did you have in mind?”
Fenenko sat down and spoke in a low voice, as if taking them into his confidence. “If we go to SK headquarters, or our homes, we’ll be arrested. If we call Karmanov, they’ll trace the call back to us. However, if I call the informant, offer him a lot of money, he might give us the file and you,” he said nodding to Craig, “can give us the account information.”
“I’ll pay anything he wants!”
“Not too much,” Fenenko said, “or he’ll grow suspicious. It has to be enough to get his interest, but not so much as to frighten him off.”
Valentina saw through the window that the train was pulling into the central metro station. “You call the informant, find out what his terms are.” She glanced at Craig. “I’ll get us a change of clothes, to make us harder to identify.”
“He will have to prove the documents are legitimate,” Craig said.
Fenenko nodded. “He would expect that.”
* * * *
Craig zipped up his new black jacket and adjusted the dark sunglasses Valentina had bought him as a disguise. His new jeans and running shoes were poor quality, but were clean and comfortable and had allowed him to dump his suit in a trash bin. Valentina had changed into jeans, and had replaced her jacket with a sweater that hung low enough to conceal the Makarov semi-automatic pistol in her belt. Fenenko, also now dressed casually, waited a short distance away under a large clock mounted on the Metro station wall.
A middle aged man carrying a brief case and wearing a dull brown suit emerged from the crowd and walked purposefully to Fenenko. He wore dark rimmed glasses and appeared to be the type who might have managed a library. It was why Nogorev had selected him. The man acknowledged Fenenko without shaking hands.
“To confirm my authority,” the man said abruptly, “we know your name is Pavlya Fenenko. You work for the Federal Security Service, internal security division. Your mother’s name is Alina, your father’s name was Luka. He died four years ago. You have two sisters.” He then recited Fenenko’s FSB identification number. “Satisfied?”
Fenenko struggled not to show his surprise. He still hadn’t told his Emergency Committee controllers his name. “How did you know who I was?”
“I tell you this to prove we have authority over you. The Emergency Committee instructed the Director of the FSB to inform us who his deep cover agent was inside Sledkom. You are now under Warrant Officer Nogorev’s orders. He is the mission commander.”
“I understand,” Fenenko said, astonished the Director of the FSB himself was directly involved. He also appreciated the significance of the Director following Emergency Committee orders, considering he had been appointed by the President.
“Remember this, my name is Yarol Tupitsyn. I am the Chief Archivist of the former KGB archives. We have met three times before, on the tenth of October, on the fifteen of December last year, and on the third of March this year. Give out no other information.”
Fenenko nodded, memorizing the cover story details. “Are the others listening?”
“Of course. They can hear every word. Now, introduce me.”
Fenenko led Tupitsyn to where Valentina and Craig waited. He made the introduction with a carefully pitched degree of minimal familiarity. Tupitsyn merely nodded to them, then led them across the station to a small coffee house where he selected a table away from other customers.
When they were seated, Tupitsyn began in an authoritative tone. “I have here the complete file on an American air force officer by the name of Colonel Jack Balard. The brief case is equipped with acid, so if you try to open it without the combination, the file will be destroyed. You should also know, I am armed. The price for the file is ten million American dollars transferred into an account of my choosing. Once the transfer is made, I will give you the file.”
“Files can be faked,” Craig said, wary of a trick.
Tupitsyn looked down his nose disdainfully. “Yes, they can.” He pulled four tickets from his pocket. He kept one and placed three on the table. The others looked at the tickets confused.
“What’s this?” Valentina asked.
“Tickets for the Trans Siberian Railway. You want proof. I will show you proof, then you will give me my money and I will go to Rio De Janeiro, watch football and fuck pretty girls.”
“You’re not going to give us the file?” Craig asked.
“Do you want the file, or do you want proof?” Tupitsyn said. “You can have the file now, if you give me the money, but then I go. No proof.”
Craig hesitated. Paying ten million dollars was nothing, compared to the money sitting in Switzerland, but without proof, he would always wonder if the document was a fake.
Tupitsyn worked the tumbler locks, careful to ensure they didn’t see the combination. He opened the case, revealing an aging folder thick with papers, and stamped with the crest of the now defunct KGB. Tupitsyn lifted the cover of the folder, revealing the first page, yellow from years of aging, and pointed to a name neatly typed in Cyrillic characters.
Valentina leaned forward and translated. “It says Colonel Jack Balard, USAF.”
“Are you sure you do not want the file now?” Tupitsyn asked, tantalizing Craig with the prospect of an immediate answer, against the risk of a forgery. “Note the age of the paper. That cannot be easily faked.”
Craig studied the dry, yellowed pages, thinking they looked genuine. “Old paintings are faked all the time. I want real proof and the file.”
“As you wish.” Tupitsyn slammed the case shut and spun the locks. “Only I know the combination. Remember, if you try to open the case, the file will be destroyed. So, do we have a deal?”
“Absolutely,” Craig said.
Tupitsyn handcuffed the brief case to his wrist. “Our train leaves in fourteen minutes!”
* * * *
November 6, 2280
“Lost him again!” Zikky said, unable to find any trace of Craig Balard in twenty first century Russia.
“What does that Russian police report say now?” Mariena asked.
Zikky shook his head. “There isn’t one.”
“Did it disappear out of the memory core after the last reset?”
“Nope,” Zikky said. “It never existed in the memory core – ever! I did a molecular scan of the base encoding. There’s absolutely no trace of it.”
Mariena fell silent for a moment, deep in thought. “Craig Balard never died in Russia, in this timeline. So you never uploaded the police report of his death.”
“I uploaded something!”
“Yes, but what data in which t
imeline?” Mariena smiled wistfully. “My brother would have loved this.”
“Loved what? Confusion?”
“The causality paradox,” she said simply. “We read a Russian police report, that caused us to send a message into the past, that got Craig Balard to do something different, which saved his life, and caused the police report that triggered the whole chain of events, never to have existed – even though it caused this timeline!”
“Oh yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense!” Zikky exclaimed.
“At least we know he got your warning,” Captain Wilkins said.
“We know more than that,” Mariena declared. “We know we’re fundamentally impacting the timeline. The fact the station’s memory core physically changed from one timeline to the next proves it. The question is, what are the resets doing to our memories?”
Zikky scowled. “I remember everything we did – at least, I think I do.”
“How would you know?”
“I remember the previous timeline, because I remember the Russian police report.”
“But in this timeline, we have a dataset in the station’s memory core originating from this timeline, not the previous one. How did it get there, if you didn’t upload it? So which dataset do you really remember uploading?”
Zikky opened his mouth to speak, then sighed. “I think I need another yeast extracted donut!”
“There must be a difference between our memories and our reality,” Mariena said. “We know we’re causing tiny resets of the timeline, because we can see what happened to Craig Balard, and our tachyon sensors detected the temporal tremors. But we might also be causing partial resets of ourselves – of our memories – without ever realizing it. Just enough to keep the universe rational.”
“No way,” Zikky said. “I remember sending the messages to Balard, before the resets.”
“Yes, you need those memories for a rational understanding of where we are and what we’re doing,” she said. “But what happens when we trigger a reset that doesn’t require those memories? Or worse, that demands we don’t have them?”
Zikky swallowed. “You’re saying our memories could go the same way as the station’s memory core?”
“I don’t know, but I think we’ll have to rerun every search,” Mariena said, “through every language dataset, from the very beginning, starting with Russian. Treat it like we’re dealing with a completely new dataset – because we are!”
“But I’ve almost finished doing that!”
“No, you haven’t. You’ve barely started – in this timeline. The tachyon sensor detected a timeline reset, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So, we’re in a new timeline,” she explained. “That means the dataset in the station’s memory core is different now, to the dataset you spent four years searching in the previous timeline.”
Zikky winced. “Oh no. Do I have to re-upload everything again?”
Mariena fell silent, trying to untangle the increasingly complex causality paradox they were creating. “No, because you’ve already done it. You must have. Craig Balard’s actions occurred in our past, before you uploaded the Russian dataset in this new timeline. The Russian police report never existed, because the reset wiped it out, however, you uploaded all the Russian data that belongs in this timeline, whether you know it or not.”
Zikky laughed. “Are you serious? I did two uploads, but only remember one?”
“I think you did one upload per timeline, but your memory isn’t quite as precise about what was in the data as the station’s memory core. For time to be linear, you can only remember one of the uploads, but you also retain enough memory of the previous timelines for the universe to be rational. Maybe it’s what is required to keep the arrow of time pointing in one direction – into the future.”
“Assuming time is linear,” Zikky said. “But I’m starting to think it’s a pretzel.”
“We’ve only slightly bent the timeline. The resets are so tiny, we can barely detect them, and none of them directly affect any of us. The real question is, what would happen if we smashed the timeline to pieces? Would it force the arrow of time to double back – if that’s even possible?”
“That’d cause the mother of all resets!” Zikky said.
“If you search all the datasets now and find nothing new, then I must be wrong, and the universe isn’t as rational as I hope it is. If it’s pretzel time, then we’ll have to re-upload everything again. I just hope I’m right, to save us a whole lot of work.”
“No,” Captain Wilkins said. “I hope you’re right, because if you are, we can erase the war and save the Earth!”
Chapter 9
Present Day
Shortly before sunset, a Mi-8 Hip transport helicopter swept low over Moscow’s Presnensky District, pitching up at the last minute as it approached the block-like structure of the US Embassy building. The chopper maneuvered briefly to avoid a cluster of electronic surveillance aerials before landing on the eastern side of the roof. As soon as it touched down, Louis Rogers carrying a black brief case, followed by Alexander Karmanov and Bill Corman, hurried across to the helo and climbed in.
They barely had time to strap in before the Mi-8 took off and flew fast and low towards the city, taking care to avoid street corners guarded by armored personnel carriers. The streets were mostly quiet, although large crowds were gathering outside several key government buildings and on university campuses, where protesters even dared to show placards protesting the imposition of martial law.
The helo banked as it approached Politsiya Headquarters in Okhotny Ryad. Iron girders and scaffolding from local construction sites were being welded to overturned buses, trucks and cars, forming a barrier blocking access to the district. Beyond the barriers, regular army troops and tanks stood quietly watching, while inside the makeshift fortification, blue uniformed police officers cordoned off the approaches to their headquarters, ensuring the chopper had room to land.
As soon as it touched down, Karmanov led Corman and Rogers into the main building. They passed soldiers from the Paratroop Division who’d established sandbagged defensive positions at key points to ensure storming police headquarters would be a costly undertaking. They hurried up stairs, past a conference room that had been transformed into a command center for the government in exile, to an antechamber where Karmanov spoke briefly to several plain clothes police officers. A moment later, they were ushered into the inner office of Prime Minister Maxim Gundarovsky, who stood studying a wall map of Russia, flanked by a small group of trusted advisers.
Gundarovsky turned to welcome them, shaking Karmanov’s hand warmly. “Alexander, I hear you’ve been busy.”
“Not as busy as you, sir. That’s a lot of resistance you’ve organized in a short time.”
Gundarovsky gave him a worried look. “We are very weak. They’ve cut our communications, water and power. This building has a backup generator, but only a few days of fuel. If they decide to attack, we could hold out for an hour at most, even with General Zharkev’s troops here. It’s the civilian casualties that are holding them back. The Emergency Committee don’t want a blood bath – at least not yet.”
Karmanov turned and introduced Corman and Rogers.
Gundarovsky shook their hands. “I never expected to be glad to see the CIA!”
Corman smiled wryly. “Revolutions make strange bedfellows, Mr Prime Minister.”
“Indeed. Is your companion recovering?”
“He’s out of surgery. Detective Harriman will be flying home soon.”
“Glad to hear it,” Gundarovsky said with a warmth that immediately drew all manner of men to him. He noticed the black case Rogers was carrying. “Is that it?”
“Yes sir,” Rogers replied. “Where shall I set up?”
“On the roof,” Gundarovsky said, then led them towards the stairs.
By the time they emerged onto the roof, the sky was darkening, although the stars were not yet visible. Karmanov indicated a tab
le and chairs that had been set up in anticipation of their arrival. Rogers lay his case on the table, opened it and unfolded the collapsible dish antennae. It took the computer only a few seconds to align with the satellite lurking low on the horizon.
“What are you going to ask for?” Corman asked.
Gundarovsky looked out over the mass of people assembling around police headquarters. He knew similar gatherings were spontaneously appearing in other less important centers. They were even less well organized, but were a growing problem for the Emergency Committee. “Economic sanctions, freezing of all assets in the West, suspension of loans, and most important of all, recognition for us, not them.”
Shock waves were already reverberating around the world at the prospect of a new totalitarian regime emerging in Russia. Western countries had condemned the coup while China had remained strangely silent and the rest of the world trembled at the prospect of a new cold war.
Louis Rogers typed instructions into the computer, establishing a direct link with Washington. He then handed head phones fitted with a wrap around microphone to the Prime Minister, who slipped into the chair in front of the satellite uplink.
“Hello Mr President, this is Maxim Gundarovsky speaking.”
* * * *
Fenenko blinked as the morning sunlight streamed through the compartment window, waking him. The low peaks of the Ural Mountains dividing Europe from Asia loomed ahead. He moved slowly, stretching, until he noticed the cold erect figure of Tupitsyn sitting in the far corner, wide awake, watching him. Tupitsyn had refused to enter into conversation, preferring to remain aloof during the journey out of Moscow. He’d hardly exchanged a dozen words during the meal in the restaurant car or in the hours they’d spent in their compartment during the night. In all that time, the case containing the KGB documents never left his side.
Tupitsyn inclined his head toward the compartment door meaningfully. Fenenko gave him a puzzled look as Tupitsyn repeated the gesture. Fenenko rose and slipped quietly out, past Craig and Valentina, who were still fast asleep in their seats.
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