Skandal (17 page)

“Is that a threat?” Winnie asks. “Are you threatening to tell Frank about my Urban League friends?”

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to choose between the military and your ragtag band of overly optimistic dreamers. You may be able to reconcile the two, but people like Frank Tuttelbaum don’t understand the subtleties…”

Cindy closes the door, muffling their voices into English-shaped thuds I can’t understand. I hurry to the restroom and splash cool water on my face, washing away the grime of secrets and betrayals that I don’t fully understand.

*   *   *

When I head to the break room for lunch, Winnie is watching a rebroadcast of last night’s news with Walter Cronkite. “The communist forces of North Vietnam’s Viet Cong are nearly fifty thousand strong,” he intones, eyebrows bristling as he stares at us through the screen. “The South Vietnamese are not likely to last long against their guerilla warfare tactics.”

Winnie drums her nails against the wood-paneled television set that’s as wide as a Cadillac. I settle onto the couch in front of the set and prop my chin in my hands. “Are we going to go to war?” The
we
slips out before I can catch it, but I let it go. This team, this agency, this city, this country are a part of me now, no matter what that brings.

Winnie’s mouth is curled down like a comma. “Depends who you ask, I suppose. Some people think war is never the answer; others think it always is. Senator Goldwater thinks we’re letting the dark forces of communism run roughshod over a free and peaceful democracy.”

“But what do you think?” I ask.

“I think if we try to help, we’re just going to send a bunch of poor and probably colored boys to die in the jungle.” She shrugs. “But it’s not my job to think. Come on, let’s work on your medical journal translations. You were having trouble with the article on viral genetics?”

“Yes. I did not understand ‘tautomeric forms’…”

I dig the well-worn journal out of my bag and we work through the article for a few more minutes. I want to soak up every scrap of knowledge I can so I can contribute to the lab at Georgetown, but something Winnie said nags at me. Guerilla warfare. Cindy had been teaching me basic tradecraft earlier in the week, but she hadn’t mentioned any such thing. After Winnie helps me stumble through a dense paragraph on viral phenotypes, I lean back in the chair and pinch the bridge of my nose. “What does it mean, the … ‘guerilla warfare tactics?’ Is this something—”
That we did.
“That the Soviets do?”

“Well, we haven’t fought the Soviets in direct combat, but I can imagine they would. Guerilla tactics are sneaky—lots of subterfuge and disguise, with small forces picking off large ones,” Winnie says. “It’s not like World War II—the enemy doesn’t paint a bullseye on themselves with a swastika.”

The enemy could be anyone. I certainly know the feeling.

We’ve wrung out a few leads, at least—the fragments of paper we fished out of Carlos’s stovetop match an area in northwestern Paris, though I wasn’t able to dig any further memories out of them. Still, we are no closer to finding our scrubbers, or their access agent, Anna Montalban. I know I should be thanking Sergei for the tip—if he’d reach out to me again. Instead, I feel a tension in my gut like a loaded mousetrap. I keep thinking of Cindy and her competing hypotheses, comparing scenarios both likely and unlikely against the known facts. What if this, too, is just a distraction?

*   *   *

It’s Saturday morning, and Papa is nowhere to be found around the townhouse. I check the street; no sign of the Austin Healey. Stomach rumbling, I throw open the door to the baby blue refrigerator and paw around the mess of produce and brown paper–wrapped meats in search of something to fix for breakfast. Wilted lettuce, three bottles of milk in various states of emptiness, a massive jug of orange juice that looks best suited to performing dialysis … It’s more food than the three of us could eat in a month, and yet most if it has gone bad; we’re hardly ever home to cook. Papa is always dragging us to greasy burger joints and swanky steakhouses and everything in between.

Finally I unearth a carton of eggs and pre-sliced bacon. While they fry on the range, I fiddle with Papa’s electric coffee percolator, the coffee jingle from the radio springing into my mind, uninvited. Good to the last drop.

Valentin stumbles into the kitchen, hair sticking every which way, and slips his arms around my shoulders from behind. “Mm! Smells like capitalism. Delicious!”

“Might as well use it up before it goes bad.” I turn in his arms and kiss him. “Go ahead, don’t let me interrupt your morning etudes. I’ll bring you breakfast in the conservatory.”

“How dreadfully
bourgeois
.” He grins. I swat him with my dishtowel until he runs off to practice his piano scales. Open mic night at Bohemian Caverns is fast approaching, and he thinks it’s his best chance to catch the ear of a record label scout. I flip the eggs, my smile growing with every hiss of the stove and every perfect glissande of his chords. We make quite the pair, the musician and the scientist.

If only our lives were so easy—science labs and jazz halls. A drop of bacon grease leaps up to sear my arm, and I mutter a curse under my breath. We’re still miles from reaching Anna Montalban and the next scrubber in the relay. From understanding how this relates to Rostov, and what he means to do. From saving Mama. From uncovering the mole, if there is one.

I can’t find the mole on my own, and I don’t trust anyone else to help. I twist the dishtowel around in my hands, frustration seeping out of me in fits and starts. When I peered into Valya’s memories that night, I didn’t see those signs of Rostov, his scrubbing powers frizzly and sharp and impossible to miss. Valentin can’t be an unwitting mole. Paranoia binds me like a rusty chain, but I will not let it claim this victory over me. If I can’t trust Valentin to help me, what more do I have left?

Sunlight gilds the conservatory, pouring in the high windows and spilling across the plush chairs, the wooden floor, the sleek piano. After playing his newest experimental theme for me—jazzy and punchy and full of fire—Valentin and I nestle on the couch and stuff ourselves with as much bacon and eggs as we can bear. I flop back into his arms, belly up, and bask for a few moments before taking a deep breath.

“There’s something I need to tell you about,” I say. His arms tense around me and I hear him swallow. “Something I need your help with.”

He nuzzles his nose into the back of my head. “Anything you need to say. Don’t be afraid of me.”

I laugh, bitter. Back in Russia, the mere sight of Valentin was enough to send tremors of panic through me. The sound of his power set my teeth on edge. But now I fear myself far more than I ever feared Valentin. “It’s Sergei.” I cringe, closing my eyes for a moment to avoid Valya’s reaction. “He’s been talking to me in my head.”

Valentin jerks forward. “How? Is he here right now?”

“No—no, Papa has those … current-boxes in the walls. The psychic disruptors. When we were escaping Berlin, Sergei—he was able to project himself into my head, like Marylou does. I hadn’t heard from him since then, but then he did it again the other day. He says there’s something important he needs to tell us.”

Valentin pinches the bridge of his nose with a sharp exhale. “All right. Something important. About Rostov or your mother? Do you think he’s warning us, or is he trying to manipulate us?”

Fear spreads its wings inside my chest, filling up all my empty space. “He said there’s a traitor on our team.”

Valya is silent for a long time. Though he’s not sharing his thoughts with me, I know exactly what must be running through his mind; it’s running through mine, too. The question of who to tell and how to tell them, if anyone at all. Of the futility of our efforts to stop Rostov—whether they will be our undoing.

“It could be a lie, like you said.” I glance away. “He might want us paranoid. He could be trying to make us feel vulnerable. I can’t imagine Sergei has come around to our way of thinking, but I suppose it’s possible. He’s the one who told me to check the stove at Carlos Fonseca’s apartment.”

I feel the moment it hits him when he slumps back into the couch. “How long ago did Sergei contact you?” He asks it slowly. Too steadily.

“A few days ago.” I’m motionless. For all that I’d dreaded sharing this knowledge, I feel hollowed out, lightened. It’s a relief not to bottle it up any longer. “I had to be sure that Rostov—I was afraid that the troubles you’ve had—”

His laugh scrapes like sandpaper. “My troubles are purely my own, Yul. Can you trust me on that?”

I bite my lower lip. “Of course I trust you. But you’ve had so much else on your mind, and I didn’t want to be—”

“A burden? A nuisance? Don’t you understand, Yulia? You’re my reason to fight.” His limbs are stiff. “And we said—no more secrets.”

Shame flushes through me. Of course he’s right. A thousand protests rush to my lips, all my half-baked fears, but I squash them down. “I’m sorry, Valentin.”

“I’m sorry you had to carry this weight.” Valya’s arms are still around me; he rocks back and forth, considering. “It could be a lie, you’re right. But that’s a costly risk to take. If there were a mole, it might explain why we’re always a few steps behind. Why we can’t find Anna Montalban, or why everywhere we look is scrubbed clean of memories.” He tilts his head. Under my cheek, I feel the hitch in his breath. “But it doesn’t answer our questions about your mother? What’s her plan?”

The tremor starts in my toes, a live wire coming loose from its moorings, working its way up my legs and through my spine into my brain. I’m shaking, the seed of fear growing into an entire forest within me, my emotional attunement acting like a positive feedback loop.

Hypothesis A: Mama has surrendered to Rostov’s plan fully and will do whatever he asks of her. She will push them onward toward whatever devious end he demands. She is no longer the mother who took Zhenya and me into hiding just to keep her integrity.

Hypothesis B: Mama is conducting a psychological warfare campaign of her own. She appears to be cooperating with Rostov, but is really working toward a different goal. But what? Does she need my help? Does she need us to protect her from our own teammates?

“I’m scared, Valya. Even if Sergei is lying, I have to listen to him—he’s the only person who can tell me what’s happened to my mother. I don’t know if she needs our help. I don’t want to hurt her.”

I’m trembling still, the fear rolling over itself inside me like a rising ocean tide. I can’t control my terror of failing Mama, of failing my family. And I’m petrified that I’ve become what Papa accused me of—a victim of my own ignorance, a monster with no idea of the power she wields.

“Yulia.” His shield melody swells. “We can do this, together. Until we know what your mother wants from us, I think it’s best for us to focus on whether our team is really safe—whether Sergei’s telling the truth.”

“You’re right. It’s a start.”

He kisses the crown of my head. “Let’s focus on finding this traitor, then, if there really is one to be found. When I joined the PsyOps team, Cindy taught me that people who betray their countries are motivated by a few common factors: money, ideology, compromise, ego, revenge.” He ticks the factors off on his fingers. “We can look at each of our teammates for these things.”

He’s appealing to the scientist in me—seeking order from chaos. But experimentation and observation are only two types of approaches; other things can be learned from blunt interference. “Of course,” I say, “you could always push past their shields.”

He shifts on the couch. I’ve caught him off guard. “N-not against these people. They’re supposed to be our teammates. I can’t just—I mean, unless I’m really, really certain…” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Yulia, it isn’t right to use my scrubber ability that way. I can’t ever do that again.”

I shake my head back and forth. “I understand you’re afraid of your ability, but everything has its uses.”

He shifts and sits up, pulling away from me, but says nothing. Instead there’s just a roaring noise in my ears, like an incoming wave. Waves. Valentin’s past. I can smell the tangy sea breeze, feel the sand squishing between my toes—the echo of memories I’d gleaned and just as quickly lost. Valentin hasn’t woken up screaming since the other night, but I can see the strain in the dark grooves under his eyes.

It stings, this hollowness in me of not knowing what troubles him so. “This isn’t about our team. You helped me remember my past. Why won’t you let me try again to help you move on from yours?”

His arms go slack. “Your father might be cruel about it, but he has a point. You shouldn’t have to handle that much emotion. I refuse to hurt you with it.”

I stare him down as if I don’t even recognize him. “Hurt me? I’m trying to help
you
!”

“Well, maybe I don’t need to be helped,” he snaps. “Maybe I’m just fine as I am.”

I scoot to the far end of the couch. Maybe I am too eager to try to fix others’ problems; I’ve certainly tried to save those who didn’t want saving before. Zhenya, Sergei, Larissa … Perhaps even Mama, now. But Valya? He’s been suffering ever since our confrontation with Rostov—nursing a wound that won’t heal. “You’re a wreck. You scream in the middle of the night. You’ll barely use your ability. You call that being just fine?”

“I call that keeping you safe,” he says, eyes narrowed.

“Don’t bother. You or Papa, either one.” I shove off of the couch and gather our plates. “I’ll be as dangerous as I want to be.”

“Like your father?” Valya asks. I cringe. He isn’t fighting fair. “I see how well that works out for him.”

“What works out for who?” Papa flings open the back door of the conservatory. We didn’t see him approaching through the side garden. Now I hear the Austin Healey’s motor growling along the street. “Yulia, did you forget your appointment?”

“What appointment?” I ask.

“With Winnie? She’s waiting in the car. You’re supposed to meet your new professor at Georgetown, clean his lab, learn about some of his research projects. Glad it’s you and not us, huh?” He elbows Valentin as he slides past us. “What say we hit the movies, Valya? They’re playing a new Annette Funnicello film at Georgetown Theater, and with that broad on screen, who cares if it’s Disney?”