'Unless we stay in Petersburg or Moscow,' Natalya said, 'they would not do us much good.'
'And around Uzhur,' Nikolai added, 'there is, what you say, blanket. Only military frequencies work. Besides,' Nikolai said somewhat darkly, 'we either meet there, or we don't.'
They left Ratmino separately, Nikolai to make his phone calls-but from Olga's, not his own apartment-and Benjamin and Natalya to gather their things from the Dubna Otel, then take a taxi to a smaller train station outside of Dubna.
Two hours later, Nikolai met them at the small station, where the Dubna-Moscow train would stop briefly; it wasn't really a station, but rather a mere concrete platform with a rusted iron roof.
Nikolai embraced Natalya, kissed her on both cheeks, and told her to be very careful. Then he took Benjamin aside and gave him a small bundle.
'What's this?' Benjamin asked.
'Insurance,' Nikolai said. He opened the bundle.
Inside was a compact black automatic pistol with a brown hand grip. A small five-pointed star was embossed in the middle of the grip.
'Is Makarov,' said Nikolai. 'Good weapon.'
Benjamin looked at Nikolai with a mixture of surprise and horror.
'Nikolai,' he said, 'are you kidding? I've never used one of these. I'm an 'academician,' remember?'
'Is easy,' Nikolai said. He quickly showed Benjamin how the safety operated, how to remove and check the clip. Then he rewrapped the gun and gave it to Benjamin.
'I would never get it on plane anyway,' he said. 'And I feel better if I know you have it.'
'I'm not sure I will,' said Benjamin. But he stuffed the bundle into his parka pocket. Then he shook Nikolai's hand.
'Udachi!' Nikolai said. 'Good luck, Mr. Levebre!'
'And good luck to you, too, Nikolai,' answered Benjamin.
Then he followed Natalya onto the train.
CHAPTER 46
Benjamin had of course heard of the Trans-Siberian Railway; he just never imagined he'd actually be on it, journeying across three thousand kilometers of Russia to a secret Russian rocket base in Siberia-all so he could perform a supremely unlikely act of burglary.
But those four days of train travel gave Benjamin a better idea of just how vast a country Russia truly was.
Once east of Moscow, the landscape became covered with seemingly limitless pine forests. When there weren't forests, there were fields-immense fields of wheat and barley that stretched to the horizon. At Yekaterinburg-where, Natalya grimly pointed out, the Romanovs were executed by the Bolsheviks-they crossed the Ural Mountains, the divide between Europe and Asia. They were now officially in Siberia. When Benjamin evidenced surprise at this, Natalya explained that, contrary to what most Westerners thought, Siberia wasn't just the frozen north of Russia; Siberia was, in fact, the entire eastern half of the country.
Along the way they passed through the huge oil fields around Tyumen, with numberless red-and-gray oil derricks nodding up and down and looking like the feeding skeletons of prehistoric monsters; through Omsk, a metropolis filled with blocky, white modern buildings nestled against the Irtysh River; through Novosibirsk, Russia's third largest city, famous for its enormous, domed ballet theater, as well as its scientific facilities, both public and secret.
Most of the time they tried not to think about what lay ahead. They talked of their childhoods. Natalya surprised Benjamin by revealing that, as a teenager, she'd been a leader of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Union. Benjamin said it was difficult to imagine her as some sort of 'Commie boss.'
'Oh,' she said, 'I was quite stern. You should see a photograph of me from that time. I look positively sinister.'
'But you didn't join the Party?'
'No,' she said. 'By that time, the thaw of glasnost was already beginning, Gorbachev was breaking up the country, and everyone knew the Party's days would soon be over. And by then my father had made his… discoveries. We knew the truth about my grandfathers' work for the NKVD. If I had joined the Party, it would have broken my father's heart.'
But Natalya was far more interested in hearing about Benjamin's history. He talked about what he considered his absolutely uneventful childhood.
'It was not nearly so exciting as living in a secret city in Siberia,' he said. But Natalya seemed interested in every detail: if he'd been a Boy Scout (what she called the American Pioneers, and yes, he had, making it to Star); who his girlfriends had been in high school (only two, he'd said, which surprised her, but both blondes, which didn't); why he'd never gotten married ('Of course, because I hadn't met you'-an answer she labeled 'a blatant compliment').
Mostly, however, they watched the passing landscape, read newspapers they bought in stations along the way, and, inevitably, talked about the whole khren in which they'd become entangled.
'I've been thinking about these 'wobbles' Jeremy discovered,' Benjamin said one night as they passed through a countryside utterly devoid of city lights of any kind. 'It's just hard for me to understand how people, then or now, could manufacture enemies and a war just to remain in power. It seems… inhuman.'
'Or perhaps all too human,' Natalya replied. She was sitting next to him, had been resting her head on his shoulder. Now she sat up.
'Our whole history is of people willing to do anything to stay in power. Everyone was a potential enemy, everything was a possible plot against the Soviet people.'
'For years before World War the Second, Stalin had told the people that the Nazis were their enemies. But when Molotov signed the nonagression pact with Germany, in a single day suddenly Germany became our friend, and Britain our enemy. They were told it was all part of Father Stalin's grand strategy. And they accepted this lie without question.'
She took a page from the London Times Benjamin had been reading, drew a diagram.
'This picture was distributed on millions of leaflets handed out in Moscow and Leningrad.'
'You see?' she said. 'Instead of letting Churchill pit the Soviets against the Nazis, allowing the British to stay above the fray, Stalin wanted people to believe the nonaggression pact forced London into that role, leaving the Soviets on top.'
'Interesting,' said Benjamin, thoughtfully examining Natalya's drawing.
'Understandable?' she asked.
'No… I mean yes. It's just that, well, I've seen something before, something that reminds me of your little triangles.'
And then he told her about how Nabil Hassan had interpreted the symbol he'd found in the engraving of Horatio Gates: as a secretive power bringing two enemies into conflict, then, he'd put it, 'sitting back in silence.'
'Whether the Gray Cardinals are from your Revolution or ours,' said Natalya firmly, 'their methods are always the same.'
'I just don't…' His voice trailed off.
'What?' Natalya prodded.
'If our Gray Cardinals were behind the Newburgh conspiracy two centuries ago…' He paused, then looked up at her. 'What happened to them?'
'When the 1905 revolution failed,' Natalya said, 'most of the Bolsheviks were arrested and exiled. But the ones who escaped went underground. They had struck too soon. They needed to wait for better times. Or, as was the case, worse times.' Her eyes became quite steely. 'Perhaps your American conspirators were similarly slumbering. Waiting.'
