Rift Zone

PROLOGUE

VNUKOVO AIRPORT, MOSCOW, USSR

1961

A Soviet border guard rummaged through the mother’s battered suitcase, flinging clothes onto the floor of the customs hall while the toddler clutched her bear.

“We know.” The official tapped the luggage. “Next time.”

The mother plopped her two hundred pounds of hillbilly dignity onto the stone tiles and gathered their belongings as if sorting laundry on their front porch in Arkansas. The child studied a portrait of Khrushchev hanging on the beaten plaster wall and trembled until she noticed the bald man in the picture was smiling at her. She shyly smiled back and wondered if her daddy had looked like him.

Late that night, in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, the girl and her mother met God’s chosen and squeezed into an abandoned mausoleum for a secret meeting. “Come on, sweet pea,” the mother said, “Jesus needs Teddy now.” She yanked the animal from the child and plunged a dagger into the bear, sacrificing it to her god. Like entrails from a freshly butchered hog, stuffing burst from its belly. The believers shouted praises as she sank her hand into the gut, pulled out a New Testament and raised it toward the heavens.

No one noticed the terror in the little girl’s eyes.

When the girl was old enough to understand that the Soviet state feared her mother, she realized she and the communists would share a lifelong bond.