by Darcy Fray
As the car reached the crest of the sloping hill, an old farmhouse came into view. The taxi stopped a few feet short of the front door. The driver remained in his seat with the engine running and his eyes locked on the house. Gordon assumed this was his cue to exit. He stepped out into the bitter early morning air, which involuntarily stole his first breath. He made his way along a freshly shoveled path to the front door and knocked. Footsteps approached, deliberate and sure.
The front door opened. It was his father.
“Son.” the General pulled Gordon through the door and held him in a tight embrace. An unspoken understanding bound them -- someone was missing from this reunion. Gordon tried desperately to hold back the tears, but it was a battle not easily won.
The General released Gordon and stepped back to take a proper look at him. There was no mistaking the adoration he felt for his son.
“I’m so proud of you, Gordon.” The General pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the tears that silently streamed down Gordon’s face.
Gordon had been waiting his whole life to hear those words spoken by his father. Their absence had driven him to succeed.
“I guess you know I have some questions?”
“And I’m ready for them all. Come have a seat.” His father led him to a long wooden table with communal bench style seating. Gordon took a place opposite his father and looked around the small rustic farmhouse. An antique wood stove in the open-style living room threw off a hospitable warm glow. A worn sofa, an armchair and a few scattered side tables and shelves completed the minimalist furnishings.
The General poured two shots of Peter the Great’s Zarskaya vodka. Gordon raised his glass.
“Budem zdorovy,” the General said as their glasses clinked.
“I didn’t know you speak Russian.”
The General poured two more shots. “When in Rome.”
“Tell me about Mom. Everything.”
The General took a mournful deep breath as if he were about to relive the dreaded moment. “We were heading out to Uncle Mike’s for Christmas. Mom looked beautiful, she had on that red dress she loved so much. There was a car pulled over on the side of the road just before you cross the Colorado River heading into California...on the I-40. The driver was a man, about forty-five years old...he flagged us down. He was dressed in business attire...I didn’t even think twice about whether to stop or not. I pulled over, told Mom to wait in the car and I got out to help him. I walked over to his car and he seemed friendly enough. He said his radiator had overheated and asked if I had any water or coolant. I bent over the car engine to take a look, and that was the last I remember until I woke up sitting in the driver’s seat of my car...in the river.” The General swallowed hard. He had little experience recounting the tale, and even three years later it still felt raw.
“Was Mom next to you...when you woke up?” Gordon reached across the table and placed his hand on his father’s arm. It was a small gesture, but it helped his father continue.
“No...she was gone. I came to and the car was fully submerged and filling up with water rapidly. Your mom’s window was rolled down and she was gone. I undid my seatbelt and tried opening my door and window, but they were both jammed, so I swam out the open window on her side. The water was murky, like swimming through pea soup, but I just kept at it.” The General poured himself yet another shot and threw it down. “We had just had some bad storms, so the river was flowing fast and it was cold. I kept looking for her, but I was drifting with the current and I couldn’t see a thing. I swear I looked for hours and I damn near died of hypothermia.” The General looked to Gordon for a sign of approval.
“Mom couldn’t have been in any better hands.”
“That’s not the whole story, Gordon.” The General hung his head.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I knew something was up. I stumbled upon something at work that I wasn’t supposed to see. Nobody was supposed to see it. Nobody. It was unthinkable.” The General shook his head. “I didn’t know what to do and I brought it to the attention of the wrong guy. He told me to forget about it, but I guess he could sense that was just not going to happen. Everything took a turn there. I was followed. I’m pretty sure they were keeping tabs on Mom too. I never told her. I never should have told anyone. She’d be here today. It’s my fault.”
“What was it, Dad?”
“Almost four years ago, I discovered that a cabal within our federal government was planning a dirty bomb attack on the Qualcomm Stadium on Super Bowl Sunday. The fingerprint on the bomb was going to point to Iran. I’m assuming the plan was to use that intel as a pretext to go to war.”
“Dad, you know I would never doubt your word, but that’s a serious accusation. The U.S. government killing its own citizens?” Gordon had never been a political guy. He came from a long line of Republicans, but chose to register as an Independent and embarrassingly, hadn’t even bothered to vote in the last election. Despite his disinterest in politics, growing up on a military base had given him a heightened sense of patriotism. The scenario his father had just related to him seemed unimaginable.
“Believe me, it’s not something I ever expected to see. I spent my whole life working to protect the citizens of the United States and then I find that a contingent within our own government is planning to kill them?”
“Why didn’t you tell Mom?”
“Because your mom was too good and too trusting. Hearing something like that would have destroyed her entire belief system…I suppose it did anyway.”
Gordon rose from the bench, rounded the table and took a seat next to his father. He pulled his father’s head to his chest. The General collapsed. The pain he had suppressed for years surfaced. Gordon had never seen his father like this. An emotionally repellent man, the General, was now sobbing in his arms. It was an odd feeling, a child consoling a parent.
After a prolonged embrace, the General pulled away, hanging his head in shame. Crying with both poise and grace required practice -- something he had little of. The General sniffled as he roughly wiped away the tears on his shirt sleeve.
Gordon did his best to overlook the emotional outburst, aimlessly glancing around the room. It seemed the noble thing to do. “So Dad, where have you been all this time?”
“A better question is, where haven’t I been? I went to Mexico for a while after the incident. I anonymously alerted the FBI to the Super Bowl suitcase nuke and I supplied just enough intel to be taken seriously. Security was so tight by the time the Bowl came around, you couldn’t get a pocket knife past security. I’ve spent every waking moment looking for Mom and hunting down the men responsible for her death...I’ve watched your life unfold from afar. I just want you to know that you’ve given me my only moments of joy and pride over the past three years. I’m so proud of you, and you know how proud Mom would have been.”
The General lifted his bleary-eyed gaze, seeking his son’s affirmation. Gordon simply offered a quick nod. His head was a befogged mess of emotions and questions. It was as if his mouth was a tiny door that simply couldn’t accommodate the deluge of sentences waiting to exit. The room fell into a clumsy silence, eventually broken by the General.
“Son?”
“Sorry. It’s a lot to absorb -- Mom, the Super Bowl, the government. So what is this mess I got myself wrapped up in?”
“It runs deep. My investigation led me to an organization called Veritas Bellum. I found we had mutual interests. The disappearance of Dmitry Zolkin and his wife Sarah popped up on our radar almost immediately. Veritas has a long history of exposing suspicious deaths and disappearances of prominent scientists and Dr. Zolkin certainly fit the profile. You made the association between Zolkin and the Dust, West Virginia disappearance for us. It wasn’t something that anyone else had connected. We assumed Zolkin was killed after he discontinued his work at the Central Investigation Institute for Special Technology. Once FSB, always FSB.”
“Can I trust John?”
“John is a pawn who thinks he’s a king. He’s stuck in the middle of a much bigger battle that he knows nothing about.”
“Is that a ‘no’?”
“It’s a ‘don’t trust pawns’...or kings, for that matter.”
“Do you have the journal here, Dad?”
The General rose from the bench and walked over to a small side table next to a tattered old armchair. He opened the top drawer and pulled out Dmitry’s journal and a typed translation. “The original in Russian, and a translation.”
Gordon began to read.
•••
The Year 1986 - Russia
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s reactor number four suffered a catastrophic power increase, leading to explosions in its core, which released large quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, spreading over much of the western Soviet Union and Europe. Nuclear scientists had previously assured Gorbachev and Soviet leadership that their nuclear reactors were completely safe, leading to finger pointing and a general distrust in the technology. The KGB was tasked with collecting the best minds in the USSR and directing their energies toward solving their country’s looming power crisis. The KGB plucked the leading scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow Power Engineering Institute, Moscow State University, Tomsk Polytechnic University and Saint Petersburg University.
Dr. Dmitry Zoltov’s name appeared very near the top of the recruitment list. He had been a professor at Saint Petersburg State University in the physics department for six years, and his polarizing theoretical work was widely known. Due to the unyielding demands of Soviet leadership, the post-Chernobyl recruitment process was actually a compulsory enlistment. “No” simply wasn’t an option and before long, Dmitry was conducting his research out of the Saint Petersburg branch of the KGB’s Central Investigation Institute for Special Technology. Dmitry was quite familiar with Sarah’s disdain for the KGB and he made the difficult choice to withhold the details of his involvement from her.
His teaching schedule was cut in half to just two morning classes and his afternoons and evenings were spent at his new research lab, #22, at the Institute. The KGB’s willingness to cater to his every whim and desire appealed to Dmitry’s hungry ego. It was a research scientist’s dream.
His Dusha experiments began at a very basic level. He believed that every living creature had a soul, so he started small. Hundreds of mice entered Dmitry’s laboratory alive and left dead over the course of those first few months. Fellow researchers at the Institute, who already thought Dmitry’s work odd, referred to him as the “The Grim Squeaker” due to the high volume of mouse corpses produced by his research.
Those doomed mice were connected to every machine, probe, wire, contraption and gadget both known and unknown to man. Ultimately, their means of execution was a 150 mg/kg dose of sodium pentobarbital and they spent the last five minutes of their lives slowly slipping into a coma-like state, followed by a quiet death. All in the name of science, or at least that’s what Dmitry kept telling himself.
As a physicist, Dmitry had spent very little time working with creatures, whether living or deceased, and playing the role of executioner, combined with the lack of positive results, began to wear him down. His remedy was vodka and his self-prescribed dosage was high.
Sarah saw the signs immediately. It was so unlike Dmitry to lose his patience with her. When she confronted him one evening, he completely broke down and told her everything. At first she could barely contain her furor. How could he lie to her about something like this? Her feelings of anger and betrayal soon gave way to reason, when she realized he had little choice but to work with the KGB. She made him vow to never withhold anything from her again, no matter the perceived consequence.
Coming clean with Sarah lifted a huge weight from Dmitry’s shoulders and offered him a fresh perspective on his research. He began experimenting with a modified version of Kirlian photography, a technique that had been around since the late 1930s, when Russian engineer Semyon Kirlian accidentally discovered this particular phenomenon in his lab. In Kirlian photography, the subject is in direct contact with a film placed upon a charged metal plate. The resulting photograph depicts the subject’s bioenergy or aura, which presents itself as a fuzzy glow around the subject. In one famous experiment, a section of a leaf was torn away after the first photograph was taken, and a faint image of the missing section remained when a second photograph was taken -- almost as if the soul, or Dusha, of a living thing outlived its own shell.
Dmitry developed a high-speed version of electrophotography in order to determine the exact time Dusha left the body upon death. The mice in the experiments were outfitted with a wireless device called a Neuroprobe, which measured their brain activity in real-time. After the sodium pentobarbital was administered, the mice generally succumbed within five minutes. Dmitry considered their clinical death to be at the moment they ceased to have brain activity. Combining the electrophotography with the Neuroprobe data proved to Dmitry that there was a distinct change in the mice’s auras when photographed before and immediately after death. Interestingly, he found that the shift in aura occurred at exactly 0.33 seconds before brain activity flatlined, in 99% of the mice. Dmitry considered this shift to be the result of the soul departing the body and believed it may help explain near-death experiences.
The 0.33-second time discrepancy, in which the body continued living beyond the presence of the soul, fascinated Dmitry. Were the soul and the brain still in communication during that third of a second? Dmitry was not a religious man, but a spiritual one, yes, clearly...perhaps what appeared to be 0.33 seconds here on Earth was really an eternity for the soul? What if in that fraction of a second, the soul as a separate entity still had access to all of the memories stored within the human shell? Those who lived to love would be eternally rewarded with the beautiful memories of their lives, while those who dwelled in states of hate, fear and envy would be subject to reliving those experiences for eternity. Heaven and Hell.
Still, none of this explained where the Dusha went upon death. The spiritual implications were powerful, but did not represent the type of power the KGB was interested in. They demanded results and decided that Dmitry had had enough time “playing” with mice.
On one unseasonably cold, clear, sunny day in July, Dmitry cycled from his office in the department of physics at Saint Petersburg State University to his lab at the Institute. By this point he knew all of the security guards very well and had established the friendly shorthand chit-chat, as one does over time. But after an icy reception from Vlad, the security guard on duty, he knew something was wrong. He dared to hope -- perhaps Vlad is just having a bad morning?
As Dmitry walked down the hall to his lab, he realized his fellow scientists’ lab doors were all closed. Odd. Like Dmitry, most of the scientists were not there by choice, and worked long hours on highly experimental work that was often tedious and unfruitful. An open door to a lab was an invitation for passers-by to come in and break the tedium, if just for a moment. There were always at least one or two open at any given moment.
As Dmitry inserted the key in the door to his lab, he found it was already unlocked. Strange. He pushed open the door to discover he was not alone.
“Ah, Dr. Zoltov. I hope you don’t mind I let myself in? My name is Grigori Vasilevich.” Wearing all black, Grigori stood six foot four, with a jaw and body both apparently carved from cold steel.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Vasilevich?”
“Grigori, please.” Grigori walked around the lab handling objects and shifting papers around as if he owned the place. “Your research has caught the eye of one of my comrades. Like you, he is also a doctor. He wishes to facilitate your research and can provide you with a supply of human volunteers for your studies.”
“Sir, it would be highly unethical and inhumane to conduct my studies on humans.”
“Ethics and humanity are luxurie
s we cannot afford. These men have a debt to pay to society and you will simply be collecting it.” Grigori stopped directly in front of Dmitry, uncomfortably close.
Dmitry looked directly into Grigori’s lifeless gray eyes. “What if I don’t wish to proceed?”
“I think your wife -- Sarah, is it? I think it would be a shame if she were to drown. She does seem to love writing on that park bench along the Neva. In fact, I thought I saw her there this morning.”
“I see.” Dmitry knew this fight had only one possible winner.
“Your first specimen will be waiting for you here tomorrow, accompanied by Dr. Belikov, of course.”
Dmitry’s heart sank. Belikov was more commonly known as “Dr. Toxin.” The Soviet Poison Lab was Belikov’s hospital and his survival rates hovered around zero percent. Belikov was known to be a brilliant, ruthless man, and if Dmitry was forced to work with him, he felt certain he would have no choice but to do as he was told.
Dmitry returned home that evening and anxiously recounted the turn of events to Sarah. She begged him to leave Russia with her while they still could, but he knew it was already too late for that. The KGB would find them no matter where they might travel. He assured her they would both be fine if he simply cooperated. So he did.
Belikov greeted him the following morning and each morning after that -- until the incident.
Dmitry’s initial impressions of Belikov were surprisingly positive. He was a delicate man with fine features, a gentle voice, a warm smile and a spectacular bedside manner. Every man who rolled into Lab 22 on a hospital gurney knew he would not roll out alive, yet under Belikov’s care, they remained calm throughout the process. Dmitry wanted to hate Belikov, but he just couldn’t. The man was brilliant, kind and cultured. Dmitry’s initial feelings of horror at the thought of conducting research on humans slowly evaporated into acceptance. The first few deaths were difficult to watch, but he soon became accustomed to death’s constant presence, which lingered like an unwanted guest at the end of a party. The human mind is funny that way. No matter the horror, one can only be shocked a handful of times before the numbing begins.
