Rasputin's Bastards

THE STRANGER-WOMAN

The feeling was not dissimilar to the course their affair had taken those many decades ago.

They had met while dreaming an interrogation. The KGB had pulled in what they believed to be an American sleeper in Berlin, and City 512 had its orders to confirm this supposition.

Kolyokov remembered the day the orders had come in. He was just a month shy of his nineteenth birthday, but had already participated in three successful operations. A regular little Hero of the Workers — although most of his involvement had been in manipulating those workers that had been implanted as sleepers: strictly internal work. Foreign espionage remained his dream.

“Your dream is about to come true, Comrade Kolyokov,” said Vasili Borovich, his titular commander, as he revealed the mission over tea that morning. The two were sitting in an office in one of the lower sub-levels of City 512 — an area baffled with the new e-generators that were supposed to keep eavesdroppers out. “We are engaged in serious work. We think that our friends in the KGB have uncovered an agent who is — I would not say our equal. But formidable.”

“Well,” said Kolyokov.

“This agent is American — he has been active in North Africa — and he’s got contacts all through Germany and Czechoslovakia.” Vasili smiled and opened the spigot on the little brass samovar, refilled his tea. “So you see? Finally, young Fyodor Kolyokov gets to see the world.”

Kolyokov laughed at that. Kolyokov was only young compared to Vasili, by the fine measure that children bring to the lay of their youth. Vasili was in fact only a year ahead of Kolyokov — and not, in truth, much more experienced. At that, he was still one of the eldest in City 512 at that time and he lorded it over the rest of them, like an upperclassman.

“So how’s this going to work?” said Kolyokov. “I’m happy as ever to serve the Party and the People — but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of anyone doing an interrogation like this before, with a hostile mind, who might be trained.”

Vasili nodded. “It’s tricky. That’s why it won’t just be you. I’ll be working it too. And there’s one more. From Canada.”

Fyodor raised his eyebrows. “We’re working with Canadians now?”

“Idiot. No. I said from Canada. Not a Canadian. One of our operatives there.”

Fyodor set his teacup down and squirmed. He had to pee something awful — even then, he had a bladder that wouldn’t keep quiet for very long. Vasili could hear it too: you didn’t carry many secrets from each other at City 512. He let a little smirk cross his lips.

“So he’s coming all the way from Canada for this,” said Kolyokov impatiently. “It seems wasteful.”

Vasili’s smirk broadened and he laughed. “Not he, my friend — she. And yes — all the way from Canada, where she’s been—”

But Kolyokov didn’t wait for the rest. He rushed to the lavatory — where he would, in a moment, void his bladder, and scrub his hands and face to wash away the terrible premonition that stained him as Vasili spoke the words:

Not he, my friend — she.

Kolyokov’s isolation tank was shiny as a new car in those days, and it didn’t smell at all. It was situated in a room nearer the surface — insulated from the thrumming e-generators that would make dream-walking impossible, and just deep enough that the roar of the trucks and the airfield over-top didn’t likewise disturb the dreamers’ sleep. Its Soyuz urinal even worked — so the fullness of Kolyokov’s twitchy bladder was neither here nor there when it came to dream-walking.

They would be dream-walking to the subject. The location of City 512 was a secret kept from all but the most senior members of the KGB — and bringing a prisoner who could well be from America’s counterpart into City 512 would represent an insane breach in security. An old farmstead in East Germany, surrounded by black cars, was the subject’s prison. Comrades Kolyokov and Borovich would meet the Canadian operative there. Together, they would dream-walk into the American spy’s mind, in a process not dissimilar to the one they used to operate trained sleepers. But they wouldn’t operate this one’s mind. They’d crack it, and toss it like a dissident’s flat.

“Red,” said Kolyokov as the technician turned the latch on his tank. “And orange, and yellow…” And green…

Oh, how Kolyokov loved dream-walking in those days. To step from his imperfect flesh and into the crafted, beautiful form of his metaphorical body. They were all Gods — terrible and beautiful in the guise of their dreams. Vasili might erase his thin face and pale, too-long fingers — extend the jawline that in reality receded beneath a slight overbite. Kolyokov could trim away the roll of fat that even then spread over his belt, and replace it with the sharp-lined torso that only seemed to appear in sculptures.

In such an idealized form, Kolyokov rose over top his tank — up past the gantries, over the rows of fluorescents that hung in a row on thick black wires.

“Hey — Fyodor! Wait for your leader!”

Kolyokov stopped, and hovering there waiting, glanced down at the tanks. He marvelled at the luminescent thing that rose out of the tank marked BOROVICH.

“Look at you,” said Kolyokov as Vasili Borovich’s newly tuned metaphor rose to join him.

Vasili had pulled out all the stops. His chin was sculpted heroically, to social-realist proportions, as was his newly minted chest. His hair, clipped short to keep out the lice, here hung to his shoulders in a wild black mane. At first, Kolyokov thought he might be wearing robes, but as Vasili rose Kolyokov saw they were no such thing.

Vasili had given himself wings — white angelic wings, over a slim, naked form that would have fit snugly on an Olympic swimmer.

In spite of himself, Kolyokov laughed.

“Comrade Commander,” he said, “don’t tell me you’ve taken up religion? Or is it a woman?”

To his surprise, two pink spots appeared on Vasili’s magnificently sharp cheekbones, and his perfect blue eyes glanced downward.

Kolyokov laughed again and gave one of Vasili’s immense wings a tug with one hand.

“She must be a wonder,” he said.

“You have no idea,” said Vasili, still not meeting Kolyokov’s eye. “Now let’s go — it’s almost time for the rendezvous.”

And with a single flap of his wings, Vasili Borovich led the way to Germany, and the interrogation.

A thin layer of snow enshrouded the farmstead. The little cluster of buildings was surrounded by a web of tire tracks, spreading out from a smaller circle of vehicles tucked close into the house. Yellow light came from one window, stretching across the mucky white for what looked like twenty metres before it faded. In that light, Kolyokov could see the shadows of the KGB men as they paced to and fro — waiting for the interrogation to begin.

Kolyokov and Vasili settled to the ground outside that window and peered inside.

There were three KGB men in a large room that had at one time been a family room. One tended a coal fire in a little pot-bellied stove in one corner. Another was walking back and forth, his eyes darting nervously about the room. A third smoked a cigarette in a chair, beside a bed where their subject, a heavy-set young man with curly blond hair, was strapped naked.

“Look at them,” said Vasili with a grin. “They’re scared out of their minds.”

“Why shouldn’t they be? They’re alone in the winter, waiting for interrogators that are invisible and can read their very thoughts.” Kolyokov reached inside, and idly entered the mind of the pacing man.

“You see? That one — I can’t make much sense of it, but he’s thinking about a sum of rubles — a sum I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t have on his salary.” Kolyokov smiled thinly. “I’ll make a note of it.”

“Is this what we’ve come to at City 512? Peeping into the minds of our brave Comrades?”

Both Vasili and Kolyokov started. The voice was a woman’s — and Kolyokov thought it was the sweetest thing that he had ever heard. He and Vasili turned to see her.

She stood in a long, hooded robe, lined with mink, that covered all but her mouth, which was pulled now into a mischievous smile. Kolyokov’s hand slipped from the KGB man’s mind.

“Lena,” said Vasili. Almost of their own accord, his wings extended outward and over his head.

The woman — Lena — laughed. “Vasili Borovich? Is that you in the folds of that outrageous metaphor?”

The wings faltered, but Vasili kept his composure. “None other, my dear,” he said, and stepped forward — surely, thought Kolyokov, as though he were expecting an embrace. Kolyokov had to suppress a smirk, as this woman Lena stepped passed him, ducked underneath his extended left wing-tip, and brushed past Kolyokov to peer into the window.

“My name is Lena,” she said.

“Fyodor,” said Kolyokov.

“Well, Fyodor,” she said as she stepped through the glass and wall and into the room, “I’m glad to see someone didn’t overdress for the occasion.”

The interrogation took only a few hours — but in those hours, Kolyokov learned more about his gift and its application than he had in his entire lifetime spent studying at City 512. Lena had done this before — and she knew the tricks of a dream-walker’s defences as a locksmith knows the tumblers of a well-made safe.

Their subject turned out to be a formidable lock indeed. As they stepped into the metaphor of his defences, they found themselves standing upon a great plain. The ground was cracked like a dried sea bed — the sky the colour of fire and smoke. Kolyokov was confused — there appeared to be no entry point here at all. Perhaps they should dig? Vasili swore and flapped his angel wings in frustration. Lena held up a hand, and slowly began to turn, her eyes narrowed to observant slits. Finally she pointed.

“That horizon,” she said, “is closer than the others. We go there.”

It took what seemed like an hour to get there, but finally they found what the closer horizon signified: a cliff, dropping treacherously into a deep canyon. It might be scalable — looking down, Kolyokov could see things nested in crooks and ledges; and they would have had to have gotten there somehow. But if this were a defence system, he didn’t think the route would be easy.

“Hell,” said Lena, looking further.

“Don’t despair, my dear,” said Vasili, putting a hand on her shoulder. Lena shrugged it off.

“I’m not despairing,” she said. “Just observing. This place — it’s a Christian Hell. Look.” She pointed into the yellow mist that clung to the floor of the great canyon. Kolyokov peered.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “There are circles — tiers, going down in ever smaller circles. Think there’s an ice field in the middle?”

Lena spared Kolyokov a dazzling smile. “You’ve read your Dante,” she said, and made a scolding noise. “Careful, Fyodor. The Divine Comedy cannot be on the approved reading list at City 512.”

Kolyokov shrugged. Had he been there in Physick, she might have seen him blush.

“Well,” she said, “this is no doubt a terrifying metaphor for the weak Christian bourgeoisie in the West. Here, though, we are made of sterner stuff, hey Comrades? There is no Hell for we Soviets, but the chains and wheels of unchecked Capital.”

“You are very wise, my dear,” said Vasili.

“Actually,” she said, “I am very funny. That was a joke, my little Comrade Angel. Now why don’t you flap your wings. Perhaps it will break your fall.” And with no more than the tiniest of nudges, she sent Vasili Borovich cartwheeling over the edge of the abyss.

She laughed sweetly, as he plummeted and rolled and finally, when he was no more than a distant speck — began to spin and glide into the yellow sulfur of Hell’s ground mist.

Breaking the American’s shield was a complicated business. At the bottom of the cliff, there waited an army of red Imps, carrying pitchforks, breathing flame and uttering unsettling commentaries concerning Vasili’s parentage. Kolyokov was inclined to dive down and help out, but Lena held him back. While Vasili kept the American occupied, she meant to outflank him. If this metaphor was anything like the defensive metaphors that she was familiar with, there was only so much of it the American could control at once.

So they moved along the ridge, until Vasili’s cries and the clanging of pitchforks blended in with the droning laments of the damned. Lena stopped, and looked down at the rock. Sure enough, it was smoother here — the cracks in the clay had a blurred quality to them. When Kolyokov put his hand against the firmament of Hell, it yielded like foam rubber before solidifying under his touch.

Lena knelt beside him — put her hand on his. She smiled at him. He smiled back. And as they touched, the ground shifted and bent, and the edge of the cliff extended. Lena took her hand away, stood, and stepped on the new ground they had made. It was the top landing of a long set of stairs cut into the cliffside, extending step by step down to the next circle of Hell.

“Abandon hope, ye who enter,” said Kolyokov.

“Stop showing off,” said Lena, “or I’ll report you. Now come on. This is our way in.”

There was a great fat demon waiting for them at the bottom — but he remained lethargic and indistinct while the American put his full attention on the defeat of the angelic Vasili. Lena and Kolyokov were able to sneak past him without incident.

Kolyokov was beginning to think the whole thing would be a piece of cake when, in the midst of a stony plaza approaching the blasted out archway of a bone white cathedral, he stepped into a puddle of flaming pitch. The pain was so intense that it was all he could do not to sit up in his tank back at City 512 and shriek like a baby. Lena hauled him back, and told him not to blame himself: the puddle had literally appeared as he stepped into it. They had apparently wandered into a psychic minefield. They both concentrated, and the pain vanished as his metaphorical foot reconstituted itself.

They took greater care as they resumed their march — and for that, still trod on sudden spikes and razors and lengths of barbed wire that popped up unavoidably as they made their way along.

They met Vasili again at the edge of the next circle, and for the next phase of their journey, faced the defences of the American head-on: clouds of flesh-stripping locusts and great black tentacles, sudden gouts of red-hot magma that leapt at them from fresh-cut fissures in the rock.

They battled an immense two-headed serpent and played a riddle game with a hunchback, and cut their way through a great rose bush that grew thorns long as fingers.

Finally, on a basalt mountain in the midst of the ice field that encrusted the firmament of Hell’s centre, they met the American himself: a giant, black-skinned demon with wings pulled from a bat and thick-lidded eyes that glowed like headlamps.

“‘Night on Bald Mountain.’ How unoriginal,” said Lena.

The American Satan let out a terrible roar.

“But what do you expect from Americans?” she continued. “They drop a little LSD on their tongues or chew on the peyote, and think they can control the world. You’re better than most — I’ll give you that. But still — the best you can come up with for your defence is an image you stole from a Walt Disney film.”

Lucifer the American shrieked, swelled his immense chest and spread his wings so they blacked out the sky.

“Oh, that and I suppose your vaunted faith. But really. Fantasia? Why don’t you just have the mouse send broomsticks after us? That is every bit as terrifying as this scribble of a demon you’ve made of yourself.”

Kolyokov could see the metaphor beginning to dissolve, as Lena’s words cut through the Yank Beelzebub’s belief. That was always key to defeating these things — destroy the belief in the metaphor, and it begins to crumble. Keep playing by its rules — and it grows stronger.

“Or what,” she continued, “about that funny dog? What is his name—”

The demon’s wings began to show light through them, like thinning fabric —

“Pluto?”

The creature opened its mouth and closed it again. The light in its eyes began to dim. And so it began: the American’s metaphor of Hell began to fragment and collapse upon itself.

She’d made it look easy. But afterward, Lena told them that she’d only encountered stronger defences in the best of the younger generations — younger even than Kolyokov’s. This one — John Kaye was his true name; they’d managed to extract that from the mewling remains of the American agent — must have been an aberration to have built up such a fortress around his mind, and Lena suggested they keep him alive for his genetic material if nothing else.

“You are still breeding at City 512, aren’t you?” she said, looking directly at Kolyokov as she spoke.

“That is the main of our work there,” said Vasili, his wings drooping forlornly by this point.

“Ah, yes,” said Kolyokov. “Mostly that is what we do there now.” At their feet, Kaye had mostly finished twitching, and the KGB men had come back into the room. Lena got up from the creaky old rocking chair just as one of the agents moved to sit down on it.

At this point, she’d shed her robe to reveal a pair of dark slacks and a baggy grey turtleneck sweater. It would have been a complete contrast to Vasili’s outlandish seraphim getup but for her face; her eyes in particular, which she had crafted into a sum of what was to Kolyokov at any rate, womanly perfection. He couldn’t stop staring at her — even, he found, when she stared levelly back, as she was doing now.

“Well,” she said, “I think we are finished here. Vasili, my dear?”

“Yes!” Vasili’s wings perked and spread, and his face flushed red. “I mean — yes… my dear?”

“Why don’t you use those magnificent wings to fly back to City 512 with our report?”

“But—” poor Vasili’s face took on a puzzled mask “—I thought I’d send Comrade Kolyokov back. So we might—”

Lena raised a finger. “We might not,” she said. “Comrade Kolyokov can wait here a minute. I’ve some questions for him before he departs.”

“But—”

Lena’s finger pointed to the window. “Go,” she commanded.

Although he clearly was not pleased about it, Vasili had no choice but to obey. No one did, Kolyokov would later reflect bitterly, when Lena commanded.

The farmstead soon emptied after Vasili returned to his tank, and City 512 sent back a radio message that the interrogation was finished. The agents all but bolted from what to them must have been a haunted building. Kolyokov wondered if it was their laughter that drove the agents so quickly. Lena wiped a crystalline tear from a perfect eye and settled back into the rocking chair.

“So tell me now honestly,” she said. “Did you enjoy your first time outside City 512?”

Fyodor sat on the edge of the bed, and shrugged in what he hoped was a worldly way. “It was not my first time,” he said. “I have performed many successful operations in Leningrad and Moscow.”

“Yes,” she said. “Playing the sleepers, isn’t that right? Making them check up on their traitorous neighbours, rounding up the dissidents. That’s good — but it’s not the same thing as dream-walking here, is it?”

Now Fyodor felt himself blushing. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

“Well, I’ve enjoyed my trip here to Germany too,” said Lena. “I’ll tell you — there’s one place in the world that’s worse than City 512: Toronto. In January.”

Fyodor laughed at that, and looked up. “Toronto. That’s right. Vasili said you were the Canadian.”

Lena shook her head. “Not Canadian,” she said. “Russian. In Canada, true, but Russian.”

“Are there many of you there?” Fyodor tried to imagine an operation the size of City 512 in hostile territory.

“No,” she said. “Just me for now. But—” she smiled in a way that gave Fyodor a chill “—that won’t be for long. I’m making friends.”

Lena leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. Her smile broadened as she regarded Fyodor.

“You said — you said you wanted to ask me some questions?”

“Do you make friends?” she asked.

“Not many,” he said. “There are only so many people at City 512, and—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

Lena stood and reached into a shadow for her cloak. “Better,” she said, throwing it over her shoulders and pulling the clasp tight around her neck, “that I show you.”

Lena took Fyodor to the sky first — and then, from a height where the world curved at the edge — pointed at a line of coast that Fyodor took a moment to recognize:

“Africa,” he said.

“Tunisia,” she replied. “Some of my friends are there now.”

Fyodor followed Lena back down again into the thickening air. They travelled quickly, but the sun was quicker, and its rise had hit the low, ancient buildings of Tunis by the time they’d arrived, making it a golden desert world out of a boy’s adventure novel. Lena led him overtop telephone wires and antennae; past a railway station; over a tall iron fence; and into the diplomatic residence of the Canadian Embassy. They finally stopped in a bedchamber — where a striking dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her early thirties slept alone, beneath a slowly whirling fan.

Lena leaned over and stroked her cheek.

“Fyodor,” she said, “I would like you to meet my dear friend, Mrs. Elizabeth Dunn.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Kolyokov.

“Wife,” continued Lena, “to Montgomery Dunn — the Canadian Ambassador to the Republic of Tunisia. She and he have been stationed here for three years now — since the French pulled out, and the ancient lands of Tunisia have become once more ripe for the picking.”

“She is a sleeper?” Fyodor bent over and studied the woman’s face. In waking, the aristocratic lines to her jaw and nose might seem harsher — but now, in the early morning light, Mrs. Dunn’s face held an innocence. She might have been a child.

“Yes,” said Lena. “We’re not making too much use of her these days, unfortunately — we’d hoped that things might have progressed differently when the French handed over power to the locals. But it’s always good to have friends in warm places, hmm?”

Mrs. Dunn’s eyes blinked open.

“Well hello there,” she said — looking straight at Kolyokov.

“Shit!” Kolyokov leapt back. “She can see me! Lena! Get out of here!”

But Lena didn’t answer: and as Kolyokov looked around the room for her, he quickly realized that she was gone.

“Shh, shh,” said Mrs. Dunn as she sat up in bed. She was wearing a light, gauzy nightdress suitable to the tropical climate. In the morning light, it left little to the imagination. But her eyes — her eyes had a perfection, a clarity to them, that was unmistakable.

“Lena?”

Mrs. Dunn cocked her head and smiled. “One and the same,” she said.

“What — what are you doing?”

“The same thing,” she said, “as you have done so many times with your

Leningrad sleepers. I’m dream-walking her.”

Mrs. Dunn ran her hands down her sides, lifted one well-formed leg in front of her. She looked at it appraisingly, turning it slightly to admire the ligature of the calf. “She is still looking after herself, I see.”

“I don’t think,” said Kolyokov as Mrs. Dunn’s hand then crept up under her nightgown and towards her middle, “that you are doing the same things with your sleepers, that I do with mine.”

At that, Mrs. Dunn threw her head back and laughed. “Oh Fyodor,” she said, “you have been missing out — haven’t you? Come on—” Mrs. Dunn extended a hand “—let me introduce you to some of my other friends. This is going to be a wonderful holiday!”

Lena made her sleeper bathe and dress and eat — so it was mid-morning before she ordered a car to take them to Dan Knowling’s apartment in La Goulette.

Knowling was a stringer for the Toronto Telegram, who Lena had placed here at the same time as she had Mrs. Dunn. He was meant to be Mrs. Dunn’s backup, said Lena, in the event that dream-walking proved impossible. “Old fashioned mnemonic programming,” said Lena, “should never be discounted. We can only be so many places at once.”

Lena made Mrs. Dunn knock twice on the door to Knowling’s apartment. Mid-morning was evidently still early for a journalist in Tunisia; Mr. Knowling answered the door in a pair of grimy pajama bottoms, with bleary eyes and a dusting of blond stubble on his chin.

“Um… hello,” he said. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

Lena gave Kolyokov a fast sidelong glance.

“Quickly,” she said. “Inside.”

“Um, pardon me?” said Knowles.

“What?” said Kolyokov.

“Walk him!” said Lena. “Before he sees too much!”

“Before — ?”

“Before — ?”

“Now!”

At first, controlling Dan Knowling was a bit of trick — like driving an unfamiliar automobile. Kolyokov was used to stout little bureaucrats and underfed military personnel: Knowling was tall and athletic, with an assassin’s reflexes and 20/20 vision. It was the difference between driving a broken-down delivery van and an American sports car.

“You took too long, my sweet,” said Lena as she made Mrs. Dunn step into the apartment and shut the door. “He saw.”

“I’m — sorry,” said Kolyokov, through Mr. Knowling. “You should have warned me.”

“Well, then — consider yourself warned.”

As she spoke, Mrs. Dunn’s hand reached to the drawstrings of Mr. Knowling’s pajama bottoms and pulled them undone. With the other hand, she reached down and took hold of Mr. Knowling. Kolyokov gasped.

“Exquisite, isn’t it?” she said, pulling close so that Mrs. Dunn’s breasts pressed against hard against Mr. Knowling. “All the sensations are there for you to enjoy — but they do not possess you, as they might in ordinary lovemaking. You remain your own, Fyodor.”

Kolyokov didn’t know about that: in both ordinary lovemaking, and this game that Lena had devised with the sleepers, he was a complete virgin until this moment.

Not that he was about to let on about that: he guided Mr. Knowling’s hand to the back of Mrs. Dunn’s thigh, hiking up her skirt and sliding his fingertips down the tops of her panties with what he hoped was the assurance of an experienced lover. Mrs. Dunn let out an appreciative growl as his hand slid further down. Meanwhile, her fingers had wrapped tighter around Mr. Knowling’s member, and she pulled it free of his pants. With flattened palm, she pressed it against the trembling flesh of her stomach.

“The bed,” said Mrs. Dunn.

“Yes,” said Mr. Knowling.

And together, in a slow dance of marionettes, they crossed the tiny flat to the old iron bed, and fell there in a tangle of limbs.

They stayed in bed the day — putting the two sleepers through what must have been an exhausting array of gymnastics for their mutual pleasure. Lena was the more experienced of the two — but Kolyokov made up for his inexperience with enthusiasm, and Lena voiced no complaints.

By late in the afternoon, however, Lena announced that they were finished.

It produced a premonitory pang in Kolyokov: he remembered suddenly how she’d dismissed Vasili so easily, and was filled with an unreasoning fear that she should do the same to him now that she’d taken her pleasure.

“Don’t worry,” said Lena, “we shall meet again. Not here perhaps — but I am not finished with you, young Fyodor. And you — you still have much to learn at my knee.”

“I am glad,” said Fyodor. He nestled Mr. Knowling’s face into the crook of Mrs. Dunn’s shoulder.

Mrs. Dunn patted Mr. Knowling on the cheek. “Good. Now it’s time for you to leave Mr. Knowling,” she said.

“Now? While you — I mean, while Mrs. Dunn is still here? Won’t that compromise security?”

Mrs. Dunn smiled for Lena. “Oh my dear — we are well past that. Now step out.”

Not quite knowing what to expect, Kolyokov did as he was told. As he watched, Mr. Knowling blinked twice, and looked up at Mrs. Dunn, eyes wide in confusion.

“You — but…”

Lena made Mrs. Dunn smile down at him — and Kolyokov’s heart fell as he finally understood what was to happen. “Sorry, Danny,” she said, wrapping her fingers around his throat as she straddled him one last time. “Fyodor was a second too slow — and you saw too much.”

Although Kolyokov did not end the affair at that precise moment, it was that moment — its reverberations and implications; what it said about him, about Lena, and most important, about the two of them together — that finally caused him to quit.

He might have been better off to end it sooner. Things were never the same between himself and Vasili afterward. Vasili stopped inviting Kolyokov for tea and vodka, and after a while would not even acknowledge his presence when the two found themselves alone in a room. Within a year, Vasili had had himself moved out of City 512 to do fieldwork in the European theatre — and after that, he and Kolyokov never had cause to speak again.

Kolyokov, meanwhile, turned away from the foreign work with which he had once busied himself, and spent his days working with the next generation of City 512 students. During those years, he did much commendable work — developing among other things the internal metaphors for new sleeper agents and the three-word mnemonic that could break a program like a stretch of magnetic tape; and, like so many of his colleagues there, building his own network of sleepers that spanned the globe.

Kolyokov and Lena met as often as they could, given the demands of their work. Through the course of their affair, they made love in Rome and London; New York and Nairobi; Gdansk, and Berlin; and Hong Kong, where Kolyokov finally ended it.

“We are craven together,” he said as Lena dressed Wei Yu, a little Taiwanese prostitute who normally did this sort of thing for a clientele of bankers, government and military officials. “Like a couple of unclean puppeteers.”

Wei Yu shrugged for Lena. “So? I do not see why this is a revelation. You just don’t like your body today.”

Kolyokov patted his host’s ample gut. He was in another newspaper man — they seemed to use a lot of journalists for sleepers — but this one was no Dan Knowling. At fifty-three years old, Archibald Lonsdale was a glutton and a drunk and probably wouldn’t survive to see his fifty-fourth birthday the shape he kept himself in.

“That’s not it,” said Kolyokov. “It’s just — look at this fellow. He’s had a life, with a wife and children. And here we take him away from that to fuck a little hooker young enough to be his granddaughter.”

“It’s only flesh, Fyodor.”

Kolyokov shook Mr. Lonsdale’s head. “I make these sleepers, you know.”

“So do I.”

“Granted. But I watch them come up, some of them, from little children. From the cradle. And I can’t help wondering — are we going to take possession of these children someday, to slake our lusts?”

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” said Wei Yu.

“And what about our superiors? We’re squandering the sleepers, Lena! Don’t you imagine there will be an accounting?”

“Fyodor,” said Wei Li in a quiet, reasonable tone. “Which superiors are you referring to? I’m not aware of anyone superior to you or I, in the whole world.”

Kolyokov set Mr. Lonsdale’s lips in a thin, hard line.

“We have to end it,” he said.

Wei Yu put a small hand on Lonsdale’s thick, hairy forearm.

“Don’t leave me, Fyodor,” she said for Lena. “You don’t know how alone I am.”

On Kolyokov’s behalf, Lonsdale took hold of Wei Yu’s hand and kissed it delicately. Wei Yu’s face was a mask — Lena had pulled back from it already, and would soon depart altogether.

“Goodbye,” said Lonsdale.

“Fuck off,” said Wei Yu, and as her eyes changed and Lena receded altogether, Kolyokov cursed.

The little prostitute was back in herself now. Lena — in a fit of spite — had pulled out before they could separate the sleepers. Which meant that Wei Yu had seen Lonsdale. And if Kolyokov were to play by the rules, she would have to die.

She had certainly gotten a good look at Lonsdale by now — her eyes were locked on him as she snatched her hand back.

Kolyokov looked down at Lonsdale’s thick-fingered hands. It would be easy — and it would be according to procedure.

But he didn’t. Instead, he moved the hands to his wallet and pulled out a ten-pound note. He had no idea if that was the going rate — and Lonsdale was no help. He liked his fine food and liquor, but it turned out the old boy drew the line when it came to paying for sex.

“I’m sorry,” he said in his rudimentary Mandarin. “Here.” And Lonsdale put the money down on the bed between them. “Good?”

Wei Yu calmed down at the sight of the money, and looked between him and the cash. Kolyokov didn’t need to read her mind to see what she was doing: piecing together her lost afternoon from the best evidence — that she’d at some point met up with this fat old man, come to this room here, and blacked out, somehow managing to forget the whole exchange.

She nodded. “Good,” she said.

“Goodbye then,” said Lonsdale again.

And at Kolyokov’s direction, he pushed himself to his feet, gathered his jacket and stepped out the door. He wobbled down the stairs to the muggy heat of the Hong Kong afternoon and started back to the press club. Kolyokov stayed with him for several blocks — then left the poor man where he stood, confused and disoriented, ten pounds poorer but none the wiser — and still, blessedly, alive.