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When you have a lot,
The world seems a better place than it is.
—ANTON CHEKHOV
EL CAJON BOULEVARD,
NORTH PARK
12:01 P.M. PDT
SERGEI DROVE BACK STREETS, consulting periodically a map on the heads-up display and saying cryptically, “I do not trust the highway.”
Mona said nothing, content to smoke in silence and let Sergei handle it, clutching her bag and its precious contents and, more than anything, anxious for everything to be over. She wanted to be home again with Boris and Lydia, to enjoy the sharp cold of a Russian winter and the taste of fresh black bread, the sight of the Moscow River’s dark water and the sound of Tchaikovsky on a warm summer evening, even the stench of Moscow’s filthy air, all of it made Mona feel homesick and terribly Russian. The missing cross did not help matters.
How could you lose the Cross of the Romanokova? You are a stupid woman!
Mona inhaled deeply on the Belomor, letting her thoughts drift from the nagging anxiety to the money that would soon be hers.
The bulk of the money Chelnikov paid would provide for Boris’ new image and identity as a scion of Russian wealth and breeding and vanish her son’s recent past as a descendant of common workers. Boris would be reborn to the baronic line of Romanokova before Lenin and the Bolsheviks came and took it all away. At the academy, he would receive a top-quality education while making contacts with the sons and daughters of Russia’s new nobility and with these contacts, education and Mona’s newfound wealth, would climb back up the ladder from which the Romanokova had been so cruelly pushed.
Much of the remaining money would go toward Lydia. While in Europe or the States, 56 years would not be considered terribly old, Mona’s mother had lived under the harsh conditions of Soviet rule— not the pampered life of the nomenklatura, but the brutal life of a worker, a life spent standing on line for hours in the bitter cold only to find, upon reaching the counter, there was nothing left save a misshapen loaf of stale black bread. The life of a diabetic in a country where insulin disappeared from state-hospital shelves to reappear on the black market is not easy, nor any life lived outside the soft embrace of the Party, and Mona was determined her mother live well.
As for herself, Mona planned to pursue the research she so dearly loved and to erase her own dark past with a shining future. Who knew? Perhaps ahead lay the Nobel prize. Hopefully, Chelnikov would ask her to lead his team at KosmoGen as they brought the treatment to market.
And perhaps a villa like the one Papa took us to on the Black Sea . . . And tennis lessons for Boris . . . Yes, that is the perfect addition to a cultured man, a fine tennis game . . . And Boris would be a natural player, just like Papa—
“I believe,” Sergei announced abruptly, glancing at the rear-view mirror, “that we are being followed.”
Mona’s first thought was of Mick, but glancing in the side view, she saw it was a black Chevy Suburban, rather than Mick’s Range Rover. “I thought we were cloaked." When Sergei simply shrugged, she said, "Are you certain?”
Sergei studied the rearview. “I am certain.”
Mona frowned. They were in an older part of the city, moving past small shops set back from broad sidewalks, the traffic of automobiles fairly congested. “FBI?”
“No, is not FBI,” Sergei said, stopping at a red light. He glanced at the rear-view mirror and back at the road before saying without much apparent concern: “Whoever they are, they keep their distance like they are waiting for something.”
“For what?”
Sergei shrugged. “Perhaps reinforcements. It is always more difficult to capture than kill.”
When the light changed, Sergei hit the accelerator and took a hard right onto a street called Ohio, ran two stop signs and made onto University Avenue, weaving now in and out of traffic past fast-food businesses and small shops.
“Whoever he is,” Sergei said, checking the mirror, “he is an excellent dri—”
“Lookout!”
Without warning, a large van U-turned in the middle of the street and Sergei, deftly whipping the wheel, narrowly avoided a collision, as the scruffy and unwashed driver flipped them the middle-finger. Shaking his fist in return, Sergei accelerated before turning right onto a street called Utah.
Sergei studying the rear-view mirror, saying, “If I had time, I would stop to teach you some manners . . . Ah, there they are, the kulaks.”
In the side-mirror, Mona saw the Suburban reappear. When she looked up, she saw another Suburban, identical to the first, bearing down on them like a torpedo.
“Sergei!”
Sergei’s eyes widened at the second Suburban. “Ha, the bastards hunt in packs!” Cutting the wheel, he narrowly avoided the Suburban, and as it passed, Mona saw a passenger point a silenced pistol. Suddenly, the bulletproofed glass in Sergei’s window cracked without shattering. Putting a hand to his head, Sergei pulled it away bloody, looking over at Mona and smiling, his expression that of a wolf on the taiga. “Ha. Explosive shells. Very nice.”
Sergei toed the accelerator. Immediately, Mona felt herself slammed back into the seat, while in the side-mirror, she saw the second Suburban u-turning to fall in behind the first. When a third Suburban appeared on their left, Mona thought about the missing cross.
“Can you lose them?”
“Ha! Does a crook live in the Kremlin?” Sergei said with a comfortingly wolfish grin. With a twist of the car’s lighter, dense smoke suddenly poured from the back of the Hummer. With a flip of the rear-defroster, machine-gun ports opened beneath the headlights. And by the time the hidden superchargers had kicked in, launching the Cadillac down Howard Street in a great pall of smoke, there were no more Suburbans to be seen.
“We must find a place to hide until I can tinker with the cloaking device to change the frequency,” Sergei observed. “I think I know just the place.”
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