Skandal (12 page)

Marylou flops onto the pillows beside me. “Ready for me to knock your socks off?” She grins. “Are we close enough for you to read me?”

I fold my arms across my chest so they aren’t against hers. It’s faint, but I can hear her thoughts humming, lazy and unselfconscious. I scoot back across the floor until the sound retreats. “Now I can’t.”

“Good. You’ve let a remote viewer in your head before, right?”

I nod carefully, trying not to let myself think about the alleged mole. I have to clear my mind if I’m going to let Marylou in. Then, in a flash, Marylou’s thoughts knock up against mine. I pry back my shield enough to share thoughts with her.

Good job. Now for the fun part. Try looking back through my mind—like we’re linking our powers.

I don’t like this—I much prefer keeping our powers separated by barriers as thick as aquarium glass. This is how a scrubber takes control of someone even if they’re trained to repel them; peeling back some of my shield is how a mole might gain the upper hand. Sergei and I did something similar, back in Moscow. I learned then that distance wasn’t always enough to protect me from Rostov’s hate. I close my eyes and press back, tentative, waiting for Marylou’s syrupy shield to soak me up.

I slip into her mind. Now it’s as if I’m hovering just above her, seeing the room from where she lies. “So this is how you view.”

She giggles.
Pretty much. It gets trippier, though. Get up and walk to the other side of the room.

I stagger to my own feet, fighting to bring my vision back into where I’m standing instead of where Marylou is, but it takes some effort to swap between Marylou’s sight and my own. With Sergei, once I’d linked into his sight, I generally stayed in his viewing until our mission was finished. From Marylou’s sight, I see myself wobble and nearly trip over a box of files.

Watch it, cat, you are slated for crashville. Not as easy as it looks, huh?
I catch sight of her grinning.
Switch to your sight when you’re moving around until you get the hang of it.

All right.
I align my sight, keeping her thoughts back in reserve in my mind.
So this is it? I can see through your viewing, and you can use me to scout ahead?

It gets even better.
Through Marylou’s sight, I catch a flicker of movement.
I’ve got something in my hands. Go around the corner, then reach back through my mind to where I am and see if you can read the memories off of it.

Ah, yes—I’ve done something similar with Sergei, before, when Rostov forced me to help him examine memories beyond a locked door. But I’d done it while physically touching Sergei. This makes sense to me as the next step, but the nerves inside me frazzle all the same. I weave through the curtained maze, keeping Marylou’s viewing in the back of my head.

What’re you waitin’ for?
Marylou asks.
Go on. Show me what you got. We need you to be able to cycle easily between my viewing and your own sight.

I plunge back into Marylou’s vantage point—the sensation’s dizzying, spinning my mind unsteadily like a top about to fall over. The record music slinks into the vision; the floor feels solid like linoleum beneath me again instead of the carpet I’m standing on at the opposite side of the room.

Marylou’s pointing toward an old dimestore paperback, near her but not touching her—Nancy Drew, by the looks of it.
Come tell me what you see.

Like a ghost of myself, I imagine slipping closer and closer to Marylou. My body is like a strange cloud of energy—I can feel where it exists in the remote viewing, but cannot see it. I brush my arm against Marylou’s as I reach out like a phantom to touch the book to see if she reacts.

She twitches.
Yes, I can feel you bumblin’ around.
She smiles, lopsided.
Go on, try the book.

I brush against the book in the viewing. But there’s nothing. I don’t fall into any memories or glean any emotions. The viewing wavers. My corner of the room, wood-paneled and dark, bleeds through Marylou’s sunny corner.

Oh, come on, Jules. Hold tight for a minute more. Pretend you’re, I dunno, trying to hold your breath that extra second before you have to come up for air.

As easy as that. Right. I hold my breath and push past the waver; try to claw my way back into the viewing. Once more, I reach for the book and trace one finger along its cover—

—a sunny spring day, the shadow of the Washington Monument spilling across us as we reach up to flip the page—

—and as I lose my grip, I’m torn out of the memory, out of Marylou’s viewing, slamming back into my own skull with a head-spinning slap.

Careful, Jules, don’t give yourself a condition!
I can hear Marylou’s laugh from across the room.
Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Soon, you’ll be able to share images with the whole team and see what everyone else sees through me—trust me, it makes our work much easier. You just need practice.

And practice we do—all morning long, until the rest of the team returns, without a single sign of Anna Montalban.

*   *   *

“What a waste of time,” Donna grumbles as Al threads through the afternoon traffic. “Every single one of the NATO delegates I interviewed lied to me about
something
, but not about anything useful for our case.”

“If they’re willing to lie about one thing, are they more likely to lie about something else?” I ask.

Donna nods. “Sure, but now I know how they act when they’re lying. When it came to hunting down Anna Montalban, I’m pretty sure they’re telling the truth. At least we still have this lead.”

Yes, it took quite the battle between Cindy and Frank to follow up on Donna’s suggestion to investigate the diner that Anna had mentioned the day before. I couldn’t resist but try to frame them each in the context of a mole—Frank’s blustery, red-blooded hatred could conceal his true loyalties. Cindy, on the other hand—I’ve only started to glimpse at the deep currents beneath her frosty veneer, and I wonder what more they might contain. I wish I could forget Sergei’s warning and concentrate on the task at hand—wish I could brush it aside as carelessly as Papa brushes away anything that interferes with his carefree life.

Al Sterling turns Donna, Judd, and me loose on Connecticut Avenue, just north of Dupont Circle, a wide boulevard that reminds me of the older parts of Moscow with its thick, overdressed buildings, all of them four or five stories in height, and splashed with imperial shades of blue and gold. Streetcar cables spin a web across the sky, though the cars stopped running a few years ago. I catch an overpowering whiff of flowers—a plump woman sells them from a bucket on the street corner, a quarter for a whole bouquet. The smells of coffee brewing and bread baking and lunch frying and even leather ripening at the shoe store all mingle into a dizzying potpourri.

And lording over the whole tableau, at the top of the hill, sits the Soviet embassy. Its design reminds me a little too much of the mansion where Valentin and I were effectively prisoners of the KGB, let out of our pens under armed guard for the sole purpose of hunting down traitors. Even at this distance, I can spot the slow stride of a soldier, marking off the embassy’s boundary as he makes his patrol rounds.

A tiny, wicked voice at the back of my mind asks me why my life is any better now, marching to America’s drum. I am still hunting people for their thoughts. I can imagine Sergei taunting me, telling me I am still trying to remake the world in someone else’s vision. The doubt, however, is strictly mine.

But when I look past the rainbow landscape, the shops with overflowing shelves, the rattle and hiss of daily life that spills from every mouth and machine, I can see the difference. It’s an absence—an absence of guards, of bindings, of a rabid fear to comply. And in that absence, human will and creativity and resourcefulness have grown, unchecked, filling every possible crevice like some tenacious, lovely weed. These people refuse to be stopped. There is nothing to stop me here.

“I’m gonna park the car,” Al calls out his rolled-down window. “You kids have fun. If you get into any trouble, just give me a shout—I’ll be right around the corner.” He taps his temple.

No guards with machine guns monitoring our every step when we’re permitted out into the world, no threat of violence against my family if I make an unapproved move. Yes, I can live like this.

“I’m so excited to see what you can do,” Donna says as we wait at the crosswalk. Judd hovers behind us, arms crossed. “It’s nice to have another girl on the team.”

“What about Marylou?” I ask.

Donna sighs, ponytail swinging. “She doesn’t
count
. She almost never talks, and when she does, you wish she’d stop. She’s more of a clueless beatnik than that guy on
Dobbie Gillis
.” She peers at me from the corner of her eye, like she’s challenging me:
Don’t be like Marylou. Talk, but only in a way that amuses me.

Donna pauses in front of the big window of a men’s suit shop, watching a young man having his measurements taken, the tailor straining to wrap the tape around his sculpted chest. Donna traces her index finger along the windowpane, one curving line, then another to mirror it—the shape of a heart. But she’s gone from the window and swaying down the street in seconds, the boy already forgotten.

“I guess I don’t blame you for being shy,” she says. “I mean, Russia must be
so
different from life here. Gosh, I’m from California, and even I don’t understand Washington yet.” She smiles so perfectly that I can’t imagine that’s true. “In Los Angeles, everyone is so gorgeous, and they just want to share and share when you talk to them. I had no trouble learning anything I could possibly want to know from someone. I barely had to use my ability at all. But everyone’s
so
suspicious here.”

Maybe Washington isn’t so different from Russia in that sense.

“How about you, Judd?” Donna looks over her shoulder at the lumbering hulk. Shoulders not built for a standard-width door frame, and arms aching to escape the sleeves of his too-tight plaid shirt. In silhouette, he looks like Sergei, which sends a nervous current running down my spine. But he’s got sun-blasted freckles all over his face and arms, and his wispy hair dances like a flame in the wind.

“What?” Judd grunts. He looks down at Donna, who barely reaches his ribcage.

But she smiles, and twists the already-curled tip of her ponytail around one finger. “I imagine city life is totally different from Kansas or wherever it is you’re from.”

“Indiana.” Judd shrugs—even a simple movement from him is an earthquake. “Doesn’t matter to me where I am. I do what I was made to do.”

I don’t see that straining concentration that I usually see in dedicated mindreaders—always filtering the air around them, scooping up the thoughts of passersby and pitching whatever they don’t need. “And what is it you were made to do?” I ask.

He snorts, like a laugh with his mouth closed, and a big grin pushes up his cheeks. “You’ll see.”

Again, I’m reminded of Sergei—the hulking gait that makes me feel so fragile and tiny in comparison. Sergei could be watching me right now, a thought that chills me even further. I’m not safely behind an electrical shield.

Donna stops us at the edge of the block and checks the address of the shop front against something scrawled in loopy handwriting on her left palm. “Here we go,” she says, drawing back her shoulders. Donna, nervous? I tamp out my own spark of nerves and follow her inside the diner.

A waitress nearly runs us down, both of her arms spread wide with dishes scaling them like plated armor. “Comin’ through!” she shouts. Donna leaps back with a squeak. Another waitress glances our way from behind the low breakfast counter situated down an aisle of bright turquoise booths.

“Grab a seat wherever,” she shouts to us, gesturing with a giant glass pot of coffee.

Donna hesitates a moment, gaze sweeping across the diner, then she eases into a smile and sidles up to the counter. “Actually, I’m supposed to meet one of my big sister’s friends here.”

The waitress’s eyes flick to us from under her blue eyelids, and then turn back to the mug she’s refilling. I look over the man at the counter. He’s thin, and his suit doesn’t fit right, but he smiles just as much as he should on his lunch break, and there’s a half-finished crossword puzzle folded beside his plate. I let my shoulder rub against his as we crowd around the gap in the counter. Though I can’t make out all the thick English phrases, his thoughts flicker and swirl like any other person’s, without any sign of panic, paranoia, or deceit.

“Well, who’s your sister’s friend? I know most the regulars.” She tops off the man’s mug, and turns back to us. Her name badge reads “Peggy,” which is short for something, but I can’t remember what.

“Um, Anna, I think…?” Donna tugs at her ponytail. “She’s supposed to talk to me about typing school?”

Peggy’s smile is gone. Her mouth compresses until all that shows is her off-color lip liner. “Yeah, I know who you mean. She ain’t around right now.”

Donna throws her hands up. “Gee, that’s just swell. Can you believe my sister? Probably told her the wrong time.” Her stance shifts suddenly, like a mirror image of Peggy’s—tight mouth, curved spine, playful tilt to her head.

“You’re welcome to wait.” Peggy slaps three laminated menus onto the counter. “Herb, settle up, I got payin’ customers who need a chair.”

The man at the counter—Herb—looks up from his crossword puzzle. “C’mon, Pegs, I don’t get paid ’til Friday. Can’t you put it on my tab?”

Peggy rolls her eyes, spins to the cash register, and pulls out a coffee-stained ledger. Something passes between Judd and Donna that I’m not privy to: a thought bundled up in a shared code, maybe, or a familiar language built from running multiple missions together. I wonder if I’ll ever find that level of comfort working with them. I settle onto the sticky vinyl stool and bat away the bland memories that reach for me from its surface.

Herb shuffles off, and Judd claims his stool, pinning me between him and Donna. Donna keeps chatting with Peggy, asking her inane, pointed questions—about Anna, about other customers, about the food—everything. I can’t believe Donna doesn’t see Peggy’s irritation in the hard line of her lips and the puckered skin around her eyes. Finally, Judd orders an enormous platter of pancakes and sausage, and Peggy stalks off.