“You again,” he said, a note of accusation in his tone.
“Me again,” said Fedorov, realizing the utter strangeness of this moment. For him it had been long years, decades in the future, living in the world he had created the last time he saw this young man. There had been plans and battles, and so many losses. He had lived through that impossible time in the desert when Kinlan arrived. He had consorted with Wavell, Alexander, Churchill. He had campaigned in Lebanon and Syria, fought battles on the sea, faced the wrenching strangeness of Paradox, and the second coming of Kirov, when he found himself there, inexplicably there, the one man who could remember it all. Yet for Mironov, it was only a matter of a day or so since he followed me up those stairs.
“Won’t you sit down?”
“Why should I?” said Mironov. “So that you can interrogate me? That’s what this is now, correct? You had plenty of time when you got hold of me yesterday. Why are you so curious today? Ah, yes, you wanted to see if I would go to anyone else here. You wanted to try and ferret out any possible contact I might have. I know your kind well enough.”
There was that same defiance, the hardness of rebellion already alive in the man, thought Fedorov. “I know this is what you might believe,” he said, “but no, I am not a member of the Okhrana, or of any other authority connected to the Tsar.”
“Then why the uniform?”
“Please… Sit down with me, and we can talk. I will answer all your questions. I promise.”
Mironov folded his arms, frowning. Then he walked briskly over to the table, drew back the chair, and sat down. “Very well,” he said. “If you are not the secret police, then who are you? Why that uniform? Why all these men with guns?”
“We are soldiers… Sailors actually. Those men are Marines off my ship, and we have come here on an important mission.”
“What has it to do with me?”
“Everything.”
“What? I have done nothing wrong. I was falsely tried and convicted on a technicality, a trumped up charge because they had no evidence of any other wrongdoing. They tried to say I was operating an illegal printing press, but they could find no such thing. So they just made something up—said I was causing tension between the classes. I served over a year for that, and now I’m a free man. They even let me go early, but now I’m beginning to see why. They just wanted to see who I ran to.”
“I know… It all seems that way, but it’s not. I assure you. It’s something else entirely.” Fedorov had his eyes averted, unable to look Mironov in the face. He had one hand on the table, the other resting in his lap, where he held a drawn pistol, concealed by the shadows. His heart beat faster as he realized what he now had to do—the timely cruelty he had spoken of with Karpov.
“If you only knew everything that has happened,” he said sullenly. “If you only knew how long it has been since you last laid eyes on me, and what has become of the world…. But it was my fault, not yours.”
The man seemed to be speaking as much to himself, and Mironov did not understand. “Yesterday you told me to get as far from this place as possible,” he said. Then you ran on with something about St. Petersburg in the future—in 1934. Yesterday you told me to go, to live. Well, that was exactly what I was doing, heading east to wait for the train and get clear of all these tourists coming to see the German race team off. Now why are you and your men so keen on sitting me down again for this nice little interview? What is it you really want to know? Go on—out with it!”
Fedorov raised the hand he had on the table, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I shouldn’t say another word,” he whispered, again, more to himself than Mironov. “What I have already said was damaging enough. But then again, if I finish what I came here to do, then what does it matter? What does it matter?”
“There you go, talking in riddles again. Look here, I’ve done nothing, and you have no right to detain me here. Either charge me with another false crime and be done with it, or let me go as you did yesterday.”
“Mironov….” It was the first time Fedorov had used the other man’s name, and he regretted it the moment he said it. It would only make him real, a person, a human being, and that would make it so much more difficult. But he could not help himself. It was as if he was compelled to say something, anything, to justify what he was now planning to do, to explain it to Mironov, and by so doing, be absolved.
“What if you met a man and then later found out that he did something that caused a great deal of trouble, something ruinous, something catastrophic, even if he, himself, had no inkling that he had done anything wrong at all… Even if he was completely innocent at that moment.”
Mironov’s eyes narrowed. “You are suggesting I have done something—the crime you are planning to charge me with? What is it this time? You might as well spit it out, for you’ve already decided I am guilty. You’ve tried and convicted me long ago.”
The truth in Mironov’s words stung Fedorov, for Mironov was absolutely correct. He was here to convict him, the summary judgment being the cold steel bullet in the gun beneath the edge of that table. He could feel his palm wet with sweat, a slight tremble in his hand there.
“Well, what is it this time?” Mironov insisted.
The anguish on Fedorov’s face was plain to see. “You would not understand,” he said. “Yes, it was not your doing, at least not at first. I’m the man who should be tried and convicted here.”
At that moment, something occurred to Fedorov. What if he were to repudiate everything he said in that impulsive moment years ago—a day ago to Mironov. He could just tell him to forget what he said, that it was nothing, something he was saying to himself, nothing to be bothered about.
The futility of that was immediately apparent to him, but the one side of his mind that was still the man he was before all this happened kept up its plea. That was the man who flinched at the first plane Admiral Volsky ordered shot down. That was the man who stood, glassy eyed and remorseful, as he watched Yamato burn on that dark night in the Pacific. That was the man who stood in stunned silence when the news of Volsky’s death came in the middle of his heated conversation with Karpov on the bridge, and the man who wept in his cabin later that day, knowing it was all his fault.
How had he become this man, driven to come here again, by any means, and with this pistol in his hand. How had he become the man who fired five missiles at Orlov, the one who gave that order to take down Irkutsk, killing everyone aboard, even though his inner self inveighed against him for that callous act. How had he come to the cold calculus of death, finding reasons, justifications, imperatives that would muzzle and imprison the man of conscience he had always been—the man he still was.
Yes, he knew that, deep inside, he was still a man of integrity and conscience—he was still as innocent as Mironov was at this moment, but the words Karpov had spoken to him as Yamato burned now scored his soul. “It gets easier,” he had told him—easier to kill, easier to do the heartless thing he was planning now, easier to find reasons, arguments, justifications; easier to rationalize everything and explain it all away.
But that wasn’t true, at least not for Fedorov. At his core and root, he was not that kind of man, and now, as he sat in this moment of destiny, gun in hand, the dark agent of absolute change, time’s assassin, he knew he was not the man who could murder Mironov. He could not do what Leonid Nikolaev did that day, emerging from the rest room on the third floor of the Smolny Building, the heart and center of Bolshevik power in Leningrad. He had a pistol with him that day as well, hidden in his pocket, and there was Sergei Kirov, walking towards him down the long hall, his footsteps ringing out fate’s toll with every step. He could not look the man in the eye, turning away towards the wall and fishing in his pocket for a cigarette, fumbling for a match.