"Then I must go alone," Mr. Gordons said for the second time in thirty seconds.
"Sheesh," the professor said, rolling her eyes. "Okay. Just let me get my bag." She took one look at the lab, a blizzard" of papers and spilled concoctions since the death of her assistant, then abandoned the idea of retrieving her purse; it was a lost cause. She grabbed a bottle of Tanqueray instead and tucked it under her arm. "Let's go, you spoiled brat," she said.
In the parking lot of Los Angeles International Airport, Mr. Gordons looked to the sky and turned one full revolution, his arms spread wide like a radar tracker. "He is headed due northeast," he said. "He is headed for Russia."
"How can you know that?" the professor said.
"His speed and altitude rule out a nearer landing. And if he were going anywhere else in Europe, he would not be following so northerly a path."
Dr. Payton-Holmes chugged three fingers from the gin bottle she held and belched. "I want to know how we are going to get on a plane going due northeast or anywhere else," she said. "There are things in there called metal detectors." She waved the bottle toward the main international terminal. "You're 97.6641 percent stainless steel, you know. Their detection systems will light
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up like Christmas trees when they see you coming. Not to mention the fact that we have no money for tickets."
"We have no need for tickets," Mr. Gordons said. He took her hand and walked with her to the far end of the terminal building. A heavy chain-link fence sealed off the outside world from any connection with the runway area. As she watched in horror, Mr. Gordons extended his right hand toward the fence. Before her eyes, his fingers seemed to shudder and then change from apparent flesh and blood to two hard steel claws. Faster than she could follow, he used the snippers to cut through the links of the fence. When there was a hole big enough for them to walk through, the clippers changed back to a hand.
"I don't believe it," she said. "I saw it but I don't believe it."
Up ahead, a Laker Airways DC-10 was slowly pulling away from the terminal building.
"You wait here for a moment," Mr. Gordons said.
A moment later, she saw Mr. Gordons walking along the wing of the DC-10. So did the pilot because the plane screeched to a stop.
"My God," she gasped, clutching at her hair with both hands. Clouds of white billowed from her head.
As she watched, Mr. Gordons yanked open the plane's door. He vanished inside, and a moment later, the plane began slowly rolling back toward the loading area. Dr. Payton-Holmes, frightened but unable to fight her curiosity, walked toward the plane.
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It rolled up to the passenger entrance chute, then stopped. Above her head, she could hear passengers walking from the plane, through the enclosed canvas rampway, back to the terminal. The back door of the plane opened, and a folding ladder was dropped down to the tarmac. In the doorway, she saw Mr. Gordons, resplendent in a pilot's uniform.
"Hurry, Mom," he said.
She ran up the steps, and Mr. Gordons retracted the ladder and closed the door behind her. Almost all the passengers were off the plane now. A few looked at Mr. Gordons quizzically.
"Had a little problem with one of them there red lights on the control panel," he drawled.
"Why are you talking like that?" the professor asked.
"All pilots are Southern," Gordons said. "Don't you watch TV?" He turned back to the mike. "Y'all be back on just soon as Ah check out that there light," he said.
In the cockpit, Dr. Payton-Holmes was shocked to see the bodies of the pilot and copilot stuffed unceremoniously in a corner. The pilot was unclothed. It was his uniform that Mr. Gordons wore.
"They resisted," he said. "They did not understand how important it was for me to follow this Remo Williams now."
He put the professor in the copilot's seat, then sat alongside her. He used his pilot's voice again to call the tower.
"Tower," he drawled, "this is Laker One-Niner. Sorry, a little slow getting into that takeoff pat-
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tern, but let's try it again, fellas." He nodded to a voice that crackled back into earphones he was wearing, powered up his engines, and began to back the plane away from the passenger ramp.
As he moved smoothly toward the runway, the professor said, "You ever fly one of these before?"
"No," Mr. Gordons said.
"You know how?"
"It is a machine. I am a machine. I understand it."
"You know everything about it?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where they keep those little bottles of liquor?" Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes asked, just as, with a squeal of burning rubber, the plane sped down the runway for takeoff.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Major Grigori Seminov walked past the twenty-four armed guards outside the imposing white marble building that was Moscow Center. His breath puffed out in clouds in the cold October air as he polished his monocle on the lapel of his army overcoat.
The monocle had been a present from his uncle, one of the hordes of peasant revolutionaries whose claim to fame in the blossoming People's Party of 1917 consisted of assisting in the raid on the mansion of Count Yevgeny Vladishenko, after murdering the count, his family, their servants, and all their dogs and horses. And two canaries.
To show the unenlightened skeptics of the region that the revolution represented a new era for the common man, the newly assembled Bolshevik brigade left the dismembered bodies of the slain aristocrats on the open road to rot. To demonstrate that the new order did not need the
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decadent wealth of landowners like the count, they burned his fields and storehouses. As a result, disease and famine swept the conquered grounds, and the victors faced deaths far worse than their victims had.
For his part in the bloody battle, the elder Sem-inov received a new home, comprised of one room in the Vladishenko mansion, which he and his wife shared with twelve other families who sang songs to the glory of Lenin.and the conquering Bolsheviks while their children succumbed to starvation and typhus.
Before he himself died of tuberculosis in the squalid room, Seminov dispatched his wife to warn his brother's family in Moscow to leave Russia.
"We have made a great mistake," were his dying words.
It took Maria Seminov several weeks to reach Moscow. October turned to November, and all the horses had either been butchered for meat or confiscated by the new Red Army. Her feet blistered with the cold.
When finally she reached the small house of her husband's brother, his wife, and their son, Grigori, she wept tears of joy. They welcomed her proudly. The news of the takeover of the Vladishenko estate had already spread as far as Moscow, although the gruesome fate of the diseased and dying families now occupying the mansion was never mentioned in the reports.
"My brother died a hero," Grigori's father said, swollen with pride and Russian grief on hearing of Seminov's death.
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"No, no. You've got it wrong. There is nothing heroic about dying from filth and stupidity." Maria Seminov told them of the rampant disease in the mansion, about the lack of doctors or medicine or food or horses.
"Not in front of the boy," Grigori's mother said.
"He should know," Maria said stubbornly. "This revolution in the name of the people is just another military game. Common folk like us are dying everywhere, without even our own beds to die in. They will take everything, these Bolsheviks . . . make slaves of us all. We must leave Russia before it is too late."
"Excuse me," Grigori said. "I have to go to sleep now."
"Yes, of course." Maria kissed the child and gave him the monocle his uncle had looted during his misguided moment of military fervor. "He wanted you to have this," she said. "It once belonged to a great man, a man who fed and cared for all the people who worked his lands. Perhaps one day you will be a great man, too."