Paul glanced around. “Go for it.”
“Has to do with the basics of why we’re doing this.”
Paul looked around again. Amanda touched him on the elbow again and pointed to the small metal disk in her palm. He relaxed. “You mean how the idea came about? One day Grace—”
“Face toward me,” Amanda said.
“Oh, sure,” Paul said. He turned so his knees and Amanda’s lightly touched. She didn’t pull down her skirt to cover them, although Paul guessed she could have. He started to shift back but she put her hand on his knee.
“Closer’s better,” she said. “And look down.”
He glanced at her exposed knee, and decided it wasn’t a bad place to concentrate his gaze.
“You told me that already. Is it Peter?” she asked gently.
Peter was a fiend for science; he could never get enough of it. That’s why Paul became a scientist, after all. He worshiped Peter and the room they shared was always crammed so full of his science experiments—many of which involved frogs and mice, that Paul had to navigate his way to bed each night and check the sheets carefully before crawling in. But Peter would insist on explaining each one to Paul, making sure Paul got it, his eyes dancing in pure delight…
His father finally reached the Tulsa ambulance service. The deVere family had traveled to Tulsa to visit Norman deVere’s brother, and to allow Paul and Peter to meet their cousins. But Peter had been sick the whole way.
A Russian voice, obviously drunk, finally answered, and, sounding exasperated, agreed to send an ambulance. By this time Peter’s cough had worsened, and from where Paul stood behind his mother he could see his brother’s eyes closing and opening, closing and opening, closing and opening.
“Forty-five dollars?” his father roared into the phone. “I have to pay forty-five dollars for you to take my son to the hospital?”
“In cash,” Paul heard the voice on the other end of the line shout. “Dollars, not that Russian shit.” He heard a click and watched his father hold the receiver, not knowing whether to hang it up or throw it out the window.
Half an hour later the ambulance showed up. Peter was coughing less, but harder. His coughs now were accompanied by anguished cries. Paul saw his mother wiping the blood away from his mouth as she handed him to the orderly, who was so drunk he promptly dropped Peter. His father, crimson with impotent rage, snatched up Peter and cradled him in his arms. “Let’s go, Ivan,” he snarled.
“First, the money,” the driver said, weaving unsteadily.
His father thrust some bills in the man’s hand. “Here’s for the free Soviet healthcare, Comrade,” Paul’s father said in a cruel voice.
“Thirty-five dollars here, I said forty-five.” The man crossed his arms. “We don’t go until I get forty-five.”
“The boy’s dying,” his father shouted. “Can’t you hear?”
The orderly flicked his eyes down on Peter’s convulsing form. Paul watched wide-eyed from his mother’s side. “Forty-five dollars.”
“How about this?” his father asked, hoisting Peter over one shoulder and whipping out a Colt .45 from the other. “This get your stinking Russian ass in gear, Comrade?”
Drunk as he was, the orderly recognized what was being thrust in his face. He mumbled something about letting it pass this time and opened the rear of the ambulance. He went to start the motor. On the fourth try he started the engine and Paul, standing alone back at the hotel window, saw the ambulance lurch away and head for a tree until someone jerked the steering wheel back on the road…
“Paul?”
He snapped back in and saw Amanda’s face, worried and anxious. “Are you all right?” she asked as she touched his cheek.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “Distracted. Sorry.”
“Oh,” she said, looking down at his hand. He’d squeezed his sandwich so hard the turkey oozed out from between his fingers.
“What were we… wormholes,” Paul said, cleaning his hand with his handkerchief. “Give me your napkin there.”
Amanda handed him her paper napkin. He smoothed it out on his leg and took another bite.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s Peter.”
Igor Rostov reviewed the last few dispatches Natasha Nikitin had sent. Their quality had decreased markedly, and seemed more concerned with the activities of the flighty British professor of only marginal value.
Rostov guessed that deVere had found some way to keep Natasha in the dark. His immediate supervisor had not been pleased, which had led to the scene in his office that morning:
“Ah yes, Igor Nikolayevich, come in, come in,” Petrovchenko had said.
“Thank you, Comrade,” Rostov had responded. He’d heard stories about being called to Petrovchenko’s office.
Petrovchenko seemed to be in a good mood, though. “Igor, how are you?”
“Fine, sir,” he’d mumbled. Part of the folklore of Petrovchenko’s office was correct: There weren’t any comfortable chairs to be had.
Igor selected the chair that appeared too hard, as opposed to the chair that seemed too tight or the one that seemed to be tilting at an uncomfortable angle.
“Most interesting operation you’re running in Boston, most interesting,” Petrovchenko said. “The agent is a Natasha Nikitin. Highly rated on all agency reports. You appear to be handling her well.”
“Thank you, sir,” Rostov said, shifting in his chair.
“Of course that’s to be expected from a man in your position. Otherwise you wouldn’t be in your position, would you? You’d be monitoring prisoner recreation in Siberia, right?”
Rostov didn’t say anything, and Petrovchenko looked up and laughed. “Oh come on, Igor, it was a joke. Lighten up. We’re happy with your work, you’re not going anywhere.”
Rostov allowed himself a small breath of relief. “I’m glad you’re pleased, sir.”
“Oh very pleased,” Petrovchenko said. “It looks like you’ve managed to procure some quite useful intelligence on this time travel they’re fooling around with.”
“I hope it has been satisfactory, sir,” Rostov replied.
“Oh, more than satisfactory, quite impressive, actually. At least the first dispatches were.”
Rostov’s stomach tensed. “Yes sir?”
“Any third-form student could see that your operative lost her pipeline to the good information between this report”—he threw a paper on the desk—“and this one.” He threw another paper. “What happened, they change the locks on the filing cabinets there?”
“I don’t have that information at the moment, sir, but I will certainly find—”
“You’ll certainly know very soon,” Petrovchenko snarled. “And you will remind your operative that not only does her presence in Boston depend on reestablishing that pipeline connection, your position in the agency depends on it as well. Do you follow?”
“Yes sir,” he said.
“No doubt you do,” Petrovchenko said. “As I can see by the files here you took over your position from Dmitri Volkov, who is now running a gas station in St. Louis, isn’t that correct?”
“I haven’t kept in contact with Dmitri Alexeyvich.”
“Not since you pulled the rug out from under the poor bastard’s feet,” Petrovchenko laughed. “Can you imagine anything worse than running a gas station in St. Louis?”
“No sir.”
“I can. Best hope I don’t decide to show you. Nice bit of work you did, feeding Dmitri worthless reports, which he dutifully passed up the line, while keeping the real stuff on disk for the investigators. Classic backstabbing.”
Igor squirmed. “I’m sure I acted professionally and, and in respect to the reports, they were true and correct to the best of my knowledge at the time, sir.”