Technology, opportunity, diversions, and even luxury were never in short supply on Celebration Island; however the same could not be said for space and privacy. With over seven hundred thousand children placed under the care of the federal government (who, in turn, contracted that care out to Celebration Island on a per-child, per-diem basis), and with the flotilla currently consisting of only fifty-nine ships, the average room occupancy rate was between four and six depending on the class of accommodation. The one exception to the seemingly immutable rule of overcrowding, however, was the suite arranged for one particular twelve-year-old boy by the name of Florian Lasker.
Florian required nothing less than the entire Deluxe Captain’s Quarters of the Norwegian Epic and all of its accompanying accoutrements and privilege (unlimited bandwidth, ocean-view balcony, walk-in closet, both indoor and outdoor hot tubs, separate office space, combined dining area and kitchen, baby grand piano, and a king-size bed). As Florian explained during one of the staff meetings he frequently crashed, it was the only way he could be absolutely certain nothing got between him and the algorithmically transmutative passphrase he needed to enter at least once every twenty-four hours in order to prevent his daemon (a process inconspicuously running in the background of a remote server) from sending multiple media outlets irrefutable proof in the form of timetables, photographs, financial records, and detailed sworn testimonials that multiple directors of Celebration Island were carrying on sexual relationships with dozens of underage female residents. In addition to finding his way through numerous firewalls and filters in order to gain leverage over those purporting to be his caregivers, it was from these very accommodations that Florian Lasker also arranged to get himself off of Celebration Island by participating in—and ultimately emerging victorious from—the first annual New Rutherford Academy junior boys chess championship.
Alexei wasn’t permitted on the flotilla itself, so he used one of the hydrofoil’s small tenders to navigate the archipelago, swing around the lagoon, and finally moor at the main dock of Bikini Island where he was met by a soldier in cobalt-blue fatigues and a baseball cap with a bill so rounded that one might fairly call it creased.
“Good morning,” Alexei offered. He held on to either edge of the port-side door as he leaned out, squinting in the glare of the bright white sand and grinning agreeably. He was acutely aware of how badly outgunned he and his crew were, and how little Predvestnik would be missed if it never again left Micronesian waters.
Putting himself in such a vulnerable position was feeling increasingly like monumentally poor judgment. He knew that by showing up here he was placing himself at the mercy of Celebration Island’s security forces, but what had not occurred to him until after they were well on their way was what a good opportunity this would be for US forces to take him out. Navy SEALs didn’t particularly concern him, but what Alexei did fear was death from above. With a well-coordinated drone strike, you were simply there one moment, and everywhere but there the next. It didn’t matter how quick you were, or how smart, or how well trained. If you were on the CIA’s radar, they knew how to get you off of it and still be home in time for dinner.
The soldier was looking down at his handset. He adjusted his cap. “You Alexei Dro-voo-say-ik?”
Alexei could already tell that the man was from Texas. Not from New Mexico, not from Oklahoma, and not from Arkansas, but from the heart of the Lone Star State itself. He was clean-shaven, but he had one of those heavy black beards that never really went away.
“Close enough,” Alexei said. He put on a pair of sunglasses before taking a long step from the tender to the dock. He was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of rubber, toe-gloved shoes. As he walked, he held his hands out from his body—the universal sign for “It’s cool—I’m not packing.”
“That your boat out there?” the soldier asked, gesturing with the deep glistening cleft of his chin at the ocean over Alexei’s right shoulder.
“It is,” Alexei said. “You like it?”
The soldier put his handset away, cocked his head, and hooked his thumbs in his belt. The proximity of his right hand to the scored polymer grip of his sidearm was almost certainly not accidental. “You know you got to pay a docking fee, right?”
Alexei stopped. He looked at the man for a moment, scanned the beach, then looked back at the man. Diplomacy, he reminded himself. Money he had plenty of; backup, not so much.
“Of course,” he said to the soldier. “I just don’t recall the exact amount.”
“Five thousand,” the man said.
Alexei’s eyebrows went up. “NGD?”
“Unless you got five thousand sixteen-year-old virgins on that little paddleboat of yours, I guess NGDs will just have to do.”
“Right,” Alexei said. “Tragically I didn’t think to bring a harem, so I guess we’re back to money. I’ll make you a deal.”
The soldier’s weight shifted and he once again adjusted his hat. “Go on.”
“I make it back down to this dock in one piece with what I came here for, and I’ll give you ten.”
The soldier looked down the empty beach and squinted. He leaned over and spat, then looked back at Alexei.
“You here for that Lasker kid, ain’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Shit, I should be paying you to take that little pecker off our hands.”
“That’ll work, too,” Alexei said.
For a moment, Alexei thought he succeeded in making the soldier smile, but it turned out the soldier was just using the tip of his tongue to pick something out of the back of his teeth.
“You know I can press one button and have your ship sunk faster than a cat can lick its ass, right?”
“I have no doubt about that whatsoever.”
“All right, then,” the soldier finally said. “We got us a deal.”
“Excellent,” Alexei said. “Where to now?”
“The Cross Spikes Club,” the soldier said. “Time for a beer.”
The soldier walked behind Alexei, guiding him through a network of tree-lined paths and toward the deep throb of Jamaican dubstep. The sand was fine and white, and the two men trudged up one final dune into an area where the palm trees were far enough apart to walk between. The Cross Spikes Club was a long, thatched, crescent-shaped cabana with a bar assembled out of repurposed crate lumber, and indoor and outdoor seating consisting of mismatched and sun-bleached wooden and plastic lawn furniture. Two soldiers were using a warped and delaminating ping-pong table as the surface for an elaborate drinking game, the focus of which was several tiers of plastic cups containing varying amounts of what must have been disagreeably warm and probably pretty flat beer. Beneath the thatch, two men in civilian clothing paid close attention to a third who was psyching himself up to throw the last of his three darts. At a small round patio table off to the side sat a young boy with blond hair that was long and wavy and bright blue eyes shining through his bangs. He used one hand to prop up his head and the other to interact lackadaisically with a tablet.
“That’s him,” the soldier said gesturing again with his chin. The men playing darts erupted into a chorus of disbelieving howls.
“You’re not coming?” Alexei asked the soldier.
“Shit no,” the soldier said. “That boy’s your problem now.”
Alexei shrugged and started toward the boy when the soldier took his arm.
“Hey,” the soldier said. Alexei looked down at the soldier’s hand, then back up. “You want some free advice?”
“I’m not sure I’d exactly call it free at this point,” Alexei said, “but sure.”
“Don’t trust that little prick,” the soldier said. “Don’t trust him for one goddamn second. You got that?”
Alexei watched the soldier for a moment, then nodded. The soldier released his arm, then began picking a path through the trees to the bar beneath the cabana. He sat up on a stool where he could see both Alexei and the boy, reached behind the bar, and came
back with a dark and dripping bottle. He gave the top a twist and tossed the cap away with considerable force.
The boy did not look up when Alexei approached, nor when he stood there casting a shadow over the table. Alexei could see that he was watching what appeared to be footage from intense urban combat on his tablet, then realized it was probably the unfolding of a maneuver in some sort of a real-time strategy game. The screen was reflective as opposed to backlit so the colors were bright and easily visible in the sun. On the back of the boy’s chair hung a tattered and limp backpack.
Alexei flipped a flimsy plastic chair around and straddled it. He took off his sunglasses and watched the boy play the game.
“Are you Florian Lasker?” Alexei said. He was somewhat struck by how normal the kid looked. After the boy’s performance in the tournament, Alexei was expecting him to somehow appear older, taller—at the very least more mature.
“That depends,” the boy said. He did not look up from his game. “Are you my ride out of here?”
“Assuming you want to go.”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet.” The kid was wearing a blue-and-white-horizontally-striped shirt that was too big for him. The blue fused with the unnaturally pale hue of his eyes.
“Why did you enter the contest if you weren’t sure you wanted to leave?”
“I know I want to leave,” the kid said. “I just don’t know if I want to go with you.”
“Why not? What’s wrong with me?”
“You want to put me in some rich tight-ass boarding school in Boston with a bunch of arrogant pretentious pussies.”
Alexei frowned. “It’s actually an excellent school. It was extremely difficult to secure an opening.”
“Let someone else have it then. All I want is to get out of here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Home.”
“Florian,” Alexei began, “you can’t go home. Your parents…” He broke off and took a moment to consider his next words. “They’re not in any position to take care of you right now. You know that, right?”
“They don’t have to take care of me,” the boy said. “I can take care of myself. I just want to go home.”
Alexei looked away and nodded. He drummed his fingers on the dark green plastic table. The boy’s hesitation was not something he had come prepared for since he could not imagine how anyone on Celebration Island wouldn’t seize the first opportunity to get as far away from it as possible. Florian was obviously not your average orphan, however. He either did not understand—or, more likely, did not accept—that he was powerless and largely without options. Alexei realized that he would need to make some kind of connection with Florian before the boy would accept his assistance.
“You know,” Alexei said, “I grew up in a place like this.”
“I doubt that,” the boy said. “You’re Russian. The closest thing to a tropical climate in Russia is the subtropical zone along the coast of the Black Sea.”
Alexei squinted at the boy. “I mean I grew up in an orphanage,” he said.
“What happened to your parents?”
“They were arrested.”
“By who?”
“By the Russian secret police.”
“What did they do?”
“They were accused of being what the government referred to as foreign agents.”
“I mean specifically what did they do?”
“Christ, you’re worse than the KGB,” Alexei said. “They tried to pass some extremely sensitive information on to the United States.”
“Information about what?”
“About something that the world thought was an accident, but actually wasn’t.”
“What?”
“The radioactive contamination of more than half a million people.”
“You’re talking about Chernobyl,” the boy said.
“That’s right.”
“Were your parents there?”
“Yes.”
“What happened after they were arrested?”
“They were sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia.”
“A uranium mine?”
“I don’t know. I never found out which one.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the boy said. “Either way, they probably died. In those kinds of places, you either get worked to death, or you die of malnutrition, exposure, or disease—usually dysentery. Either that, or they developed cancerous tumors as a result of radiation exposure.”
“Anyway,” Alexei said, “when I was about your age, someone came to the orphanage where I lived to take me away, too.”
“Who?”
“The Russian Federal Security Service. Basically the new KGB.”
“Why did they pick you?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“Did they train you to be a spy?”
“They did.”
“What kind of spy?” The boy had put his tablet down and was now watching Alexei with unsettling intensity.
“A domestic spy,” Alexei told the boy. “In my opinion, the absolute worst kind.”
“You mean they wanted you to target your own people?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you?”
“For a while. Then I joined the Foreign Intelligence Service and left.”
“Where did you go?”
Alexei shrugged. “I went where I was needed.”
“Did you ever go back to Russia?”
“Eventually,” Alexei said. “I had some unfinished business I needed to take care of.”
“Like what?”
“That’s not important,” Alexei said. “What’s important is that I was a misused resource. I was exploited. I never had the opportunity to choose what I wanted to do with my life, or even to pick a side. Everything was chosen for me.”
Alexei found the impassivity with which the boy continued to watch him unnerving. “And now you’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen to me, right?”
“That’s right,” Alexei said. “Sooner or later, someone is going to realize who and what you are, Florian. They’ll do everything they can to corrupt and control you, and if they can’t—well, then their only option will be to contain you.”
“How do I know you’re not here to corrupt and control me?”
“I’m here to offer you the chance to take control of your own life. I’m giving you the opportunity to attend one of the best schools in the world, and to get to know some of the most powerful families in the country. Where you go from there will be entirely up to you.”
The boy watched Alexei for a moment, then turned to retrieve the backpack from the back of his chair. He unzipped the main pocket and slipped his tablet inside.
“If you want me to go with you,” the boy said, “you have to tell me why you did it.”
“What do you mean?” Alexei said. “Why I did what?”
“Why you informed on your own parents.”
Alexei squinted at the boy and watched him for a long moment. “What makes you say that?” he finally said.
“It wasn’t coincidence that the Russian government trained you to be a domestic spy. They picked you because you were so blindly loyal to the state that you were willing to turn on your own parents. And now, all these years later, you’re here to take me away just like they came to take you away, but you’re not doing it to save me.”
Alexei’s eyebrows went up. “Oh really? Then why am I doing it?”
“You’re doing it to save yourself, ” the boy said. “Just about everything you do is in some way related to redeeming yourself for what you did to your parents, isn’t it?”
Alexei leaned back and looked out through the trees toward the beach. “Maybe this was a mistake,” he said. It was unclear whether he was talking to himself or the boy. “Something is telling me to walk away right now and let you figure out your own way off this island.”
“I don’t think you can do that,” the boy said.
“Oh, really
? And why is that?”
The boy zipped up his backpack and stood. “Because I think you need me more than I need you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Alexei and Florian sat at a small round table in the back corner of Algiers Coffee House. As was his tradition, Alexei positioned himself such that he could see both the front and back doors. The screens of both their laptops were detached and the two resulting tablets were placed together to form a single, seamless, holographic chessboard. Earlier, Alexei had bought them lunch at Cafe Sushi in Harvard Square, after which he offhandedly proposed some caffeine to offset the sake, and perhaps a friendly game of chess. The suggestion of a match was casual—almost an afterthought—and belied the fact that Alexei had been devoting at least an hour almost every day to studying opening moves, strategy, and theory in the weeks leading up to their meeting.
Florian advanced his knight by dipping his finger into the projected white horse at e4, then touching the empty square at c5. Alexei was up by one piece, but he was finding himself in an increasingly defensive position. He selected his own knight at d5, but repeated the gesture to cancel the move. Florian was controlling both the seventh and eighth ranks with his rooks, and Alexei’s king was pinned down.
Alexei studied the board for another minute, then spoke without looking up. “It’s already over, isn’t it?”
“It will be in three moves.”
Alexei shook his head. “Dammit,” he hissed. He opened the menu on his side of the board, and with poorly concealed irritation, confirmed that he wished to resign.
Florian sipped his espresso. “Good match.”
“You were toying with me, weren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t say toying,” Florian offered. “Perhaps humoring.”
Alexei studied the young man across from him. He wore a blue-and-pale-yellow-hooded rugby jersey that Alexei suspected had been hand-picked for its potential to complement the long blond hair Florian frequently pinned behind his ears and the almost unnatural azure of his eyes. As the boy’s benefactor, Alexei was doing his very best to be a graceful loser—to take pride in Florian’s achievements rather than indulge in the resentment of never having beaten him. He hadn’t actually expected to win, after all, but in Alexei’s experience, the anticipation of failure seldom made its realization any easier. Rather, all it did was shift the blame from your opponent to yourself, where it had to be gradually and insufferably internalized instead of objectified and simply ignored.
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