Skandal (7 page)

Is everything okay?
he asks, our shared music tangling together like our fingers: the Beatles and Dave Brubeck and
Babi Yar
all at once.
You seem tense.

I hesitate. Last night was a good night—no nightmares pulsing through the halls. No screaming. No anguish. But I know it’s somewhere under the surface, lurking, waiting for its chance. I don’t need to burden him with my troubles. I need him strong.
Just a little overwhelmed, is all.
I turn our music bright and summery.
I’ll be fine.

“Have a seat,” Winnie tells Valentin, “but we’re switching back to English.”

We both groan.

Valentin and Winnie banter back and forth about his work with the CIA’s new employee class, training them to resist his psychic assault. His English is soft and buttery, a stark reminder to me of his past life as the son of a high-ranking Party official within the Soviet Union—he can cycle through Russian, English, and German like he moves through piano chords. I mostly keep up, but the chattering conversations around us—Cindy and Donna, Papa and his friends—tug my ears in different directions like a cross-breeze whipping me around.

Winnie must notice the fake, baffled smile frozen on my face, because as soon as Valya stops talking, she turns toward me. “All right, Yulia. What do you need help with?”

Everything
, I think. “A few words from today’s reading. ‘
Yacht
,’” I say, with my best phlegm-loosening German accent.

“
Yacht
,” Winnie corrects me with a laugh. “It’s a boat. A rich-guy boat.”

I grin back at her. “
Lacrosse
.”

“It’s a sport, kind of like tennis and football combined. Let me guess, you’ve been reading dossiers on rich senators.”

“Very observant. What else was there … ‘
Adulterer’
…
‘er.’
Is it someone who is more adult than someone else?”

Winnie stops smiling and glances down at her deli sandwich. “No. It’s someone who cheats.”

“Cheats?” I ask. “Like at cards?”

“No. Cheats—is unfaithful to their partner. Like their wife.”

“Oh,” I say, my stomach sinking. “Oh.” I can’t help but glance in Papa’s direction. I’ve seen him flirt with waitresses and secretaries before, but it’s always been harmless banter, as far as I can tell—not seduction, and not warping their thoughts to his will. But Papa naturally radiates a magnetic charm that bends the whole room toward him.

He wouldn’t betray his vows to Mama. I’m almost sure of it. But I don’t take anything in my new life for granted.

Winnie pries up the soggy top of her bread and studies the mayonnaise intently. “Anything else?”

I shake my head and force myself to smile. “Every third word that Cindy says.”

Winnie grins. “Yeah, you and everyone else.”

Papa heads toward us with another man around his age who wears a fresh blue suit and a sturdy fedora, which he plucks off as he bows deeply before me.

“Yul,” Papa says, “my dear friend, Al Sterling. He helped you in Berlin—you remember?”

The man who may have sabotaged the
Veter 1
space capsule, killing two cosmonauts. I manage a terse smile. “Good to meet you, Mister Sterling.” I offer him my hand, and he kisses it—kisses it!—instead of shaking, flooding me with his cheerful Frank Sinatra shield. Valentin shifts beside me.

“You’ve cleaned up good, kid. Say, your pops and I are gonna catch a Senators game next week—whaddaya say? You too, Val. Get some good ol’ American baseball in your blood, huh?” He crunches up one knee and pantomimes what I think is a batter swinging.

“Um. Okay,” I say.

“Al and I always have a gas of a time when we watch the Senators. You’ll love it.” Papa scrubs his hand over my hair. “All the popcorn and Cracker Jacks and wild pitches you can stand.”

Al ribs Papa. “And when the Senators flop, at least there’s always the cigarette girls to watch!”

They burst into laughter. Papa’s laugh, so broad and animal, sounds foreign to me. Have I ever heard him laugh before America? At least the noise fits Al. Al is fresh-faced, with sturdy cheekbones and broad shoulders that I think I’ve heard Winnie describe as corn-fed. Maybe corn-bred. Cornbread? He smiles like he’s never had to frown. “You know, it’s just great having you on the team, Yul,” Al says. “Brightens your Papa’s day, it does. It’s really great.”

“It’s great,” I agree, wishing I could melt into my chair. I glance at Papa, wondering if I’ll get a chance to ask him about Mama, but he’s already bobbing away from our cluster like he’s gotten caught in a more interesting current.

“Well, I won’t take too much of your time. It’s just great to have you here. Oh, Val?” Al points his finger at Valya like he’s cocking a pistol. “Get back to work on that thing after lunch, will ya? I gotta head upstairs, talk to the big guy.”

I turn to Winnie as Papa and Al leave. “‘The big guy upstairs’—that means God, right?”

She smirks. “In this case, I think he means the Director of Central Intelligence, but they’re one and the same around here.”

Sterling’s jaunty Frank Sinatra shield lingers on my skin, urging us all to fly away on his aggressive cheer. Cindy Conrad appears behind me, Donna in tow, and drums her long nails against the back of my chair. “All right, Yulia, I’ve arranged a treat for you this afternoon. How’d you like to visit Capitol Hill?”

Without meaning to, my hand closes around Valentin’s; the world is only just starting to make sense to me again, with Valya’s music bolstering mine in harmony. “Could Valentin come with us?” I ask, though my words sound watery—childish.

Cindy snaps her lips into a thin smile. “I’d prefer if it were just us girls today. Yulia, Donna, me. I think you’ll be surprised what doors that’ll open for us on the Hill.”

“And close,” Winnie says under her breath. She tidies her sandwich’s remains. “I’d better get back to the translation cave. You’ll be all right for the afternoon, Yulia?”

“You can’t come with us either?” I ask, though I already know the answer. Capitol Hill is no place for her, and the look that passes between Cindy and Winnie cements it.

Valya lets his music tumble across me and brings my hand to his lips. “You’ll do great,” he murmurs, then kisses the back of my hand with far more intensity than Al Sterling could have mustered.
Ya tebya lublu.
The words whisper against my skin.

I love you.

I think it back to him, but too soon his hand falls from mine, the cold office air erasing any sign that he’d once been there.

*   *   *

I did not think I was afraid of riding in cars—not even the darkened back of a Red Army truck hauling me to points unknown, with rat droppings and a guard with an assault rifle as my only companions. I’ve ridden in the Austin-Healey while Papa tears across Georgetown with half a bottle of cognac in his belly. But these are amateur fears, warming me up for the sheer terror that grips me in Cindy Conrad’s Thunderbird.

She’s quiet; sober. But she grips her steering wheel with murderous intent, and every bulbous, pastel-colored car we whiz past ratchets her eyes just a bit wider and makes her smile a little more fierce. I’m not even sure automobiles were designed to go this fast. The windowpanes rattle and the engine hums like the drone of a distant scrubber.

Donna seems unperturbed by Cindy’s maniacal driving. She tilts her face out the window like a dog on a joyride, soaking up every last drop of sunlight she can find. The radio isn’t on, but Donna hums her own cheerful bop. Even when we reach a stoplight and Cindy’s brake work flings us forward, she keeps humming away.

There you are, Yulia.

I sit up straight as my heart slams into my sternum. I glance around me, hoping I’m imagining things; Donna’s still staring out the window at the office workers milling along the sidewalks, and Cindy is steering around the slower cars like she’s in Ronnie and the Daytonas’ “Little GTO.” Neither of them hear this very Russian voice, a voice I haven’t heard since it helped me escape East Berlin: Sergei Antonovich Rostov, son of General Rostov, a remote viewer with the ability to push his thoughts into others’ heads from afar.

My knuckles blanch white as I curl my hands into fists. Please let me be imagining this. I glance at Cindy in the rearview mirror. If Sergei’s in my head, he’s either very close by, or he’s far, far stronger than before. And if he’s much stronger … then I don’t even want to imagine what else he’s capable of. I swallow down the lump of terror in my throat.

Come now, Yulia, I know you can hear me. No need to be shy. What’s a little chat between old friends?

I sink into the calfskin seats. Though I can hear him, I don’t think he can peer past my musical shield to hear my thoughts. I feel a pressure inside my skull, as if he’s pressed up against the bone, waiting for me to push a thought past my shield where he can hear it.
The last time we talked, you said you wouldn’t help me again
, I remind him.
So we have nothing to discuss.
I turn up the volume on my shield.

Shostakovich, the Rolling Stones, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, it all sloshes around in my head, a catalytic ready to blast this presence from my mind. By fractions, the pressure eases. He’s retreating. I indulge myself one long, quiet sigh.

Then he surges back, loud and quick as a gun firing.
You’re wrong, though, Yulia. There’s so much for us to talk about now. So much that you need to know.

Desperation bubbles up in me, a consuming hunger for information from the other side of the Iron Curtain. My mother—what if he has a message from her? But I remind myself that this is Sergei. Everything he does is to protect his comfortable, safe future as a celebrated Soviet spy. He won’t help me. He can’t. I clamp that desperation down. If Sergei’s reaching out to me, then it’s surely on the order of General Rostov himself.

Panic is tightening inside me like a screw. I may not have a good reason to trust Cindy yet, but I know Sergei far too well. “Cindy?” I sit up straight, trying to force a confidence into my voice that I don’t feel. “I think I—”

I lurch forward as Cindy hits the brakes, stopping us just short of hitting a plaid-suited man who unleashes a string of unfamiliar words I know better than to ask Winnie to translate.

Foolish, trusting Yulia.
I can almost see Sergei’s bitter grin.
I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

“What’s the matter?” Cindy looks at me through the rearview mirror.

There’s a mole,
Sergei says.
We have a mole on your PsyOps team—I don’t know who.
He speaks unhurriedly, as if he were telling me about the weather in Moscow.
I’m only trying to help you, Yulia. I don’t want to see you get hurt.

He’s lying. I have no good reason to believe him.

But what if he isn’t?

I sit back. “It’s nothing.” Then, ducking my head, “I am sorry.”

Now there’s the smart Yulia I know.

Prove it to me, Sergei,
I tell him.
If you want me to trust you, you’d better do a damned good job of convincing me. Give me some evidence. Tell me—
I hesitate. Dare I let him know how hungry I am for news of Mama? But with the CIA keeping their knowledge of her hidden from me, he might be my only source.
Tell me what my mother’s doing.

Sergei laughs, though the sound is fading away. The pressure in my skull is almost gone now.
Don’t you worry. You’ll have your proof. And we can discuss it in person very soon.

CHAPTER 7

SERGEI
, I THINK DESPERATELY.
What do you mean? Sergei, how will we meet? What’s going to happen?

But there’s no answer. I no longer feel that pressure inside my skull, like the aura of an impending headache. Wherever he’s reaching out to me from—the old mansion that was our prison in the southern hills of Moscow, or perhaps the KGB headquarters at Lyubyanka Square, or even just around the corner in Washington, DC—he’s gone.

We crest a hilltop, and the Capitol’s thick white dome emerges from behind a copse of trees. Cindy jerks the Thunderbird into reverse, throwing Donna and me against the front seats again, then slams us into an empty parking spot along the street. She slings her arm over the seat and looks back at us, her face the picture of composure. “Everything all right, Yulia? You look vexed.”

Vexed
. If that’s anything like conflicted, then yes, that’s exactly what I’m feeling. I know I should tell Cindy right away about Sergei’s eerie message, mole or not. But Cindy keeps plenty of secrets of her own. She even hides her own name. And the last thing I want is to appear weak around her—vulnerable to being manipulated by the enemy.

I take a deep breath, rattling loose some phlegm in my throat. “Motion sickness,” I say. I smile, though the lie tastes vile in my mouth.
Just for today
, I promise myself. I’ll stay on my guard and get through today. Then I can talk to Valentin, and we can figure out just what I should do with Sergei’s warning.

Cindy nods, apparently satisfied. “We’ll start by interviewing Senator Saxton himself. Donna, he’s trained in shielding, but it can’t hurt to ask him probing questions nonetheless. Yulia, you can feel out his office space for any signs of foul play—whether by one of these scrubbers or someone else. We’re looking for people smuggling documents out, or snooping around when and where they shouldn’t. If any of his past visitors happen to be psychics themselves, that’d be a big red flag. If we don’t turn up any leads that way, we’ll move on to the other NATO representatives.” She yanks open her door. “Oh, and if anyone asks, you’re students at the Conrad Academy.”

“And what is the Conrad Academy?” I ask, peeling myself off the backseat where it’s stuck to my thighs.

“My school for promising young secretaries, of course.” She perches her pillbox hat into the perfect position atop her head and tugs on wrist-length gloves. “Come on, let’s not keep the senator waiting!”