Tainted Blood

by Ferrel D. Moore

“What am I supposed to cut down?” she asked.

  He nodded his head to the far end of the car.

  She risked a quick glance and could see nothing of interest other than a square of gold-edged red velvet hanging on the wall as though it were covering a picture.

  “What’s back there?” she asked. “A safe with something in it?”

  “Something more precious to me than gold,” he said. “But hurry, I know that you must want to leave so very badly. See what I am giving to you so you can rush away.”

  It could be anything behind that piece of velvet, she knew, but she was tired of his games. She stood to one side, tugged a little gold cord, and watched the velvet fall away.

  Behind it was an old, sepia photograph about the size of a coffee table book. A regal woman, a man kneeling before her.

  “How did you do this?” she said, swinging round quickly and focusing the pistol at the center-point of his forehead. “And why did you do this? What is your game?”

  “I have no game,” said Drogol. “Go ahead. Take the photo. It is old and I am tired of it. And no, it was not created with a computer. I have no use for such things.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “But I should know. I was there when it was taken.”

  “But that’s a picture of me in a dress standing next to you. I don’t wear dresses and I’ve never stood next to you in my entire life. One last chance. Tell me how and why you did this or I’ll blow your damned brains out.”

  Slowly, with great dignity, Drogol stood and stepped out into the aisle.

  “Shoot me if you have to, woman. I offer you a gift for your journey and you threaten me. You slap me in the face with your accusations. I tell you that is me in that photo. As for the woman, you should know her.”

  “I know my own face,” said Sveta in a quiet, menacing voice.

  “Perhaps so, but the woman in that picture is Alexandra, the last Tsarista of the Romanov’s.”

  Sveta struggled to understand.

  “It is your father in the photo, then?”

  “No child, it is me in the photo. Why do you think my enemies pursue me?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I was born on the twenty-second day of October, 1869 in a wilderness village named Pokrovskoye.”

  Sveta’s face went blank.

  “What are you saying?”

  He stepped closer and she raised her pistol.

  “Look at the photograph. See what you see. See that I am me. Understand why they hunt me. Anna Kazakova is old and dying. I am a hundred years older but strong and vital. I have power in my body, power in my blood. She thinks I have the secret of immortality flowing through my veins. The other would kill me for revenge and he does not care what is lost by my death. He thinks I killed his brother in that prison forsaken by God.”

  He took another step closer and instead of pulling the trigger, she turned her head to stare at the photo again. It was him. No denying it. And it looked to be a genuine old photograph, cracked and peeled and browned at the edges. Desperately she looked for a date or a name plaque, but there was nothing to show the names of the two people in the picture. The man on bended knee, his head inclined before the Tsarista of all Romanov Russian. The man who was clearly Drogol.

  Sveta felt him close behind her. Very close.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “I am,” he said in a low growl only inches from behind her ear, “Grigori Yefimovitch Rasputin, and I did not die in the Neva River in 1916 as that traitor Prince Yusupov told the world.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Hey, Sasha, wake up. You have a visitor,” yelled the guard.

  “Fuck you,” said Sasha without opening his eyes.

  “Suit yourself. I’ll take the cigarettes.”

  “Wait.”

  Sasha opened his eyes and sat up in the cage.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “What’s the difference?” said his guard.

  As he ran his hand over his rough cheeks, Sasha realized that he had been drugged for so long that he now had a hangover of sorts. He felt like he’d been out drinking all night, got in a fight but didn’t get laid. He hadn’t shaved or showered, and although someone had thought to put a cushioned floor in the cage and a raggedy blanket, his joints and back were stiff.

  “So who is here?” he asked.

  There was a light shining directly down on him. The purpose was two-fold, he knew. First, to keep him disoriented by preventing him from getting a good night’s sleep. Second, it kept his guards in the shadows so that he never knew if they were watching him.

  “So it’s okay, yes?” asked a familiar voice.

  “The Iron Lady says it is okay, then it’s okay,” replied the guard. “She says I shoot you, I shoot you.”

  “She said I should check in on him, make sure he’s healthy and see how his spirits are.”

  “She said that?”

  “Not really all that.”

  Sasha finally recognized the voice. It was Dr. Pazyryk.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the conversation.

  *****

  “Didn’t sound like her,” said the guard. “She throws somebody in a cage she don’t ask how they feel about it.”

  “Well here’s how it is,” said the doctor, “she wants to know if he’s healthy, and although I can tell a great deal about him from a physical examination, I’m not going into the cage with him. He bears a certain animosity toward me, you see.”

  “We got him chained. One chain each to the manacles on his wrists and ankles angled from the four corners, and another one from the top coming down to a metal band around his neck. He ain’t going to hurt you. You want to see?”

  “No, he’d strangle me with the chains while you were eating lunch or something. So I’m going to look at him over through the bars and talk to him.”

  “Talking helps you diagnose him?”

  “Certainly. Besides, he might slip and say something important Mrs. Kazakova needs to know.”

  “You’re a smart guy, doc.”

  “So that’s him over there?”

  “Only one I see chained in a cage.”

  “Yes, of course. He was hunched over and I couldn’t see his face.”

  “Sure.”

  “I didn’t know how many people we had in cages here.”

  “Yell if you need help,” said the guard.

  “Of course. Thank you. I will be sure and tell Mrs. Kazakova what a magnificent job you are doing.”

  “Don’t say nothing about me to her, if you get what I mean.”

  “I will, of course, respect your wishes.”

  *****

  The guard sat down, opened a desk drawer and took out a can of potato chips. He laid his pistol on the table within easy reach.

  Dr. Pazyryk set off for the cage in the center of the floor, roughly thirty feet away. One guard visible, empty warehouse space with a titanium cage in the middle. Probably a sniper or two in the rafters or somebody watching over the cage with nano-cameras. That would be his luck. He wondered briefly if there were microphones. That could be a problem, but the idea seemed ridiculous. Bugging a cage? Not likely. But Hauck had already thought of the possibility.

  His apprehension grew with every step. It was the first time that Hauck ever requested anything like this of him. Normally he just reported in on what he learned. He never had to do anything before this. Not really. This was serious. This could get him killed. But anything Hauck asked you to do could get you killed.

  His body temperature increased even in the cold and forbidding emptiness of the empty room. A trickle of sweat ran down his neck. This was not about a patient, it was about him, and the thought of being discovered terrified him.

  Sasha sat cross-legged in the cage, looking straight at him like a sinister yogi in the lotus position. A dangerous animal not to be trusted. A dangerous creature that did not trust its captors. The pure agony and hatred emanating from the young
man was tangible.

  “So,” said Sasha. “You betrayed me.”

  “And so nice to see you, too, Sasha.”

  “You drugged me. It was you who did this to me.”

  “Indeed it was.”

  “You confess?”

  “I do.”

  “I will peel back your skin when I get out of here and watch you die of infection.”

  “Now is that any way to speak to the man who saved your life?”

  Sasha spit at him, but the doctor moved aside.

  “You? You saved my life? This is what you call saving my life? Chained like a dog in a cage?”

  Dr. Pazyryk remembered what Hauck had told him. Let the boy vent his rage. Act hurt. Act wounded. Then tell him their version of the story.

  “How can you talk to me like this? First I risk everything to save you, now I risk my life to come and give you hope, and you treat me this way. I should have never come in the first place. Like a good friend, I even brought you cigarettes.”

  Sasha was about to say something, but the doctor caught his eye. He slid the cigarette pack out of his pocket, opened the box, and slid up a tiny screen hidden between the box and its foil liner. He shook his head at the young man to warn him into silence. It continued to display a faint green light, which meant there were no electronic transponders in the cage. He slid the card back into cigarette pack again.

  “Okay,” said the doctor nervously. “We can talk. Not much time, so don’t say anything unless I tell you to, okay?”

  Sasha, his eyes lit with new hope, nodded his vigorous agreement.

  “Good. Now I think you’ve been wronged by all of this. I am loyal to your mother, but you are her son. I know that you don’t think much of me, but I have always admired your courage and determination. You are the logical heir to her empire. But she is ill, and her mind has gone, I believe. It is possible Ivan has been slowly poisoning her with a metallic compound that has permanently damaged her brain and she is now insane. Do you understand?”

  This was Hauck’s idea. Even though chained and caged, no boy easily turns on his mother, not even Sasha. So the blame had to be shifted to another party. It was important, too, that the insanity be unable to be reversed because otherwise Sasha might try to save his mother.

  “You are saying that pig drives her crazy with his herbal poisons?”

  Dr. Pazyryk appeared to seriously consider the thought, as though weighing a terrible matter.

  “Reluctantly,” he finally said, “I believe it is true. Such damage cannot be undone. Your mother is not the same woman as before.”

  A fine point of instruction from Hauck. Such language implied that Anna Kazakova did really not disown her son. Anna Kazakova was gone. In her place was a crazy woman. It was important to reinforce that his mother had not betrayed him, but that Ivan had substituted a paranoid creature for her.

  “I will kill that man,” said Sasha. “I will stick a pistol up his ass and blow his balls off.”

  The doctor did not take time to explain the medical impossibility of such a plan.

  “First we must get you out of here so that you can plot your revenge.”

  Sasha’s body fell forward a few inches and his chin dropped.

  “Look at these chains, at these bars. It is hopeless. Why? Why has this happened?”

  “Keep your voice down,” said the doctor. “Words might echo in here.”

  Sasha nodded morosely.

  “Listen to me. In addition to the brain poison, Ivan convinced your mother Drogol’s blood could cure her disease. At first she thought that your blood could do this. She had me test samples of your blood on her to see if they could cure her. Her instructions to me were to take blood from you as though for a routine physical exam, and then use it to experiment on diseased mice using those samples. I’m sorry, Sasha, but she would have killed me if I disobeyed.”

  “You used my blood on diseased mice?”

  “She thought you shared enough genetics in common with your father to possibly cure her.”

  “That man is not my father. She is ill. My father died in the war and she knows it. This is all a mistake.”

  Dr. Pazyryk stayed the course. Convincing Sasha was completely necessary. Then, when he helped free the boy, the grateful young man would help him escape as well. The doctor knew sooner or later Ivan would figure him out, and he wanted to be long gone by then.

  “No. It’s not a mistake. It is the work of that albino magician. He knows that once he gets rid of your mother, you are the next in line to take over as head of the organization. With you both gone, he will grab the reins of power and claim ownership of all that your family has built.”

  The silence that followed was so loud that Dr. Pazyryk began to get nervous. The guard at the far away table looked to be sleeping, but that could be an act. Perhaps sound carried so well that even with hushed voices he could hear them and was pretending to be asleep.

  “What are we to do?” asked Sasha. “Tell me, what are we to do?”

  “First, I tell you that your mother, under the influence of Ivan, wanted you killed. Why, because she hates Drogol and believes that you are his child. You and I know that this is bullshit, but Ivan kept pushing the idea on her. I had to convince her that it was necessary to keep you alive for bait to catch the beast. Ivan wanted you dead.”

  “Thank you so very much, Doctor. You have saved me to be an animal staked out and soon eaten.”

  “Have a little trust, Sasha. I have to go now, but I will be back. I will be back to give you a sedative that will actually only be sugar and water. Do you understand?”

  “Why would you do such a stupid thing?”

  “I have convinced your mother that with further study of your physiology we may yet find a cure for her illness within you. I begged her to bring electronic scanning equipment to use in my research and she agreed.”

  “You are going to cut me open?”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Sasha. I must leave now. But when I come back, I will give you something that is supposed to put you to sleep. You will pretend to be unconscious. Do you understand?”

  Sasha agreed with a nervous yes.

  “Then, when I have declared that you are, to my satisfaction, completely unconscious, the guards will unchain you and strap you to a gurney. You will be wheeled to a separate room for a CAT scan. There will be only one guard outside of the room, and I will drug him. When he is down, I will free you and we will escape together. Now, I must go.”

  The look in Sasha’s eyes told Dr. Pazyryk that he had won his confidence.

  “Doctor?”

  “What is it?”

  “I will not forget your friendship.”

  “I am risking my life for you, Sasha.”

  “I will not forget. But one more thing, Doctor?”

  “Yes?

  “Make sure that you find a way to get me an automatic weapon and lots of ammunition before we try to escape.”

  After a slight, awkward nod, Dr. Pazyryk began the lonely trek back across the cold concrete floor. He very much hoped Hauck knew what he was doing or he and Sasha would be dead before the end of the day.

  He had not walked twenty feet before he heard the guard shout out, “Mrs. Kazakova wants to see you. Now. They’ve located the car they got away in. It had a GPS link in it.”

  Dr. Pazyryk almost fainted mid-stride.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I don’t like this sitting around and talking,” said the Instructor. “It’s boring. It’s fucking-A boring. I like to do things; I don’t like to drink coffee and yak. That’s why I hate coming in to the middle of something—especially if it’s a goat rodeo like this. But I ain’t going in blind. So I want to know everything you know that’s worth knowing and no hiding shit from me. That way we’re through and I’m only bored for just a little bit. We all together on this?”

  “Yes,” said Hauck through gritted teeth.

  “So let me see if I got this straight,” said the Ins
tructor. “Anna catches this werewolf guy when she was with the KGB. Am I right?”

  Hauck looked at the options list of anesthetic gases Traxler had handed to him.

  “Exactly,” he said, without looking up from the paper. “We had no idea what we were getting into. He was a madman with a small, underground army of followers to protect him. They were like a cult.”

  “And you had to go into the sewers, which wasn’t exactly what you guys trained for. Had to be careful pulling the trigger underground or you’d set off an explosion. Shit like that.”

  Hauck looked up and far away, remembering some of the people he’d lost to Drogol.

  “A lot of good men and women died that night.”

  “You can tell me the details someday if we get drunk and play pool. Right now, I’m more interested if you saw anything that night should have tipped you off how bad it was going to get.”

  “Nothing,” said Hauck, “until it was too late. It went through men like a propeller cutting through water in those sewers. One man made it back and started babbling about a monster. I thought perhaps a diseased gorilla had escaped from the zoo and was wandering the underground. So I ordered up all the high tensile strength nets and cables I could get my hands on. And I brought in animal control teams. Everything happened so fast I can’t tell you how we actually trapped him.”

  “Bullshit,” said the Instructor. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t ever fucking lie to me. Do I look like one of your stooges? Now it’s a simple question: how’d you bring him down?”

  Hauck looked the old man straight in the eye.

  “I’m telling you that I don’t know. It was Anna’s show. Only she knows the full details. Communications were terrible. Everything was out of control. One minute we were dealing with a monster and the next we were dealing with Drogol. But we only got him because he was where the beast was. The beast itself was … gone.”

  The Instructor grimaced.

  “So is this about a guy and his pet freak monster, or is it about a guy who turns into a monster?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hauck.

  “So you see anything good on that list from Rudolph?”

  “Everything is good on the list from Rudolph,” came a voice from across the room.