10
A VISIT TO THE SMITHSONIAN
Deep Time. Its texture is the granular trickle of sand through the fingers; its signature sound, the echoing of footsteps down marble corridors, past doorways opening onto the light of other days.
Out on Constitution Avenue the heat and noise were building toward their midday peak. Here, inside the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the cool and the quiet were all but sepulchral.
Jonathan Knox stood before a window into earth’s past: the Ancient Seas diorama, with its teeming, thrashing life arrested at the height of febrile intensity, its serpentine proto-whale arching for the never-to-be-completed kill. He peered into the empty eye of the archaic predator and felt how narrow a gap separated them, measured against all the annals of the earth, and he shivered at the spectral touch of Deep Time.
Contemplating that trackless, bottomless emptiness, the mind could cease its manic twitching, could view the tumult of the present from the chill, calm perspective of the ages. Knox needed that: the events of the morning had rattled him. He needed to distance himself from them before he could think what to do.
One thing was clear: the confrontation with Aristos had settled nothing, nothing at all. Knox grimaced, replaying that final scene. He’d let himself get too involved, lost his objectivity — never a good thing. The key was to see with the other’s eyes, then find the right word, le mot juste, the word that shifted the focus toward a mutually-acceptable vision.
Instead, he’d only made things worse, letting Aristos bully him into playing the old game of who’s got the bigger, uh, hammer.
He’d won a round, but so what? The game went on. The same old game frozen at mid-move in the paleozoic pageant before him. The game no one ever really won in the end.
The game that had, evidently, caught up two old friends in its coils.
Sasha and Galya ... It had been a long time since he’d thought of them, even in passing. A long time since he’d wanted to. Did they really have a claim on him after all these years? And, if so, was aiding and abetting CROM any way to make good on it? Would he be saving them or destroying them?
Not that it mattered. Humiliating Aristos had slammed the door on any chance of persuading CROM to go easy. He couldn’t save Galya and Sasha now, no matter how much he might want to.
And, in Sasha’s case at least, Knox wasn’t sure just how much he might want to. Not given the way they’d left things, almost twenty years ago.
It was to have been Knox’s final night in Moscow. A night late in the month of May. Moscow State University’s Lenin Hills campus — in his mind’s eye forever glazed with ice and snow — had come into bloom. A time for final exams and farewells.
As the last long late-spring twilight blued into dusk, with incongruously balmy breezes wafting in the open window of Sasha’s dorm room, the three friends had toasted one another’s health, peace, and eternal friendship.
At some point in the endless rounds of vodka, Sasha had brought forth his “most prized possession”: a thick, crudely-bound document entitled Kak vyigryvat’ druz’ei i vliyat’sya na lyudei. The greatest book he had ever read, bar none.
There was something about that title. Knox’s eye strayed to the author’s name — Deyl Karnehgi — and he choked back a laugh just in time. Sasha was holding a bootlegged, photocopied Russian translation of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Sasha had always seemed unusually adept at getting the bureaucracy to disgorge a desired result. No wonder!
The festivities were winding down. Around ten p.m. Galina excused herself to go study for an eight a.m. final. But not before giving Knox one achingly warm embrace that left him wondering ever after what might have been.
Sasha insisted that the two of them party on, watch the sun come up on their last night together. Knox could always sleep on the plane.
The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. Knox had been up late carousing the night before. By midnight he was bone-tired and ready to crash.
“Don’t worry,” Sasha told him, “I have something here that will help us stay awake. And entertain us besides.” He rummaged through his desk drawers and brought out a small, crudely-carved wooden box containing two dried shreds of brownish fleshy-looking stuff.
“I got them back home last summer, on a canoe trip up to the site of the Tunguska disaster. From that old Evenki shaman I told you about — Dzhen-something. A hundred years old, if he was a day. And still sharp as a pin, for all his wild stories about seeing the Thunder God plant his lodge-pole in the Stony Tunguska heartlands. He took a liking to me, I think, and when I told him I was studying the stars, he gave me these.”
Sasha picked up one of the shreds and held it to the light. “— If I really wanted to walk out among the campfires of the Upper World beyond the sky, the old man said, this was the way the shamans did it.”
“Did it work?” Knox eyed the shriveled brownish lumps dubiously.
“I do not know, Dzhon. I have only these two, and have been saving them for a very special occasion.”
Knox shuddered with more than the mausoleum chill of the Smithsonian’s Ice Age Hall, recalling just how ‘special’ that occasion had become. How he had missed his flight the following morning, and the morning after that. The USAF captain who served as Embassy physician had diagnosed him with food poisoning. And he was ill, true enough, albeit with a sickness not of the body but of the soul. As the ensuing weeks, and months, and years were to show.
Just then his handheld rang, offering welcome distraction.
“Hello?”
“It’s Mycroft, Jonathan. I hope I’m not interrupting. I have something you need to hear.”
“No, no — no problem. I was just finishing up here, in fact. Getting ready to come home.” As he spoke the words, Knox realized they were true. He had irrevocably closed the book on Sasha and Galina, abandoned them to whatever it was that fate, or CROM, held in store.
But Mycroft was still talking. “Do you recall the external links I found on that CROM website? The encrypted ones?”
“Mmm, vaguely.”
“Well, accessing the CROM machine this morning gave me the keys I needed.” Mycroft paused for breath. “Jonathan, those links led to an intranet site inside the Russian Embassy. A site maintained by some entity called the ‘FSB.’”
“Sure, that’s their, ah, Federal Security Service. What about it?”
“You’re their featured attraction.”
“Come again?”
“Your name and address, a none-too-flattering likeness, and a caption in Russian. Babelfish translated it as ‘Detain and interrogate.’”
“Detain and interrogate? For what?”
“I couldn’t be certain. But almost the entire site was devoted to ‘the business of G. M. Postrel’nikova.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yeah, sure, the G. stands for Galina — a friend I haven’t seen for twenty years.” And now never would again.
“And, Mycroft? I hate to tell you, but your Babelfish is misfiring again. That word it translated as ‘business’? I’m sure it’s delo in the original, and that can mean any number of things: ‘Business’ is one, but in this context the best translation would be ...” Knox trailed off as the implication hit him.
“Jonathan, are you still there?”
“It means ‘case,’” he said, “As in criminal case — the FSB’s investigation into Galina’s disappearance.”
“But if you haven’t seen this person in twenty years, then why —“
“I don’t know why!”
His shout echoed off the vaulted marble ceiling, loud enough to startle the two other men sharing the hall with him. They quickly turned back to the display cases they’d been inspecting, but not before Knox had managed to get a good look at them.
They didn’t look much like your typical mid-week museum-goers. If anything, they looked more like museum specimens. The big guy with the sloping forehead and thick-muscled frame, for instance: he could have stepped right out of the Early Man exhibit upstairs. And his smaller companion — thin, sharp-featured, with glittering, furtive eyes that slid away when Knox returned his stare — he would’ve looked at home among the shrews and voles of the Rodentia collection.
And, now that he’d seen them, Knox realized he’d been seeing them all along. They’d been with him, hovering at the edge of noticeability, ever since Ancient Seas at least, maybe since he’d entered the museum.
Mycroft was saying something. “You seem to have come to the attention of some powerful instrumentalities of late, more’s the pity.”
It came back to him then: Detain and interrogate.
“Listen, Mycroft, I’ve got to go.”
Knox pocketed his handheld and swallowed hard. It was probably pure coincidence. This whole CROM thing had him jumpy enough to start seeing patterns where there were none. And even if it was the FSB, what could they do to him here in the heart of DC?
Still, no sense taking chances. Knox began to sidle toward the exit, past case after free-standing case filled with shards of pottery and small bronze medallions, all inscribed with graceful loops and whorls. Something called ‘The Enigma of Linear A.’
Any other time, he might be interested. What interested him now, though, was that his shadows had picked up the pace. Perhaps ten feet behind him, and closing. With the exit arch still thirty feet away.
He was just debating whether to make a run for it, when he saw something that stopped him cold. There, beneath the Exit sign, stood an all-too familiar figure, waving to him.
Marianna raised her arm and called out “Jon. Over here.”
What a time she’d had reacquiring him. The Smithsonian was just too damned big. Marianna felt like she’d been tramping around it for hours. She must’ve passed that damned stuffed African Elephant three times by now. Why couldn’t the guy have gone to a bookstore or a bar or the goddamn Lincoln Memorial, for godsakes? Why’d it have to be this barn?
It was only as she’d circled the Rotunda once more that the special-exhibit poster finally registered. ‘The Enigma of Linear A.’ No time right now, but it was here through end September; maybe she’d maybe come back and scope it out some other day.
Or ... What the hell. As well look for Jon there as anywhere. She studied the floorplan she’d downloaded to her handheld. Past Pacific Cultures, left at the Mighty Marlin ...
There, in the center of the special exhibits hall, stood case after case of priceless artifacts. What had they done, moved the whole Iraklion collection here for the month? They would have loved this, Mom and Dad both. Marianna brushed at the corner of her eye.
When she looked up again, she saw him: Jonathan Knox.
And beyond him, two FSB foot-soldiers, to judge by the dark suits and dour expressions. They looked for all the world like the sweepers for an abduction op.
Shit! Jon was going to be spoiled goods for sure if he showed up at the gala tonight with the smell of the Russian Federal Security Service all over him. Or failed to show up at all.
She beckoned to him. Even the FSB wouldn’t try picking him up if he were in the company of an eyewitness. Look at me, dummy!
He did. He stopped short and stared at her.
“Over here!” she called again.
Then she watched, dumbfounded, as he turned tail and bolted for the far exit, with the FSB in hot pursuit.