Skandal (6 page)

I certainly don’t feel like someone with a good sense of right or wrong. From her cool tone, I’m not entirely sure she means it as a compliment, either. “And how do you know that?”

Cindy looks down at her lap; her lips twitch, like she’s about to tell me, but then she shakes her head. “Another time.” We reach another alcove in the maze, where she plucks a shoebox off of a desk and holds it out to me. “But the second thing it tells me is that there’s only so far you’re willing to be pushed.”

I breathe in slowly, so slow the cold air makes my teeth ache. I know what’s coming next.

“I had the field team bring this in for you. We collected these items from the dead spies we’re investigating. We need to know who these people were and why they were sent here.”

I sink into the nearest couch and balance the shoebox on my knees, trying to touch it as little as possible. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.”

Cindy settles next to me, barely disturbing the couch. “Take your time.”

My hands tingle from disuse. I’ve learned to keep them to myself in Papa’s house, where he and Valentin leave a faint trail of scrubber sound on everything they touch. When Winnie takes me to the Smithsonian museums, I’m too overwhelmed with her translation challenges to focus on the whispered conversations the tourists leave behind. Well, maybe I’ve read objects at the museum once or twice. A tour group had just gone through, and the guide had read the Old Glory plaque verbatim, so I pressed my fingertip to the plaque and quoted it back to Winnie as if I was reading it.

I learned quite an earful of unpleasant words when Winnie realized I was cheating.

Cindy gestures toward the box. “I understand that you knew one of those men—the one who exuded the extremely strong psychic ability. He had been the contact for a double agent within the State Department.”

I study the box’s contents: eyeglasses, a pillbox, a tiny notebook, a man’s wingtipped shoe. The possessions of the bloody, wide-eyed dead from the photographs.

“I am your teacher and your commander, after all. So when I choose to challenge you, or not challenge you—include you or exclude you—I need you to trust that I have my reasons for it.”

I hesitate, palms itching, nervous energy running through me. I don’t think I can trust her; not yet. But maybe, by following her orders, she’ll reveal more of what she knows about my mother. “Okay.” I like this English word: round and flexible and noncommittal. It will satisfy for now.

“Glad to hear it.” She pulls her smile back into place. “Now—what can you tell me about these objects?”

I reach for the shoe, but the moment my fingers close around it, blinding white pain fires through me like buckshot. I slam against the back of the couch. Static spirals around me in a whirling storm, blistering with cold. It feels like Papa and Valentin and Rostov all combined, needling through my skin, in and out. My throat is raw—my hand sizzles with electricity.

The office is utterly silent except for the trippy record player; Cindy stares at me with white-rimmed eyes.

“It’s been scrubbed of memories. It’s completely…” I clench and relax my hand in a fist. Is there an English word for this aggressive emptiness, like a void sucking away all thought?

“There isn’t anything you can glean from it?”

“I don’t think so.” I try to envision an edge to the vast nothingness I saw, stretching as far as Siberia in every direction. “Even my father and Valentin aren’t strong enough to erase so much. Whose was this?”

Cindy checks the folder in her lap and holds up a photograph. “Your old friend, Pavel. Apparently he was running this man as a Russian agent.” She taps the folder. “He worked in the Latin American office of the State Department for five years. The FBI opened an investigation on him a month ago when a co-worker raised concerns he might be committing espionage. Turns out, he was dropping briefcases full of classified documents next to a bench on the National Mall, and Pavel was collecting them.”

“And this is Pavel’s shoe. After he died.” Something rings inside of me, as though I am hollowed out. I didn’t truly believe the general when he told me Pavel was a powerful scrubber. But the proof is still crackling through my nerves. Could this really be my mother’s doing? Rostov demanded she build an army of psychics, and this man wasn’t one before.

Cindy nods. “Originally, we were going to bring you to his apartment so you could search the area, try to find new leads for us, but there was an … incident.”

I swallow. Incident. Emergency. Disaster.

“Someone burned it down not an hour after we removed his body. We’re lucky none of the men guarding it were hurt.” Cindy’s voice doesn’t waver, but her smile does. “The other items are from other locations where we found similar bodies. The pillbox was on a woman who’d last been seen trying to enter the NATO offices in Brussels.”

I reach for the pillbox. My pulse ricochets in my ears, anticipating another wave of bleaching noise. As my fingers circle the cold metal, white blossoms suround me. It drinks me in, swallows me into its throat of steel wool and scrapes me all the way down. The bleach rots me away, one layer of skin at a time.

But maybe I can outlast it. If I can skim just one memory—salvage one clue—

The woman curls around a telephone receiver, lying in a fetal position, stiff polyester carpet fibers stamped hard into one cheek. Her skin is mine, and it is too tight—like a cooked sausage pushing at its casing. The psychic noise pushes back on me from all sides. It’s worse now. I gain some sense that this noise has been festering for a while, but now it’s consuming me whole. It’s invaded my every cell. I am nothing but this painful, piercing noise.

I have a telephone receiver cradled to my ear, propped beside me on the carpet. “Please,” I rasp into the perforated holes. “Send someone.” My thumb strokes back and forth against the faded rose pattern on the pillbox’s lid. “Your cyanide didn’t work.”

The phone crackles with a voice tinged in frost. “You must finish the mission.”

“Please.” Speaking is so hard. I can barely feel the word pushing through my vocal cords. I’m strangled by my own psychic noise. “Please kill me.”

A labored inhalation, or maybe it’s the static in the phone line turning the caller’s breath into crackling squares of noise. “You must reach Senator Saxton.”

“It doesn’t matter.” The pillbox slips through my fingers. The carpet fibers pressing into my temple are damp, hot with the smell of copper. “It’s too late for me.”

I fling myself out of the chattering white void and choke down fresh air. As soon as I’ve let go of the pillbox, I clamp my hand onto Cindy’s wrist and let what I’ve just seen pour back out of me.

“Yulia!—” she pleads, her tone suddenly sharp and high. The tone of panic and pain. I want her to feel this pain, too. I shouldn’t be the only one subjected to such misery. She needs to know what I’m capable of, what these scrubbers are like. I won’t suffer alone—

Bozhe moi.
My anger is suddenly gone, poured out of me and into Cindy. I pry my hand away.

“Cindy—Miss Conrad—I am so sorry—” I dump the shoebox onto the ground and curl my arms around my legs, ignoring the twinge from my bad ankle. “I wanted you to see the memory, but I—”

Cindy’s breathing heavily; she runs a hand against her taut, silky hair. “No harm done.” Her eyelids flutter rapid fire. “Is—is that how you shared your findings with your KGB mentors?”

No. I was only a tarpaulin strung between trees, collecting memories like rainwater, then waiting for Rostov to wring every last drop from me. I shake my head and lower my legs back down, trying to match Cindy as she schools herself to calmness.

“Very well. It was my choice to push you.” She raises her chin, regal. “So this woman appears to be a—a scrubber, as well.”

I take a slow breath. “I think so. And she was dying. Whatever is causing the bleeding from her ears—the psychic noise—I think she was in great pain, and she tried to end it with a cyanide pill.” I tighten my hands into fists, trying to squeeze down the dark memories lingering against them. “Do you know this Senator Saxton they mentioned?”

“I’m afraid so.” Cindy stands, bracelets jangling. “Wait right here.”

While Cindy digs around in her desk, I try to keep balance on the couch, as it threatens to reel me in again. Someone laughs from behind me, a snorting sound. I peer over the edge to find Marylou flat on her back on the floor. She’s chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and her hair makes her look like she’s escaped a volcanic eruption because she keeps undershooting the ashtray by her head. “That was real groovy,” she says.

“What? You heard us?”

“Yeah. I liked what you did with your box of stuff.” Her pupils are cavernous pits, inviting me in. I can’t read the look on her face, both bleary and frighteningly incisive, and I don’t like it. “It’s like you’re reaching through the time-space continuum, you know? And, like, knotting it all together.”

I creep back on the couch. “Thanks.” The silence between us swells. “I did not … know you were down there.”

“Always.” Another heavy, crushing pause as she takes a slow drag. “Do you think we could swim in it?” she asks. Then, as if to clarify, “Time.”

Suddenly Cindy is there, peering over Marylou with a click of her tongue. “I didn’t realize you were scheduled for an INFRA session today.”

Marylou snorts with laughter again. “I’m looking in the Forbidden City—couldn’t get past their blockers without one. Following Mao around. I slide in on sunbeams and melt into his shadow, Miss Cindy. It’s
poetry
.”

“I’m sure you could do it without the ‘outside help’ if you tried.” Cindy turns away from Marylou and settles beside me again. “Project MK INFRA. Our research department had been trying to induce psychic abilities for years through the use of hallucinogens so we didn’t have to rely on psychic volunteers, but we had it all wrong—you have to have the genetic predisposition for psychic ability first. Now we’re running preliminary trials to see if it can enhance the abilities you all already possess.”

“Hallucinogens,” I repeat, still trying to process her words.

Cindy smirks. “Don’t worry, I’m not keen on letting them run trials on you anytime soon.” She opens another folder across our laps. “Senator Arliss Saxton, Congressional representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”

I page through the file. Russian propaganda led me to expect a round, white-suited Southern old boy with sinister facial hair, not unlike the man on the bucket of chicken Papa sometimes brings home for dinner, but Senator Saxton just looks tired. His face is riveted into place with deep pockmarks, and his dark hair has been splashed with white. His stockiness looks like fortification against some unseen threat.

“Congressional representative,” I echo. “Is this … significant?”

“You have more experience with scrubbers than I do.” Cindy thumbs the corner of the file. “You tell me what one could accomplish if they had control of the man who can send every NATO country to war.”

CHAPTER 6

CINDY AND I SPEND AN HOUR
mapping out everywhere they’d found the dead operatives—the possible scrubbers, with blood dribbling from their noses and ears. Sure enough, they show a steady westward progression through the NATO member states of Europe—from West Germany to France to Great Britain—and now to America leaving a trail of security incidents in their wake. An assault on the West German NATO general in the streets of West Berlin. A British aide walks onto the Tube one day and walks off with no knowledge of where or who she is. For almost every seemingly unrelated security incident to befall a government official, a dead scrubber turned up a few days later in the same city, matching the description of whoever had made the attack.

And then there’s Senator Saxton, whose dossier I muddle through. Turns out, Saxton had contacted the CIA recently with concerns that someone was leaking NATO documents—files misplaced, reports gone awry. Nothing classified, but he was concerned all the same. Then, last week, he reported an attempted break-in at his Georgetown home, and the Secret Service placed him under protective detail while the FBI and CIA jointly investigated. “Given his position and the other recent episodes,” Cindy says, “we can’t rule out the possibility that foreign agents are trying to harm him or intimidate him in some way. And if they have one of these powerful psychics on their side…”

I can fill in that blank perfectly fine. I’ve seen what a highly skilled scrubber can do. Force a man to turn a gun on himself. Drive a world leader to input the codes for a nuclear launch. I won’t let that happen again. I pore over her reports, letting myself forget, however briefly, that I might be capable of this kind of danger, too.

When we break for lunch my head is laden with so many strange words from the dossier, I can’t wait to ask Winnie for help. “There’s my little
devochka
!” she calls to me from one of the break room tables. I reel toward her—my anchor, my filter for everything mad in this new world. She hugs me for a moment before I pull away. “How’s your first day so far?” she asks me in Russian.

“Rough. But not the worst I’ve had.” I glance over my shoulder, check that Cindy is still chatting in the far corner with Donna, and tell Winnie briefly about the file with my mother. Her lips draw tight as she listens.

“I can’t blame you for being upset. But these people are only trying to keep the country safe—you can’t blame them for doing their job, for following the rules.”

I want to believe her, but her voice is flat, as if she’s said these words before. I may still be learning English, but I know the sound of something you have to convince yourself of. “What about Cindy? Do you trust her?”

Winnie’s eyebrows lift. “She’s tough—just the right kind of ruthless we need. I don’t agree with her methods sometimes, but I can’t argue with her results.”

“But do you trust her?” I ask.

“As much as I trust anyone.” She takes a breath like she’s about to say more, but the door swings open, and Papa, Valentin, and two others enter the break room. Valentin’s stare softens when he sees me. He circles around my chair and rests his palms on my shoulders, murmuring a sweet nickname for me in Russian before planting a kiss on the crown of my head. All the nervousness and fear that’s been skittering through me vanishes with that touch. I smile and lean back in the chair.