“Yeah,” Tallis shifting into a cheery tough-moppet voice, “are you gonna go crashing in the gate?”
Misha pushes up a sleeve, revealing one of his prison tats, Ever-Virgin Mary Mother of God holding her baby, Jesus, on whose forehead at about third-eye position Maxine now can just detect a little bump about the size of a zit, which babies aren’t supposed to have. “Transponder implant,” Misha explains. “We found out from social-engineering cute nyashetchka we met in bar.”
“Tiffany,” Grisha recalls.
“Everybody who works for hashslingrz gets one of these, so Security can track them wherever they go.”
Wait a minute. “My sister’s husband has been walking around with a tracking implant? Since—”
Shrug, “Couple months. Even Ice Man himself has one. You didn’t know that?”
“You, Tallis?”
“Only till I could get my dermatologist back from St. Maarten’s to take it out.”
“And when you went dark, Hubby never said anything?”
The cute fingernail. “I guess I wasn’t thinking past Chazz and me, and how to keep it from Gabe.”
“Once again, Tallis,” Maxine doesn’t want to be the bully here, but the news isn’t penetrating. “Gabe knew, he planned the whole thing, of course he didn’t make an issue.” Stubborn kid. She wonders how March ever dealt with this.
The interior of the limo has picked up a Gaussian blur from the smoke of inexpensive cigar tobacco and high-priced weed. Things grow merry. Not to mention less cautious. The boys admit, for one thing, that their tattoos aren’t quite legit. Seems that back in Russia, having been popped actually for minor hacker beefs under Article 272, illegal access, they were never inside for long enough to rate real prison tattoos, so later on had to settle drunkenly instead for a Brooklyn ink parlour that does knockoffs for those who wish to appear more dangerous than they are. In a passage of lighthearted back-and-forth, Misha and Grisha discuss who is more of a wannabe badass than whom, during which the Bizons get waved around, Maxine has to hope rhetorically.
“According to Igor last time we talked,” Maxine schnozzing right ahead, “this beef between you people and Ice isn’t KGB business—”
“Igor doesn’t know about this thing tonight.”
“Of course not, Misha. Let’s say he has deniability and you guys are strictly on your own here. I’m still wondering why you aren’t doing it from a little further away, like on the Internet. Overflow exploit, denial of service, whatever.”
“Too institutional. Hacker-school approach. Grisha and I are close-up type of scumbags. You didn’t notice? More personal this way.”
“So if it’s personal…” She doesn’t quite mention Lester Traipse, but a crinkled, almost-kind look, the sort of expression Stalin liked to beam at you in his publicity shots, has crept into Misha’s eyes.
“Isn’t only Lester. Please. Ice has this coming, you know it, we all know it. But better you don’t have full history.”
Deimos-and-Phobos gamer machismo, legitimate avenging angels, what? Maybe it is about more than Lester tonight, but isn’t Lester enough? whatever he saw that he shouldn’t’ve, the visitation that meant his end rising spooky and vaporous above the spreadsheets of secret cash flow, was something that couldn’t be allowed out among civilians….
“OK, but how about a little history?”
The fellows exchange a mischievous look. Anasha can do funny things to a man. Even to two men.
“You heard about HALO jump.” Misha sez. “Igor tells story to everybody.”
“Especially cute women.” sez Grisha.
“Was not HALO jump, however. Was HAHO jump.”
“That’s… laughing all the way down, no wait, High Altitude…”
“High Opening. Chutes open, maybe 27,000 feet, you and your unit can fly 30, 40 miles, all stacked up in sky, lowest guy carries GLONASS receiver—”
“Like Russian GPS. One night Igor is on insertion job, everything gets fucked up, praporschik freaks out from no oxygen, wind spreads everybody over half Caucasus, GLONASS quits working. Igor gets down OK, but now he’s all by himself. No idea where or if base camp is set up. Uses compass and map to try and find rest of his unit. Days later, smells something. Little village, totally like massacred. Young, old, dogs, everybody.”
“Torched. That’s when Igor has soul crisis.”
“He doesn’t only get out of Spetsnaz—when he has enough money, he sets up his own private reparation plan.”
“Sending money to the Chechens?” wonders Maxine, “this isn’t considered treason?”
“It’s a lot of money, and by then Igor is well protected. He even thinks abut converting to Islam, but there’s too many problems. War ends, second war starts, some of people he’s been helping are now guerrillas. Situation has grown complicated. There are Chechens and there are Chechens.”
“Some good guys, some not so good.”
Names of resistance organizations that Maxine can’t keep straight. But now, well, not exactly a lightbulb—more like the glowing end of an El Producto—goes on over her head.
“So the money Lester was diverting from Ice—”
“Was going to bad guys, by way of Wahhabist bullshit front. Igor knew how to reach money before it would get all mixed up in Emirates account. He expedites matters for Lester, takes little commission. Everything dzhef, till somebody finds out.”
“Ice?”
“Whoever is running Ice? You tell us.”
“And Lester…” Maxine realizes she has blurted.
“Lester was like little hedgehog in fog. Only trying to find his friends.”
“Poor Lester.”
What, now it’s all gonna go saline, here?
“Exit 18,” Misha announces instead, exhaling smoke, eyes gleaming, “Poughkeepsie.” And not a moment too soon.
The train station’s just over the bridge. Waiting in the parking lot is Yuri, a cheerful athletic type leaning against a Hummer bearing stigmata from a long history of hard road, behind it a sizable trailer with a generator for the pulse weapon. From RV generators she’s seen, Maxine estimates 10, 15,000 watts. “Ten-percent power” may be a figure of speech.
They’re in time to catch the 10:59 to New York. “So long, boys,” Maxine waves, “go safe, can’t say I really approve, I know if my own kids ever got hold of a vircator…”
“Here, don’t forget this,” discreetly handing her back the Beretta.
“You realize you’ve just made Tallis and me accessories to some criminal, probably even terrorist, act.”
The padonki exchange a hopeful glance. “You think so?”
“First of all, it’s federal, hashslingrz is an arm of U.S. security—”
“They don’t want to hear about this right now,” Tallis dragging her down the platform. “Fuckin dweebs.”
The boys wave out the windows as they pull away. “Do svidanya Maksi! Poka, byelokurva!”
41
In the train on the way back, Maxine must’ve fallen asleep. She dreams she’s still in the ZiL. The landscape out the windows has frozen to deep Russian midwinter, snowfields under a piece of moon, illumination from the olden days of sleigh travel. A snow-inundated village, a church spire, a gas station shut for the night. Crossfade to Brothers Karamazov, Doctor Zhivago and others, covering their winter distances like this, frictionless, faster than anything else, suddenly you can get more than one errand done per trip, a breakthrough in romantic technology. Somewhere between Lake Heatsink and Albany, across the dark wilderness, a fleet of black SUVs now with only their fog lights lit, on the way to intercept. Maxine falls into an exitless loop, the dream as she surfaces turning into a spreadsheet she can’t follow. She wakes up around Spuyten Duyvil to Tallis’s sleeping face, closer to her own than you’d expect, as if sometime in sleep their faces had been even closer.