They looped around, and now they could see the cabin more clearly. It was strangely built, circular.
“Ayurt,” said Kagan.
“Yakut?”
Kagan shook his head, puzzled. “No. Mongolian.”
A few hundred feet upstream from the cabin a mound rose out of the snow. Some rocks poked through.
“That must be the grave,” said Kagan.
Tarasov nodded. “Okay, Vadim. Take her down.”
The nearest place to land was a quarter-mile downstream. The helicopter set down and Kagan and Tarasov scrambled out onto the snow. They began to hike upstream.
The walk took fifteen minutes. Tarasov was just beginning to think they must have missed it when they stepped out into the clearing. They hurried to the cabin. Snow had piled roof-high on the uphill side. The door was broken and snow had drifted indoors. Tarasov went inside.
Theyurtwas hexagonal in shape. There was a single room with a wood-burning stove in the center. A metal flue disappeared through the roof.
“This is an Urguma house,” said Kagan.
“Urguma?”
“Nomadic Eskimos. There are fewer than two hundred of them left in all the world. They drive their reindeer herds into the mountains in summer, and then west to the taiga in winter. They build houses like these at each end of their migration.”
“Why would Bragin build an Urguma house?”
Kagan shrugged. “Maybe it’s something he picked up in the camps. It’s very practical, as you can see. A single stove heats everything. No dividing walls. Very simple.”
The room had been ransacked, exactly as Yermali’s assistant had said. Pots and dishes lay on the floor. Tarasov took a step forward, and a bit of plate crunched beneath his boot. A new-looking pine bed was turned on its side against the far wall. Its mattress lay beside it, slit open. Pine needles oozed out like blood from a wound.
Kagan looked at the mattress and said, “A pine-straw mattress — just like thezeks make in the camps.”
Tarasov circled the room. When he reached the upended bed he spied something on the floor and bent to pick it up. It was a candlestick holder made of barbed wire.
“A strange souvenir for a victim of the gulag,” said Kagan.
Tarasov pinched his lips grimly. “Not a victim, asurvivor. This would have reminded him of that.”
“Not much left of the place,” said Kagan. He shook his head. “How did he live up here? It must have been a nightmare.”
“It was a dream come true,” said Tarasov. He pointed to a flower box over the kitchen table.
“He loved this place enough to bring in flowers,” said Tarasov. “He was very happy here.”
“Perhaps.”
“Let’s take a look at that grave,” said Tarasov.
They went outside and started uphill. The grave site was pretty much what they had seen from the air: a pile of rocks partially buried by snow.
They stood over it a minute. Suddenly Tarasov clapped his mittens together and let out a laugh. “That’s it!”
“What?”
“What a fool I’ve been! It’s not the man who makes the home. It’s the woman.”
“What does that — ”
“I know how Bragin escaped.”
They lifted off and turned north along the western edge of the mountains until they were once again over tundra.
Tarasov cursed himself for not having figured it out sooner. The answer was there all along. The timing! It was the only clue he should have required. Stepan Bragin had disappeared in May, but he hadn’t turned up on the Norwegian border until November. Six months! Where had he been all that time?
The helicopter raced north. They had six hours of daylight left, and Kagan assured him it would be plenty of time to test Tarasov’s theory.
Tarasov went over it in his mind. Stepan Bragin had, after all,walked out of Oimyakon. He had traveled with the Urguma Eskimos, his wife’s tribe, taking part in their annual migration from the eastern highlands to the western taiga grasslands. And if Tarasov’s theory turned out to be right, then it was also possible that Stepan had given some member of the Urguma tribe the very item sought by the Leningrad agents — the item Tarasov felt certain was a document, a testament that would clear up the mystery of the stub-nose man.
In the helicopter, Kagan explained that, ordinarily, it might take weeks to locate a single Urguma tribe on the tundra. Their migration varied each year and followed no timetable. But by chance, Kagan had sent a helicopter to the Urguma camp just three days earlier on a medical emergency, the very medical emergency that had prevented Tarasov from interviewing the doctor who had examined Nadia Bragina. The camp, Kagan informed them, was in a place called Upper Sharuleis Flat.
“It’s not far,” said Vadim. “We’ll be there in a half-hour.”
Tarasov felt the need for another sanity check. He left Kagan and Vadim in the cockpit and went to the rear of the helicopter. He sat down and went over it all one more time, attacking his theory from every angle. It held up.
If all goes well, thought Tarasov, by evening I will know the great secret Bragin knew about Podolok —and the link to the Perovs.
He was about to rejoin the others in the cockpit when the first jolt came. It felt like a car hitting a pothole. Then, almost immediately, there was a second jolt, bigger, and the floor of the helicopter fell away. Everything in the compartment rose off the floor as though weightless.
Kagan was shouting, “Get her up! Get her up!”
“She won’t respond!” said Vadim.
Tarasov grabbed hold of a bar on the wall and tried to climb forward through the body of the craft. But the helicopter was shaking so badly he was swept off his feet. He flew backward and crashed against a wooden crate. He struggled to his feet. It was strangely quiet in the craft, and with a chill Tarasov realized why: The engine had died. The rotors were freewheeling.
“We’re going down!” Kagan cried.
The tundra filled the front windshield, and Tarasov threw himself behind the crate. In the last instant before impact, Tarasov was thinking about Sasha. He was suddenly glad Marina was marrying Titovo. His wife and son would be taken care of.
The craft exploded. A sharp pain bit his left arm. There was a curioussnap from his rib cage as it was crushed like kindling.
Then . . . blackness.
Tarasov awoke on his back. Bits of twisted metal and debris lay all around him. Part of the rotor lay a few feet away. A brown vinyl seat stood ludicrously beside him. He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious, but the aircraft was still burning somewhere nearby. He couldn’t see it, but the black smoke swirled over his head. The smell stung his nose. His left arm ached, and he suddenly remembered the sharp pain he had felt on impact. He turned to examine it. There was nothing there. The arm was gone. It had been ripped away along with the sleeve of his parka . . .
He opened his eyes and looked around. The smoke was gone now, so he must have been unconscious for a while. He decided not to look at his missing arm. It was difficult to breathe. He felt as though someone were sitting on his chest. He wondered about Vadim and Kagan. They must be hurt badly, too; perhaps they were even dead. Why else wouldn’t they have come? He looked up into the clear sky for sign of a rescue plane. He lay like that for a long time, watching the sky, listening to the wind, shivering. He was still watching as the sky changed from blue to black.
The wolves came sometime in the night. Tarasov held them off with his pistol. He fired his last bullet at dawn.
By then he no longer felt the cold, and his body had stopped shivering. Death was near. It wasn’t so bad. He closed his eyes and waited.
Death came to Konstantin Tarasov in the form of a reindeer goddess, a strange angel of the north with the head of a woman and the body of a reindeer. He had been dozing when he sensed her presence. He opened his eyes. It was daytime — he couldn’t say if it was the same day. The angel hovered over him, a shimmering silhouette in the blinding brightness of
the sun. He squinted, and her face came into view, a gentle Eskimo face. He smiled. She laid her hands upon him, and he began to rise. Together, they floated up into the light.
25
Victor Perov sat alone in the last row of Lenin Auditorium as the vote was taken. He made no speech. He had done all his speech-making a week earlier, during the Communist party meeting, when it might have mattered. The outcome of that meeting had sealed the outcome of this one. Victor came this evening only in order to see the final vote for himself, and to force his comrades to look at him as they voted to cast him out.
“All in favor?” the chairman called out.
“All against?”
Victor went back to his office and opened the door. He recalled the last time he had returned to his office after a committee meeting. That was two weeks ago, when he had met Konstantin Tarasov. Victor half-expected to see the magnetic KGB agent leaning on his office door frame, that cocky smirk on his face. But he didn’t come. Tarasov had vanished, and that surprised Victor. He had not expected to get rid of the KGB man so easily. Tarasov didn’t strike Victor as the type to give up without a fight.
Victor fell into his chair. He was exhausted. In the ten days since he met Koos van der Laan in Stelskogo Park, he had barely slept. Along with Oksana Filipova and Valery Bonderov, he had been working day and night to try to crack the shell of secrecy that surrounded the gulag of Soviet psychiatric hospitals. But Bonderov had been right that day at the Baku restaurant: It was a desperate task. Not only was he unable to find solid information about the ayslums’ number and whereabouts, he couldn’t even confirm theirexistence. Victor began to appreciate what a valuable man Pavel Danilov had been, and what a loss to the cause of justice his murder was that night on the docks of Rechnoy Vokzal. That realization was part of a disturbing shift in Victor’s thinking. He had embarked on a quest that began as a search for his brother, but already it was becoming much more. It was a journey into the dark recesses of a system he had spent his life helping to build, but that now he realized he had never truly known. Anton had fallen into a pit, and before Victor could rescue him, he had to admit that such a pit could exist, and that he himself had helped dig it.
Meanwhile, Victor was running out of time. In a matter of weeks, the net that encircled him would finally close, and not even Yevgenia would be able to free him. Next to be lost would be his membership in the Academy of Sciences. Then his membership in the Communist party itself. His life was a tower of bricks he had once thought to be as solid as the Great Pyramid. Now it was collapsing beneath his feet at a pace that left him dizzy.
In the race to find his brother, Victor was losing. Something drastic had to be done, and there was only one option left: He had to convince Yevgenia to help. But before he could do that, he had to get permission from Oksana, and that wouldn’t be easy. Victor winced when he contemplated the showdown, but he couldn’t shirk it anymore. Yevgenia was their last hope. He had asked Oksana and Valery to meet him that evening at his flat in order to make his case.
Victor glanced down at his feet. Two empty cardboard boxes sat on the floor beside him. He looked around his office at his awards, his equipment and his books. The time had come to pack it all up neatly into those two boxes and walk out of his office for the last time.
Victor lifted the photograph from his desk. It was his most prized possession, a picture of his father, Yevgenia, Anton and himself at Lake Sini on vacation in 1979, the year before his father died.
He took a last look around his office and went out. He pulled the door closed and stabbed the key into the lock like a dagger in someone’s chest. He went down the long corridor, past the telescope his friend Vladimir Ryzhkov had loved so dearly, down the stairs toward the security check. He said good-bye to it all as he went, for he knew he would never see any of it again. But it wasn’t to a building or to an institute or even to astronomy that he said good-bye. It was to a dream he had held since Anton gave him that telescope on his twelfth birthday, a dream he had worked for, realized and flourished within. That dream had given Victor’s life its structure and direction. Once so potent, it had become as thin as broth. What unnerved Victor as he strode down that corridor for the last time was not that he was turning the final page on this chapter of his life, but that the next chapter had not been written. Before him lay a blank page.
Victor descended the stairs to the security check, and Ivan came out of his booth, his eyes eager. These twice-daily searches of Victor’s papers had given new meaning to Ivan’s dull existence.
Victor came toward Ivan and held out his hands, “Sorry to disappoint you, dear friend,” said Victor. “But I have nothing for you to search today.”
Ivan’s eyes fell. He spotted the picture frame in Victor’s hand. “What’s that?”
“A family photo.” Victor held it up for inspection.
“I will have to confiscate it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You are not permitted to take anything from the building. Those are my orders.”
“Get out of my way,” said Victor, and he pushed through the gate.
As Victor passed, Ivan grabbed his arm. Victor jerked free. Ivan lunged for the photo. He nearly got it, but Victor slapped away his hand at the last moment.
Now on the other side of the security check, Victor turned to face the security guard.
“Are you out of your mind?” Victor asked.
The two men looked at each other. Ivan had a strange, confused look on his face. Then his hand went slowly to his holster, and he drew out his gun.
“Jesus,” breathed Victor. “Youare out of your mind.”
Ivan pointed his pistol at Victor. His hand shook. “Give me the photograph.”
Victor turned his back to Ivan and walked toward the outer doors.
“Stop!” shouted Ivan.
Without looking back, Victor asked,“Or you’ll shoot?”
He threw open the glass doors and stepped out into a snowy, mid-April night.
And that was how Victor Perov bade farewell to the SAPO Institute.
An hour later, Victor stepped into the foyer of his Moscow apartment and shook the snow from his coat.
“We’re in here,” Oksana called out from the living room.
Victor hung his coat on a peg and went to the living room. Oksana and Valery were seated side by side on the floor behind a coffee table covered with maps, transportation schedules, telephone city codes and bits of paper with the names and addresses of physicians, nurses, hospitals, prisons — anything possibly connected to special psychiatric hospitals.
Victor looked at them and said, “Planning a trip?”
Oksana’s eyes searched Victor’s face. “How did it go at SAPO?”
Victor shrugged. “Like we expected.”
“I’m sorry, Victor.”
Valery looked up, realizing suddenly that Victor had entered the room. “What?”
Victor smiled. Valery was like a new man. Victor’s old roommate had offered him a clinical job in Leningrad starting in the fall. Valery was barely recognizable as the tragic drunk Victor and Oksana had met two weeks earlier in the Baku restaurant. On this evening, he wore a loosely woven sweater with the words “1980 Olympics” on it. It was tacky but new. A clean collar poked over the top. His hair had been cut recently, though the locks on his hairline still fell onto his brow whenever he dipped his head. He was forever pushing them up. A teacup was beside him.
“Nothing,” said Victor.
Oksana put a newspaper in Victor’s hand. It was the evening edition ofIzvestiya.
“What’s this?”
Oksana grimaced and said, “Page three.”
Victor opened the paper and stared in disbelief. There, under a story about the murder of an ambulance driver at Rechnoy Vokzal, was a picture of Katherine Sears. The article went on to describe how the American tourist was wanted in connection with the murder. She was believed to be hiding somewhere outside Moscow. All Soviet citizen
s were urged to report anything connected to her whereabouts. A telephone number was given.
“Jesus,” said Victor when he finished reading. “They’re trying to use the public to find her.”
“The KGB must really be desperate,” said Oksana.
Victor nodded. A crime report in the Soviet press was almost unheard of. According to communist propaganda, crime did not exist in the U.S.S.R.
Valery said, “A foreigner doesn’t just ‘hide out’ in the U.S.S.R. How is she doing it?”
“She must have help,” said Oksana.
Victor paced, shaking his head. “At least we know she’s still alive,” he said.
“Why doesn’t she try to contact you?” asked Valery.
Victor looked at the picture in the newspaper and sighed. “She’s protecting me.”
“Poor Katherine,” said Oksana.
They were all quiet a moment, and then Valery cleared his throat. “You said you had something you wanted to discuss?”
Victor nodded solemnly. It was time to convince Valery and Oksana that the Iron Perova was their only hope.
The telephone rang. Victor hesitated: He was reluctant to be distracted now that he had resolved to act.
“It could be my mother,” said Oksana. “She’s with Grisha.”
Victor nodded and picked up. “Allo?”
A man’s voice spoke in heavily accented Russian. “May I speak to Yuri Nikolayevich?”
Victor started. “Who?”
“Yuri Nikolayevich.” The accent was ridiculous.
“There’s no one here by that name,” said Victor. “You have the wrong number.”
“Sorry.” The person hung up.
Victor put the receiver in the cradle and stared ahead. His heart was pounding. Oksana and Bonderov watched him.
“What’s the matter?” asked Oksana.
Victor looked into Valery’s eyes, then Oksana’s. “That was the Dutch Embassy. They want to meet me at Stelskogo Park tomorrow afternoon.”
Oksana said, “I thought the Dutch thought you were a KGB spy.”
Victor shrugged. “So did I.”
The Forbidden Zone Page 28
