Lead us from victory to victory!
Rostov clamps down on my arm. Yulia. My own name becomes a traitor in my mind, slithering around me, circling. I have a special mission just for you.
Something snaps in me—like a rubber band stretched to breaking point. I slump into him as pops of color flood my vision. Bang-bang. I can’t break free.
Valentin turns toward us, his mouth a round O of panic. All color flees from Larissa’s face. “Yulia, wait!” But I can’t. I can do nothing but obey.
Rostov shoves past the guards—rather, the guards fly back from him, on jerky mechanized legs. A dizziness like deep hunger keeps me off balance. I am dimly aware of the building around us, then winter air like a slap. I scan the airstrip for the American, but he’s long gone; the air reeks of metal and smoke. Rostov shoves me into a military truck and we rumble along the road. Sirens whirl in front of us in hypnotic syncopation all the way back to the hotel.
One foot after the next. I am Rostov’s marionette. Back into the swelter of Hotel Kepler. The radiator blasts me like a prison cell slamming shut. Sweat rolls down my spine, between my shoulder blades. My puppet master steers me into the elevator. The face I see reflected in the brass trimming is not my own; it is the loose skin of a girl with all her insides scooped out.
“Come, Chernina,” Rostov says, as the elevator gates latch shut. “We must set Secretary Khruschev straight.”
CHAPTER 40
NIKITA SERGEYEVICH KHRUSCHEV, the general secretary of the Communist Party and the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is slick with sweat from his bald dome to his sagging gut. His shirt is half unbuttoned, and wiry chest hair spills from it like white worms. “Don’t issue anything yet,” he yells into a telephone. “I’m not pointing a finger at the Americans until we decide if we want this to be public at all.”
“Comrade secretary,” Rostov says. “A word, please.”
Khruschev slams down the phone and whirls toward us. “General Rostov.” The tumbler of vodka slides out of his hand; from his shining red Rudolph nose, I’m guessing he had a few on the truck ride back here. “Of the Committee for State Security, yes? KGB? I’m sorry, but as you can imagine, I have some rather pressing matters to deal with right now. I was not expecting you.”
Neither were his guards, when Rostov reduced them to knotted, convulsing lumps in front of his hotel room door.
“You have been allowed to desecrate our founding principles for long enough, comrade.” Rostov snatches the vodka from his hands. “We have abandoned the teachings of Marx and Engels. The guideposts of Lenin and Stalin.”
“Stalin was a monster. A murderer. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Khruschev says. “What’s your point?”
“At least he saw a blatant attack for what it was. The Americans were responsible for what happened today. They must be punished!”
Khuschev leaps from his chair, but he barely reaches Rostov’s sternum. “Punished? And where is your proof?” He sighs. “I have tried letting your kind of Party man steer the nation before. But what did it get us? We humiliated ourselves in Cuba. We have killed our best and bravest cosmonauts today, we have, in our haste, and—Yeargh!”
His rant dissolves into anguished screams as waves of pain radiate from Rostov. Were he not forcing me upright, I’d be doubled over from the piercing whine. The sick, sticky smell of death flutters its fingers under my nose.
“This humiliation cannot go unanswered. We must not appear weak,” Rostov says. Khruschev has a mental shield—it must be standard training from the KGB now—but it’s weakening by the moment. Khruschev marches back to the telephone, eyes dead, lips slack. He picks up the receiver.
“Yulia,” Rostov says. “Read the documents inside the secretary’s briefcase.”
As if I have a choice. My hands slam against the double-locked satchel. The secretary only carries one set of keys; the other must be back in Moscow. Rostov mashes my fingertips into the soft leather until memories of the daily work of filling this satchel leap out. Each morning, armed guards deliver a fresh set of papers. Strange, unrelated words, printed in equidistant spacing across each page. Codes.
My throat spasms as if trying to seal itself shut. Nuclear launch codes. Rostov means to make Khruschev recite them, input them at a distant missile launch site, and start a new world war.
“Read them,” Rostov hisses, his voice grating my mind as if it were cheese. This morning’s codes stream before my eyes. Rostov bores into my brain. A dial tone fills the air between Khruschev and us. Mechanically, he punches in a phone number.
“I’m listening,” a voices says on the other end of the line.
Dacha. Tributary. Concerto.
“Dacha. Tributary. Concerto,” Khruschev recites into the telephone, his voice deflated.