Sokolov stood quietly by the yellow cab and waited.
He was outside the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, near the corner of East Ninety-first and Fifth, about three hundred yards northwest of the Russian consulate. The whole street was bathed a drab gray, deep in the shade, what with the evening sun lying low in the Western sky. A small cluster of trees obscured his view of the consulate’s entrance, but this was as close as he wanted to be for the moment. A first-time visitor would have never suspected that a mere three days earlier, the street had been full of protesters. Or that this was where, after all this time, Sokolov had been so stupid as to reveal to his enemies exactly who he was.
Or, rather, who he had been.
He had to make his move. And he had to do it quickly. After all, with Daphne in their hands, he didn’t have a choice. He had to try to get her back, despite the potentially catastrophic consequences of his capture. And so he’d left his hotel at seven that morning and grabbed breakfast at a cheap diner that wouldn’t put too much of a dent into his limited cash reserves. Then he’d walked three blocks to an Internet café, where he’d spent the best part of the morning researching the Russian consulate and its employees.
He knew that many of the job titles given to consulate employees were bogus-merely cover for what they really spent their time doing: intelligence-gathering, industrial espionage, recruiting agents, and hypocritically luxuriating in America’s plentiful embrace while nodding slavishly every time the Kremlin issued yet another edict condemning America and the West’s interference in the sovereign affairs of Mother Russia. He’d always thought it ironic that the consulate was housed in John Henry Hammond House, one of the most opulent private homes ever constructed on the island of Manhattan. It had been built in the early 1900s by Emily Vanderbilt Sloane and her husband as a gift to their daughter. The mansion next door, Burden House, had been built for her sister. Hardly standard bearers of the proletariat ideal, but then again, the rulers of Russia, past and present, had never intended to share the grim conditions they imposed on their people.
He’d spotted Third Secretary Fyodor Yakovlev’s name on the list, his now-dead visitor of the day before, and seeing the name had sent a cold jolt up his spine. He’d moved on and kept searching until he’d settled on Lazar Rogozin, counselor for political-military affairs, who he’d seen on a recent circular from a New York-based NGO protesting the systematic attacks on gays and immigrant workers in Moscow by members of the Nashi, the Kremlin’s modern take on Hitler Youth. The circular asked that everyone who took issue with this abhorrent and increasingly common practice in the motherland should bombard Rogozin with letters and e-mails, whom the organization had identified as having financial interests in at least two businesses that were known to fund Nashi’s activities. The NGO activists had even been gracious enough to provide a photograph of him.
After grabbing some lunch, Sokolov had managed to find a phone booth, which he’d used to call the consulate. Using a disguised, soft-spoken voice, he’d asked if Rogozin was in. The answer had been yes. Sokolov had hung up while he was being transferred, then walked around until he’d found a thrift shop. There, he’d bought a heavy navy-blue coat that he’d shrugged on while he was still in the shop, a loose-fitting felt beret that he’d pulled down so it covered most of his ears, and a knitted scarf he’d wrapped around his neck.
He’d then taken the subway and walked across town to the corner of Fifty-ninth and Fifth, where he’d spent almost an hour studying the faces and body language of various taxi drivers and mustering up the courage to go ahead with what he intended until, at about five, he felt confident and desperate enough to approach a driver for the task ahead. The cabbie he’d chosen was a black man in a Rasta hat who, unsurprisingly, turned out to be Jamaican. The man, Winston, was so laid-back he didn’t bat an eyelid at what Sokolov told him he needed him to do. The only issue with Winston, as Sokolov soon discovered, was that he always drove with the window open, no matter the time of year. He said it kept the germs from breeding inside his cab, which, given the rickety state it was in, seemed like it should be the least of his worries in terms of his well-being. Still, he was ready to do Sokolov’s bidding without asking questions, and that was all Sokolov required.
And so they’d driven uptown, motored past the consulate, and parked outside the museum.
And waited.
And as he waited, his mind drifted back to how it had all started. To the discovery he’d made in the cellar of his father’s house. To the journals of his grandfather, the ones that would consume his future.
The ones he suddenly wished he’d never read.
13
Misha’s Journal
Verkhoturye, Ural Mountains
December 1899
Everything has changed.
My stay here, in this place, has been upended. I was here for a reason I thought I understood. I came here to put my old life behind me, to think about what I had done, and to find a noble direction for the future. But the future that is now before me is like nothing I imagined. Here, at the dawn of the new century, I feel the portents of an eventful time ahead, a time of which a lot is unknown at the moment, save for this feeling that great change is about to be thrust upon us all.
A change in which I feel I am destined to play a central role.
And yet, this has all come unexpectedly. That was not at all my plan. Far from it. It is for this reason that I have taken pen to hand and I am writing this journal while still closeted away here, at the Nikolaev Monastery, a sixteenth-century cloister that sits crouched on a hillock close to the town of Verkhoturye in the Ural Mountains. No doubt you will have heard of it, as it is famous across Siberia for its relics: the bones of Saint Simeon, the mystic who wandered the banks of the Tura River and spent his days praying, fishing, and mending the clothes of the poor. Simeon had died in 1642, a young man of thirty-five, as a result of his fasting; fifty years after his death, his coffin was said to have risen out of the ground, with his remains astoundingly well preserved. Simeon’s grave became a place of pilgrimage for those seeking to be healed, and after two and a half centuries of duty, his bones were moved to their new healing outpost here at the Nikolaev Monastery, where they continue to attract wanderers in need.
It is because of Saint Simeon that I find myself in this portentous situation. For I have recently met a man, here, in this remote place of contemplation and prayer, a man who also came here to seek Saint Simeon’s guidance. A man who, I believe, will bring about this great change.
I came here myself seeking change, seeking to escape from my own demons. You see, I have done things that confound me. I have delved into secrets that terrify me, the unfortunate result of a life devoted to study and knowledge-knowledge that I now wish I had never gained.
I had considered myself fortunate to have enjoyed the benefit of a proper education. My father, a schoolteacher, had sewn the seeds of curiosity in me from my earliest days. My mind had been taken captive by the wonders of science ever since I was a child, and I remember gazing with equal fascination at the stars in the sky or at the veins in my wrist. But it was at university that the hidden truths of our nature started to be revealed to me. It was also there that chance-or misfortune-would introduce me to the work of Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, the illustrious Prussian physicist. It would, however, be disingenuous for me to blame him for my discoveries. It was my own curiosity, along with my selfish disregard for propriety and caution, that have led me this far and have now brought me here to try to atone for my digressions.
At first, the ramifications of my work were not manifest to me. I was simply intrigued, and thrilled, by the results of my first experiments. It never occurred to me that I should abandon my line of inquiry. I was blinded, driven by an unseen hand to explore further the secrets hidden inside us. Secrets that I should have left alone. Secrets that are laden with monstrous potential. And so I came here, to this remote, holy place, to pray for guidance. To try to veer away from my chosen path, to leave behind the science of the devil that had bewitched me, to try to find a more worthy pursuit for the rest of my years.