by Robin White
Nowek found an isolation valve and spun the wheel. The steam hissed, sizzled, spat, then went silent. Nowek breathed through his mouth. He could feel death cascade down like a shower of fine, corrupt particles. It made his skin prickle.
He saw the plastic card in the dog skinner’s waistband and gently pulled it free. The dog skinner had a name: Ivan Bezdomov, an optical engineer who once worked for Sovah. He must have kept a key to the building. He showed it to Yuri.
“An engineer skinning dogs like a savage,” said Yuri. “It makes you wonder what made him do it.”
“His pension.” Nowek pocketed the card.
A whistle came from downstairs. It was Mahmet.
Yuri said, “In five minutes the electric fence goes hot. I don’t see any diamonds. Have you seen enough?”
A yard filled with derelict diamond machinery. A squatter, a dog skinner who picked the wrong place to be. Nowek looked up at the dead man. The oil business left spills. The diamond business left bodies. “Yes,” said Nowek. “I’ve seen enough.”
Nowek came home expecting to see his father asleep in the chair, a drained bottle of medicinal vodka on the table beside him. Instead, there was only silence. He turned on the lights.
Gosplana, the tough old woman Chuchin had hired to look after him, had struck the apartment like a sarma, the autumn hurricanes that shrieked in off Lake Baikal. Instead of tearing things apart, this sarma had put them back together.
His father’s chair was empty. A clean cloth had been spread over the headrest, replacing one grown black with use. The table was cleared and polished. It glowed with a honeyed luster. Clean dishes were in the sink. The bloodstained clothes he’d rinsed out had been dried and folded. There wasn’t a bottle, a glass, in sight.
Where was Tadeus? For that matter, where was Gosplana? Not on the couch. He went to his father’s bedroom, cracked the door open enough to let in a little light, and looked in.
Tadeus was in bed, his slippers neatly placed on the floor, ready for his feet to discover the next morning. His snoring was loud and deep. Of late, his father had spurned bed, preferring to remain in his chair. It worried Nowek. He thought his father’s world was slowly closing in. First to the apartment, then the chair. The old man had fought all suggestions to sleep in a bed.
Nowek watched his father’s chest rise and fall, then looked more closely. Some of the snores were in synch with his breathing, some not. Nowek could tell a solo performance from a duet.
An almost blind musician. A deaf hydroelectric dam builder. The mysteries of love were unfathomable. Who could ever explain them? He quietly shut the door and went to the kitchen.
There Nowek turned on the electric ring for some tea, and opened the cabinet by the window. Nestled between a canvas sack of flour and a brick of tea was his binocular microscope. He took the microscope down, broke off a chunk of pressed tea and dropped it into the kettle, then went to his desk in the living room.
The desk was dusted, the papers aligned. He plugged in the scope, switched on the stage illuminator, then carefully unfolded the handkerchief he’d slid into his pocket.
The dirt from the floor of that not-quite abandoned building looked even less impressive under the microscope. The pale tan powder flecked with brown grit was transformed into a yellow beach paved in soft, crumbling plates. A few broken sheets of mica sparkled from it. In other words, a kind of common clay found on the bottom of any lake in the world. He moved the cloth to the area of darker grit.
The landscape shifted. The pale yellow beach was gone. Nowek now looked down on a field of jagged, deeply colored shards. The individual fragments were no bigger than grains of sand. Unlike sand, they weren’t rounded.
The teakettle shrieked.
Nowek got up and poured the pot full, then brought it out to his desk to steep. He selected higher magnification. The view darkened. He adjusted the lamp to throw more light.
Now he floated above the remains of a shattered stained-glass window. Some fragments were emerald green, some wine red, others amber. A few glowed with the azure blue of a tropical sea. Their edges were wickedly sharp, and that was the key.
What Russian geologist didn’t know the story? In the 1930s, the geologist Sobolev noted that the rocks of Siberia and South Africa were very similar. His reasoning was simple: If there were diamonds there, why not here?
Sobolev mentioned it to a student, Larisa Popugayeva. They were more than just academic friends. They planned a joint prospecting trip that was also to be a honeymoon, but then the war came. Sobolev died in the siege of Leningrad. Larisa survived.
In the summer of 1947, she traveled to the northern Siberian province of Yakutia. Larisa began her hunt in the rivers, where diamonds might collect. Summer came and went. Autumn was near, and the snows not far. She set up her final camp near the banks of a small river. A barge was due that afternoon to take her back to Yakutsk.
No one knows why she bothered to take one last sample. Whatever the reason, she found fragments of ilmenite, garnet, pyrope, and green diopside, indicator minerals that formed alongside diamonds. Like Sobolev, her reasoning was also simple: the more crystals she found, the closer she was to the diamonds.
She sent the barge away and drove up the banks of the river. Snow swirled around the prospecting party. The river froze solid. The indicator minerals grew more plentiful. Their source, and the diamonds, had to be nearby.
Then, in February, with the thermometer down to seventy degrees of frost, she discovered the banks of a frozen river paved with perfect crystals, still shiny, their edges new and sharp. She set off across the marsh and found a shallow, frozen lake two kilometers across. It was the mouth of an ancient volcano. The indicator crystals had summoned her straight to the first of the great Siberian diamond pipes, Mir.
The crystals under his microscope, the dirt he’d collected from the floor, were a veritable rogue’s gallery of indicator minerals. New and fresh, they could only have been left by someone who’d walked the same ground Larisa Popugayeva had walked. And like the crystals she found that day, like Galena’s diamond earrings, they were summoning Nowek to the very same place: Mirny.
MIRNY
Wednesday,
September 29
Chapter 16
The North
Kristall’s twin-engine AN-24 was the NIC-est plane Nowek had ever been allowed to sit in. The carpets were unstained. The toilets worked. The seats were upholstered in gray leather. The captain himself had ushered Nowek and Chuchin aboard in Irkutsk, and then waited while they got settled in the small VIP cabin. It was separated from the cockpit by a paneled wooden door and from the simpler accommodations in back by a red curtain.
Lieutenant Sherbakov had been exiled to the wilds of the aft cabin, which only grew wilder when they picked up a dozen returning miners in Yakutsk, capital city of the Republic of Sakha, a weightless balloon of a state kept inflated by diamond taxes.
The returning miners had stomped aboard looking like Vikings returning from a successful raid. Their shoulders were draped with net bags bursting with meat, fruit, disposable diapers, stereos. And, of course, vodka. When the plane banked, the aisles clinked with empty bottles. The party grew until celebration and riot merged, became indistinguishable.
How had men who hadn’t been paid in months been able to afford it all?
Nowek looked out the window at a rolling, empty landscape of bare mountains and struggling forest. The trees were dwindling, the open marsh of the northern tundra growing. Roads were few, signs of settlement fewer; an occasional power line, the equally identifiable one-kilometer-square clearing that marked the ruins of an old prison camp. Mirny was still half an hour away, and soon Siberia’s true north would begin. Once it did, it would stretch unbroken all the way to the polar sea.
“Are you listening to me?” asked Chuchin. He had a deck of cards out on his lap. They were smudged and dog-eared. He started to shuffle them.
Nowek turned. “What?”
“
Let’s play Durak.”
Durak meant The Fool. Nowek said, “Have you ever wondered why a game where there are no winners, only losers, is so popular in Russia?”
“No.” Chuchin shrugged. “It’s just a game. Unless you make more of it, but that’s looking for trouble. In my opinion,” he added.
“Meaning?”
“You know what they did to Volsky. You know about the building in Irkutsk. You saw what they did to someone they didn’t like. You can make a report to your KGB friends and say I did my job. It’s not like you’d be turning your back on anything.”
“It’s like poison ivy, Chuchin. You don’t cut off a leaf. You go for the roots, where everything begins, and you pull it out of the ground until there’s nothing left. The roots aren’t in Moscow. They’re in Mirny.” He lowered his voice. “Someone was feeding Volsky information. If I can find him, I might find some answers.”
“Unless they find you first. Then what?”
“Then I’ll think of something else.” He glanced out the window. The landscape had changed. The mountains were gone and so were the trees. In their place was a level marsh that went to the horizon and beyond. True north. “Those miners bought a lot of things in Yakutsk for men who haven’t been paid. Don’t you wonder how they did it?”
“It’s not my business to wonder.” He lit another Prima.
“Cigarettes might be scarce in Mirny. You brought enough?”
Chuchin looked offended. “It’s not even a question.”
“They probably have some back there to sell. It’s just a thought.”
Chuchin sighed and stood up. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it first.”
Chuchin went aft through the red curtain. Nowek pulled a book out of the seat pocket. It was Kristall’s To the Diamond Frontier!
Exclamation marks were the giveaway. The Soviets used them to inflate common things with great purpose. A photo of some poor fisherman mending a net would carry the dead weight of Fulfilling the Nation’s Demand for Fish Protein! A soldier stuck in a wooden shack on some nameless rail bridge became Eternal Vigilance Guards the Rails! At least To the Diamond Frontier! was better than To the Pole of Cold!
He opened the book. First came pictures of unspoiled arctic wilderness (Nature!). Then, scouts leading pack-laden reindeer up a shallow river. In the background? Helicopters (Progress!). Next came four pages of bureaucrats (Planning!). Those of the lowest rank held microphones to their lips. Higher up, fountain pens and telephones appeared. You could tell right away who the big boss was: he used a pen to conduct a meeting while holding a phone to an ear.
Nowek came to a picture of a young woman. Larisa Popugayeva, the geologist who had actually found the diamonds. No pens. No telephones. She held a well-used rock hammer. He turned the page. The machines grew bigger. The holes deeper. The first diamond glittered in a miner’s cupped hands. Then, that pinnacle of Russian enterprise, the hydroelectric plant.
Next came Mirny “street scenes” showing pretty girls out for a stroll (Sex!). Pretty girls getting married, pretty girls pushing baby carriages (Young Siberia!). Schools. Cultural facilities. Parks of Rest and Relaxation. Clinics. Squads of skiers joylessly marching across snow (Mirny! A Winter Playground!). Mirny. Paradise on earth, minus a few details.
The last page showed a photograph of a large white bird in flight against a frigid-blue sunset. It was a stork, and probably real, though in books like these even real birds looked stuffed, even the sharpest, brightest eye became a bead of glass.
The red curtain parted, and Chuchin returned with a carton of Marlboros, a greasy envelope filled with smoked omul, a small oily herring found only in Lake Baikal, and a wad of paper notes.
Nowek raised an eyebrow at the Marlboros. “You’re developing expensive tastes.”
“It’s all they had.” He tossed the familiar red-and-white box down. “Cartons. Boxes of cartons. And not that fake Hungarian shit. The real thing. Forget diamonds. They have enough Marlboros on this plane to buy Kristall.”
“So what did they use for money?”
Chuchin handed him the paper notes. “They changed my rubles for these. They said where we’re going, they’re all we need.”
They were veskels, company IOUs inscribed with Kristall’s logo. Legally, you could only use them in company stores, which meant Mirny. Anywhere else and they would have to be converted into something slightly more believable.
Veskels were usually issued by bankrupt companies who still had something worth bartering for. A steel company needing tires for its trucks would swap veskels with a tire factory needing steel. The tire plant needed rubber, so they’d trade steel IOUs with a plant that made elastic bands. The elastic band factory got paid in brassieres. The bra maker ended up with steel company veskels, which, if they were lucky, they could exchange for something they needed. At best, it was freelance feudalism. At worst, a game of musical chairs where anyone left standing at the end lost everything.
Marlboros, a currency second only to dollars. Yet some shopkeeper had been willing to sell his valuable cigarettes for something that he had to know was almost worthless. There was no way Nowek could make that exchange plausible. But the logical alternative, that the miners had used dollars, was even more fantastic.
Chuchin bit off some fish, crunched the bones with a thoughtful expression. “You’re hungry?”
Omul came cold smoked, hot smoked, raw, and even rotten. The best Nowek could say about these was that like him, they were a long way from home. “Not enough.”
“You know Levin is using you to find out how the stones are leaking. So long as he catches his fish, who cares what happens to the bait? You’ll still climb on his hook?”
If it meant finding Volsky’s contact in Mirny? If it meant clearing his name? If it meant finding out who had sent those gems to Galena? “Yes,” said Nowek. “I’ll climb on the devil’s own hook.”
The miners at the back of the plane roared, clinked bottles, and toasted one another. Sherbakov wondered how much they could drink and remain conscious. He wondered when Levin would show up in Mirny, and how soon they would be able to leave. One day? Two?
Sherbakov’s travel papers said he was an engineer from Sib-Auto, a mining equipment company, coming to Mirny for a survey of Kristall’s major equipment in order to “make recommendations.” It was the best cover the threadbare Irkutsk FSB office could come up with on short notice. Once, the KGB had run the entire security apparatus in Mirny. Now the FSB had to lie to get him in.
He tried to shut the din from his ears as he worked on KGB, his e-mail security program. He’d finally found the software bug that had been driving him crazy.
KGB was a kind of virus with a purpose. Once introduced to a host computer, it took up residence there. Infect two computers, or as Sherbakov preferred to say, vaccinate them, and they could communicate with one another in perfect security. The encryption program was 126-bit, making it more secure than the nuclear release codes Boris Yeltsin carried in his suitcase.
But the virus had proven to be less than reliable. Sometimes KGB worked perfectly. But other times, half the message was rendered into jibberish, or worse, sent unencoded. Test versions of KGB were encoding his own e-mail messages, plus Levin’s and Nowek’s. Now he knew where the problem was, he could correct it. Then forget Siberia. Forget Moscow. He’d be a millionaire sitting on a California beach. KGB would be his ticket to . . .
Something jabbed his shoulder. He turned.
“Hey engineer!” It was a gold-toothed miner with a half-dead bottle. He pronounced engineer with a sneer. “We’re almost there. It’s your last chance.” He sloshed the vodka in Sherbakov’s face. “This will keep your prick from freezing.” His name was Anton.
Anton’s breath could defrost a runway. Sherbakov pushed the bottle away. “No thanks.”
“You don’t care if your prick falls off?”
“I’m not worried.”
“You must have nothing to worry about.” With that, Anton stumbled back to his mates and flopped down. He said something to them, and they roared again.
Apes. Sherbakov put away his notebook and pulled out his new Game Boy. Its transparent case was tinted a color called Radioactive Purple. He played Tetris with the volume turned low. Alexei Pajitnov, the game’s creator, was Sherbakov’s hero. If a Russian mathematician could become rich with a computer, why not an FSB lieutenant?
The plane flew surrounded by the unearthly brilliance of the far north. The endless marsh below was shot through with a silver filigree of ice. Nothing, not a hill, not a telephone pole, not a tree, broke the tundra’s geometric flatness.
Chuchin leaned over to see. “Where’s all the snow?”
“Mirny is a kind of frozen desert. The world’s lowest temperature was recorded here,” said Nowek. “Minus one hundred and sixty degrees. The air has to be very dry for cold that deep. When it does rain, the water just gets locked up in the permafrost. It doesn’t go anywhere. It melts, it freezes. Nothing changes.”
Chuchin looked outside. “Something’s changed.”
Nowek leaned over. Chuchin was right. The tundra was gone, buried under mounds of bare, broken rock. Mine tailings.
Suddenly, the Antonov flew across a sheer cliff that plunged to a shadowed bottom. The AN-24 could have easily flown circles inside the vast, stepped crater. Apartment buildings crowded the south rim. They looked like a child’s set of dominoes next to the open-pit diamond mine. A tall black tower rose from the opposite rim.
The plane dipped a wing. Nowek had to fight a moment of vertigo as he stared down at the bottom of the pit. Then the wing came level, the engines throttled back, the wheels rumbled out, and they were down on Mirny’s runway, raising clouds of dust.
