Then, mercifully, they stopped. They stood over his supine body, then left the room in a cheerful, uproarious mood.
I took one last look at him before I scurried back to my hiding place, worried they might come out at any moment. But they didn’t. In fact, nothing further happened for several hours. I was chilled to the bone and desperate to leave and find some shelter and warmth, but I couldn’t tear myself away. Not yet. I needed to see it through to the very end.
With each passing hour, I felt my consciousness wane. It was a struggle to stay awake, but I couldn’t let myself fall asleep, not out in that cold. My eyelids now felt like they were made of lead and were inexorably forcing themselves shut when the side door creaked open.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Rasputin, on his feet, staggering out of the palace. Impossible, surely-but no, it was him, still alive, still breathing. He wasn’t wearing his coat and faltered as he moved across the yard, heading for the gate, his feet plodding heavily in the sloppy, wet snow.
I felt an urge to rush out and help him. We’d been through a lot together, and seeing him wounded like that pained me. But before I could step out of my hiding spot, before he’d even managed ten yards, the door burst open and male silhouettes spilled out into the night, rasping, “Get him,” and “He’s getting away.” Then I heard two other gunshots and they were on him, pulling him to the ground. One of the men, a man I didn’t recognize and who wore a Russian Army gray coat, pulled out a revolver from under his coat and shot Rasputin in the forehead point-blank.
They carried him back inside.
About half an hour later, I watched as another car drove into the courtyard. Several men, their breath coming out in swirling white puffs, emerged from the house carrying Rasputin’s body. They stuffed it into the car. Three of the men climbed in, and the car sped off. The whole country would later hear how they drove his body to a bridge and dumped it into the freezing river.
The autopsy on his body would reveal that he was still alive when he hit the water.
Even in death, my old master would continue to mesmerize the country. His death became the stuff of legend: he was poisoned, beaten, and shot several times, and yet he still lived on.
Only a devil could manage that.
IT WAS TIME FOR me to disappear.
First, I made sure I destroyed everything. The machine. All my equipment. My notes and my books, all burned.
A whole lifetime of work. Gone.
It had to be done.
Then I left Petrograd and the brewing rebellion and wandered the land for months until I settled here in the Kaluga Province, in a small village called Karovo. It is a remote, idyllic place of birch forests, picturesque bluffs, and lush meadows by the Oka River.
I have found work as a farmer. I masquerade as a barely literate fool with no past and no future.
I plow the soil and keep to myself in the quiet hope that, one day, I will find a way to atone for my sins.
65
I asked Sokolov, “And your grandfather destroyed the machine?”
“Yes,” he confirmed. “The machine. All his notes. Everything. All he left behind were the journals.”
I was puzzled. “So you don’t know what it was? How it worked?”
“Not exactly. But there were clues, in what he wrote. He mentioned things like it was powered by batteries, then the piezoelectric transducer-”
“Hang on, batteries?” Aparo interrupted. “We’re talking early nineteen hundreds, right? They had batteries back then?”
“Batteries have been around for over two hundred years,” Sokolov said. “That ‘Ever Ready’ Flash Light my grandfather referred to? The first one came out in 1899. They’ve even found clay jars in Iraq that are over two thousand years old and that are believed to be primitive electric cells.” He waved it off. “Anyway, my grandfather also talked about having studied drumbeats and church organs and how they affected us. He said he needed to put wax in his ears when he used it, whereas he was surprised that Rasputin didn’t need to, that he had trained himself to be immune to it-which meant its effect came through the ears. He mentioned Heinrich Wilhelm Dove and his ‘magic.’ Dove was no magician. He was a Prussian scientist, and it became clear that the magic my grandfather was talking about was actually what Dove had discovered in 1839: binaural beats. All pieces of the puzzle. And gradually, they all fell into place. I figured out how he did it. I suppose part of his hubris couldn’t resist leaving some trace of his work, teasing his reader and alluding to his genius.” He dropped his gaze. “Perhaps we all suffer from it.”
Sokolov told us about his journey, from his local village to the technical school a long bus ride away and on to Leningrad University.
“Manipulating neural circuits was a big priority back then,” Sokolov told us. “They were recruiting the best minds from universities across the USSR, and I was lucky in that I came to it all at a time when technology was opening up all kinds of possibilities. It was an exciting time. Subliminal messages, inaudible commands, radio-frequency radiation, infrasound, isochronic tones, transcranial magnetic stimulation of specific areas of the brain… all kinds of new approaches to psychic driving and psycho-correction, all of us looking for the Holy Graiclass="underline" the ability to influence thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and behavior. To control people from a distance.”
“And you figured it out.”
He nodded. “When they transferred me from Leningrad University to the KGB’s Department of Information-Psychological Actions in 1974, research into microwaves hadn’t progressed much beyond attempts to disorient and confuse by aiming a broad range of wavelengths at the subject. That’s where I started. And I discovered other frequencies and settings that could do a whole lot more.” He let out a ragged sigh, then said, “I worked on it for eight years before we finally tested it on human subjects.” He shook his head, visibly pained by the memory. It took him a moment before he could resume his story. “Mujahedin rebels the Army had captured in Afghanistan. They never knew what hit them. They turned into killers within seconds. We just watched them butcher each other to death. Dozens of them.”
He looked up at me, his eyes imploring for some kind of empathy. I nodded, encouraging him to continue. It was a strange feeling to be sitting there with him. And it was oddly satisfying to finally hear him tell us what had happened, even if his entire story appeared to be filled with death.
“So you defected,” I said. “Why?”
“All those deaths. It woke me up. Before that, I was naïve. I was too caught up in my own ego, in the science of it, in this extraordinary possibility of controlling people’s emotions and desires. My fellow researchers and I, we had these big conversations about what it would mean to create a completely psychocivilized society. It was fascinating and addictive. But I didn’t dwell on the fact that it could also program people to kill on command. Then when it happened… it was a huge shock to me. The implications of what I had invented… And I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t let something like that happen again. I couldn’t hand it over to them. Not after everything they’d done, everything I knew they were capable of. I mean, they’d just tried to kill the pope. The pope… There was nothing they wouldn’t do.”