Skandal

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  For Jason,

  who makes everything sharper, brighter, better

  CHAPTER 1

  WASHINGTON, DC, APRIL 1964

  “YULIA ANDREEVNA CHERNINA.” The general’s mouth stretches around the rubbery Russian vowels as he reads from the file before him. “Did I get that right?” He smiles at me like any mistake would be my fault, somehow. “We are here to determine whether someone of your … background is fit to serve the United States of America in her constant battle against tyranny.”

  Background. Yes. A tidy little euphemism—I’m finding English has lots of those. What he’s asking is whether I’m a communist psychic sleeper agent sent to America to ignite a revolution, but these are ugly words, and America is not a place for ugliness. The America I’ve lived in for the past three months is impeccably clean. It’s shot through with colors and smells and sounds I never could have imagined when I lived in the Soviet Union. And tyranny—tyranny is not encouraged like in the KGB that once controlled me, but something to be stamped out wherever America finds it. By using skills like mine, America can unmask tyranny everywhere. My psychic powers make me a microscope that reveals a festering colony of bacteria on a seemingly clean surface.

  The general clears his throat as he flips through my file. Muted sunlight from the oval window behind him casts him in shadow, along with the rest of the panel members seated at his side. “You are a product of the KGB—the Committee for State Security—and its psychic espionage program. Your father, Andrei, testified before this committee that he participated in the genetic research arm of this program during World War II under Stalin’s direction, correct?” He doesn’t wait for confirmation, from me or the rest of the committee. “And our intelligence indicates that your mother has resumed that research now.”

  Everything spoken in English sounds muffled by gauze. I can only process it so fast; I can only take in so many words before I have to shake them out to make room for more. But the translation lag softens the blow of what he’s actually said: that my mother is the enemy now.

  I lean toward the microphone, flinching as it shrieks with feedback. “That is correct, comra—sir.”

  “Then you understand why you’re here today. You realize the grave threat posed by the Soviets and their psychic espionage program. You would agree that General Rostov, head of the KGB First Directorate, must be stopped.”

  My stomach churns. The soda fountain milkshake I had with lunch feels heavier than polonium in my gut. “Yes,” I say, though it sounds too faint. Yes, I want to stop Rostov, the man who used me as a weapon to root out dissidents and spies. But I worry that these Americans will see my mother’s fate as tied up in his.

  “Glad to hear it.” The general’s face splits in a smile. “We’ve already heard the testimony of your father and Valentin Sorokhin, as well as your tutor, Staff Sergeant Davis, who has deemed your language skills sufficient now to join them in their work. But there are a few things I want you to clarify in person.”

  My eyes dart toward Winnie Davis, my English teacher, on call if the language becomes too dense. She leans casually in the room’s corner, brown arms crossed over her crisp Air Force blues. With a smile, she nods at me. She isn’t psychic, and I can’t read her mind from this distance, but it’s the same smile she gives me when I’m practicing English with her. You’ve got this. Keep going.

  “I am happy to … make … assistance.” I cringe before I’ve finished saying it. I’m not cut out for word games, much less spy games.

  “You believe that you possess psychic powers,” the general says. I think it’s a question, but I don’t trust my ears. Sometimes I think only thoughts and memories speak the truth to me, and even those can be twisted until I don’t know what to trust. He waits a few moments, the air thickening between us. “Well? Go on. Tell everyone what I’m thinking.”

  I stare back at his shadowed face. “It is easiest for me if I touch you,” I say.

  Nervous laughter ripples around me until the general shushes it with a wave of his hand. His motions are effortless—downright lazy, compared to the crushing, impatient energy of Rostov, the KGB officer I once worked for. “That’s right. ‘Reads thoughts and memories through contact,’” he reads from the dossier, then stretches one hand before him toward the edge of the table. “Permission to approach the panel.”

  I swallow and stand up.

  His knuckles are hairy and rough; my fingers hover above them, barely permitting contact. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this. Three months, to be precise; three months ago, I sucked up memories and emotions through my fingertips until I couldn’t hold any more, then pushed them all out at once in a torrent of pain. Because I did so, I was able to escape the KGB with Valentin—we fled the Soviet Union to join my father and his new CIA friends—but I’ve kept my hands to myself since then, or at the very least, refused to look any deeper than the surface, memories collecting on me like a film of nervous sweat.

  Perhaps I should be grateful for my gift. But I don’t want to be a weapon anymore, capable of causing pain. I don’t want to be viewed as an instrument for torture or for condemning average people to death for their thoughts, like I did back in Russia. Rostov used me to hunt dissidents and traitors; he tried to use me to launch a nuclear war, and nearly succeeded. I don’t want that kind of power lying in wait just beneath my skin.

  But I don’t want Rostov to suceed even more.

  I let my thoughts sink into the general’s skin. A marching band bursts from the contact, coiling through the hearing room, weaving around me and each of the panel members. Trumpets circle the general. Brassy high notes punctuate the drumbeat pounding into my skull. I recognize the melody from one of Winnie’s cultural lessons—“Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Phillip Sousa. Be kind to your web-footed friends, for that duck may be somebody’s mother. I suspect those aren’t the real lyrics, but it made for a fun afternoon, belting about ducks at the tops of our lungs while Valentin hammered out the chords on Papa’s baby grand.

  “You have a musical shield,” I say. To protect against enemy psychics, he keeps a song forever stuck in his head, covering up his real thoughts. “I cannot look past that.” I lift my hand and the brassy march diminishes.

  The general chuckles. “I’m sure you could if you wanted to.”

  It’s not a compliment. I take a step back from the panel, sweat sprouting under my armpits.

  “Your father can. Mister Sorokhin can. And your old KGB boss—General Anton Rostov—I understand he’s altered your thoughts before.”

  So has my own father, but I’m not interested in discussing that with this stranger. “My power does not work that way,” I stammer. “And—and if it did, it would not be my place.”

  “What if I ordered you to?” the general asks. The woman to his left scribbles furiously. As the general leans forward, the dim sunlight grazes his face—broad, meaty, cut with deep furrows. “Did the KGB ever make you do things that
weren’t your ‘place’?” A dangerous grin unfolds. “Did you obey?”

  I remember gunshots, ringing through the haze of Rostov’s mind control. I remember my mouth disobeying me, reading out nuclear launch codes as Rostov coiled like barbed wire around my mind.

  “That’s a rather complicated question.” Winnie steps forward from the corner, arms unfurling. “Sir.”

  “It’s still relevant. War often places us in situations with no right choice.” His head retreats into his broad oxen shoulders. “In Korea, I had to make plenty of those calls. Who lives and who dies. Trust me, Miss Chernina, we will understand.”

  My head throbs as a thousand phantom heartbeats push blood through my brain. The young engineer, Natalya, executed for treason after I ran to her for help. My best friend, Larissa, sacrificing herself so Valentin and I could escape to America with my father. Dozens of people whose brains my father scrubbed—warped, altered, or erased—to find me. Cosmonauts incinerated inside the Veter 1 capsule—I still don’t know if Papa and his team member were responsible for the explosion or not, but if he was, and I could have prevented those deaths …

  “We did what we had to do,” I say slowly, neither meeting his gaze, nor Winnie’s, “to survive.”

  Scribble, scribble, scratch.

  In Russian, silence is a defensive measure; it’s a shovel and a soft patch of earth. But so far, English speakers wield silence like a weapon around me, its threat growing sharper with each word left unsaid. I look down at my bare knees, slow my breathing to match the creeping strings of my mental musical shield, Shostakovich’s Babi Yar symphony, and wait.

  “So, Miss Chernina. Tell us more about your decision to defect to America.”

  “It was more a decision to leave Russia, at the time.” The scratching pencils rise in cadence; my armpits now rival the Vasyugan Swamp. I look to Winnie, but she’s turned away from me. Was that the wrong answer? “But—but once Papa told me about his life here, I knew this was where I wanted to be.” The words gush out of me with frantic abandon. If I linger on them too long, they’ll trip me up. Better to surge forward. “No waiting in lines, no equality through our shared misery. No one is afraid of their own thoughts. I am … myself here.”

  One of the women stops scribbling and snickers, unintentionally letting her thoughts bubble over her musical shield and flow onto the table as I grip its edge. This kid’s accent is straight outta the McCarthy hearings.

  “And why,” the general asks, folding his hands before him, “do you now want to work for the United States government?”

  I allow myself a slow smile. Now this, I can answer. “I know what General Rostov is capable of.” Despite my dense rye-bread accent, I know these words perfectly. “He is not satisfied with the stalemate between East and West, and he will destroy whatever he must to spark a new war. He cannot be allowed to continue. No one deserves his—‘flavor,’ is that correct?—of pain.”

  Winnie is nodding at me. I want to smile, but fear has me in its rictus. My jaw aches from clenching it so hard.

  “An interesting way of putting it,” the general says. “One of our top priorities is dealing with General Rostov and his new allies around the world.”

  “One of,” I echo.

  “Let me be clear, Miss Chernina. We welcome the assistance of someone with your skill set.” He eases back in his chair and slides a thick folder out of his stack. “But Rostov is not our only concern.”

  My chest tightens like fingers lacing together. I’m afraid I know what’s coming next.

  “We cannot ignore your mother’s role in Rostov’s plans. According to our intelligence, he’s tasked her with building a whole new army of mindreading spies.”

  My breath rushes out of me like a punch to the sternum. It was a mistake to come here today—I’m not ready after all. “She’s cooperating because she must. She is protecting my brother.” She was protecting me, too, until I ran away. I push away the constantly hovering question of how they were punished following my escape. She told me to run, after all. She had to have a plan.

  The general tilts his head. “Whatever her motivation, she is doing this work. And whatever they’re working on must be stopped. Do you understand this?”

  Shostakovich marches through my thoughts with a slow, sturdy drumbeat. “I understand,” I say carefully, “that their work must be stopped.”

  The general flips through the folder before him, his smile as thin as a knife. “Then we are in agreement.” He shoves it across the table toward me; black-and-white photographs flutter free. I bend down, my bad ankle creaking like a rusty hinge, and scoop up the photos. Then nearly drop them.

  Crime scene photos. Dead men and women, staring beyond the camera with milky eyes. One victim is sprawled out on the pavement, his hat tilted upward, revealing his stunned face. A woman curls into the corner of a train car. Nothing similar links any of these people that I can tell—race, age, place of death—except they all wear the slippery skin of sudden weight loss and the dark pouches beneath their eyes of too many sleepless nights. And dark trails blaze from their nostrils, their ears.

  Something tightens in my gut, clenches hard and ripe and refuses to let go. I’m thankful the images are in black and white, flattening down the gore into less jarring hues.

  “What happened to these people?” I ask, hysteria bringing out my guttural Slavic snarl. What I mean to ask is why is he showing me this awfulness—what relevance does it have to our discussion about Mama? But that line of questioning bumps against a bruised and battered patch in my brain. He thinks Mama is behind this somehow.

  And I’m scared he might be right.

  The general clears his throat. “These bodies have turned up all over North America and Western Europe over the past six weeks. At first, we were afraid we had a biological attack on our hands. Anthrax, smallpox—every couple of years, we get double agents making a bunch of noise about how the Russkies are bringing back the Plague. But we called in the Communicable Disease Center, and their tests for every known disease came back negative. And the geographical distribution—London, New York, West Berlin, Toronto—made no sense for an epidemic.”

  My ears turn redder and redder with each multisyllabic word. I wish I didn’t have to rely on Winnie. I glance toward her, eyebrows raised in surrender, and she translates in flawless Russian.

  “They look like they are the victims of a psychic attack. But there are so many of them.” I keep shuffling through the photographs—there must be almost twenty people in here.

  “That was our thought, too, after we ruled out biological causes. Then we came across another victim while investigating a possible mole in the State Department. The FBI went to the apartment of the mole’s handler and found him inside—just barely clinging to life. That one—that’s him, right there.”

  I suck in my breath as I study the last photograph. The man’s spider legs curl under his chin; he lies on his side, blood collecting on the rug beneath him. Diamond-cut cheekbones and a pair of scars across one eye.

  “I know this man,” I say.

  The general’s eyes tighten like a camera lens focusing. “One of our PsyOps team members was with us when we found him. Said he’d never encountered such a powerful psychic before. I think you’ve got a name for them—psychics like your father?”

  “Scrubbers.” Psychics who don’t merely read minds—they twist and bend thoughts into whatever arrangement they please. They can conjure entire memories out of nothingness or suppress a thought as if it never occurred. “But—but this man. Pavel. He isn’t a scrubber.” I tap the photograph. “He was one of our guards back in Moscow, just a low-ranking KGB soldier. He didn’t have any psychic abilities himself.”

  The general squashes his lips together. “Tell that to the poor PsyOps team member. Just being around the guy gave him an awful nosebleed, his thoughts were so strong—said it felt like getting an ice-pick lobotomy.”

  My hands are quivering like plucked strings as I drop the s
tack of photos on the table. I know what he’s describing all too well. I’ve been victim to a scrubber’s corrosive wave of psychic energy, wrenching my thoughts around, boring through my skull, filling my head with whatever maddening visions he pleases. Scrubbers are impossible to miss. Pavel couldn’t have been one—I’m certain of it.

  “You said he was still alive when you found him.” I meet the general’s gaze, avoiding the dead eyes of the photographs as they stare up at me. “Did he tell you anything?”

  “The PsyOps member was too busy trying to keep his brain from dribbling out of his nose to read the guy’s mind. But the perp said something before he expired.” The general peers down at his file. “‘Rostov. Chernina. They’ve gone too far.’”

  The pain in my heart, sharp and piercing, dulls the lesser ache of my bad ankle. Chernina. Mama. Pavel didn’t have the abilities before, I’m certain of it. Could she really do these things—building a psychic army, amplifying their powers far beyond anything we’ve ever known? If she were only trying to survive, then she’d do the bare minimum necessary to keep herself and Zhenya safe. This has to be part of a ploy to get her and Zhenya out of Russia. But how?

  The general glances to the panel members on either side of him, some sort of wordless, thoughtless language passing between their eyes. “Miss Chernina, we are here because we need your help to stop her. To stop … this.” He sweeps his hand toward the photographs. “We believe the Soviets may have found a way to activate or enhance psychic abilities, and your mother is the logical choice to head such an endeavor, though we don’t know what they intend to accomplish with these psychics just yet. The Psychic Operations team needs your skills and your knowledge to prevent whatever they’re working toward. I realize this is a lot to ask of you, but I suspect I don’t need to tell you how dangerous an army of these … ‘scrubbers’ … could be.”

  What Rostov’s working toward. The last I saw Rostov, his brilliant plan was to force the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev to start a third world war by launching nuclear missiles at American targets. It may have been a momentary act of desperation, an emotional retaliatory strike for the Veter 1 rocket explosion. Maybe. But a man like him won’t rest until the whole world has bowed to his aggressive version of Soviet supremacy.