MJ-12: Endgame

by Michael J. Martinez

Frank smirked a bit. “So who do you like, Mr. Beam? If you had to slap a sawbuck down, who’s your pick to win the derby?”

  The diplomat smiled broadly. “I know who I want, Mr. Lodge. Someone safe and sane, like Kaganovich, who has a real sense of what’s possible and necessary, rather than someone like Beria, who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about getting things done, so long as he has all the marbles.”

  “What about Malenkov?” Frank asked.

  “Bah. Puppet. The deputy premiers have the power, and they’ll be working to pull his strings,” Beam said.

  Any further conversation was cut short as the somber ceremonial music changed to a slightly louder, more up-tempo melody when the current leadership of the Soviet Union entered the hall, led by Georgy Malenkov, the new premier—a round-faced, pudgy bureaucrat who looked for all the world like a harried accountant. Behind him was Molotov, Malenkov’s recently reappointed foreign minister, whose spectacles and mustache gave him the air of a college professor or cartoon supervillain, depending on your point of view, and whose idea of “diplomacy” boiled down to repeating what he wanted until he either got it or called off the talks. Stern-faced Nicolai Bulganin came in full Soviet Army regalia, which to Frank’s eye made him look like a tin-pot dictator of a banana republic somewhere. Lazar Kaganovich was a balding, mustachioed man with a sturdy frame who, frankly, was the only one who looked like any of the workers or peasants supposedly in charge of the Soviet Union.

  And finally, there was Lavrentiy Beria—head of State Security and the infamous MGB and, apparently unbeknownst to the rest of the Soviet leadership, a Variant.

  Frank’s eyes followed Beria as he proceeded down the hall, hoping that the man would catch a glimpse of him. It was unlikely—there were several hundred people in the hall, after all, and the American delegation had been exiled to a back corner of the room along with the other non-Communist officials, cordoned off from the rest by a wall of anonymous, stone-faced handlers.

  They’d have to send their message later, then.

  * * *

  U.S. Navy Commander Danny Wallace pulled the collar of the woolen coat up around his face and adjusted the pageboy cap on his head to ward off the morning chill in Red Square. He was wearing the simple clothes of a factory worker—heavy overalls and a work shirt, steel-toed leather boots—and kept his gloves on lest someone discover the hands of an officer and desk worker rather than those of a laborer. Danny paused to look at his left hand briefly, flexing it. Nearly four years ago, that hand had been severely damaged in an experiment with a vortex phenomenon created by the bombing at Hiroshima and transported to a secret American facility—a kind of dimensional anomaly that was somehow connected to the advent of Variants worldwide. The Russians had stumbled upon and quarantined a vortex of their own as well, of course, because nothing was ever easy. The hand had gotten better, thanks to another Variant’s Enhancement, but Danny swore he could feel it still ache some days, a phantom pain that would never quite go away.

  Shaking off the memory, Danny turned and opened his mind, stretching out with his senses for the unmistakable mental pull of other Variants. In addition to being the day-to-day commanding officer of the MAJESTIC-12 program, Danny himself was a Variant too. His only Enhancement was the ability to detect other Variants—a tool that proved extremely useful for the U.S. government as it was finding and collecting Enhanced individuals to recruit for the MJ-12 program.

  It also made discovering Soviet Variants a hell of a lot easier. And today, Moscow was full of them.

  Danny couldn’t see any Variants right now, but he felt no fewer than a dozen in the immediate area around Red Square. Three of them were well known to him—Frank and Maggie, of course, would be part of the procession from the House of the Unions to Red Square, where Stalin would take his place next to the body of Lenin. Then there was Tim Sorensen, a middle-aged Minnesota electrician who could turn invisible at will—one of the absolute best Enhancements a covert agent could have, frankly, even if a condition of his ability was that he had to remain silent, not touch anything, and make sure to dodge whoever was coming his way. Crowds made Sorensen’s job especially tough, which was why he was wandering the halls of the largely empty Kremlin now—a robust opportunity to gather intelligence straight from the source while nearly everyone else in Moscow was at the funeral. Danny smiled slightly at the thought of Sorensen invisibly rifling through filing cabinets in Beria’s office while the man himself was only a few hundred yards away.

  Of course, there was Beria himself, whom Danny had met before on a plain in Kazakhstan, part of the mission to rescue Variants who’d been captured during a crapshoot of a mission in Syria in ’49. The Soviet spymaster was slowly entering Red Square now, among Stalin’s pallbearers. Frank and Maggie were trailing behind him—along with two others who were likely Beria’s own agents.

  Yet another Variant seemed to flicker in and out of Danny’s senses; he figured it was another Russian he’d met before, one who could send a shadowy projection of himself to almost anywhere else in the world. It made sense that this other Variant would be checking out the funeral—running interference for Beria and keeping an eye on the crowds.

  Danny pulled his coat collar up a little higher. Just in case.

  The rest of the Variants Danny sensed were spread around the city. He felt the vague pull of others leading off toward Leningrad, home of the Bekhterev Institute—a front for Beria’s Soviet version of the MAJESTIC-12 program. Over the coming days, Danny would need to track down and visually identify the other Variants in the city. The palm-sized camera in his hand would help with that, and give the American Embassy and its staff of full-time spooks new persons of interest to track and tail.

  As the first speaker of the day—Malenkov, the one who had taken Stalin’s place at the top of the Party—began his oration, someone bumped into Danny’s shoulder hard, prompting him to turn quickly and defensively. It was only a “fellow” worker, straining for a better view. “Izvini, tovarishch,” the man said absently. Sorry, Comrade.

  “Ya v poryadeke,” Danny replied. I’m fine. Unlike Frank’s facility with languages, Danny’s Russian skills had been earned the hard way, through intensive classes at the Army’s language school in Monterey, California. But he was getting pretty good, and Frank humored him enough to practice regularly at their base in Mountain Home.

  The man next to him then bent down and picked something up off the ground. “Dumayu, ty uronil eto, tovarishch,” the man said to Danny, handing him his wallet.

  Danny immediately reached for his back pocket, and found that his wallet was indeed missing. “Oy! Spasibo!” Danny said, taking the wallet from the smiling “comrade” next to him, amazed at the skill that must have been used to lift the wallet from a deep pants pocket. The MGB wasn’t taking any chances today, it seemed—but neither was Danny, which was why his wallet contained perfectly doctored papers identifying him as Dmitry Alekandrovich Vavilov, late of the village of Gornyy, near Irkutsk in the far western part of Russia.

  Really, it should’ve been Frank pulling crowd duty—his usefulness with language and culture was, of course, built on lifetimes of other people’s experiences. But Danny wanted the freedom to pursue other Variants, if necessary, whereas Frank’s insights into the new politics of the Soviet Union would be handier if he had a front-row seat.

  The MGB man who had lifted Danny’s wallet smiled at him and then continued to push his way through the crowd. Another test passed, one of dozens through the years—though never here, in the very heart of Communism. Danny and his fellow Variants had been to Istanbul, Prague, Vienna, Damascus, Beirut, Kazakhstan, East Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, Korea, and China—so many countries—since the MAJESTIC-12 program started up in 1947, but they’d never been sent to the U.S.S.R. itself until now. The power vacuum after Stalin’s death—and the unspoken but very real fear in Washington of Beria’s ascension—had paved the way for MAJESTIC-12’s position in the vanguard of this particular
op.

  That had Danny excited. He’d been working for years to prove to the powers that be that the Variants were normal, patriotic Americans, despite their uncanny abilities, and that they deserved the full faith and trust of the United States government. But even MAJESTIC-12’s biggest supporters—Vandenberg and Truman foremost among them—never seemed a hundred percent comfortable with people who could kill with a touch or twist emotions like Silly Putty. Someday, maybe.

  Danny’s attention was drawn back to the present by thunderous applause—Malenkov had finished speaking, and now Beria was heading to the podium. He stood there, watching the crowd and accepting their applause, appearing to soak it in, until he raised his hands and the noise immediately died down.

  What if he just shot flames from his hands, right here and now? Danny wondered. Is he that confident? Would he push the world that far?

  “Dear Comrades! Friends!” Beria began. “It is difficult to express in words the feeling of profound grief that is being experienced during these days by our party and the peoples of our country, as well as all progressive mankind. Stalin, the great comrade-in-arms and inspired continuer of Lenin’s work, is no more. We have lost a man who is near and dear to all Soviet peoples, to millions of working peoples of the whole world.”

  Danny looked around at the rest of the dignitaries up on the dais, pinpointing the other Variants. He could immediately make out Frank and Maggie—their patterns, for want of a better word, were intimately familiar to Danny by now. The two others that had been trailing them were now behind the dais, making it tough for Danny to make them out. He thought about going around to try to catch a glimpse, but the stone-faced Red Army soldiers in their greatcoats, armed with Kalashnikovs, held a very firm line all around the VIP area.

  The flickering shadow was no longer around, and most of the other Variants in the city weren’t moving around much—probably listening to the funeral proceedings on the radio.

  “Comrades!” Beria continued, warming up as he went; Danny had glossed over a bit, admittedly, as he scanned the crowd and the city. “The grief in our hearts is unquenchable, the loss is immeasurably heavy, but even under this burden the steel will of the Communist Party will not bend; its unity and its firm will in the struggle for Communism will not waver.

  “Our party, armed with the revolutionary theory of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, taught by the half-century-long struggle for the interests of the working class and all the working people, knows how to lead the cause in order to secure the building of a Communist society. The Central Committee of our party and the Soviet government have been trained in the great school of Lenin and Stalin to direct the country.”

  Laying it on thick, Danny thought as Beria continued to give a history lesson about the leadership of the Communist Party through Russia’s long history of troubles. Even the most caustic critic of Communism had to admit that Russia had experienced its share of woes during the past fifty years, even if much of it was caused by Stalin’s own ineptitude.

  “The enemies of the Soviet state calculate that the heavy loss we have borne will lead to disorder and confusion in our ranks,” Beria said, his finger raised high. “But their expectations are in vain: harsh disillusionment awaits them. He who is not blind sees that our party, during its difficult days, is closing its ranks still more closely, that it is united and unshakable. He who is not blind sees that during these grievous days all the peoples of the Soviet Union, in fraternal unity with the great Russian people, have rallied still more closely around the Soviet government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

  “The Soviet people unanimously support both the domestic and the foreign policy of the Soviet state,” Beria said. “And let it be known that the Champions of the Proletariat stand ready to defend the Soviet people against the enemies of our great, multinational state—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!”

  Danny froze in his tracks, and not simply at the mention of the Champions of the Proletariat—Beria’s glorifying nickname for his own Variants.

  In that moment, Danny saw the glimmer of a shadow both behind and within Beria, a shadow in the shape of a person, mimicking Beria’s movements and yet also seeming to pull away from him as well.

  Or pull at him.

  Danny shook his head and shut his eyes; the shadow was gone when he opened them again. Beria thundered on in his speech, seemingly unaffected by whatever just happened.

  This was new—really new—and Danny didn’t like it one bit. He’d seen shadows like that before, though. Once, within the depths of the strange vortex that had, at the time, been housed at Area 51 in Nevada, and was now hidden away at Mountain Home in Idaho. The second time was when Danny had been within range of the Soviet Union’s first atomic test—Beria’s vain attempt at killing American Variants that had only barely been thwarted.

  Those shadows had remained an official mystery, but Danny feared them all the same. They were, he was sure of it, some kind of intelligence. Some kind of sentient beings responsible for the Enhancement of Variants. And deep down, somehow, Danny knew they weren’t friendly.

  * * *

  For the umpteenth time, Maggie found herself compressed into some slinky dress for some party so she could fuck with people’s heads and get information for the good old U.S. of A. To be fair, the dress was more conservative than usual—it was a funeral, after all—and the ubiquitous champagne was nowhere to be found. But still, it was getting rote. The conversations, the people, the secrets—all of it.

  Maggie smiled and laughed at the joke made by Molotov, the foreign minister, even though she really didn’t find it funny. But then she felt a slight pull on her arm, which was entwined with Frank’s. Tone it down a bit.

  “Sorry. A bit too much wine,” she said reflexively, nodding to the red in her glass. It was either wine or vodka, and while Maggie could hold her liquor as well as any man, it was still barely lunchtime.

  Molotov smiled as the interpreter translated, and then replied in Russian—a language Maggie had studied, but still had yet to master. “Mr. Molotov says it is good to hear laughter in these dark times,” the interpreter said. “The great Stalin himself was fond of laughter, so it is right that there should be some here now.”

  Frank nodded and said something presumably nice and diplomatic in Russian, and Molotov left them alone a few moments after that. Maggie felt her smile evaporate—her cheeks were hurting from the effort—and she resumed scanning the room, seeking out the threads of extreme emotion amongst the otherwise sedate crowd in the Hall of Columns, where they had returned for the reception.

  “You know, for someone who reads emotions every day, your acting is getting worse, not better,” Frank said quietly, radiating a quiet amusement.

  “But that’s what you people do, isn’t it?” Maggie responded, allowing him a smirk. “Someone makes a joke, you laugh.”

  “It was a shitty joke,” Frank replied. “And this whole detachment thing … You still seeing your shrink, Mags?”

  Maggie sighed. “Three times a week while I’m home. You still seeing yours, or are you relying on the one in your head?”

  “As a matter of fact, Dr. Mills is telling me right now that he’d like you to stop projecting,” Frank said. Maggie knew enough about the people inhabiting Frank’s skull to know that there was indeed a psychiatrist named Mills in there with him. “He says your disassociation is getting worse every day. You know what he suggests?”

  “Enlighten me,” Maggie said, eyes rolling.

  “Go visit a hospital. See the newborns. See the kids in the critical wards. See the folks dying there. See all the visitors and feel all that emotion. Maybe that’ll hot-wire your brain again.”

  Maggie frowned. “You can both keep your ideas to yourself. In fact—” She was interrupted by four quick buzzes in her clutch; a small radio disguised as a makeup case was there, and someone had keyed in a silent, vibrating code. Beria is in the room.

  Both Maggie and Frank looked towa
rd the back door of the room, where Danny was lounging by the bar, having traded in his fake proletariat clothing for his own real U.S. Navy uniform, even though he was still acting, this time as America’s fake deputy naval attaché to the U.S.S.R. Danny nodded forward, and they turned to see Beria enter the room, now wearing a Western-style suit. Maggie was amazed at how much the Georgian had gained weight and lost hair in the less than four short years since they’d met on the battlefield, and wondered just how much juggling Stalin’s declining health had taken a toll on the man.

  One way to find out.

  “I’m gonna go say hi,” she said to Frank. “Coming?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” he replied, tightness and tension softly radiating from him. Frank was coiled, ready for anything. She’d felt it a hundred times before from him; it was an emotional state peculiar to only a handful of people—people who took life-and-death risks for a living.

  They walked across the hall, drinks in hand, and then waited their turn as Beria made his way through the crowd, glad-handing the diplomats and party officials present, his face seamlessly shifting from practiced smile to practiced somberness. His emotional state was one of impatience and, depending on his conversation partner, boredom or contempt, with barely a few sparks of interest or favor.

  Then Beria laid eyes on them, and she felt a tendril of fear from him that was quickly quashed down. Good.

  Beria walked over and extended his hand to Frank. “Ah! Mr. Lodge, if I recall? So kind of you to come. I am pleased America sent individuals so … accomplished … as yourselves to pay your country’s respects to our great leader.”

  Frank took Beria’s hand and shook it perfunctorily. “It’s been a while, Comrade Deputy Premier,” he said quietly. “I haven’t forgotten your hospitality from before.”

  Beria smiled; the “hospitality” Frank mentioned was imprisonment and a battery of tests at Beria’s secret base in Kazakhstan, where the Georgian had tried to turn Frank and two other Variants against the United States—then attempted to drop an A-bomb on them when that had failed.