Skandal (33 page)

I’m sending all the minions to the bathroom to get them out of here. Hurry, girls!
Papa calls.

The flashing bulbs resume, capturing the chaos and panic for the papers. Smoke and the smell of burning magnesium hang heavy in the air. The hair on my arms stands on end as if a great electrical storm is rolling through. The two opposing frequencies of Rostov and Papa chatter back and forth in my mind.

Donna and I chase the scrubbers out of the great hall, sending our glimpse of them back to Tony via Marylou, who reports back a minute later.
Great. I’ve IDed them all. We’ll keep FBI tied up for weeks tracking them down and looking into their associates.
He laughs.
Well done.

We’re not done yet
, I say.

On the other side of the powder room door, I can feel the crackle and hum of all of those powerful psychics; it brings me little comfort to know that Papa’s wrestled them under his control. What if Rostov gains the upper hand? “Let’s be quick,” I tell Donna. She nods and tears open her purse.

With the minions subdued by Papa, it’s easy to snap our makeshift disruptors—Cindy’s disruptor boxes attached to dog collars—into place around their necks. It closes the circuit of the disruptor so it boxes in their power, just like Larissa showed me how to do. Once the collars are around their throats it breaks the link to Papa, and they sink down to the floor, or slump against the counter. We’ll leave them here until the FBI agents move in to collect them. I wonder how much of the person they once were remains in them, in those cold stares and limp limbs and shallow, listless breaths; I force my thoughts away from imagining Valentin in this state.

Donna holds up our stack of collars that remain. “There are only eight scrubbers here.”

She’s right. The crowd of minions is far smaller than we expected.
Marylou? Tony? Who are we missing?

Your mother showed us dossiers for at least twenty-five different operatives
, Tony answers, via Marylou.

My heart is beating rapidfire; I scan the faces of the neutralized scrubbers in front of us.
So where are the rest?

We’ve got a problem.
It’s Papa. The haze in his image is gone; he stands over the slumped form of the Hound, wiping a trail of blood from his nose.
Rostov isn’t here.

Then who was controlling the minions?
Donna asks.

But I see the second figure now, unconscious next to the Hound.

Sergei.

He was controlling them instead of Rostov. I try to swallow, but it’s as if a fist has clenched around my throat and won’t let go. I knew he was getting stronger, but I hadn’t realized his powers were evolving this way.
Then where’s Rostov?

Marylou sucks in her breath.
Oh, golly gee. Oh, dag nabbit all to …
Marylou takes a deep breath.
Look out at Lafayette Square, in front of the White House.

Donna and I rush back into the main hallway to peer through the watery old glass. At first, I’m not sure what it is we’re seeing on the square. There are the usual protestors, with placards calling for everything from repealment of Jim Crow laws to release of the Kennedy assassination files to the public to voting rights for cats. But a cluster of men in suits at the mouth of the entrance gate stands out. The guards are slumped against the guard post; the gate to the White House stands open wide.

A flock of people trudge through the gate, heads lowered, shoulders drawn. A Secret Service agent rushes toward them from the White House portcullis, but then he crumples, falling into the emerald grass. In the very center of the flock, a head above the rest, I can make out the olive-green rounded hat of a KGB commander.

Major General Anton Ivanovich Rostov.

And at his side are Mama and Valentin.

CHAPTER 30

“WAIT, YULIA.
It’s too dangerous.” Donna grips my shoulder. “We can’t overpower Rostov without your dad’s help.”

But he’s deep beneath the Soviet embassy, almost a mile away. Distraction.
Maskirovka.
Rostov’s—and the Soviet Union’s—signature style. We thought the threat of war in Vietnam was meant to be a distraction for the United States. But it was a plot to distract us from
this
.

Cindy cuts in via Marylou.
Stay put, Yulia. We’re sweeping the tunnels right now, but I’ll try to dispatch a SWAT team to the White House, if they’ll take orders from me instead of Frank. There’s nothing you can do.

You think they can stop him? With an army of scrubbers supporting him?
I shake my head.
I have no choice.

But Yulia—the Death card.
Cindy’s thoughts feel thin as paper.
The more you think about charging in there, the stronger it looms in my mind.

Then I guess that’s the price I’ll have to pay.

I hobble down the grand staircase, Donna trailing behind me. The foyer is still crammed with reporters and diplomats, laughing nervously about Saxton’s collapse, oblivious to the siege taking place at the White House next door. As soon as we run onto the patio, the air around us turns sour; it’s permeated by an overwhelming sense of foreboding, like those green-tinted moments before a massive thunderstorm. Already, Rostov and his twisted herd are entering the White House, but there’s still time to stop them. I just have to figure out how.

Donna twines her golden ponytail around one finger and stares right through me, like I’m one of her psychic subjects, an orange just waiting to be unpeeled.
Come on, Yulia
, Donna says, pressing the thought just to me instead of through Marylou’s connection
. We can do this.

A tiny, taunting voice—I suspect it’s an echo of Misha and Masha and Frank Tuttelbaum, all rolled into one—tells me we can’t. That I’ll end up like the scrubbers’ victims, my sanity clinging to the fast-fraying rope that is my brain, my thoughts mangled and mauled, my mind a hollowed-out husk. I remember too clearly the taste of blood down the back of my throat, the smell of it metallic and the taste salty on my upper lip. A single powerful scrubber can wipe a mind clean. What could twenty of them do to me?

Yulia.
It’s Papa, hunting desperately through the lab as the FBI agents rush around him.
If you can block Rostov’s amplifier, you’ll have a much better chance.

But who’s the amplifier?
I ask.

Papa winces as he leafs through a file folder.
The Hound wasn’t the only amplifier—she’s an amplifier, too.
I swallow, hard, as a knot of emotions—betrayal, shock, disbelief—tangles itself tight inside my chest.
That’s why I was always so much stronger with her
, Papa says.

It was never just foresight for her, though he’d made himself forget that part. In our family of three psychics, she was always our backbone, our guardian. He’d said it himself—he was always strongest with her. And she bolstered us in other ways, too. I just didn’t pay close enough attention to the firebird feather right before me.

I can do this.
My mind is mine alone.
I thread my mantra through my thoughts, through my mental shield, through the rise and fall of my lungs. My mind is mine alone. My mind is mine alone.

But their minds—they will be mine.

Donna stays right at my side as I stride toward the black iron gate; I’m dimly aware of Judd moving our way from the Dolley Madison House, as well, where he’d been ready to start a fire emergency if our initial plan to stop the summit scrubbers went awry. Marylou, Cindy, Papa, and Tony hover in our thoughts, ready to help. I don’t have to do this alone.

I press my hand to the forehead of the gate guard, slumped inside his command post. He stares back up at me with bloodshot eyes that won’t focus. Chaotic thoughts swarm like hornets inside his head, drowning out his mind’s efforts to process the world around him, to make sense of what he’s seeing and hearing and feeling.

Cling to that image—there.
The man’s memory spits up an image of him sitting in a sunny lawn, watching his son play catch with their sheepdog.
This is you. Your memories and thoughts.
I focus on the warm emotions, the sense of peace these memories offer him. Direct him away from the negative, the fear, the pain. If I can guide him away from what the scrubber did, then maybe I can help him counteract it.
Where does this thought lead? How does it make you who you are?

Slowly, related images coalesce around the fragment. Training the dog to heel and fetch. Teaching his son the alphabet. Grilling burgers on the back patio while his wife sets the table in her flouncy Donna Reed dress. He is, bit by bit, himself once more. The noise from Rostov’s horde remains, but it’s relegated to one segment of memory, rather than infecting the whole.

Donna’s turn. “Those men and women. They weren’t supposed to pass through here. What did they tell you? What did they show you?”

His thoughts turn over and over on her words, filtering through Rostov’s lies like any other memory. “They said it’s time to relieve President Johnson of his burden. Oh, God, they wanted me to—” He swallows down a sob. “It seemed like such a good idea at the time—”

“And where is President Johnson?” Donna presses. Judd jogs up to us, face flushed and red as his freckles, but keeps quiet.

“The Oval Office. He’s scheduled to sign a non-aggression pact with the Viet Cong pending the outcome of the peace summit.”

Donna and Judd and I glance at each other; their expressions look as sour as mine feels. “Then we’d better be on our way,” Judd says.

We round the curving driveway, passing another guard, this one a soldier clutching an assault rifle to his chest as blood spills from his ears. A shiver runs down my spine as I remember Cindy’s cards, and the way her determined spin on “Death” didn’t soften the interpretation much.

A KGB officer in uniform runs down the curving staircase of the grand entrance as we step inside. “Halt! It is not permitted for you—”

Then he screams as his rifle’s ammunition box explodes. The conflagration spreads to his sleeve and up his arm, and he runs from us, screaming and flinging his flame-wrapped arm against the wall. The fire crackles and hisses.

“Frank said I was never good at following orders,” Judd says.

We reach the top of the staircase. Psychic energy hangs heavy in the air, swampy and miserable to wade through, as if it could physically force me back down the stairs by its mere presence. There’s no doubt which direction Rostov has taken them. My stomach roils like a simmering stew, and blood wells in my nose; I can’t risk walking any closer with the scrubbers under Rostov’s command.

Come on, Yul. We’ve got this,
Marylou says.

Can you give me a glimpse further down the hall? Show me what we’re facing?

I’ll do my best.

I close my eyes and reach through my mind into Marylou’s vision.

A white blur clouds our sight like a wind-whipped tundra plain. The scrubbers are phantoms looming in the mist, wisps of thought eddying around them. I push my thoughts closer, welcoming the porcupine spikes of so many scrubbers’ minds. Through Marylou’s viewing, I can trail my fingers along their arms, like rubbing my finger along the wrong side of a knife. Most of their minds are too far gone to salvage much, but I can wrest them away from Rostov’s control. It will have to be enough.

I am Slim Pickens, riding the bomb all the way down. I am Dick Van Dyke, deftly avoiding that ottoman in my path. I am James Bond, throwing the Soviet assassin from the train. I am Cathy Gale on
The Avengers
, coolly navigating a darkened room.

My mind is mine alone.

The mist draws back. The scrubbers stand in a yellow-striped, rounded room, its high ceilings frosted in molding. So many thoughts flow together, like the thin ribbons of a river delta joining and tangling into a roaring behemoth, right at my fingertips, flowing straight into Rostov.

If we can disrupt that stream, if we can break Rostov free of Mama and her amplification—

They turn as legion to face Rostov.

Rostov is clutching an older man by the throat: President Lyndon Johnson, with his rounded nose and caterpillar brows. He howls as Rostov drills into his mind; blood trickles from his ears.

Rostov’s lip curls back in a sneer. His gaunt face, like a wax statue melted and hanging off its metal wire frame, is forever seared in my memories, no matter how I’ve tried to forget. Even though I’ve been freed of his control for months, the sight of him still makes my knees buckle, as if it’s written into my DNA to bend to his will and carry out his command.

The scrubbers draw tighter around Rostov. It’s now or never, while they’re focused on the president. I pull my vision out of Marylou’s and reach into my bag. Two people to save—Valentin with the cure, and Mama with the disruptor. But I don’t know if I can fight through the scrubbers long enough for even one.

“Judd?” Donna asks. “I think you know what to do.”

He beams as we charge through the hallway and into the Oval Offfice.

The blizzard of scrubbing noise burns my skin like radiation and throbs deep in my marrow. It batters against my thoughts, relentless as the tide, but I neither fight it nor surrender to it. My mind is mine alone. I am the Star, I am a riverbed; these thoughts and feelings and commands rush over me and continue on their way.

Dimly, I hear the shatter and feel the spray of glass as Judd explodes the lights overhead. Mama. I’m staggering blindly through the torrent of noise. I sense the shift in the scrubbers around me, as Rostov’s confidence streaming through them turns to rage. I reach into the purse still hanging at my hip.

Now that I have his attention, it’ll be too much—

Give up, surrender, accept—

—I clip one of the spare disruptor collars around my own throat.

It’s only a finger in the dam, only a bandage on the sucking wound, but it holds the scrubbers at bay, a frail soap bubble of silence in a room full of pins. Only a few more feet to go. Mama is slumped forward, shoulders hunched, eyes reddened and dulled, but she looks up at me as I reach for her hand. Her smile tells me all I need to know—that this is how she wanted it. That I’m making the right future shine.