The forklift driver spun his wheel and drove off madly. He kept looking over his shoulder as he tried to steer between the crates. But because his eyes were locked on the mad disaster behind him, he crashed the extended metal blades straight into an electrical control panel. A shower of sparks erupted upon impact, and the warehouse was plunged into darkness. Seconds later, the emergency backup came to life, and the darkness was penetrated by twirling red strobes of light.
Gennady dropped his knife, reaching inside his coat for a pistol. When he looked up at the open jaws of the eight foot tall wolf-beast illuminated by angry red bursts, he turned and ran toward the shipping office. Other men scattered, running in whatever direction their legs took them.
One little man scrambled up the side of stacked wooden container loads big enough to hold two cars each. He fell back once, sliding downward until his chin impaled on an upward slanted hook. Fingers dug in reflexively to hold his weight in place. He tried to scream, but his jaws wouldn’t work. Pain clashed so loudly through his mind that he didn’t t feel the splinters shaft beneath his nails. He began to whimper and tried to wedge his toes in between an opening in the boards as the hook in his chin ground against his jawbone. Warm liquid poured down the front of his neck, spreading across the front of his shirt He hung suspended like a fish on a hook in the scarlet glow of the strobes.
There was a momentary lull in the shots and he thought that it was over. In the silence, he still heard the wounded grinding of the warehouse door pulley system. Then, a thud as the door bottomed out and he realized he was now trapped inside with the monster. His sweaty feet began to slide out of his shoes. The hook ground deeper into his jawbone. Blind with pain, he clung frantically to the splintered wood and his hands began to feel as though they were on fire.
Then, the stack of containers began to creak and groan and move. He realized that something was pushing over the entire mountain of wooden crates to get at him.
Chapter Six
As the VIP Boeing 737-200 winged its way through the night skies toward Detroit, the moon rode high above dense dark clouds like a wary, solitary eye contemplating their flight. In her darkened private cabin, Anna Kazakova lay on an elevated bed, attached by tubes to an intravenous stand bolted to the floor. Wires ran from her body to cardiac monitoring machines, and an oxygen harness ran from the back of her head to her nose. Sasha sat at the end of her bed in a cushioned armchair staring at her intently while she looked out through the portal at the moon.
They were alone.
Off to one side of her bed, Ivan had left a television with a video player attached to it. Dr. Pazyryk waited nervously on the far side of the door, while Ivan, having plugged in the video equipment, now stood guard outside the door and stared at the doctor until he finally turned away and made himself a vodka martini.
“What I will now tell you must be told to no one else. Do you understand?” Anna began.
“Of course, Mother.”
“Of course, always ‘of course, Mother,’” she said irritably. “Do you think me senile?”
“No, Mother.”
“An easy answer. But after you hear what I have to tell you, you may have your doubts.”
Sasha knew better than to answer her last statement. Instead, he waited for her to continue when she was ready. In the silence, he thought he could hear the flow of oxygen into her nostrils, although he knew it was not possible.
“I know,” she said after a time, “that you are waiting for me to die. Don’t deny it. I know that it is true. You are young and rich and handsome, and your lust for power is exceeded only by your ambition. All that you need to satisfy your desires is my death. Not a word, I said.”
She stared down his protests, her rheumy eyes fixed on his as though by the sheer power of her will she could keep him quiet. The luxury cabin felt suddenly colder and he realized he was thousands of feet high in the night, his life dependent upon strangers and machines. Alone with the only parent he had ever known. He looked out an oval window and thought he saw the moon shudder.
“For that, I admire you. My own blood courses through your veins and you are as you must be. You are strong as I once was. We are a family of dark secrets, you and I, and tonight, if my strength holds, you will learn the darkest of that knowledge which I conceal from the world. Listen to the engine’s power, Sasha. We fly above the clouds, although, in truth, we were never meant to leave the ground.”
The look in her eyes was one that he was familiar with; it was the look of the elderly explaining their sins to those who would repeat them and truths to those who would ignore them.
She tugged at her blanket with fingers too pale and boney until she maneuvered it past the tangle of electrical wires that attached her to her monitors. Although Sasha made a move to rise and help her, one cold look pushed him back into his chair. Finally satisfied, she glanced once more out the window to stare at the moon, and then begin again.
“You know some of who I am and some of what I’ve done. Some things you will never know and be better off not knowing. I will tell you certain things and spare you others. Everything that I tell you comes at a price. Do you understand this? Do you? Because if you agree to hear this story, there is no going back. If the two men whom it concerns ever find out that you know, they will hunt you down and kill you.”
“They can try,” snorted Sasha.
“And at least one of them will eat your flesh and chew your bones.”
For a moment, Sasha was speechless. He stared at his mother’s dry lips as though they had malfunctioned.
“One of them is a cannibal?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she shook her head from side to side.
“No. One of these two is an animal.”
At first he did not notice that he had pressed himself backward into his seat, pushing away from his mother. When he did notice, he leaned forward again and pulled himself up, straightening his back and squaring his shoulders.
“Tell me, Mother. I am not afraid. You know this secret, and they have not destroyed you.”
“One would. One cannot.”
“Riddles, Mother, more riddles. Tell me what you will tell me but do not play for a child.”
Her eyes closed, and for a moment Sasha thought she had drifted off to sleep, but she began speaking again as though she had closed her eyes to see the past more clearly.
“Many years ago, I was an ambitious station chief in the secret police. This much you may already know. I was ruthless and beautiful and there is no more deadly combination. Can you see me like that, my boy, or can you see only your old, dying mother kept alive by medicine, machines and a drunken doctor?”
Before he could respond, her eyes popped open and arms shot forward as though to be handcuffed.
“Look at my arms,” she cried. “My skin sags and my veins are thin. My bones are fragile and my blood corrupted. I was not always like this. I was beautiful once. You must understand that to understand anything. Look at my face. Look at me.”
Eyes wide open. Lips pulled back to show yellowed teeth and a dry tongue. Age spots on her forehead like patches of dead grass spreading across an untended lawn. Sasha could barely stand to glance at her.
“Now you see, don’t you? I have memories of beauty trapped in a body that will soon be dust. But once I was beautiful and I knew it. Men followed me like dogs. They bent to my will so they might have me.”
“Mother, please.”
She laughed. It was a coarse eruption of delight.
“And I had power. Power from the State to protect the State. I gave what I gave to get that power and I gave what it took to keep it. Would you like to know what I gave?”
“No, Mother.”
The cabin filled with her hideous cackle.
“There were always plots against party officials. Always men fermenting plans to strike against the protectors of the proletariat. It was my mission to seize such anarchists and spies, imprison them and torture confessions and information o
ut of them. Many did not survive. Others fared worse. Of course, many of these were merely inconvenient citizens who stood in the way of what party members wanted, but the exercise of absolute power is necessary to those who would keep it.
“I received information one night about a certain man who was said to be plotting against an official of high authority. It was my duty to have him arrested and to oversee his interrogation. He lived among the underground peoples. Do you know this phrase, Sasha?”
He knew the underground people were those who hid in the shadows of Soviet life. The gypsies and Freemasons, the black marketers and criminals. They were known as such because beneath the cities of Moscow were endless sewers and tunnels, secret places on no maps and communities of people who, as Beria once said, were harder to find than spies and more difficult to exterminate than rats.
“Yes, I know of them.”
“Good. He lived among them, this one known as Drogol. Down in the filthy stink that ran beneath the streets of our city. We heard of him first in an interrogation of a petty criminal who had raped the daughter of an apparatchik. Men under persuasion, men under torture, will offer anything and anyone up to stop the pain. This man had nothing for us but stories about a man who raved that he was Russia’s rightful ruler. A crazy man, our informant said, with wild eyes and the devil’s way with women. But this was hardly worth the descent into darkness to him. So we filed a report, as we filed reports for everything in those days.”
“But you heard of him again?” asked Sasha eagerly.
“Yes. We heard of him again. This time in connection with a murder near the edge of Blagoveshenskiy Cathedral.”
“And?”
“We brought him in.”
“He does not sound so formidable.”
His mother managed to prop herself up on her elbows momentarily. Her face lit with animation.
“He killed twenty-six men before we captured him. Twenty-six armed men. We had to cordon off twelve blocks above and below ground. We poured diesel fuel down the tunnels and set them on fire. Armed men at all sewer and street exits. Over a hundred of the underground people died in the smoke and flames. No one knew they lived to begin with except others of their type, so we were able to contain what happened by blaming it on a gas leak. No one believed us, but in those days no one would dare challenge us. Even the capitalist spies kept their distance from the situation. I was well known to them and feared as well. I locked down the city so tightly that no one would dare to question me. I had the highest permissions. And, I did it. When the fires underground grew too intense, Drogol rose to the surface.”
“And you took him?”
“Fah. We took him by shooting him with tranquilizers and catching him in an animal net made of metal alloy fibers, then dropping a titanium cage over him.”
This did not make sense to Sasha. So much force for one man? Although he did not wish it to seem that he doubted her, he had to ask the question.
“Why so much force for only one man?”
“See for yourself,” said his mother. “Play the disc on the television. This video was transferred from the original tapes by Dimitri himself. By the way, do you know why the great genius Dimitri works so tirelessly for me? No? It is because his brother was one of the guards you are about to watch die at Drogol’s prison. In this copy, he has for me removed all sounds. I have heard the screams and begging too often. I do not wish to hear them anymore. If you have use of a copy with sound, I will tell Dimitri to make one for you.”
This was the moment he was waiting for, the moment when he could finally see the source of his mother’s fears. And she was afraid, no matter what she told others. When he inserted the disc into the machine it was as though he were inserting a key into a locked door behind which lay unimaginable wealth guarded by a terrible curse. He pushed the Play button, and then returned to his chair. He knew that his mother would not look at the video again. Instead she would watch him watching her past unfold.
Gray and white speckles flooded the screen like an electronic snow storm, and then a grainy black and white picture replaced them. Cement walls and shadows. Metal desks and grim men in uniform filling out paperwork, cleaning their pistols while two of them played chess. Young men. Maybe one in his thirties who seemed to be in charge of the shift. Thick black belts and buttons reflected light awkwardly back at the camera.
The men jumped to their feet suddenly and snapped to attention. Seconds later, a much younger version of Sasha’s mother stepped onto the screen. Even in the grainy black and white video he could see that she was right. When she was younger, Anna Kazakova had been a very beautiful woman. Sasha fought the urge to turn and stare at her, so that he might compare the so very attractive woman on the screen with the matriarch with the loose and spotted skin who lay near him. The fact that they were one and the same woman made his skin crawl.
He saw the way the men at the prison avoided her eyes. He could almost smell their fear by watching the tiny twitches at the edge of their mouths. She was speaking to the sergeant, berating him coolly for something. This man could no doubt have broken her neck with a twist of his hands he looked so powerfully built. But he feared her. Sasha knew this reaction.
One of the men went to a metal door and unlocked it. The video temporarily ended.
The screen returned to show Anna and two guards on the other side of the door; clearly this was taken by another camera. The three of them walked down a long hallway lit by only two weak bulbs. Further down the hall, they stopped. One of the men withdrew a ring of keys, unlocked a door, and then stood to one side as his mother entered. He then locked the door behind them.
Time passed. Sasha could not tell how long. The men stood one to either side of the door.
Eventually, one them turned as though summoned, and unlocked the door again. His mother was escorted back down the hall.
There was a new man waiting for her in the office. Sasha leaned forward and stared at the screen.
“Hauck,” said his mother in a voice just barely above a whisper.
Even in the soundless black and white video, the man’s natural authority and intelligence showed through in his sharp features and his wide forehead. He was tall and well built; his uniform fit him like a glove. When he looked at one of the people in the room, he locked on them as though they were the only other person in the world. The guards stayed back from him, as though for their own safety. When he spoke, he gestured fiercely.
Sasha’s mother was the only person in the room who did not appear intimidated. They seemed to be discussing something that angered Hauck so much that he could barely contain his temper. But she did not appear the least concerned. She raised her hand once for him to be silent, then exited like a Tsarista.
The video went blank again. Once again, Sasha had no way of knowing how much time had passed.
It came back, and the first thing that he noticed was that Hauck held a phone receiver to his ear. He was tapping the phone cradle with one finger as though there was a problem with the connection. He seemed to grow more and more agitated. The guards around him looked nervous, and one worked at the buttons for a bank of blank video monitoring screens.
This is it, thought Sasha. This is where it all begins.
The lights flickered in the guard room. All the men except Hauck looked up to the ceiling to see what was wrong. Hauck pulled his sidearm and he screamed a furious command. Sasha would ask the great Dimitri to restore all sound for him, if only so that he could hear that one command.
One of the men looked at the same door that Sasha’s mother had taken to interrogate Drogol in his cell; this guard, a bulky flat faced man who looked like a Ukrainian of mixed blood, went to that door, unlocked it, and began to turn the handle. He held his gun close to his chest and tilted his head as though he heard a noise.
Hauck saw what the guard was doing and held up a hand of warning as he screamed. Too late. The door cracked open. Hauck brought up his pistol, but another guard reacted withou
t thinking and yanked Hauck’s arm away. Sasha saw the pistol buck and fire, and in his mind he could hear the shot, hear the bullet banging off of iron and cracking concrete.
With his face distorted by rage, Hauck came back around and took aim again just as the metal door pushed all the way open from the other side.
Sasha forgot about his mother and where he was. He forgot where they were going and why. He saw only the hair covered beast that ducked under the door sill, roared back as Hauck’s first bullet hit it, then raised its clawed hands and sprang into the guardroom like Judgment Day.
Hauck moved to get out of the way as the beast snapped at his throat, but it flung a big metal desk after him and Hauck flew back like he had been hit by a train and disappeared beneath it. The monster seemed to change form as it moved, as though one moment it was a man and the next moment it was a wild beast. Its image rippled as it changed.
A spray of black blood splashed across the camera lens, but through its thin smear Sasha saw men ripped apart and their innards torn loose. Their mouths formed silent screams, and Sasha—who had himself both seen and delivered brutal death—began to sweat. The creature moved so quickly that it was over in a matter of moments.
Then the feeding began.
When it became clear that the video had run out, Sasha turned the machine off and, after a few moments of staring at his hands, looked up and turned to his mother.
“What was that thing? Where did it come from? How did it get into a secure prison?”
“So many questions. So long ago. First, I must have something to drink.”
She touched a button on the speaker console bolted to the side of her bed.
“Ivan,” she said in a detached voice, “have the doctor bring me something to drink. And bring something for Sasha.”
“I need nothing, Mother, except to know what happened in that video. What was that thing?”
He extended his index finger toward the screen like a pointing rod.
“Let me answer your questions in reverse. Ah. Wait. Here is the doctor with my drink.”
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