Rasputin's Shadow

1

Queens, New York City

Present Day

The vodka didn’t taste like much, not anymore, and that last swig had scorched his throat like acid, but that didn’t stop him from wanting more.

This was a bad day for Leo Sokolov.

A bad day coming close on the heels of many bad days.

He tore his eyes off the wall-mounted TV screen and gestured to the barman for a top-up, then returned his gaze to the live feed coming back from Moscow. Bitterness roiled inside him as the camera zoomed in on the coffin being lowered into the ground.

The last of us, he lamented in angry silence. The last… and the best.

The last of the family I wiped out.

The screen split to show another feed, this one coming from the city’s Manezh Square, where thousands of protesters were angrily demonstrating under the walls and spires of the Kremlin. Under the very noses of those who had murdered that brave, noble-that magnificent man.

You can scream and shout all you like, he fumed inwardly. What do they care? What they did to him they’ll do again, and they’ll keep doing it every time someone dares to speak out against them. They don’t care how many they kill. To them, we’re all just… He remembered the man’s rousing words.

We’re all just cattle.

A profound sadness seeped through him as the screen shifted to a close-up of the grieving widow, all in black, doing her best to appear dignified and defiant despite knowing, Sokolov was sure, that any lingering aspirations of protest would be relentlessly snuffed out of her.

Sokolov’s fingers tightened against the glass.

Unlike other opposition leaders, the man they were burying hadn’t been an egomaniac lusting for power, or a bored oligarch looking to add another trophy to his gilded life. Ilya Shislenko hadn’t been a wistful Communist, a messianic environmentalist, or a raving leftist radical. He was just a concerned, ordinary citizen, a lawyer who was determined to try to make things right. If not right, then at least better. Driven to fight those in power, the ones he’d publicly branded as the party of liars and thieves-a label that was now firmly embedded in the psyches of those campaigning against the government. Committed to fight the rampant corruption and embezzlement, to get rid of those who’d stolen the country from the ones who’d enslaved it for decades, those who now ruled it with a gold-plated blade instead of an iron fist, those who’d pillaged its formidable wealth and stashed their billions in London and Zurich. Putting his life on the line to give his fellow countrymen some of the dignity and the freedom that many of their neighbors in Europe and elsewhere around the world enjoyed.

How proud Sokolov had felt when he first read about him. It had breathed new life into his weary, sixty-three-year-old lungs, seeing this charismatic young man feted on the news channels, reading glowing profiles about him in The New York Times, listening to his rousing speeches on YouTube, watching as the protest marches he’d led grew and grew until the unheard-of started to happen, until tens of thousands of angry, fed-up Russians of all ages and means braved freezing temperatures and menacing riot police and started congregating in Bolotnaya Square and elsewhere in the capital to hear his words and shout out their agreement and express their having had enough of being treated like mindless serfs.

And if listening to his words wasn’t exhilarating enough, if seeing those crowds back in the home country didn’t make his heart thunder, what made it all the more rapturous was that this inspirational leader, this exceptional and courageous man, this savior of saviors, was none other than the son of Leo’s own brother. His nephew, and apart from him, the last surviving member of his family.

The family that he had all but obliterated himself.

The screen cut back to footage of his nephew’s last speech, footage that Sokolov suddenly found almost unbearable to watch. Looking at the young man’s poised features and the irresistible energy he radiated, Sokolov couldn’t help but imagine how that would have changed after he’d been arrested, couldn’t block out the horrors that he knew had befallen the man. As he had so many times since the news of his death had broken, he couldn’t avoid picturing his nephew-that beautiful, shining beacon of a man-thrown in some dark hole at Lefortovo Prison, the bland, mustard-colored detention center close to the center of Moscow where enemies of the state had been incarcerated since the days of the tsars. He knew all about its sordid past, about how dissidents held there were force-fed through their nostrils to get them to be more compliant. He knew about its dungeons and its “psychological cells,” the ones with the black walls, the solitary twenty-five-watt bulb switched on 24/7 and the constant, maddening vibration that roared in from the neighboring hydrodynamics institute with such vigor that you couldn’t even set a cup on a table without it skittering off. He also knew about its monstrous meat grinder, the one they used to pulp the bodies of its victims before they were sluiced into the city’s sewers. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been imprisoned there, as had another Alexander, the ex-KGB agent Litvinenko, who’d been given a chain-smoking informer for a cell-mate during his incarceration there-a thoughtful little gift from his former employers, given how much he couldn’t stand cigarettes-before being murdered by way of polonium-laced tea after running off to London following his release.

The death of Sokolov’s nephew hadn’t been anywhere near as sophisticated. But, Sokolov knew, it was undoubtedly far more painful.

Undoubtedly.

He shut his eyes in a futile attempt to block out the wrenching images of what he knew they would have done to him in there, but the images kept coming. He knew what these men were capable of; he knew it well and fully and in all of its gory, inhuman detail, and he knew they wouldn’t have spared his nephew any of it, not when a decision had been taken high up, not when they needed to get rid of a major thorn in their side, not when they wanted to set an example.

The screen shifted to another point of view, this one coming from somewhere much closer to the rundown Astoria bar Sokolov was slouched in. It showed a protest demonstration that was currently under way in Manhattan, outside the Russian consulate. Hundreds of demonstrators, waving signs, shaking fists, attaching bouquets of flowers and tributes to the gates of adjacent buildings-the whole scene watched over by New York’s finest and a small army of news crews.

The screen then cut away to show other, similar, demonstrations taking place outside Russian embassies and consulates around the world before returning to the one in Manhattan.

Sokolov stared at the screen with deadened eyes. Within moments, he’d paid his tab and staggered out of the bar, vaguely aware of where he was, but dead certain about where he needed to be.

Somehow, he managed to make it from Queens to Manhattan and all the way to East Ninety-first Street and the big, noisy throng that pressed against the police barricades. His chest heaved with anger, fueled by the intense passion on display all around him, and he joined in, making his way deeper into the crowd, pumping his fist in the air as he took up the familiar resounding choruses of “Izhetsy, ubiitsy” (Liars, murderers) and “Pozor” (Shame on you).

Before long, he was at the front of the crowd, right up against the barricade that protected the consulate’s gates. The chants had grown louder, the fists pumping the air more vigorously. The whole effect, combined with the alcohol swirling through his veins, turned almost hallucinogenic. His mind wandered in all kinds of directions before quickly settling onto a very satisfying image, a revenge fantasy that spread across him like wildfire. It warmed him up from within and he found himself nursing it and allowing it to grow until it consumed him like a raging inferno.

Through tired, foggy eyes he noticed a couple of men by the consulate’s entrance. They were eyeing the crowd and conferred briefly before retreating behind closed doors.

Sokolov couldn’t help himself.

“That’s right! You run and you hide, you godless swine,” he hollered after them. “Your time’s running out, you hear me? Your time’s running out, all of you, and you’re going to pay. You’re going to pay dearly.” Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he slammed his fist repeatedly against the barricade. “You think you’ve heard the last of us? You think you’ve heard the last of the Shislenkos? Well, think again, you bastards. We’re going to bring you down. We’re going to wipe you out, every single last one of you.”

He spent the next hour or so there, screaming his tired lungs out and shaking his weak, tired fists. Eventually, his energy drained and he slunk away, his head bowed. He managed to make it back to the subway and then to his apartment in Astoria, where his doting wife, Daphne, was waiting for him.

What he didn’t realize, of course, what he wasn’t conscious of even though he should have known better and would have known better had it not been for those four last shots of vodka, was that they were watching. They were watching and they were listening, as they always were, especially at times like these, at gatherings like these where crowds of undesirables could be taped and analyzed and catalogued and added to all kinds of sinister lists. CCTV cameras mounted on the walls and roof of the consulate had been rolling and powerful directional mikes had been recording and, even worse, undercover agents of the Federation had been roaming the crowd, mimicking the protesters and their angry shouts and fists all while studying the faces around them and picking out those who merited a closer look.

Sokolov didn’t know any of that, but he should have.

Three days later, they came for him.