“How long? Perhaps over one hundred and fifty years. Why? What for do you ask?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of listening to yourself?”
As though moved by a suddenly revealed moon, one of Drogol’s wolves howled somewhere off behind the upended train cars. Drogol held up his palm toward Sveta and tilted his head to one side. He sniffed the air. Something. Maybe nothing.
“Sometimes,” he said, “the rats irritate them.”
Zoe edged closer to Drogol.
“Do not fear the wolves,” he told her. “They are good and steady companions whose only desire is to protect me.”
“The rats. I don’t like rats.”
“No one likes rats,” said Sveta, “not even other rats.”
She glared at Zoe as she said it.
If Drogol noticed the animosity in her voice, he ignored it. Women had always fought over him. Men had always died around him.
“Even in so many years here, I have not truly explored this fabulous city. In fact, so bitter am I against Tesla, that, although I admire this underground city’s so cold beauty, I cannot truly love this place. Yet it is all that I have. So many years I wandered alone, looking for something to keep me from becoming a monster. In the beginning, have I told you, during the cycle of the full moon.”
For a moment, they inhaled the silence that more than anything else defined Drogol’s world.
“There was no peace for me,” he said. “The moon comes and goes in the night sky, waning and waxing as God commands. I was at its mercy. When it grew in fullness, I would … transform. I came to fear the moon. Yet it was not always so for me.
“When I was a boy, I would walk the forest paths of Siberia, wandering the night. I had always two friends with me. The moon would accompany me to show me the safe way. My wolf would stay close by to protect me. I carried a stick, a stick maybe as long as you, Zoe. Can you imagine this?”
Zoe looked as though she would cry.
“You must have been afraid,” she said.
“Hah. Afraid? I was joyous. The moon to show me a safe path, a wolf to protect me and a stick to walk with. What more could a boy ask for when traveling alone?”
“A rifle,” said Sveta.
Drogol laughed so hard that he bent over and slapped his knees in delight.
“Yes, a good rifle,” he said finally. “Tsarista, that is true.”
“I’m not—”
“Tell me, Zoe. Who is this woman to me?”
The two women looked at each other.
I dare you, thought Sveta.
“She is your heart’s desire,” said Zoe. She looked down at her hands and wiped them on her coat.
“Yes, she is. Though she has no memory of who she once was, so she is in truth only an image of my heart’s desire. Because of this, she is perhaps reincarnated in face only. No matter. I have been alone for a long time in my despair, and you brought her to me that I might have hope and strength again to do what is right.”
Grabbing a brass lever as long as his forearm inset into a control board, Drogol pulled it upward, and then pushed it forward. Suddenly the room was filled with a sound like piano wire unwinding from a spool.
He looked at Sveta.
“The house where you found me is one of many where I worked at the hermetic arts. Mine was a disease of the moon. The science of that earlier day had nothing that would cure me, so I became both a student and a practitioner of the Hermetic Arts. The world may laugh now at Astrology, Alchemy, Tarot and Magic, but I tell you truly that it was within these arts that I discovered something to suppress the curse.”
“You found a cure?” asked Sveta
“No, not a cure. What I found was that certain preparations of colloidal gold held the curse at bay. Common lore had it that mercury or silver would be effective, but they were just superstitions. A disease of the moon can only be cured by a preparation of the sun—gold, of course, being the metal of the sun. So it was in that house I first created something that would keep me from turning into a monster every full moon.”
He walked underneath the platform and began making magnetometer measurements. Zoe followed quickly, not wanting to be left alone with Sveta. For a time he said nothing, his attention focused on the work he was doing. All the while Sveta counted the minutes, growing increasingly agitated. She knew that Hauck was not far away. When he finished, he turned to them again.
“And now,” he said, “all is ready. I will show you where to set the dial, I will give you my confession, and then we shall do this.”
“Your confession?” said a bewildered Sveta. “We’re not priests.”
“I have confessed to God, now I must have witnesses. Such is my way.”
Sveta hoped his confession was short.
He led them out from under the platform, walking until he reached the bottom of the steps. After climbing halfway up, he turned and sat down, expecting them to stand looking up at him. His face was calmer than Sveta had seen it since she first laid eyes on him.
“We become what we fear most. This I have learned in my long lifetime. But there is no place for fear in God’s love, and to harbor such fear therefore keeps us away from God. Listen to me. My father was a terrible man who beat my mother and myself unmercifully. We lived in terror of his anger.”
Oh my God, thought Sveta. He’s going all the way back to his childhood. There’s no time for this. I should just shoot him and get it over with.
“He and my mother died when I was young. I was left to take care of myself as best I could. It was a hard life, children. I was sickly and weak. I came to covet power and influence over others so that I would never be victimized again. I feared my father’s power over me, so I coveted that same power over others.
“I was alone and starved too often. So one day when the holy men of our pagan faith came to me and asked me to come with them, I went. I accepted their faith; I had nothing and they would take care of me. Eventually, I turned away from these people and their faith when I met a true holy man in the forests. He told me about the real God who would reveal himself to me if only I would seek him out. And his words were inspired. I did find God—not in scriptures or religion, but in seeking him. God spoke to me, and gave me the gift of influence and bestowed upon me the honor of administering his healing abilities to those in need. But I misused these gifts because I could not put aside my need for power.
“God lifts up those who are weak, but I wanted strength and power because I so feared it in my father. One day God punished me for my arrogance by allowing the god of science to deliver upon me this curse.
“Now, I have great power. But I cannot use it for good because when I transform I become a raging, terrible beast whose needs are only to destroy and devour. It was to be many years before I learned to control this with the alchemical formula I spoke of moments ago. Before that success, I killed many innocents. More than I can now consider without sinking into abject terror and remorse.
“You may ask why I have not killed my miserable self. Why, you may ask, did not Rasputin take his own life? I tell you that it is a sin to do so. I would be permanently separated from God.
“So tonight, I instead attempt to restore myself to who I once was so that I may live and die a normal death, taking each day hostage as though it were the last. I would do good in the world. I can no longer live as a monster. You, Zoe, will help me in this. You, Sveta, will kill me if I fail. Through the monster I am a murderer, and the penalty for murder must be death if I cannot be cured.”
Sveta and Zoe exchanged glances. Sveta spoke first.
“How can I kill you?”
Drogol opened his coat, and withdrew a long bladed knife, which he then handed to Sveta.
“Should the time come, you will use this to cut off my head. It is the true way to kill me. Can you do this for me?”
She took the knife.
“You’re sure this will work?”
Drogol tugged at the edges of his beard and appeared to c
onsider the question thoroughly. It began to irritate Sveta, as she began to think that Hauck and his team would find them before she could escape.
“I know much, very much about this curse and those who have been afflicted with the wolf-bite,” he said finally. “On this earth I am the only man who knows anything at all about the effects of being exposed to Tesla’s Tunguska disaster. And even I do not know that you will be permitted to sever my head.”
Anything to get you into that tube so I can get out of here before Hauck shows up, she thought.
“Okay,” she said. “If this thing doesn’t work and you still want to die, I’ll be your executioner.”
What Sveta planned on doing was being long gone before Drogol came out of the tube.
“No,” said Zoe. “You can’t ask her to do that.”
“She has already agreed. As the Tsarista Alexandra knew so many years ago, I am too dangerous a man to let live.”
Damned straight, though Sveta.
Without another word, Drogol stood, turned and walked up and into the tube. The quartz door hissed closed. Vapors began to swirl around his feet and soon the tube was filled with a soft mist. He smiled at them once, and then bent his head as though praying.
“Hauck put you up to this,” Sveta said to Zoe.
“I was following orders, but now I don’t know. What if this works? What if he’s normal again?”
“You explain it to Hauck. I’m getting the hell out of here the minute you throw the switch.”
Zoe looked desperate.
“It was the only way,” she said.
“It’s what spies do,” said Sveta, and she shook her head in disgust. “Go ahead, turn the knob. I’m out of here.”
The brass dial turned easily beneath Zoe’s fingers. The sound in the room came alive with a high-pitched frequency. The tube began to charge with silver light that grew in intensity as Zoe moved the dial slowly towards its mark.
When Sveta looked up at Drogol she saw him standing straight as a cadet, his eyes wide open, his lips pressed tightly together. His eyes began to glow like liquid metal and she saw swirls of blue light pulsate around him, wrapping him in bands of energy like an electric snake.
Time to go, thought Sveta, but she was transfixed by the sight.
Drogol’s mouth opened in a silent scream and Sveta saw tears streaming from Zoe’s eyes. The golden light that lit the complex began to swirl and spark as though alive.
Now or never.
Sveta grabbed her gear and was about to step off the platform when she felt the ground shake from an explosion somewhere in the direction of the entrance.
Too late.
Hauck had arrived.
Chapter Twenty-eight
But it wasn’t Hauck’s team that exploded their way into the underground complex—it was Ivan’s.
The first few men through the door stopped suddenly at the unexpected sight of the immense complex. Behind them, men started shoving and pushing and asking what was wrong, but no one could hear each other because their ears still rang from the percussive force of the explosion.
What the men that came through first saw astounded them. It was not the size of what they had stumbled into that caused them to stop and gape in wonder, it was the simple fact that moments before they were armed and dangerous men who filled a dirty, descending, half-constructed passageway with impending violence. Now they were face to face with a golden world of arcing technology in a cavern the size of two football stadiums. Hardened killers pushed their way out onto the first platform to stare at bursts of blue steam that shot up from hidden pipes, copper-ringed towers that crackled with power and shot brilliant rays of light across the spaces to bounce off each other to another and yet another such tower.
“Where are we?” said one.
“What?” said another.
Earplugs could only do so much and most of these men simply didn’t put them in because they didn’t really believe the sound of an explosion could hurt their ears. Half of them had been street criminals that Sasha bought from overcrowded Russian prisons and shipped to Mishka and the others were Russian Mafiya thugs.
“Mishka’s coming through,” said someone else.
Some men pressed against the side rails to make space for him, but none turned to face him. Instead they stared out at the underground city in awe.
When Mishka arrived, he, too, stared in disbelief.
What is this place? he wondered. What have we found?
Try as he might, he could not devise an answer. Whatever it was, it was a secret that in some way might be worth a fortune. Or, it occurred to him in a flash, it could be a death sentence. What if this was a secret military installation of the United States government? But if it was, where were the soldiers? Maybe a research facility, but if it was, where were the scientists? Even without descending to ground level, he was intuitively certain that the place was empty.
Except, perhaps, for the beast who had slaughtered his men at the warehouse.
“What do we do?” asked one of his men.
The mood in his group was changing. They could smell the money. He might be able to use that to advantage. No. He could use nothing to advantage down here. Ivan would have made sure to pay at least two or three of these men to kill him when the shooting started. Executions were easy enough to buy. He ought to know; he had paid for enough of them himself.
He could expect no help from Sasha’s men, for his friend was somewhere above ground chained and caged. They were both dead men before the night was out.
“What do we do?” the man asked again. “This place is so big. How will we find the one we’re looking for?”
Mishka had an idea.
“We go down,” he said.
“Yes, but where do we begin looking? He could be hiding anywhere.”
That was what gave him hope. It was a place big enough to get lost in. A place so large that, when the shooting started, he could double back and get out the way he came in. He didn’t know who Ivan paid to kill him, but he could improve his own odds by ordering the men to split up in groups of three. Whoever came with him, he would have them take the lead and, when the time was right, he would dispose of them.
It might work. If he could get away, he would find a way to leave the country, maybe find a way to return home someday. Even Moscow was safer than Detroit.
“He’s right,” said another. “Where do we start?”
Mishka looked out across the complex, and somewhere near its center he saw a pulsating pillar of white light calling him like a lighthouse beacon. He had no idea what it was, but it was clearly something important. Something was going on there.
“There,” he said, pointing at it.
His men only knew that they were chasing a dangerous man who sometimes kept vicious wolves. Mishka knew that tonight they would face much worse.
“Go,” he said.
They began moving carefully, quietly down the stairs as though whatever waited for them in this strange world had not heard the explosion.
*****
Sveta grabbed the telescope barrel and swung it up and around to face the entrance. She bent over to the eyepiece and looked in. Nothing but a blur. She swore, and then began adjusting the focus knob, then re-aiming, then re-adjusting.
“What is it?” said Zoe. “What’s going on?”
“Your friends are here. Weren’t you expecting them?”
It was impossible to quickly find the right spot for viewing the way the telescope was configured. It was an ancient astronomer’s instrument, meant for slowly turning the gears toward a particular section of the sky with identified coordinates. Whoever had crafted it hadn’t planned on it being used to track a fast-moving incoming SWAT team.
Automatic weapons fire from somewhere near the stairway.
“Shit.”
“What?” asked Zoe.
“What are they shooting at? There’s no one down here but us, is there?”
“Wolves. Maybe they’re sho
oting at the wolves.”
A second later Sveta though she heard a wolf yelp. Snarling and more rifle fire.
“Bastards.”
Sveta bent back over the telescope and tried to block out the thought of what was happening.
Behind them the Tesla tube began to ring with resonant notes, as though the tube itself were a variable tuning fork. Drogol could be seen, had they been looking back at him, only as an image that faded in and out like a bad cell phone signal.
At last an image came into view of a man’s head.
You son of a bitch, she thought.
After some quick trial and error, she was able to control the telescopic direction and magnification so that she began to get an idea what was going on. Hauck probably thought that he came with enough men, she thought, but he hadn’t counted on a place this big. There were too many places to hide.
They were far enough away that she had a little time, so she started counting. Maybe fifteen, maybe twenty men by the time she was through. It was hard to tell through the telescope. She was getting nauseous just looking through it.
“What do we do?” Zoe asked.
“We?” Sveta said without looking up. “I’m getting out before they get here. Right now I’m just sizing them up. Oh shit.”
Zoe grabbed her arm and tugged.
“What is it?”
With a quick motion, Sveta pulled her arm away and stood up.
“You called Hauck, didn’t you?”
“I had to,” said Zoe defiantly.
“I don’t give a damn about that now. You know who’s over there coming in the same way we did? No? It’s my cousin Mishka, the same asshole who threw you into a closet and left you to die at the warehouse. Red Mafiya. And he’s got about twenty men with him now. Probably more up at the surface. So how the hell did he find us down here? Are you in with him, too?”
“I don’t even know who he is,” protested Zoe.
Long, drawn out tones began to vibrate through the platform. The Tesla tube light show began to pulse more slowly, each note longer and deeper than the other. Drogol was visible within the tube, but the energy flux made him look more like a created hologram. There was something soothing about the sound and light imagery.
Tainted Blood Page 21
