Rasputin's Shadow

12

Sokolov stood quietly by the yellow cab and waited.

He was outside the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, near the corner of East Ninety-first and Fifth, about three hundred yards northwest of the Russian consulate. The whole street was bathed a drab gray, deep in the shade, what with the evening sun lying low in the Western sky. A small cluster of trees obscured his view of the consulate’s entrance, but this was as close as he wanted to be for the moment. A first-time visitor would have never suspected that a mere three days earlier, the street had been full of protesters. Or that this was where, after all this time, Sokolov had been so stupid as to reveal to his enemies exactly who he was.

Or, rather, who he had been.

He had to make his move. And he had to do it quickly. After all, with Daphne in their hands, he didn’t have a choice. He had to try to get her back, despite the potentially catastrophic consequences of his capture. And so he’d left his hotel at seven that morning and grabbed breakfast at a cheap diner that wouldn’t put too much of a dent into his limited cash reserves. Then he’d walked three blocks to an Internet café, where he’d spent the best part of the morning researching the Russian consulate and its employees.

He knew that many of the job titles given to consulate employees were bogus-merely cover for what they really spent their time doing: intelligence-gathering, industrial espionage, recruiting agents, and hypocritically luxuriating in America’s plentiful embrace while nodding slavishly every time the Kremlin issued yet another edict condemning America and the West’s interference in the sovereign affairs of Mother Russia. He’d always thought it ironic that the consulate was housed in John Henry Hammond House, one of the most opulent private homes ever constructed on the island of Manhattan. It had been built in the early 1900s by Emily Vanderbilt Sloane and her husband as a gift to their daughter. The mansion next door, Burden House, had been built for her sister. Hardly standard bearers of the proletariat ideal, but then again, the rulers of Russia, past and present, had never intended to share the grim conditions they imposed on their people.

He’d spotted Third Secretary Fyodor Yakovlev’s name on the list, his now-dead visitor of the day before, and seeing the name had sent a cold jolt up his spine. He’d moved on and kept searching until he’d settled on Lazar Rogozin, counselor for political-military affairs, who he’d seen on a recent circular from a New York-based NGO protesting the systematic attacks on gays and immigrant workers in Moscow by members of the Nashi, the Kremlin’s modern take on Hitler Youth. The circular asked that everyone who took issue with this abhorrent and increasingly common practice in the motherland should bombard Rogozin with letters and e-mails, whom the organization had identified as having financial interests in at least two businesses that were known to fund Nashi’s activities. The NGO activists had even been gracious enough to provide a photograph of him.

After grabbing some lunch, Sokolov had managed to find a phone booth, which he’d used to call the consulate. Using a disguised, soft-spoken voice, he’d asked if Rogozin was in. The answer had been yes. Sokolov had hung up while he was being transferred, then walked around until he’d found a thrift shop. There, he’d bought a heavy navy-blue coat that he’d shrugged on while he was still in the shop, a loose-fitting felt beret that he’d pulled down so it covered most of his ears, and a knitted scarf he’d wrapped around his neck.

He’d then taken the subway and walked across town to the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth, where he’d spent almost an hour studying the faces and body language of various taxi drivers and mustering up the courage to go ahead with what he intended until, at about five, he felt confident and desperate enough to approach a driver for the task ahead. The cabbie he’d chosen was a black man in a Rasta hat who, unsurprisingly, turned out to be Jamaican. The man, Winston, was so laid-back he didn’t bat an eyelid at what Sokolov told him he needed him to do. The only issue with Winston, as Sokolov soon discovered, was that he always drove with the window open, no matter the time of year. He said it kept the germs from breeding inside his cab, which, given the rickety state it was in, seemed like it should be the least of his worries in terms of his well-being. Still, he was ready to do Sokolov’s bidding without asking questions, and that was all Sokolov required.

And so they’d driven uptown, motored past the consulate, and parked outside the museum.

And waited.

And as he waited, his mind drifted back to how it had all started. To the discovery he’d made in the cellar of his father’s house. To the journals of his grandfather, the ones that would consume his future.

The ones he suddenly wished he’d never read.