Skandal

by Lindsay Smith

  I drop to the floor in front of him. I’m empty now. No match for gravity. I open my mouth, but it’s too dry to speak; the rage has burned through me and left nothing but ash. I shake my head. “No. There had to be some other way.”

  “You know what torture it was for me to be away from her—even for the day. When she was at work and I wasn’t, then that door opened, I would—” He works his jaw, searching. “I would—”

  “The look on your face,” I say. “Like you were seeing a sunrise for the very first time.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s it.” He stares at me. “And she made me stronger—I remember that much, because I know how powerful I could be with her around, and how weak I feel right now. She was my scaffolding. There’s nothing to support me now.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “You couldn’t stop touching her. Your hand was always at her elbow, her waist, her shoulder. Tucking her hair back from her face.” I choke back a sob. “She was your life outside the lab. You loved Zhenya and me, but I thought it was because of what we meant—because we were something you’d made with her.”

  Papa’s hand shields his face. “She insisted. Insisted. That I had to do whatever was necessary to rescue our children from the Party—and if this was necessary, to allow me to leave Russia, to rescue you—” He gulps for air. “I couldn’t bear to leave her behind, otherwise. The fear of not seeing her, not knowing if she was okay—it would’ve killed me. I couldn’t do what needed to be done, over years and years away from her, to save her. I had to cut it out of me. And if I were caught—if they had tried to find out if she was involved—then she’d be safe.”

  I remember the last moment I saw Papa. At the time, I thought he was leaving to visit friends; he’d tucked a cigarette into his lips and threw his scarf over his shoulder. His glasses fogged as he stepped out into the frosty evening, the air blue from a hidden sunset. He didn’t give Mama a kiss, didn’t give me a second glance. He was simply gone.

  That night, Mama woke us up, and we went on the run.

  “I did what she asked. I brought you here, safe and sound. I’ve done what was necessary to protect you. To carry out her plan, whatever it might be. Don’t you see?” He bashes a fist against his thigh. For a moment, I imagine I can see him as Cindy might, with her strange visions—I imagine him clutching his own bloody heart, torn from his chest, throbbing with erased memories. “There is nothing left. Nothing but this emptiness, and I can’t seem to fill it up.”

  I’m crawling on my hands and knees toward him, my head heavy with warring emotions. He took my memories of my power from me; he didn’t give me a choice. But he chose to do this to himself. For us. I tuck myself under his outstretched arm. He is not the man who balanced Mama like a scale, who only ever showed his true face once safely locked in our home. But he is still my papa. He wraps his arm around my shoulder, hot tears spilling into my hair. I breathe in and out with him, our chests rising and falling together. His sorrow seeps into my skin, but I am the Star. I let it evaporate, leaving us both in peace.

  “What can we do?” I ask after a long minute. “What’s next in her plan?”

  “The last stage for my part of the plan was rescuing you. She said she…” He squeezes his eyes shut, straining for the right memory. “She said the next part was hers to handle. That when she was ready for our help, she’d let us know.”

  “But there has to be something we can do! What if she does end up needing us?”

  Papa shakes his head, slow and weary. “I don’t know if I can. I’m afraid that for all I’ve done to myself, it won’t be enough. For all the memories I’ve erased, I’ll take one look at her, and it will all come back. I won’t be able to do what I must.”

  “How could it?” I ask. But he hadn’t had the nerve to erase my memories fully; there was still a shape of them pressed into my brain, like comics picked up on Silly Putty. With Valentin’s help, I’d recovered most of them. Did he really have the power to erase his fully when he couldn’t even do it to me?

  “All these jagged lines where she’s been severed away. My brain won’t listen to me. It knows the pathway to her, but when it goes down that pathway and finds nothing, it gets angry. It gets hungry for something.” He pads his breast pocket, searching for a cigarette. “So I give it what I can.”

  All the food and alcohol. Cigarettes and fast cars, and his flirtatious, carefree attitude. I look at him sideways.

  “You have to be strong, my Yulia,” he says. His arm falls away from me; his eyelids sink shut as if swollen. “We have to help her.”

  I stand up slowly and smooth out my dress. Whatever panic and fear and love and hate I’ve felt in the past few minutes, I’m leaving it there, on that floor. I don’t have time for those things.

  “I will, Papa. I promise.”

  Papa lifts his head and wipes his eyes on the sleeve of his stiff leather jacket; the sleeve pulls back to reveal an impossibly ornate wristwatch. “Shit,” Papa says. “It’s time.”

  “For what?”

  Papa unfolds from the floor. His usual carefree expression has returned, but he takes my hand and squeezes it like he did when I was a little girl and he was afraid I might slip from his glove, even for just a moment. “When we were working together in Berlin, at the end of World War II, we received all our orders on an encrypted radio frequency.” He guides me to the staircase with a wince. “You see—I still remember the codes, but I can’t see her face hunched over the radio with me. But she’s there, lurking at the edges, like a cobweb that won’t clear away.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. For the first time since I came to America with him, I think I truly do feel sorry for him. The hurt and betrayal and confusion are still there, but now, at least, I can sympathize as well.

  He leads me into the master bedroom suite on the second floor and clicks on the light in the auxiliary closet. I freeze in place as amber light washes over the array of equipment inside—the hulking recorder, its reels already spinning; the radio set that looks like it belongs inside a space capsule.

  Papa yanks the headphone cord out of the radio and an eerie melody floods the room, tinkling as innocently as an ice cream truck rolling down the street. But something about the static woven into it freezes my blood; it sets off a painful tugging in my chest, like it means to reel me toward it.

  Papa’s eyes are slits and he’s smiling with the same yearning I feel, but then he shakes it off and spins another dial, introducing a blast of static. I shake my head, clearing away the emotion. “What is this?” I ask.

  “They call it a numbers station. As long as we had a shortwave radio, we could always get encrypted messages in the field.” He flips through a pad of graph paper; it’s bloated with page after page of numbers scrawled in evenly spaced sets of five, with Cyrillic letters written underneath. “The station identifies itself with the song, then a coded message follows that spies deep in the field can easily decode, as long as they know the key.”

  The song fades out; Papa shuts off the static blast.

  “Rostov embedded the music with some sort of … wavelength,” Papa explains. “A curious element of our powers I figured out during the Great Patriotic War. Music affects our brain waves, you see, and while we can shield our thoughts with some songs, others can be used to synchronize our thought patterns—it turns them into a homing beacon. When someone’s thoughts are synchronized to a known pattern, they’re easy to trace, even at great distances.”

  “You used that on me before,” I say. “When we crossed paths in Moscow. I remember the melody—one of Zhenya’s little tunes—”

  Papa whistles those notes, sending a piercing pain straight through my heart. “It made you into a beacon, so I could always find you.” He swallows hard. “A shining light to lead me to shore. My darling Yulia.”

  I turn my head away. I hadn’t realized how resigned I’d become to the Papa I’ve known the past few months; these reminders of his sweetness and adoration for me are a little embarrassing and a li
ttle heartbreaking all at once. “So it’s easier for his agents to track us down, making us a beacon in the same way?”

  “Precisely. I haven’t shared this station’s existence with our PsyOps friends just yet. If they heard it, it could cause serious harm—the potential to turn us all into beacons if they listened to it directly. That’s why I play the static—so I can still listen in without my brainwaves getting synchronized. Rostov still uses this station to communicate internationally; he probably uses the same wavelength to control his scrubbers, too.”

  Like Valentin’s about to be. I swallow hard.

  A woman’s voice chimes in, scratchy like Valentin’s jazz records, reciting strings of numbers in a choppy succession. Papa scribbles the sets of numbers down, face scrunched up in deep concentration.

  He drops the pencil halfway through and twists around to stare at me with a hollow gaze. I frown at him. “What? What does the message say?”

  He stares at me with red-rimmed eyes. “They’re coming to the States.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I’M ALREADY WAITING at the doors to Doctor Stokowski’s research lab when he arrives at six the next morning. “Miss Chernina.” He removes his hat and fishes for his chunky key ring. “You’re awfully early for today’s sessions.”

  “I have some ideas for the virus research.” I follow him into the room and start pulling covers off of the electron microscopes, then I open up the storage refrigerator that contains the samples I swabbed from Valentin, Papa, and myself. In my bag is the sample Valentin swiped for me yesterday, before we went to the safe house; I’m crossing my fingers it’s still active. “We can already train them to recognize certain sequences, yes? Now I want to encode the virus to attack a specific code sequence.”

  Doctor Stokowski’s hand rests on the spin dial where the inert viral strains are locked up. “Let me guess. That added sequence on the samples you’ve been bringing me?”

  “Yes, exactly that.” Our chromosome samples—mine and Papa’s. Showing where a congenital virus, the source of our psychic powers, had twisted itself into those taut little springs of genetic code. It’s a part of us from birth, nearly impossible to rip free.

  I need to rip it free.

  One sharp breath, in and out, and my mantra crowding out my protestations. A steady stream of images thread through my mind: Papa, broken and sobbing on the foyer floor. Valentin’s mind frizzing with the first onset of the serum. The faces of all the dead scrubbers, staring ahead with milky eyes. My plan will take Valya’s psychic ability from him, but it’s the price he’ll have to pay.

  I shove my lab notebook at Doctor Stokowski and wait for him to read through my experiment proposal.

  Doctor Stokowski hands the notebook back to me and peels off his glasses. “Well, you certainly have a firm grasp of the material.” He wipes the lenses on his sweater. “I understand that you won’t be able to give me much information in the way of context for this experiment, but your methodology looks sound. I have just one condition.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Make good on your intentions to enroll in the biology department this fall.” He pushes his glasses back up his nose.

  I smile through my frazzled nerves. “You have my word.”

  We unleash all his favorite research viruses on segments of the samples I brought to see how the different kinds react to it. It’s like watching an alien army invade, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers: the virus injects its DNA-altering sequences into my helpless saliva cells, and Papa’s, and Valya’s. In each case, we’ve altered the virus to erase a certain chunk of code, feasting on it for nutrients, and it’s doing just that—but it’s damaging everything around them, as well.

  Doctor Stokowski helps me tweak and refine, changing the virus’s potency, its payload, its propagation speed. But whenever it’s strong enough to rip out the altered psychic genetic markers, then it shreds the surrounding code, as well.

  “There isn’t any way you can bring me a sample of whatever infected this sample?” he asks, gesturing to the tray of Valya’s DNA, after our latest effort turns my genetic material into Swiss cheese. “I think we’re on the right path, but it’s causing too much damage to the cells around it. I’d have to study the source virus to understand how to minimize the damage.”

  He means the serum, but I only have its aftereffects, how it looks now that it’s snared itself on Valya’s genes. My chest is caving in. I can’t hold onto my breath. But I cannot let this panic crush me. I push it away from me, let it crumble and erode. If the Russians are coming, more of Rostov’s pawns, then surely they have more of the serum with them. If we can disrupt their goals, if we can analyze the serum more closely …

  Far too many ifs for me to pin Valya’s life on, but I have nowhere else to turn.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  *

  “Absolutely not,” Frank Tuttelbaum howls, perfectly audible from the other side of his office door. “If we start tailing every van of Russians to pass through this city, Secretary Khruschev will pitch an even bigger fit than he usually does! We can’t afford to draw that kind of attention to the CIA.”

  Cindy murmurs something to Frank that I can’t hear as Papa gives me a look. He’s been handling our idleness, officially restricted from team duties, about as well as I am. “I take it he’s not impressed with Anna Montalban’s information on the peace summit.”

  “If we can interrupt the Soviets’ Pathway for Peace delegation when they arrive, who knows what we could learn from them?” I lean forward. “Think, Papa. The delegates themselves could be the scrubbers who are supposed to disrupt the summit. If we can capture them before they reach the embassy, and if they have the serum on them…”

  “You’d have to block traffic all along Dupont Circle. Good luck with that. Last time that happened was during Doctor King’s march last summer. Where are you going to find the resources for that? Especially with Frank barring us from active operations.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to do it on our own.” My gaze drifts toward the translators’ office. Winnie’s in there right now, packing up her belongings now that she’s retiring from the Air Force. I remember her argument with Cindy over her work with the Urban League. I suppose Winnie did have to choose, in the end, between the safe but short military track and—how did Cindy put it?—overly optimistic dreamers armed with nothing but picket signs.

  I poke my head into the office and catch Winnie’s eye. She groans and sets down her banker’s box of files. “You look like you’re up to no good,” she says.

  I smile. “Only with your help.”

  *

  I almost feel sorry for the Pathway for Peace Soviet delegation when we reach Dupont Circle that afternoon. Or rather, when we park several blocks from Dupont Circle, which is the closest we can get, as the whole neighborhood has turned into one massive, gyrating, chanting sea of color and noise. Some people carry placards—“I TOO HAVE A DREAM,” “I SIT WITH ROSA,” “SAY NO TO WAR,” “HUGS NOT BOMBS.” Others sing back and forth: calls and responses ranging from protests to Motown songs.

  Donna and Judd stare as a juggling competition breaks out around us. “What in the…” She squeaks and dodges a beanbag as it swishes straight through her ponytail.

  Winnie’s barely able to contain her smile as a man holding an Urban League sandwich board gives her a sly wink. It’s not only Winnie’s League members out in full force, though they launched the event at her urging; they called on their friends, who called on theirs, and a full-blown protest/street festival/rally has broken out, to send a message to the summit and the rest of the world when they catch it on the nightly news. Skinny white girls in flowing dresses weave through the crowd, passing out carnations; everywhere I look, the races and sexes and subcultures and classes have swirled together into a street carnival that celebrates as much as it scolds.

  “Is this what you had in mind?” Winnie asks me in Russian, as Cindy’s momentarily distracted by her
heel catching in a sidewalk crack.

  I smile back at her. “It’s perfect.”

  “No,” Winnie says, “not perfect just yet. Let’s catch these assholes first.”

  I’ve got eyes on the Soviet delegation. Spotted them getting out of their van, and they are furious, Marylou announces in our heads, the message tangled up in the agreed-upon musical number that our entire team can hear for this operation—“Moscow Nights.” Five delegates with three plainclothes guards. Guards are around them in a tight triangle—might be tricky to split one or two of them off.

  I’m sure we can manage something, Papa replies.

  Marylou pushes the image of the group toward us. Head toward P Street. You’ve almost reached them. I can only make out some of their faces, but none of them look like any of the guards or team members from my days with the KGB. I relax a little at that, glad I won’t have to encounter a familiar face, though I had been hoping against hope that Mama might be among them.

  Tony’s identified the first delegation member, Marylou updates us. Anatoliy Totchkov. He taught at the Red Army Military Academy before joining a Special Projects research team. An interesting choice for a peace delegation. What do you wanna bet he’s part of the team that designed the serum?

  Let’s grab him, I say. One of Mama’s scientists—he could fix my attempts at curing Valentin in no time.

  Patience, Cindy answers. We’ll delay whichever members of the delegation we can while putting our people in the least amount of danger.

  We prowl the crowd for a few minutes more, shadows on the periphery of the delegates’ path. Finally, an opportunity presents itself: I can almost hear the smile in Marylou’s voice when she shows us a pair of fire-eaters performing close to the delegation. Judd, want to have some fun?

  Papa shoves ahead of us. Let me get in place and we’ll be ready to go. On your count, Judd …

  Three.

  Within the hour, we’ll have captured Rostov’s operatives, sent to disrupt the peace talks. I can find out the key to curing Valya. And maybe, just maybe, we can learn the next steps in Mama’s plan.