Pattern Recognition (39 page)

“Titanium?”

“Soviet eco-disaster. Not as big as drying up the Aral Sea, but you’ve been hiking down the middle of a forty-mile strip of catastrophic industrial pollution, about two miles wide. I think you want to have a very in-depth shower.”

“Where are we?”

“About eight hundred miles north of Moscow.”

“What day?”

“Friday night. You went under Wednesday, and you were out until whenever you woke up today. I think they probably sedated you.”

She tries to get to her feet, but suddenly he’s there, hands on her shoulders. “Don’t. Stay put.” The weird one-eyed binoculars are dangling a few inches from her face. He straightens up, turning into the glare. He waves to the helicopter. “If they hadn’t had these night-vision glasses,” he says, over his shoulder, “we might not have found you.”

“
WHAT
do you know about the Russian prison system?” he asks her. They’re both wearing big greasy beige plastic headsets with microphones and green curly cords. The ear cups have enough soundproofing to muffle the roar of the engine, but he sounds like he’s down a fairly deep well.

“That its not fun?”

“HIV and tuberculosis are endemic. It gets worse from there. Where we’re going is basically a privatized prison.”

“Privatized?”

“A bold New Russian entrepreneurial experiment. Their version of CCA, Cornell Corrections, Wackenhut. Regular prison system is a nightmare, real and present danger to the public health. If they wanted to set up an operation to breed new strains of drug-resistant TB, they probably couldn’t do a better job than their prisons are already doing. Some people think AIDS, in this country, in a few more years, will look like the Black Death, and the prisons aren’t helping that either. So when one of Volkov’s corporations decides to set up a test operation, where healthy, motivated prisoners can lead healthy, motivated lives, plus receive training and career direction, who’s going to stand in the way?”

“That’s where the footage is rendered?”

“And what motivates these model prisoners? Self-interest. They’re healthy to begin with, otherwise they wouldn’t have been chosen for this. If they stay in the regular system, they aren’t going to be. That’s one. Two is that when they get here, they see it isn’t a bad deal at all. It’s coed, and the food is a lot better than what a lot of people in this country make do with. Three is that they get paid for their labor. Not a fortune, but they can bank it, or send it home to their families. There’s thirty channels on satellite and a video library, and they can order books and CDs. No Net access, though. No web browsing. No phones. That’s an instant ticket back to TB Land. And there’s only one choice, though, in occupational training.”

“They render the footage?”

“All of it.” He offers her the canteen. “How are your feet?”

She waves it away. “Okay unless I move them.”

“We’re almost there,” he says, pointing forward, through the plastic nose. “Final motivating factor that keeps the campers here: Volkov. Probably
the names never mentioned, but if you were an inmate, and Russian, which of course they all are, I think you’d get the drift.”

The helmeted pilot, whose face she hasn’t seen, says something in crackly Russian, and is answered by another voice, out of the night.

She sees a ring of lights come on, ahead of them.

“I don’t understand how this could all have been put together, just to facilitate Nora’s art. Well,
how
isn’t a problem, I guess, but
why?”

“Massive organizational redundancy, in the service of absolute authority. We’re talking post-Soviet, right? And enormous personal wealth. Nora’s uncle isn’t Bill Gates yet, but it wouldn’t be entirely ridiculous to mention them in the same sentence. He was on top of a lot of changes, here, very early, and largely managed to keep his name out of the media. Which must have been a downright spooky accomplishment. Always has brilliant government connections, regardless of who’s in power. He’s ridden out a lot, that way.”

“You’ve met him?”

“I was in the same room with him. Bigend was doing most of the talking. Translators. He doesn’t speak English. You speak French?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither. Never regretted it more than when he and Bigend were having a conversation.”

“Why?”

He turns and looks at her. “It was like watching spiders mate.”

“They got along?”

“A lot of information being exchanged, but it probably didn’t have that much to do with what they were actually saying, either through the translator or in French.”

The helicopter’s four wheels touch down unexpectedly on concrete. It’s like being dropped ten inches while seated on a golf cart. It hurts her feet.

“They’re going to check you over, patch you up, then Volkov wants to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. When you went missing, he flew us all up here in a lot faster helicopter than this.”

“‘Us’ who?”

But he’s already removed his headset. Unlatching his harness, he can’t hear her.

41.
A TOAST TO MR. POLLARD

With her bandaged feet in oversized black felt house slippers, Cayce tries not to shuffle as she and Parkaboy traverse the corridor of yellow lockers. On their way, he says, to dinner.

The past hour or so (she still hasn’t found her watch) have been spent being examined by a doctor, showering thoroughly, and having her feet bandaged. Now she’s back in Skirt Thing and the black cardigan, Parkaboy having suggested that dressing for dinner would be a good idea.

Skirt Thing, along with the rest of her clothing, and her makeup kit, had been waiting for her, washed and folded, on one of the beds in the infirmary where she’d regained consciousness.

The slippers, provided by the same woman who’d brought her soup, make her feel ridiculous, but the blisters and bandages rule out her French shoes, and the doctor had used a pair of shears on the Parco boots, to get them off without hurting her any more than he’d had to.

“What was that you said Dorotea gave me?”

“Rohypnol.”

“The doctor here said it was something else. At least I think he did. ‘Psychiatric medicine’?”

“They told us they’d taken you to a private clinic, from the hotel. Then they told us you were being moved to ‘a secure location,’ which must’ve meant here. I guessed Rohypnol from the sound of it; something she thought would make you easy to push around.”

“Where is she? Do you know? Do they?”

“That doesn’t seem to be considered a proper topic of conversation. They go sort of fish-eyed if you bring it up. Any idea what she was after?”

“She wanted to know how I’d gotten Stella’s e-mail address.”

“I’m curious about that myself.” He’s showered, shaved, and changed into new black jeans and a clean but travel-creased white shirt. “But what she slipped you, that’s anybody’s guess. The bar staff thought you were hallucinating.”

“I was.”

“Up here,” he says, indicating a flight of stairs. “You okay?”

She climbs a few steps, then stops. “I’m wearing Minnie Mouse shoes, I’m so tired I’m not sure I know what it’s like not to be, jet lag seems like a luxury of those who don’t travel much, and I feel like I’ve been beaten with rubber hoses. Not to mention a general lack of skin on my feet.”

They climb three flights of concrete stairs, Cayce increasingly relying on the railing, and enter what must be the interior of the ugly concrete tiara she’d seen as she was running away.

An oval, its windows set between canted concrete uprights. The ceiling vaults determinedly toward the front of the building, to reach a mural depicting the world, Eurasia front and center, bracketed by heroic wheat sheaves erupting with nose cones and Sputniks, colors faded from their original brightness, like an old globe discovered in a hot dusty room above a high school gymnasium.

She sees Bigend raise a glass in greeting, from the center of a group of people.

“Time to meet the big guy,” Parkaboy says quietly, smiling and offering her his arm. Which she takes, in an absurd flashback to prom night, and they walk forward together.

“Peter,” Bigend says, “we’ve all heard you were the one who found her.” He shakes Parkaboy’s hand, then hugs and air-kisses Cayce. “We’ve been very worried about you.” He’s roseate with some dire new energy she hasn’t seen in him before. His dark forelock falls across his eyes; he tosses his head to throw it back, entirely too coltish for anyone’s good,
then turns to the man beside him. “Andrei, this is Cayce Pollard, the woman who’s brought us all together. You’ve already met Peter. Cayce, this is Andrei Volkov.” Displaying his white and worryingly numerous teeth.

Cayce looks at Volkov and thinks immediately of Eichmann in the dock.

A nondescript, balding man in indeterminate middle age, gold glinting at the temples of his rimless glasses. He wears the sort of dark suit that rewards its expense primarily with a certain invisibility, a white shirt whose collar might be linen-finish porcelain, and a necktie of thick, lustrous, patternless silk, midnight blue.

Volkov takes her hand. His touch is ritual and brief.

“My English is poor,” he says, “but I must tell you how sorry we are, that you were treated so badly. I am sorry also,” and here he turns to a young man Cayce realizes she recognizes from the squat behind Georgievsky, and continues in Russian.

“He regrets that he is unable to join you now for dinner, but he has pressing engagements in Moscow,” translates the young man, his bushy ginger hair a few shades lighter than Parkaboy’s. He’s wearing a suit as well, but one that looks as though he’s rented it.

Volkov says something more, in Russian.

“He says that Stella Volkova also apologizes for the discomfort you have so unnecessarily suffered, and that she would be here, tonight, but, as you know, her sister requires her in Moscow. Both the Volkovas look forward to your next visit, upon your return to Moscow.”

“Thank you,” Cayce says, noticing the neat deep wedge missing from the upper curve of Volkov’s right ear, and hearing the doctor’s shears cutting through the suede of the Parco boots.

“Goodbye, then,” Volkov says. He turns to Bigend and says something in what she guesses is quick and probably idiomatic French.

“Goodbye,” Cayce says, automatically, as he starts for the door, two young men in dark suits falling into step beside him. A third remains, standing nearby, until Volkov is out of sight, then follows.

“Systema,” Bigend says.

“What?”

“Those three. The Russian martial art, formerly forbidden to all but Spetsnaz and KGB bodyguards. It has its formal basis in Cossack dancing. Quite unlike anything Eastern.” He looks like a very determined child, on Christmas morning, who’s finally gotten his way and been allowed downstairs. “But you haven’t been introduced to Sergei Magomedov,” he says, indicating the young translator, who offers her his hand.

“I saw you at the studio,” the young man says. Twenty-three at the oldest.

“I remember.”

“And Wiktor Marchwinska-Wyrwal,” Bigend says, introducing the fifth member of the remaining party, a tall man with very carefully barbered gray hair, dressed for a French preppie’s idea of a British country weekend, the silky tweed of his jacket looking as though it were woven from the wool of unborn lambs. Cayce shakes his hand. He has Voytek’s perfectly horizontal cheekbones, and a phone plugged discreetly into his right ear.

“A great pleasure,” this one says. “I am, of course, hugely glad to see you here, safe and I hope relatively sound. I am, I should tell you, Andrei Volkov’s security chief, new to the job, and I have you to thank for it.”

“You do?” She sees three men in white jackets and dark trousers enter, pushing stainless-steel carts on hard rubber wheels.

“Perhaps I can explain over dinner,” he says, gesturing to a round table she hasn’t noticed, its white cloth set for six. Two of the three in white coats are positioning the carts, but the third is removing the sixth setting.

“Who was that for?” she asks.

“Boone,” says Bigend. “But he’s getting a lift back to Moscow with Volkov instead. Asked me to tell you he’s sorry.”

Cayce looks from Bigend to Parkaboy, then back to the sixth chair, and says nothing.

“
ANDREI
Volkov,” says Marchwinska-Wyrwal, with no preface, as the plates from the soup course are being removed, “is now the wealthiest man in Russia. That this is not more common knowledge is a remarkable reflection on the man himself.”

They’re dining by candlelight, the curved strip lighting overhead dimmed to a faint amber glow.

“His empire, if you will, has necessarily been assembled piecemeal, owing to the recent, extraordinary, and very chaotic history of his country. A remarkable strategist, but until recently unable to devote much time or energy to the shaping of that which he’s acquired. Corporations and properties of all sorts have simply stacked up, if you will, awaiting the creation of a more systematic structure. This is now being done, and I am happy to say that I am a part of that, and you should know that you have had a part in it as well.”

“I don’t see how.”

“No,” he says, “it certainly wouldn’t have been obvious, least of all to you.” He watches as one of the waiters pours more white wine into his glass. Cayce notices the black tips of a tattoo of some kind, showing above the collar of the waiter’s white jacket, and thinks of Damien. “He loved his brother deeply, of course,” the Polish security chief continues, “and after the assassination made certain that his nieces would receive constant protection, as well as whatever they might require in order to be as comfortable as possible. Nora’s plight particularly moves him, as indeed it must any of us, and it was at his suggestion that an editing
room was assembled for her in the clinic in Switzerland. As that aspect of the efforts toward her recovery evolved, so evolved a certain division in methodologies—”

“It was inevitable,” interjects Sergei Magomedov, who perhaps has been drinking a little too quickly, “as the system created to assure the security of the Volkovas was about a rigid secrecy, and the mechanism created to make the work public was not. The anonymity, the encryption, the strategies, as they evolved—”