Rasputin's Bastards

A LOST OPPORTUNITY

Alexei had been working with Mrs. Kontos-Wu for nearly three months when they boarded the Romanians’ cabin cruiser outside Boston, and nearly all of that time was spent in travel. Mrs. Kontos-Wu was an associate with Wolfe-Jordan, which had meant nothing to Alexei when he came to New York following an extended stay in Belarus. His work there hadn’t left much time for reading newspapers — particularly the financial sections where Wolfe-Jordan might have rated mention.

Because of that, her executive assistant Stephen Haber had been resolutely unimpressed with Alexei. He peered over his resume with undisguised disdain, the day they’d sat across from one another in a little hotel conference room in mid-town Manhattan.

“You worked with the KGB,” said Stephen, “until 1992. Am I wasting my time asking your duties?”

Alexei shrugged. “No,” he said. “I worked in Moscow in an office for two years in the early 1990s. It was not dramatic work. Before that — I was in foreign work. That is harder to talk about.”

“We’re all friends here,” said Stephen, in a tone that suggested that they weren’t friends at all.

“Okay,” said Alexei. “I spent time in Pakistan. East Germany. Czechoslovakia. Little bit in Poland.”

“What about Chechnya?”

“After my time.”

“Afghanistan?”

Alexei didn’t answer that one.

“Well.” Stephen was just a kid. He was probably twenty-five, but if Alexei ran into him on the street he wouldn’t have guessed him any older than twenty. Here, it was clear he’d managed to acquire the unpleasant confidence of many more years. Stephen tilted his head back and looked at Alexei hard — like he was trying to read his mind. “You won’t be doing much business in Afghanistan.”

“Okay.”

“But you may be working in a lot of other countries. Any problems with that?”

“I like to travel.”

“Good. You ever kill someone?”

Quiet for a moment. Alexei looked at the presentation board behind Stephen. There was a smear of blue ink across the bottom — Alexei thought he could make out the letters D and L in it.

“You ever kill someone?” asked Stephen again.

“Sure. Everyone in KGB killed someone.”

Stephen rolled his eyes and made a note on a yellow tablet.

“You were in Belarus most recently I hear.”

Alexei nodded. “Sure.”

Stephen eyed him. “You found good work with the Mafiya.”

“Sure,” said Alexei. “That’s all the work there is for KGB people in Belarus. Only killing people who piss off Mafiya.” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “That and washing the blood from our hands. Two hours a night.”

Stephen smiled thinly. “Funny,” he said.

Alexei smiled back. “Anyway,” he said, “there is no Russian mafia.”

Stephen looked at him. “You talk like someone who doesn’t want this job.”

“Oh,” said Alexei, “that’s not true.”

Stephen shook his head. “You poor bastard,” he said.

Alexei took it to mean that he’d blown the interview. Stephen Haber wouldn’t be calling again — not after a self-sabotaging interview like that. Thinking about it later, he had to wonder if maybe something inside him simply warned him away — was doing its best to keep him clear of this American workplace with its nursery school management.

But he’d been wrong. The next day, Alexei got a call and they met in the hotel bar — empty even of staff in the early afternoon. Alexei sipped a ginger ale. Stephen fiddled with an unlit cigarette and seemed nervous.

“You really don’t need to know this,” he’d explained, “but you’re working with one of the best. Mrs. Kontos-Wu is very hands-on. She doesn’t just pick companies out of the air. She doesn’t just sit in the office. She looks. That’s why we brought you in — Mrs. Kontos-Wu needs discreet protection; these companies are in pretty unstable places, some of them — politically unstable, you get what I mean.”

“That is what makes her so good, yes?” Alexei said, trying to at least belatedly pick up some of Stephen’s enthusiasm for his new boss.

“Not good,” said Stephen. “The best. Like you’re going to be.”

And so they had travelled: to tour diamond mines in South Africa; a computer chip factory in Taiwan; a biotech company in Calcutta and a half-built hotel complex in Borneo. On all of these, it was Alexei’s job to see that Mrs. Kontos-Wu came to no harm — that neither terrorists nor industrial spies nor, for that matter, common thieves even got near Mrs. Kontos-Wu and her entourage. Alexei carried a little arsenal of weapons — from the asp to the butterfly knife, to an electric stun-wand and a Glock semi-automatic handgun — and if pressed he knew he could kill with any one of them. But if he were ever so pressed, Alexei also knew it would have meant he’d already failed.

Seen in such terms, his first three months had been an unqualified success. Alexei swept their hotel rooms, hung back watchfully during Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s many meetings, scanned the crowds as they passed among them and generally enjoyed the sights and sounds of the new cities.

And Mrs. Kontos-Wu seemed to do well too. Everyone she met with seemed to be very agreeable — gave her all the information she needed — and even, sometimes, gave her more. Stephen Haber had been right: Mrs. Kontos-Wu evidently was the best.

Perhaps it was a combination of that — the sight of so many unfamiliar places, the chaos of so many smells and tastes, so many voices speaking in so many unintelligible languages, his boss’s uncanny ability to close a deal — that had made him careless in the banality of Boston Harbour.

Perhaps it was just stupidity.

“I have some people to talk to in Boston,” she told Stephen, the previous afternoon. “You can stay behind.”

Alexei was sitting on a wing-backed chair in the outer office, flipping through the back pages of the Post, counting time until his boss needed him. He folded the paper and looked out through the open doorway. Alexei could see Stephen, but Mrs. Kontos-Wu was hidden by a filing cabinet. As for Stephen — he didn’t look pleased at the news.

“You’ll still take your protection,” said Stephen — barely glancing at Alexei, who by this time had stood up and was leaning in the doorframe.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu glanced over the filing cabinet at Alexei. She was a small, slender woman, with long black hair and a faint Asian cast to her eyes. Now all he could see were those eyes. They were crinkled in a smile. “I don’t know that I’ll need him,” she said. “What do you think, Alexei?”

Alexei shrugged. “Never good to travel alone,” he said.

“But it’s up to me.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu leaned back in her chair, and disappeared behind the cabinet again. “That’s what I like about you, Alexei,” she said, a little sharply. “You leave it up to me.”

Stephen made his fingers into a steeple and stared ahead, blank-faced. Alexei stepped into the room, his own hands folded, in what was for him a gesture of servitude. Mrs. Kontos-Wu was still smiling at him. “All right, Stephen.” She didn’t look at her assistant. “Alexei comes — although I don’t think he’ll be needed. The sea air will do us both good.”

“Where are we going?” said Alexei. “If I may ask.”

“We are going to Boston,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “And from there — who knows?”

Later, in the car from the airport, Mrs. Kontos-Wu had told him a little more. “I’m meeting with a broker,” she said. “He’s a Turk. His name’s Shadak.”

“That is interesting,” said Alexei. He remembered he used to know a Shadak once. Back in Pakistan. Nice guy. Had a pretty girlfriend. But he didn’t say anything.

“He’s — an old friend,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “He has some associates he wants me to meet. I want you to keep an eye on them — they’re Romanian.”

“And?”

“Just keep an eye on them.”

Keeping an eye on the Romanians wasn’t, as it turned out, all that difficult — because when they got to the club where Mr. Shadak’s motor yacht, Ming Lei 3, was moored, Mr. Shadak was nowhere to be seen. So far as Alexei could tell, the yacht was filled with Romanians, stem to stern, and he could have looked anywhere and counted on seeing at least one. Altogether, Alexei counted a dozen of them by the time they disembarked — five men, ranging in age from maybe twenty-five to fifty; two women, both in their late twenties, and — incongruously — five children, none older than fourteen, the youngest one surely not more than eight. So far as Alexei could tell, the children were engaged as help on the yacht. They moved the baggage, opened doors and even offered to serve a selection of spirits once he and his employer had settled in.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu seemed unperturbed at the arrangement. One of the Romanians, a balding stork of a man who introduced himself as Mr. Hzekul, told them that Mr. Shadak would be joining them tomorrow, and when Alexei quietly voiced his skepticism at just how Mr. Shadak would do this if they were to be at sea, Mrs. Kontos-Wu waved his suspicions away.

“This isn’t unusual,” she said. “Not that unusual, not for Mr. Shadak.”

“I will keep an eye on them,” said Alexei, “all the same.”

Ming Lei 3 debarked from Boston Harbour late in the afternoon, and it was warm enough for Mrs. Kontos-Wu to change into a shorts and a light cotton shirt, to bid the land adieu. Alexei wished he could do the same — the afternoon sun was hot, particularly as it beat down on his dark suit jacket. But he was worried about the Romanians. He’d worked alongside some of them in the old days, and from everything he’d heard, Romanians in general and their Securitat in particular were still among the shiftiest bastards in the Eastern Bloc. And given that — and the little premonitory crawl that moved up and down Alexei’s back like a line of feeding ants — there just weren’t enough places to hide what he deemed to be the necessary arsenal in a pair of swimming trunks.

So Alexei sweated the afternoon out, sipping on ginger ale and watching the Boston skyline shrink on the horizon behind them. A little girl, maybe eleven, with wide black eyes set in a gaunt and serious face, hovered around him like a mayfly, forever tempting him with food and hard liquor in horribly broken English: “Cawiar?” “Meester want wodka?” “Shreemp?” “Hawe weeskie now?”

“No,” he would say, “nothing for me.” But she would persist — much to Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s amusement, if not Alexei’s.

“She’s a little professional,” she drawled to Mr. Hzekul as she sipped at her own martini, just mixed by a fourteen-year-old boy with a little s-shaped scar on his chin, and hair, like the rest of them, jet black.

“As is your man, I see,” said Mr. Hzekul, leaning close to Mrs. Kontos-Wu. His fingers brushed the bare flesh of her arm in a way that made Alexei tense, and Mr. Hzekul must have sensed this. He turned to Alexei, smiling broadly. “Good! Do not drink on duty! Always on guard. Good policeman, yes?”

“As you say, sir.” Alexei smiled and bent slightly at the waist. Mr. Hzekul leaned back against the seat cushion, and sipped at his own drink: a Canadian beer, which he drank straight from the can.

Behind them, the line of land vanished and the sea air sent an evening chill across the deck. Before Mrs. Kontos-Wu could even comment, another child came scurrying from the cabin with a blanket. Mrs. Kontos-Wu accepted it readily, and smiled her thanks as she wrapped it around her shoulders. This child was the smallest yet, so young and dressed so androgynously that Alexei couldn’t even tell whether it was a boy or girl. The child vanished inside, and Alexei, his professional attention fixed on the lecherous Mr. Hzekul just then, didn’t give it much thought.

I should have, he thought a day later, lying in a bunk on board Holden Gibson’s boat and fingering his bandaged scalp.

That night, for instance, every instinct had told him to be out on deck. Mrs. Kontos-Wu had again dismissed his concerns for her well-being where Mr. Hzekul was concerned; even suggested playfully that Alexei might have been a bit jealous. “But you have nothing to fear,” she said, and shuddered theatrically. “He’s not my type.”

Alexei had blushed, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu had laughed and winked and sent him out the door. “Go be a guard,” she said. “But leave Mr. Hzekul alone. This business will all be done soon enough.”

“What is this business?” asked Alexei — realizing even as he said it that he had stumbled across an invisible line of decorum. It was a line he’d managed to avoid for three months — that one between employee and associate — but tonight… “I am sorry—” he began.

“Go guard,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu firmly, and shut the door.

Ah shit, he’d thought. That’s why you never made the Party. No sense of politics… or the politic.

So Alexei went up on deck. He didn’t know what he expected to see, but he didn’t feel at all right about things as they stood, and he’d done everything he could below: swept Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s cabin for listening devices, put a contact alarm on her door-frame, checked the battery in her panic button. All that was left, he supposed, was for a crew of Romanian assassins to come aboard clandestinely. And anyway, here was where his gut told him to be.

The weather had shifted mightily since sunset. By midnight, when Alexei emerged from below, the calm clear summer sky was replaced by rolling black clouds and the air was filled with sharp, cold rain. He fished a Maglite from his jacket pocket and played the beam across the water-splashed deck. There was a faint light up in the cabin, where one of the Romanian adults held the wheel, but it wasn’t much brighter than Alexei’s own flashlight, and otherwise the boat was entirely dark. Which struck him as odd — wasn’t there some kind of maritime law requiring ships to run lights through the night?

A scuffling sound brought him to attention. It came from the gangway around the main cabin, toward the foredeck, but when he shone his light in the sound’s direction, there was nothing there but the misting rain.

Alexei shifted the Maglite to his left hand and drew his Glock from its shoulder holster. He shut the light off, and when he judged his eyes had adjusted well enough to the darkness he started to make his way along the edge of the boat.

The bow was as dark as the rest of the vessel. He nearly tripped over the dingy as he moved from the gunwale towards the middle of the boat, and when he righted himself he kept down on one knee — the deck here was curved, and his stomach twisted as he realized it wouldn’t take much for him to slide off it and end up freezing to death in Ming Lei 3’s wake — or perhaps more mercifully, chopped into shark chum in its propeller.

Somewhere in the dark, he heard a wet thud, and another slapping sound. Maybe something moved in front of him, maybe to his side — it was too dark to tell.

He raised the gun, and turned on the flashlight.

And God help him, he nearly fired.

It was the little girl — the “wheeskie?” girl, with the dark eyes and the underfed demeanor. She was standing not four feet in front of him, and she blinked in the light, held up her hand to ward it off. He put the safety back on the Glock and returned it to its shoulder holster, but kept the light on her face.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Cee tee five twelf,” she said.

“What?”

“Cee tee five twelf,” she repeated. “You are de one.”

The girl stepped backwards, and Alexei started to follow.

He heard a thumping sound from below, followed by a crack!, and a shouting man. Alexei redrew the Glock, and jumped onto the deck below the wheelhouse. There, he caught a glimpse of one of the Romanians — the woman — but she didn’t see him. At that, a buzz moved up his back — almost like the vibration that Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s pager would set off, if the pager had been set directly at the base of his spine. The sensation was a look-out-behind-you kind of prickling, that his mother might have named precognition.

He spun around, nearly losing his footing, as a quick shadow moved in his peripheral.

But Alexei was quick too. Just quick enough to see the smallest child — the boy-girl one, who’d been so fast with the blanket — swinging a boat-hook in a blurred arc through the rain. It cracked hard against his forehead — and before he could even react, the kid brought it down again.

There was a hollow thumping sound, and the little… girl?… jumped down next to Alexei. She moved with a steady care, and her eyes didn’t leave his.

“Baba Yaga,” she said. “Manka. Vasilissa.”

The back of Alexei’s head hit hard against the deck, and the world went dark as his Maglite skittered across the deck and into the sea.

Ah God, he thought with a horrible certainty. They got her. Lured me away, and they got Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

The girl stood over him now, and repeated the words: “Baba Yaga. Manka. Vasilissa.”

And then: “For your own good, cousin.”

And before the full humiliation of the moment could hit, the real blackness crept up to take him away.