Every death serves a purpose, Mama said. She didn’t just get her family out of the Soviet Union. She gave me the tools to stop Rostov.
Rostov’s face is flushed with red and purple as he tries to repel the psychic assault. He lunges forward, as the flames gobble at his uniform—the red tabs and medals; the brass buttons; the sickle and hammer pin set inside a red star. He drops to extinguish himself on the massive round rug that bears the United States seal, and the fire goes out with a whimper. But I don’t let go.
“Kill him!” Judd cries.
But death would be too good for General Rostov. I have something far better in mind. My hand is steady, so steady, as I pull another syringe from my purse and jab it into his neck.
Color rushes back into the world, blotting out the chattering white haze. The fog burns away as the air thins, as the sound dies, as the antidote courses through Rostov’s veins. He hadn’t been infected with Mama’s serum, but the end result should be the same—the virus should devour every last traces of the genetic code that makes us psychics what we are. I breathe in, count to myself, breathe out, then force myself to press two fingers to his pulse. Slow, but stable; he’s badly wounded from both the burns and psychic struggle, but he’ll survive to stand trial.
What I’m more anxious for is what I don’t feel.
His powers.
It’s safe. The cure is safe. I release Rostov and rush toward Valentin, slumped with all the other scrubbers. Valentin’s eyes are squeezed shut. Red rims his nostrils, but his nose isn’t flowing like the others’. He shudders and jolts as if from a seizure, and a film of sweat sheens his forehead. He thrusts his hand forward and gropes for mine.
“Tebya lyublu,” he murmurs. “Molodtsa.”
“No. No. You can’t go, Valya. Hold tight.” Please don’t let it be too late, I add silently. Mama’s dead face looms ripe in my memory and a fresh pool of anguish starts to build, but I let it drip away from me as I dig out another syringe and administer the cure.
The next seconds—minutes—ache. I can barely breathe. All I can see is Valya’s still eyes, and in my mind, Mama’s face, so cold and empty. My antidote worked on Rostov, but what if Valya’s had the serum in him for too long? What if it’s already shredded up his mind and body? I reach out to brush his hair from his forehead, but I can’t bear to touch him—to hear whatever psychic war is waging inside his own head.
Valentin sits up with a groan.
I fling my arms around him and hug him tight. His thoughts are right there on the surface—no shield, no subterfuge. He’s trying to piece together the past several hours, but it’s shattered like a mirror, refracting out of order and context. “Yulia.” He buries his head into my shoulder. “Yulia.”
I kiss his forehead, clammy with sweat, and swallow back my tears. “Are you okay? Please, if he hurt you—” I can hear his thoughts whirring, unguarded, merely half-formed words and ideas gone as soon as they surface. Slowly, his shield weaves back around them, but it’s faint. “Valya, please, talk to me.”
His lips part—and hang there. “I can’t—”
His shield churns and churns, louder now. Like he’s reassuring himself he can still shield his thoughts. But that steady hum of psychic energy, hungry for a target, is nowhere to be found.
“My powers. They’re gone.” His hands tighten into fists. “I can’t—I can’t hear anyone, I’m not—”
I lean back, chewing my lower lip. “I had to, Valya. It was the only way to save you.”
His face softens, then, his mouth lifting with a faint smile. He runs his finger along the side of my face. “Yes. I’m safe now.”
I hug him tighter, and then I feel it: how smooth his mind is, worn like a river stone, all the crackle and jaggedness erased. The mind of someone unburdened. “Are you okay?” I ask him, which is absurd, since I’m the one sobbing massive tears of sorrow and relief and joy and pain, every emotion in my repertoire spilling into and out of me.
“Of course.” His eyelids sink shut. “Of course I am. I’m free.”
CHAPTER 31
WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 1964
LARISSA IS PARDONED for espionage charges because Cindy, Papa, and I testified that she cooperated with the PsyOps team. Rostov, Sergei, Misha, and Masha, however, joined Frank Tuttelbaum in a military jail outside of Bolling Air Force Base while they awaited trial. Their cells have to be fitted with psychic disrupters so no one’s thoughts can get in or out, though that isn’t a problem for Rostov anymore. Tuttelbaum confesses to sharing classified information with “unauthorized foreign government personnel,” which sounds so much nicer than what he was really doing—collaborating with the Soviet Union to force America into war against the Viet Cong.
Once we were able to certify that Rostov had been completely stripped of all psychic ability, we exchanged him with the Soviet Union for five of our own spies. A few weeks later, an article turned up in the Party newspaper, Pravda, citing the exposure and condemnation of an unnamed rogue KGB general whose defiance of the Party’s wishes had been dealt with accordingly.
Larissa and I visited Sergei not long after he was locked up. He’s not sad about his plight, or even his father’s; he’s more disappointed that the world is the way it is, and the grand ideas he wanted to purport are not so grand after all.
Now, surrounded by the bursting colors of May, we’re hosting Mama’s funeral—a small affair at a little graveyard along the Potomac River. Just Papa, Zhenya, Valentin, Larissa, and me, spreading her ashes to the four winds. While Larissa and Valya entertain Zhenya, Papa and I sit on the cliffs together and let the wind thread through our hair. “Are you ready?” I ask him, as the afternoon shadows start to pull and stretch.
He laces his hand in mine in return.
At first, I see only his raw, torn-edged memories of Mama, but as the music flows from me to him, wisps of images spiral away from their songs. Her face melts and swirls like a sketch artist refining it—Mama in a drab soldier’s uniform, picking through a pile of rubble with a young Papa at her side as smoke rises around them and air raid sirens drone. Mama clutching a bundle to her chest as Papa and a tiny raven-haired girl peer at her. Mama’s face wreathed in a field of clover as the sun splashes her and Papa in gold.
Papa’s thoughts are stitching themselves back together; the frayed ends where he ripped Mama away tie themselves off, albeit imperfectly. There’s a sinkhole aching in his heart where Mama should belong, but piece by piece, he can unravel her gift, and maybe someday fill most of it in.
After the FBI raided the Soviet embassy, they found twenty miles’ worth of tunnels that accessed nearly every major agency in Washington. They also found five dead scrubbers and eighteen bankers’ boxes full of Mama’s life’s research. I took the boxes to Doctor Stokowski, and he and I are going to work on them for a new research initiative when I start college at Georgetown in the fall.
The Soviets said nothing about the death and capture of multiple Soviet spies, seizure of the Soviet embassy, and discovery of the endless tunnels, though they did announce that the Soviet Union had just acquired a lovely piece of property on the edge of the District and intended to build a newer, better embassy there instead.
Zhenya doesn’t ask about Mama, but he and Papa have been nearly inseparable since Larissa brought him home. Maybe Papa never forgot that echo of Mama in Zhenya’s smile.
*
Valentin’s invited to perform at a battle of the bands at a round-domed coliseum near Union Station, where we saw the Beatles play when they first visited America. The music fills us up; the music flows out of us. Larissa, Donna, Marylou, Judd, Tony, and me—we scream and dance and sing along and sweat until my dress sticks to me like cling film. I like to imagine Mama’s face in the crowd, stitched onto all the anonymous souls who know nothing of the war we’ve averted or the pain we’ve felt.
When we leave the coliseum, Papa is waiting out front for us, leaning against a transport van with Cindy and Winnie in the front seat. The smi
le on his face isn’t so big as it usually is, but somehow, he looks happier. He feels happier.
“Trouble in Turkey, kids,” Winnie says. She’s ditched the Air Force uniform, but instead of joining the Urban League, Cindy—our new PsyOps chief—hired her on at the CIA as an operations officer. Rumor has it she glared the director into submission when he initially vetoed the idea of a colored woman on the staff. She looks just as commanding in her pretty flower-print dress as she did in her Air Force uniform. “One of our diplomats has gone missing, and a courier bag full of secret documents is gone with him.”
“Plane leaves in an hour,” Papa says. “Zhenya’s staying with the neighbors while we’re gone.”
“Valya, you’ll be helping me at our command post,” Winnie says, ticking off her fingers. “Yulia, you’ll scout ahead with your dad…”
Valya links his hand in mine. Our melodies knit themselves together, unburdened, unhurried, pure. His lack of powers soothes him, while my power keeps me whole.
Our minds are ours alone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The year 1964 was a time of both victories and setbacks for America. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the countless other crusaders for equal rights, school integration, and repealment of Jim Crow laws paved the way for the Civil Rights Act. But as political unrest between the communist North Vietnamese and rebel South intensified, many Americans hoped to stamp out the spectre of communism abroad, or at least contain it, as America had attempted in the Korean peninsula in the 1950s. Sadly, it was not to be the case—by August of 1964, an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin prompted President Johnson to launch military operations in Vietnam, and the resulting American role in the war dragged on into 1973.
Since its founding in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has captured the imagination of Americans with its dual image of dangerous glamour and extreme secrecy. Allen Dulles’s account of the CIA’s creation and early days, The Craft of Intelligence, informed much of my representation of the CIA in this book, as did Robert Littell’s Inside the CIA, which details the day-to-day structure and operations of the CIA now. The rubric of agent personality factors that Yulia and Valentin use to hunt for the mole are adapted from Henry Crumpton’s The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service.
Although I fabricated the PsyOps team within the CIA and the MK INFRA experiment, both are (very loosely) modeled after real American attempts to induce psychic powers. As outrageous as it sounds, the Department of Defense’s Stargate program did indeed seek to develop psychic ability and the CIA’s MK ULTRA experiments actually explored espionage applications of LSD.
Less fantastical but no less damaging to the agency’s credibility, however, were the projects run by people such as Frank Tuttelbaum, who tried to turn the agency into their own vehicle for egotistical political maneuvering. In the 1960s, these renegade CIA managers orchestrated political assassinations, illegal wiretapping and infiltration of American organizations and individuals, and manipulation of Latin and South American politics. In 1973, Congress created the Church Committee to investigate such government abuses and, thankfully, they dismantled many such fiefdoms. Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA touches on these programs as well as the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, both of which serve as cautionary tales for government overreach today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lindsay Smith’s love of Russian culture has taken her to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a reindeer festival in the middle of Siberia. She writes on foreign affairs and lives in Washington, D.C. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY LINDSAY SMITH
SEKRET
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Lindsay Smith
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Lindsay Smith
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
macteenbooks.com
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Lindsay.
Skandal / Lindsay Smith.—First edition.
pages cm
Sequel to: Sekret.
Summary: “In the sequel to SEKRET, Yulia and Valentine have escaped Russia to live in Washington, DC, where they are working with CIA psychics, including Yulia’s increasingly erratic father”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-62672-005-3 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-250-07369-3 (trade paperback)—ISBN 978-1-62672006-0 (e-book) [1. Spies—Fiction. 2. Psychic ability—Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 4. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction. 5. Washington (DC)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S65435Sk 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014040757
eISBN 9781626720060
First hardcover edition, 2015
eBook edition, April 2015
Skandal Page 27
