Danny closed his eyes and shook his head tiredly as he realized he hadn’t discounted the fact that Maggie really might’ve flipped on them. She’d been with MAJESTIC-12 since the beginning; Danny had personally recruited her out of a mental hospital near San Francisco. But she’d always been independent, and her emotional detachment — the biggest side effect of her Enhancement — had increased considerably over the years, to the point where the things she said and the choices she made seemed almost alien at times. But then she’d smile and end up doing the right thing. Was that genuine, or was she so accustomed to pulling emotional threads that she did it out of habit now? Would she ultimately see Beria’s power play, centered on Variant supremacy, as the way to go? Or was she simply playing along until she could turn the tables?
Danny ran through the dozen or so contingencies in his head before finally giving up. He just didn’t have enough information to figure out what to do next, and wouldn’t until he talked to Frank.
And Frank was moving again.
Checking his watch and seeing seventy-four minutes had gone by since he pulled over, Danny started the car and slowly started driving again, heading toward Frank, who was now slowly walking northward toward the safe house. As he drove, Danny didn’t see any great increase in police or military activity. On the one hand, that was a little surprising, as Frank would be an extremely high-value target, but on the other, it was possible Beria wouldn’t want to create too much of a ruckus and show his hand politically. Just as Beria was sure to have informants in the Party and Red Army, his rivals likely would have their own people reporting on the First Deputy Premier as well.
Five minutes later, Danny spotted Frank on a side street, dressed in a factory worker’s overalls and coat. Checking his mirrors and finding no other cars coming up behind him, Danny pulled over to the side and rolled down his window. “Dmitry! I haven’t seen you in ages!” Danny called out. “Can I give you a ride, Comrade?” Coast clear. Get in the car.
Frank turned and gave a smile. “Alexi! How are you? How are Anna and the kids?” What about the safe house?
“They’re well, thank you! I feel like I haven’t seen much of them, though. I’m working hard these days.” So far so good, but can’t say for certain. “Come, let me take you home.” Seriously, get in the car.
Frank walked over and opened the passenger door. “That’s kind of you, Comrade. Thank you.” The door slammed and Danny pulled out, leaving Frank to slump back in his seat. “They got to Maggie,” he said, dropping the pretense.
“I know. I sensed her.”
“No, they got to her, Dan. She’s wearing an MGB uniform now.” Frank’s voice had a tinge of anguish in it, even as he tried to report matter-of-factly on his unauthorized excursion. “I went to talk trade, and to let Beria know we were behind the train job. And she just comes in and says ‘Heya’ and Beria’s all smiles about it. It’s bad.”
Danny nodded. “Unless she’s doubling. What do you think?”
“Possibly?” Frank said. “I mean, I could never read her very well, and the psych guy in my head can never make heads or tails of her. So who knows? She came in, Beria picks up his phone — probably to call the cavalry — and I decided to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Right. So what the hell were you thinking doing that?” Danny’s voice remained calm, belying his burning desire to reach out and punch him in the face.
Frank just shrugged. “Beria was hunkering down, we’re stretched thin babysitting the Commies we got. Figured I’d stir things up. But Dan — we got bigger problems.”
“Bigger how?”
Frank rolled down the window a hair to let some cold, fresh air into the car, which smelled of spilled booze and cigarettes — one of the reasons they got it so cheap to begin with. “You know my memories, my voices, they’ve been growing more active lately, yeah?”
Danny’s heart sank. He feared where this was going. “Yeah.”
“Well… I killed those MGB men, from the train… I killed them based on their advice. Not just the Russians I took on the last time we were here. But from some of the guys who’ve been with me since the beginning, like Mark Davis. They were all insistent that those men had to die in order to keep our cover from being blown. I… I trusted them.”
“You trusted them more than me,” Danny replied.
Frank smirked. “Yeah, I guess I did. I mean, I feel like they know me and I know them, right? It’s… I don’t know… it’s intimate in a way that nobody else would really get.”
“I have a hard time thinking General Davis and all those military guys you’ve absorbed would have encouraged you to disobey direct orders.” Danny tried not to sound peevish, and knew he was failing.
“But that’s why I trusted them! Because you’re right, there’s a lot of respect for chain of command from some of those guys. But when I got the Americans and the MGB guys and the Red Army guys and even the academics and everyone else all on the same page? It’s… well, that’s the problem. Something else happened just now.”
“What?”
Frank took several long moments to reply, and Danny turned to see him staring out the window as the city went past. “They all wanted me to join up with Beria. All of them. Just now.”
Danny absorbed this for an equally long time.
“I have to ask,” Danny said finally. “Did you feel like they were exerting any control over you? Like, you had to fight them off in order to not join up with Beria?”
Frank chuckled, surprisingly. “Am I possessed? No. I don’t think it works like that. There was never any surrender of motor control or anything like that. Just a big fucking shout in my head from everybody there. ‘Join him. Join him.’ Honestly, it was spooky as hell. And apparently I’m not alone. Before Maggie came in, Beria told me that the Soviet’s Enhancements were changing. Evolving. We seeing anything like that?”
Danny thought back to the angry faces he saw on the train, emerging like specters from the Variants themselves. “I don’t know. I’m not sure the science team has reported anything like that. But we’ve been so busy with ops…”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
They don’t always tell me everything.
15
Hoyt Vandenberg grimaced with every jolt of the C-47 Skytrain as it cruised over the Northern Rockies. The transport wasn’t particularly well suited for comfort — Vandenberg was traveling below the radar, hence a seat on one of the Air Force’s mainstay troop and cargo transports. But each jostle sent a wave of pain through the lower core of his body, a reminder of the sentence he’d been given months ago.
Cancer.
And not just any cancer — prostate cancer, which he felt was the worst goddamn sentence he could’ve gotten. Every trip to the bathroom was an ordeal. Sitting down had to be managed very carefully, and standing up almost as much. He’d gotten good at wearing a poker face through the pain, but every now and then his body would come up with some new stab of agony, or some additional indignity that required him to change his habits or limit his activities. He missed golf like you wouldn’t believe, but the last swing he took with his driver had him doubled over in pain for a good ten minutes.