The Restoration Game (29 page)

The only evidence I had that the CIA was involved in my mission
at all
was what Amanda, Ross, and Yuri had told me. Apart from the saucer-wreck look and feel of the map—and what the hell did I know of current paper and plastics technology, let alone of commercially available satellite and aerial imaging?—I didn't have a shred of physical evidence. I couldn't even be sure that the Agency had a direct hand in the Maple Revolution—the money and strategy behind it could have come from some philanthropic foundation or from some NGO (yeah, I know, but…) or indeed from some private business interest, and one which didn't need to be particularly wealthy, at that. The whole op—the game development and distribution, and the evident subsidy to the oppo press, and all the leaflets and flags and maple-leaf symbols, and my journey itself—could all have come in at well under a million dollars. Was it possible that what was really going on was that Amanda, and maybe someone with big money behind Amanda, was trying to get the mine
back
, out of the hands of the local excommie oligarchs like Klebov and into the hands of whatever or whoever had inherited the claims of the Ural Caspian Mineral Company?

And if that was the case, what was my mission supposed to accomplish?

“Shit,” I said, out loud.

“I beg your pardon?” said Fyodor.

“Sorry.” I shook my head. “Just…remembered something I hadn't done before I left home. It's trivial.”

I smiled reassuringly, leaned back, and sipped the coffee. Missing out on coffee earlier, what with the undrinkable muck in the Internet café, had left me with acute caffeine deprivation. I tried to think of a more innocuous question than the one I'd almost asked.

“What's with all the red-heads?” I said.

“The Hoxhaists?” Fyodor frowned. “They're insignificant. Completely mad. They huddle around the Stalin statue and sing Soviet Krassnian anthems.”

“No, no,” I said. “I meant, all the people with dyed red hair. What's that about?”

“Ah,” Fyodor said. “It's for the colour, you see, of maple leaves in autumn.”

“Really?” I said. “Nothing to do with the legendary flame-haired Vrai?”

“Nothing at all.” Fyodor ran a hand backward over his own red hair. “Well, possibly it has something to do with the game that has become so popular. The Vrai were the rulers long ago. Perhaps having red hair is a way of claiming the people should rule? I don't know.”

“Oh!” I said. “I get it! It is because of
The Krassniad!
Amanda was so clever…”

“Amanda?”

“Amanda Stone,” I said. “She wrote the book. Before she wrote the book, there were just folktales and traditions, but by tying them together into one story, she made it a story that both the Krassnar and the Vrai could take pride in. Of course she got the idea from Avram Arbatov's thesis, so it was really Arbatov who had that idea, and that must have been what he was trying to do….”

I fell into a place where I could see things falling into place.

“You know about Arbatov?” Fyodor said. “The academician who was killed in the Terror? He is quite obscure, even in Krassnia.”

“Oh, he's well known in the West,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

An awkward pause.

“I know why you're here,” Fyodor said.

“Yes?” I said, uncertainly. Of course he knew why I was here.

“The mountain and its secret. Hence your interest in the flame-haired Vrai.” He passed his hand over his hair again. “In case you are wondering, I am not one. I'm not a native Krassnian. My parents came here from Russia in the sixties.”

Why was he telling me this?

“Anyway,” he said, “are you ready to go?”

“Yes, when—”

“I mean today. Now.”

I nearly spilled my coffee. “Now? It's what, twelve thirty now? I wouldn't have time.”

“The mountain is only ten kilometres away. Half an hour's drive.”

“But the climb!” I said. “The place is above the snowline.”

“Another couple of hours, three at the most. Plenty of time to return before sunset.”

“Not counting evading the guards, apart from anything else.”

Fyodor looked impatient. “I have spent days observing them through binoculars, from a safe house in one of the villages. Their patrols are regular. The soldiers are of low morale. We can time your ascent to avoid them.”

“But—I need to acclimatise, to—I don't know, I just didn't expect—”

Fyodor leaned forward. “Listen,” he said, his voice low and fierce. “Every day you remain here is another day in which you could be picked up. This evening there is a rally of thousands in Freedom Square. That could be the occasion for a crackdown. The sooner your job is done, the better.”

What he said made sense. But I still felt rushed and disoriented. I'd expected more time.

“I'll have to get my walking boots,” I said. “And the map and so on, from the hotel.”

Fyodor sighed, exasperated, as if I'd said I had to wash my hair and choose an outfit.

“Which hotel is it?”

“The Metro,” I said.

“Two minutes' walk from here,” he said. He tipped the bottle to his mouth, drained it, and stood up. “I will be in a car outside it in ten.”

4.

Simkin Street, off the Prospekt, has two hotels on opposite sides of the road: the Kosmo and the Metro. I went into the Kosmo and up to my room. Changed into my big, lightweight walking boots and my warm trousers, grabbed my fleece and waterproof jacket, stuffed a pair of gloves and the contents of the aluminium case into my mini-backpack, checked that my torch and compass and Leatherman Juice were in its zipped side pockets, and left.

Down in the lobby I waited beside the glass sliding doors and watched the entrance to the Metro. A small yellow car drew up and parked, the driver's side to the sidewalk. No one got out. More to the point, no one went into the Metro, and particularly not the cops I'd half expected. I waited five minutes, took a deep breath, and went out and crossed the road. I leaned down at the front passenger window and tapped. Fyodor's head jerked around. He was wearing shades, so I couldn't see his eyes. I saw a frown, then a nod.

“Sorry I'm late,” I said, as I got in.

“You said you were in the Metro,” Fyodor said, turning the ignition key.

“Did I? Sorry.” I threw my stuff on the back seat, beside a litre bottle of water and a pack of fruit-and-nut bars—for me, I guessed—and buckled up.

“An easy mistake,” Fyodor said.

By now I was feeling a small pang of guilt about having mistrusted him so much.

“I guess it's safer to talk here than on the street,” I said.

“I should hope so,” said Fyodor, keeping his gaze on the road.

“Are you really working for the CIA?” I said.

“That's a very improper question,” said Fyodor. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” I said, “I
think
I'm working for the CIA, but I'm not sure.”

Fyodor laughed. “This is a common experience!”

He took the opportunity of a turn off the Prospekt to glance sideways at me, and smile.

“You are having the cold feet,” he said, looking back at the road. “This too is a common experience.”

He turned again, onto a street parallel to the Prospekt which led north out of town. Apartment blocks, painted up and freshened; more small shops than I remembered from—oh! This was, of course, the same main road north-ward out of town that the bus had driven up on the scariest day of my life.

I made a weak little “Uh!” sound.

“Yes,” said Fyodor, apparently taking my pathetic mew as an inarticulate reply, “it
is
frightening. You come to a strange country, you have a false identity, you tell lies about yourself, you know you are at risk of discovery, you are in what we call
konspiratsia
, which is a little broader than ‘conspiracy.’ And you naturally come to see
konspiratsia
everywhere, you become a little bit paranoid. It is normal.”

“How do you know it's normal? Have you done this yourself?”

“No,” said Fyodor. “I haven't worked abroad, not even ‘near abroad.’ But I was taught this by men with experience of such matters.”

“Men you won't say were your Agency handlers?”

“Exactly, I will say no such thing. And you shouldn't ask!”

“Sorry,” I said, abashed.

“You needn't apologise,” he said, in Krassnian. “It merely confirms who you are—a young English woman whose inexperience in the business is compensated by her local knowledge and fluent Krassnian.”

“That's what you were told about me?” I asked, replying in Krassnian by reflex.

“And it's true, as you've just again demonstrated. So you need not worry about me, Lucy, I know who you are.”

“How the—?” I said, in English. My hand went to my mouth, too late.

Then I saw, or thought I saw, what had happened.

“Oh! Fuck, I get it. If you were told just that about me, you could find out my name.”

We passed the edge of town. On either side now were the well-spaced villas of the new rich.

“How so?” said Fyodor, his voice cool. “Let us treat this as an exercise. See how you would do, in the business.”

“Well,” I said, “there's really only one way to be fluent in Krassnian, and that's to have spoken it in childhood. So I would look for records in the local Soviet—the municipality, I mean—of someone English and now living in the West who was born here about twenty-odd years ago and/or who lived here for a few years after that. As far as I know, there's only me.” “Very good,” said Fyodor. “That's what I would have done, if I'd had to. As it happens, I didn't.”

He took a hand off the wheel and gestured at the road ahead, towards the Caucasus range and Mount Krasny.

“You are familiar with this road, yes?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. I couldn't keep a grim tone out of my voice.

“I was on that bus with you, Lucy Stone,” he said. “My name is Andrei Melyukhin.”

You might think I'd have been delighted and amazed at how screamingly unlikely this was—though it wasn't, as I shortly found out—but in fact the big shock was that I remembered his name from much more recently than the scariest day of my life. I remembered it from almost exactly five months earlier, from the time I'd dredged the names of Andrei Melyukhin and Irina Zemskova from my memory, to include them in my email to Ross Stewart giving him an account of the event. These names had recurred to my mind even more recently when Ross had thanked me for that account, when he'd been persuading me to go to Krassnia.

He'd said the FSB might still be keeping track of these names.

“The moment our teacher—Miss Yesiyeva, you remember her? Drank herself to death by ‘95, the bitch—gave that man with the militiamen the class register, I became a revolutionary. I knew then that nobody in this system could be trusted, not even the ‘nice' ones. When she helped him to pick us out and assured us we would be all right, my new conviction was confirmed. Ever since that day, I've wanted to see a clean sweep of the people who were in power then. Which hasn't happened, and won't happen with the Maple Revolution. Do you think I don't know what is going on? Until I was pulled from the job a few days ago to prepare for this one, I was full-time on the revolution's finances. But the Maple Revolution is necessary. When the Liberal Democrats reveal themselves to be as corrupt and useless and Communist as the Social Democrats, the way to get rid of them will at least be obvious.”

“That's worked so well in Georgia and Ukraine.”

“Patience. Anyway, Lucy, it is no accident that the CIA's man in Krasnod should once have been a boy in that classroom with you. As I sat on the bus on this road, I was sorry that Hitler was dead, because that meant I couldn't help him fight these bastards. Then I remembered the other great demons we were always being warned about, and I swore to myself that one day I would join the CIA or the Zionists. I had no more idea of what these names stood for than I did that of Hitler. I had no idea what Zionists were, except that they were enemies of Russia and of the nomenklatura that ruled us and still does. As I grew older and learned more, I discovered I was not, shall we say, well qualified to be a Zionist. But the CIA, ah! It still exists and is open to all! What joy!”

“I can see that, but—”

He ignored me, and waved a hand to indicate a dirt road going off to the right. “You remember we passed down that road, to the Russian army base? And what happened to us there?”

“Of course I remember,” I said. “That's what I was about to say. Nothing bad happened to us. OK, it was terrifying at the time, we didn't know what was going on, and I always think of it as the scariest day of my life. But the fact remains that Klebov and the militia pulled the Georgian and Jewish kids and, uh, us out of the way of a Krassnar ethnic attack. It felt like we were being singled out, but it was the very opposite, wasn't it?”

Andrei said nothing for a moment. Then he said: “Klebov? Klebov the mine owner? What did he have to do with it?”

I looked at him with new surprise. “You don't know? He was KGB then.”

“Of course he was KGB, that is well known.”

“He was the man in the suit.”

The car swerved, veered, recovered.

“I didn't know that,” said Andrei.