Skandal (20 page)

“Shit!” Al hisses. “Shit.”

“We’ll catch him.” Papa sets his jaw and weaves around the wreckage toward the end of the bridge.

We clatter off the bridge, into the southern side of Paris, and within a few blocks, we’re on the green Renault’s tail. I squeeze the door handle so hard my nails puncture the vinyl covering as the white static storm envelops us.

“Here goes nothing,” Al says, voice strained. “When he gets out of the car, Yulia, how about you do him like you did Donna and the Hound while I make him nice and toasty?”

Flood him with these negative emotions. This man tried to hurt us; he’s working for Rostov. Certainly he deserves it. But as I try to imagine myself doing so, all I feel are the puppet strings lashing around my wrists once more.

Al clenches his fists and leans forward, eager; Heinrich’s car jumps up onto the curb as thick black smoke spews from his muffler. He rolls the windows down, more smoke pouring from inside. Papa slows down just a hair as we gain on him. Flames leap from the open edges of the scrubber’s car. He throws open the driver’s door and staggers away from the car as a massive fireball billows out and up—

The blast knocks the scrubber to the ground as the smell of hot metal floods our car. Is he down? Please let him be down. Please don’t make me have to—

Papa cries out; our car lurches across traffic and swipes against a street pole, our hood crumpling into a round poster board. “Papa?” I force myself off the back of Al’s seat. My shoulder throbs, but if I have any other injuries, they’re buried under a flood of adrenaline. “Papa, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. My door’s wedged shut.” He tugs at the door handle, but the outside of the door clangs against a lamppost. “Go! Don’t worry about me. Get him!”

I scramble out of the back on the passenger’s side. Al is stalking toward Heinrich, who’s sprawled across the pavement among a crowd of spectators. Al guides the roaring flames down the sidewalk, straining to reach Heinrich, but Heinrich’s face—ever-shifting faces, really—is contorted with focus; Al’s steps slow as static crackles around us. We stop. Why are we here again? My gaze drifts over the burning car, the gawking Parisians, the man struggling to his feet. I recognize that these things are before me, but there is no purpose to them; they are not relevant. If I could just remember my purpose here—

The crackling tapers off, replaced by a dull pounding in my skull.

The scrubber’s gone—fleeing around the corner. I try to shake off the lingering film of his control and take off running after him. His noise trails behind him like the stink of ripe garbage, leading me down a narrow alley. If I stay just far enough back, I can follow his static noise on the cold stone walls without getting close enough for him to distort my thoughts …

Chains rattle somewhere around the bend, like someone’s climbing up a fence. I flatten against the wall, then once the static recedes, peek slowly around the corner. Heinrich’s loafers disappear over a metal gate that’s been chained and padlocked shut. Though it’s in the middle of a grungy alley, the stone opening reminds me of the entrance to a mausoleum.

“The Catacombs,” Al Sterling says, jogging up behind me. “Come on.” He launches himself at the gate and scrambles to the top, then reaches down an arm to help hoist me up. I kick and scrabble against the links, unable to gain purchase until I’m halfway over.

“What did they feed you back in Moscow, anyway?” Al asks. “Feathers?”

We shuffle into the heavy darkness of the gated-off stone antechamber. The floor slopes down sharply, leading into further depths that I can’t see; I reach for the wall to brace myself, but quickly wish I hadn’t. The cold stones are slimy with runoff, and immediately a sharp memory—a glint of steel, a stinging lash across my neck—makes me pull away.

But the deeper we descend, the quicker the light dies out, smothered in the oppressive, stifling air. Al pulls a lighter from his pocket and ignites it with a click. In his hands, it glows ten times brighter than a regular lighter would.

Human bones line the walls around us—femurs stacked lengthwise, their knobby ends worn smooth as polished wood. The archway before us is crowned with grinning, yellowed skulls. Bile burns at my throat. Now I recognize the thickness in the air, denser than mere humidity; it’s the muffled memories of the hundreds of thousands of dead it must have taken to build this lewd labyrinth.

I wrap my arms tight around my chest and turn sideways to squeeze through the narrow arch. I will not touch these walls. I cannot carry the weight of so many memories. As Al’s light glides over each row of bones along our path, though, I feel as if those empty eye sockets are watching us, as if their memories are just waiting to envelop me like a plague the moment I get too close.

Is this what Cindy’s vision of Judgment meant for me?

What’s the matter, Yulia?
Sergei’s voice slinks around my thoughts like an overly friendly cat.
Afraid of what you might find?

I nearly slam into Al. My heart pounds like a dirge.
Sergei. Where are you? Why is Rostov sending these scrubbers after us?

Come, now, you’re a clever girl. Why do you think?

Because he doesn’t want NATO meddling in the civil war in Vietnam. Or maybe he wants us to go to war in Vietnam. And he’s trying to use his scrubbers to control the delegates. But—
I clench my hands into tight fists.
But why is my mother helping him? Is she really creating these scrubbers? They weren’t psychics before. And why are they dying?

His laughter pings against my musical shield, like a kid throwing rocks.
Of course they’re her work. I suppose not everyone’s afraid to make the most of their gifts.

I am an ungrounded wire, crackling with anger and frustration. He can’t be right. She wouldn’t tell Sergei, of all people, if she had another plan. There has to be something more.

I stagger forward on the uneven ground and reach out to catch myself on the wall of bones. Sergei laughs, the sound ringing through my skull.
You didn’t mind touching dead bodies the other day.

My head whips upward.
You saw that?

I’m always watching out for you, Yulia. Someone has to.
He laughs again.
Someday, you’ll thank me for it. Maybe someday very soon.

What do you mean?
I ask.
Sergei?
I peel back a fraction of my shield.
Who is the mole?
But there’s nothing but the ringing silence of Al’s and my shoes on the grimy catacomb floor.

“Keep going, Yul, keep going.” Al tugs at his charred, ragged shirtsleeves. “We’ll find the bastard.”

But even as he says it, we reach a split in the tunnel.

Al’s grip tightens on his lighter; the shadows on the bones quiver in reply. “Okay. Let’s go left. Each time we come to a fork, keep taking the leftmost turn, got it? Try leaving a trail of memories for us to follow.” He smiles weakly. “Your pops’ll kill me if I get you lost, you know.”

I relish the idea slightly less than I’d relish the chance to toss the radio in the bathtub with me, but I nod. “Thank you for not making me go by myself.”

We move slowly into the next chamber after scanning ahead of us. Its walls hum with a psychic resonance I’m afraid to identify. But I must. With Al’s eyes on me, I curl two fingers around the ball grip of a femur.

The memories hit me like an electric current. The scrubber is close—very close, possibly the next chamber over. But as I open my mouth to warn Al, the skeletal memories flood through me. Gravediggers, piles of bones—no, that skull is looking at me, I’m sure of it—a lightning storm tearing through my head. Yes, the bones are coming alive. They are crawling toward me, bringing with them a white, soothing breeze, promising to carry me away. Whispers thread around me like spider silk. Chanting. Begging me to stay with them, to sink into the cool, wet earth. Bony fingers reach for me, buzzing with faint static—

No, Yulia!
Marylou cries.
It’s the scrubber. You have to fight him off!
A dark image pushes against the haze, against the roaring of voices. The scrubber and his unsteady appearance emerge through an archway. His static rolls forward, threatening to crush me like an avalance. But I have my own weapon: a tide of emotions, sweeping me along, hungry and eager for a target. Yes. I can stop him, just like I stopped the Hound. If I can keep control of myself just a moment longer—

The static engulfs me, like I’m at the base of a waterfall and the voices are pouring onto me. I shove off of the femur and reach forward. I have to unleash these feelings. Just a few more steps and I can reach him—

Click. I see the world in snapshots through the haze of scrubbing white. Al Sterling lunges forward with a scream, an order that’s buried under the words of the tortured, clambering, skeletal dead.

Click. The skeletons surge forward, all around me, crushing me in their brittle bones; they urge me to sleep, to forget my fears and concerns.
Do not fight
, they beg me. Their memories press into my skin.
Stay and listen to our tales.

Click. Al’s lighter clatters to the stone. The shadows of Al and another man, his psychic noise blazing like a nuclear blast, form one monstrous mass across the skeletal chamber wall, then merge into total darkness as the light extinguishes.

My emotions surge back into me, suffocating, scouring. I fall into the scrubber’s haze, riding on a tide of empty white.

CHAPTER 17

I DREAM OF RUSSIA;
of Mama tucking me into bed at our dacha while a fierce blizzard fills our windows with white. “Hush now,” she tells me. “Sleep. When you wake up, the worst will have passed.”

But I do not sleep well. In my mind, I am trapped inside a maze of bones, and I can feel the thudding steps of a Minotaur drawing nearer from all sides. Rostov and the Hound and his fleet of altered scrubbers. Mama, wielding a gleaming syringe. I scream at her in Russian, but she shifts into the scrubber, and Al Sterling wrestles with her. He staggers back, rubbing the vein in his forearm and begging me not to tell.

Someone steps in front of me—Cindy? Donna? I scream at them, trying to make them understand, but I can’t put the words in the right order.
He is poisoned. I am poisoned. The mole is poisoning us. I will poison you all.

Dimly, I am aware of an engine drone. I breathe in stale, stratosphere-cooled air and slowly open my eyes. We’re back on the Starlift, and everyone else is either asleep in their chairs, cross-armed and pouting (Donna), or sprawled on a makeshift cot (Al Sterling and, apparently, me).

The damned scrubber again. I touch my upper lip, but find no blood. I twist around to study Al on the cot next to mine; he’s slumped against the bent metal wall of the plane, staring straight ahead. If he sees me, he doesn’t acknowledge it. I suppress a shudder. That haunted look aligns too closely to what I saw in my fevered dreams.

Were they dreams? My gaze travels down his tattered, burned sleeves. I’m looking for something—a snake bite? Something in the soft inside of his elbow. But the puckered, seared skin of his forearms makes for great camouflage; I try to remember what I’m searching for, but the tighter I try to grasp the thought, the quicker it slips from my mind.

“Yulia.” It’s Valentin—I hadn’t even noticed him curled up beside my cot. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired of letting these scrubbers get the better of me.” I slump into his outstretched arm; he pulls me into a warm embrace. “I’m feeling … tired. What happened?”

Valya grimaces. “We lost the scrubber. When we caught up with you in the Catacombs, he was long gone.”

I sink further against him. I’m too tired to muster up anger. At Rostov and Mama and their army, at Sergei, at my own weakness. If I could have just fought past his noise, embraced my powers …

“We got Senator Saxton and the rest of the NATO delegates out of there safely and they’re all under their respective country’s protection, but the trail is cold again.”

I frown. “There was only Heinrich? He didn’t have any backup?”

“No one we could find, no.”

“But he seemed to know exactly who I was. If they knew we were coming—” I do not say what I am thinking,
If the mole told them we were coming
, but Valentin must be thinking it too—“why wouldn’t they bring reinforcements?” I groan and slump back on the cot. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop Heinrich. We can’t seem to catch a break.”

Valya traces a slow, soothing circle on my shoulder. “If your theory on this … relay … is correct, then Heinrich’s time is almost up. Maybe we’ll have better luck stopping whoever comes next.”

“But we have no idea who they are. And no idea about what Rostov’s directing them toward,” I say. My eyelids sag, the weight of exhaustion and my own futility too much to bear.

“I’m afraid not.” He presses his lips to my forehead. “But there’s nothing we can do about it until we’re back at Headquarters. Get your rest, Yul.”

I lean against him, savoring his warmth, his scent, his music humming on his skin. But the last thing I see before I sleep is Al Sterling’s intense stare, drilling right through me from the other side of the plane.

*   *   *

Cindy sits me down at Langley the next day, towering over me in heels while the couch endeavors to slurp me up. She purses her lips and looks me over like I’m an “interesting” piece of art.

“Would you like to talk about what happened in Paris?” she asks.

I flinch and stare down at my fingers, spreading them out before me. The catacombs, drenched with so much pain and suffering … And then the scrubber’s noise like a toxic spray. “I’m sorry I let the scrubber get away, Miss Conrad. It was just too much.”

She tilts her head, a smile softening her expression. “Of course the scrubber was too much for you. He was too much for any of us—even your father. I’m more concerned about the effect the environment had on you.”

My cheeks burn with shame. “I’m sorry, Miss Conrad.”

“Sorry?” Cindy tilts her head. “We learn through failure. I certainly have. What are you sorry for?”