“Ari’s choices were all about positioning himself to take over the family business, with maybe a small bias for the antiquities market, which he correctly predicted would go up. He’s made his rich family richer.”
“And you?” asked Gadyuka. “Why study those sciences?”
Valen absently reached out for the joint, took a hit, and held it while he thought of how to answer. He blew smoke up into the darkness gathered on the ceiling.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “my family lived in Chelyabinsk. We were not wealthy by any stretch, but we had enough. And to spare, I suppose. My mother was the sister of Abram Golovin. When my parents were killed in a car accident, I was sent to Ukraine to live with my uncle and his family. This was in 1985. The wall was still up and we were still the Soviet Union. Forever ago.” He sighed, took another hit, and then passed the joint back. “I loved my uncle. He was a good man, a decent man. He was a Communist and to him that meant something. To him, the Party was not the corrupt and decaying thing that they tell children in school nowadays. Back then it was a glorious ideal.”
“You are lecturing,” said Gadyuka mildly. “You are doing what the Americans call ‘preaching to the choir. ’”
He nodded. “Sorry. But I get that way when I think about Uncle Abram. When I think about Dr. Abram Golovin. Chief structural engineer at Chernobyl. A man whose books on building nuclear power plants were taught in the best universities. He taught me so much, you see. He explained the science of it. All of it, from A to Zed. From selecting the site and doing the geological surveys of the area, to working with architects to design and build a perfect facility, and to maintaining it despite the enormous pressures of cooling water, wastewater, nuclear waste management… the lot.”
Gadyuka and Valen handed the joint back and forth. It was getting small now, so she pinched it out and rolled another while Valen talked about his uncle.
“And then,” said Valen with a tightness in his voice, “on my eighth birthday, it all fell apart. 26 April, 1986. We woke to the sound of sirens. There were screams and explosions and people were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. I stared out of my bedroom window and saw that the sky was on fire. Strange colors, too. Red and yellow and orange, but also a green hue. None of the papers ever mentioned that part, but I saw it clear as day. It was there for several minutes, and then it was gone. Everything was gone. My uncle was gone.”
He took the joint from Gadyuka but thought better of it and handed it back.
“They blamed him, of course,” said Valen. “Everyone did. They said that it was a structural fault, or a poor geological report. Oh, I know what you’ll say — that some people have lobbied pretty heavily to say that it was operator error, but in the reports that mattered, they said the plant was not designed to safety standards, in effect, and incorporated unsafe features and that inadequate safety analysis was performed. A scapegoat was needed, and they picked Uncle Abram because he was from Ukraine, not from Russia. That mattered then. In the eyes of the world, it mattered. In terms of propaganda, it mattered. The family was disgraced. I was shipped back to Russia and my cousins, my mother’s sisters, went into the system and I never heard from them again. Siberia, I suppose, though why they should be punished is beyond me. I was forbidden to even mention my uncle’s name. My own surname, Sokolov, was changed to the absurd one I have now. Do you know that it has no actual meaning? I heard a joke once that it was something they made up in some ministry office, and saddled me with it because no one else would have the name and everyone who mattered would instantly know who I am and the shame I carry. Perhaps I’d have even vanished into a camp, except for the fact that my father’s family had just enough pull to get me into a state school.”
Gadyuka turned on her side and stroked his thigh. “But…?” she prompted.
“But I don’t believe that. My uncle was a brilliant and diligent man. He checked everything twice, three times. He never left the slightest thing to chance.”
“You were a boy, Valen.”
He shook his head. “I know, but I was observant, even then. Uncle Abram always joked that I had an insatiable mind. Like a shark, always looking for something new to eat. It’s true. Always has been. So, when I was a little older, I managed to get hold of his research, his studies, as much of it as I could legally obtain. I’ve spent my life learning the things I needed to learn in order to understand it and then validate it.”
“What if you’d found a flaw?”
“Then I’d have gotten a measure of peace from that,” said Valen sharply. “I could have hated Uncle Abram like everyone else and been part of the crowd. But… no. I even went over those studies with my professors at Caltech. They all agreed that Chernobyl was sited correctly and built with great precision. Which left me with a puzzle. Why had it failed? What really caused it all to fall apart?” He sighed, then turned to her. “Why do you ask?”
“Because if you do what I want you to do, you may have the opportunity to clear your uncle’s name. And you will be doing a great service to our people.”
He gaped at her.
“Lovely myshka,” she murmured, a smile curling the corners of her mouth. “When you read your uncle’s research, did you read the report titled ‘Anomalous and Incidental Minerals Recovered’?”
“Yes, of course. It was a list of various minerals found during excavation, but which had little or no significance.”
“Did you, by any chance, take note of something called L. quartz?”
“I don’t recall offhand.”
“The L stands for a word. Lemurian, like the lost island in those stories. There is a white version, which is common. Not this, though. It is a vibrant green. It’s exceptionally rare, and exceptionally important to your new project,” she said. “Just like the quartz you were so clever to find for me in that submarine. I want you and your little black marketer friend, Ari Kostas, to find more of it. I want you to find all of it. Beg, borrow, or steal.”
CHAPTER FOUR
We drove around for a while, watching to see if we picked up a tail. And we did. Ghost caught me glowering into the rearview mirror and turned to bare his titanium teeth through the window.
“It’s smoked glass, Einstein,” I told him. “They can’t even see you.”
He gave an eloquent fart and continued to snarl. I cracked a window.
The follow car was the same make and model of blue government Crown Victoria.
“Okay, kids,” I said, “if you want to play, then let’s have some jollies.”
For the next ten minutes I made a whole bunch of random turns, U-turns, and even cut down a wide alley between factories. The driver of the follow car was good, but he was probably getting smug because he thought he was keeping up with someone who was attempting to flee. I was not in a fleeing mood, because the more I thought about the first bunch of assholes bracing me at Helen’s grave, the madder I got.
Church was no help, because he was still making calls, and when I got Aunt Sallie on the line, she told me to: “Stop bothering the grown-ups, stop whining like a girl, and grow a set.”
The follow car kept up with me, and I began to wonder if I was making a mistake by judging them according to the three clown-shoes I roughed up at the cemetery. Maybe I was also letting my anger cloud my thinking.
Thunder suddenly boomed overhead and it began to rain. Kind of a dramatic bit of affirmation that my gloomy musings were correct, but that was fine. I tapped three digits into the keypad on the steering column to activate the MindReader Q1 artificial intelligence system.