Chapter 24: Kyzyl Mission
Ulan-Ude, Chita, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk… and now Kyzyl.
Kyzyl had plenty of gasoline but none of the network cable Rudy needed. All the hardware he’d ordered, a truckload of cable and other hardware from Krasnoyarsk and Omsk, shipments that he beat to Kyzyl by two days, arrived unpilfered. However, when he started digging into the walls of Tyva State University—TGU, pronounced T-gu, two syllables, by the locals—he found the existing network in far worse shape than he he’d expected. Many of the wires were old, spliced together from different generations. If he installed the new servers and security on that patchwork, the campus would have worse connectivity and response times, and it would add little value to the distributed processing Irkutsk expected from its remote partner sites.
Rudy spent a full work week salvaging every bit of usable cable and combining it with his Krasnoyarsk supply to rebuild the campus data backbone. That allowed him to establish and test the central security node, the primary purpose of his contract. He got reliable service to each building, but the salvaging left 60% of the provisioned offices without connections.
Recabling the entire network would far exceed the parameters of TGU’s contract, but Rudy couldn’t leave the university with a dysfunctional campus network. He thus moved his trip to Novosibirsk back a week and went to the finance office to discuss the feasibility of scouring the Kyzyl valley for cable.
His main contact in that office was Saran—Sara with an n, as Rudy heard it. A short woman with dark, serious features that Rudy read as a mix of Russian and Mongolian genes, Saran was the university’s purchasing agent. She knew who spent what in every department. She signed every check and could identify every swindler in town.
When he introduced himself the first day, Saran asked, as many new acquaintances did, if his name was short for Rudolf. “No, just Rudy,” he replied, thinking about his parents’ insistence on that short form, their stern correction of anyone, including Rudy himself at age 5, who tried to expand the name, how they’d showed him his birth certificate to convince him not to go putting on airs or pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
“Rudy,” Saran repeated. “Ru-u-u-udy… not Rudolf. In German, the two parts mean ‘famous’ and ‘wolf’. But you are no wolf?” The tease behind her serious features suggested not fear of a predator but hope to find a kindred hunter.
Rudy deflected: “Well, I’m not famous, either.”
Now, a week later, when he described what he wanted to do to finish his work, Saran teased him again. “Find your missing wolf, Ru-udy. It will take a keen hunter to find that much cable. I will help.”
Saran showed a keen interest in the project—of all the administrators, she seemed most interested in expanding her office’s use of the network: “Electronic payments, electronic requisitions, electronic record-keeping, all will speed my operations, but all must be locked down so bandits, outside and inside, don’t drain our budget.” So every morning for a week, she cleared her office tasks and met Rudy at 10:30 in front of her building with a TGU truck—a small Chinese model, a 1990s descendant of the goat truck he’d seen in the mountains. This machine did not smell of French fries, but it had a cramped cab and a rattling flatbed that might safely carry one large desk. Saran checked the truck out of the motor pool and brought it around front herself, where she would find Rudy waiting by the Mongol Poet, the bronze abstract statue next to the steps in which Rudy could see neither Mongol nor poet but which Saran assured him commemorated the native people’s voices calling across the dry plains to the mountains. Saran slid over and surrendered the driver seat to Rudy. They couldn’t avoid rubbing elbows as the truck bounced down the rough streets. Saran would read papers from the portfolio she squeezed between herself and the passenger door and make notes, looking up between documents to give last-second navigation. Rudy kept his speed down and stayed alert so he could respond in an instant to Saran’s surprise directions.
Saran took him to every hardware and construction materials outlet, retail and wholesale. Rudy couldn’t have found all of them without her. Kyzyl, like much of Russia, had no Yellow Pages. Shops and warehouses were tucked away in random places in residential neighborhoods and behind parks, often with no signage or clear indication that they were anyplace a man off the street could drop in to do business. Saran’s working business knowledge was vital in keeping him from walking into a meeting of the Kyzyl mafia (“Over there,” Saran said casually on Wednesday, pointing to a gas station next to the national park) or a surveillance post of state secret service.
But for three days, Saran’s vital help couldn’t turn up any shop or any entrepreneur who had enough of the right cable on hand. They scrounged a quarter of what Rudy needed to run full service to every building, and he was able to finish the main building, including Saran’s office. But the pedagogy, law, and science buildings were stuck with just one office each with workable connection.
Rudy called suppliers each day, hoping to smoke out better delivery times, but his most reliable dealer, in Krasnoyarsk, could promise nothing sooner than three weeks. He’d already used up the slack in his schedule—Novosibirsk and projects back at the Institute needed his attention—and riding back here from anywhere on his upcoming route would take another week. Even if he wanted to risk flying—and Galina and Vitaly agreed that the less he submitted his well-forged passport to airport security, the better—service to Kyzyl was intermittent and might not get him back to Irkutsk or Krasnoyarsk any faster than the Captain’s bike.
But on Rudy’s second Thursday in Kyzyl, they struck gold. On the south side of town, on the way to the airport, they saw a construction crew unloading shipping containers from two trucks at a site next to two big backhoes digging out a sprawling foundation. When they’d driven by on Tuesday, Saran had said it was going to be a new supermarket. On Thursday, Rudy spotted a familiar logo on crates coming out of a shipping container: SingSolv, a Singapore electronics firm. A man in a telehandler had just slid his forks under a second shipping container on a truck when another man in a hardhat on the ground waved him still and launched into an agitated discussion with a third man, perhaps a truck driver. He pointed pretty avidly toward his clipboard and a fan of sheets on it.
“Safe to talk to these guys?” Rudy asked Saran, pointing to the side of the road.
She glanced up from a contract, scanned the cluster of activity by the trucks and the containers, then looked up the highway to the contractor signs by the fence. “Should be,” Saran said in her desert accent. “Main contractor works with university. Not active mafia.”
Rudy pulled off the road into the construction zone. The Chinese truck hopped over ruts in the dirt, sending up tan-grey dust clouds in the wind and bouncing him and Saran against the ceiling. Rudy parked a cautious distance away from the telehandler and the shipping containers.
“You have plan?” Saran asked.
He had no plan, not even a clear way to explain the vibe that made him want to talk to these men. The SingSolv logo and the frustration of the man with the clipboard were all he had to go on.
“No, just… curious. Come with?”
“Of course.”
Saran hopped out of the truck and strode beside Rudy to the trucks. Clipboard/hardhat man and the driver were scowling, waving, pointing, and shouting. It was hard to understand them over the wind and the diesel rumble of the idling telehandler. Not ready… two months… no space….
“Hello,” Rudy interrupted. “Do you need warehouse space?”
Foreman and driver both paused to look at Rudy and Saran. Rudy fit the scene in his work boots and coveralls; Saran stood out in her shimmery gray business suit and narrow red flats. Neither gave the vibe of a track-suited thug.
“No,” said the foreman, an unusually tall Asian man. “I need this Cossack to take back the truck and a half of materials I don’t need.”
“But,” the driver protested, a pale Russian uninterested in the newcomers and focused on getting his customer to take this load and let him get out of town, “the invoice clearly designates everything for this site, and this truck and mine are both picking up other loads here for Krasnoyarsk. We have to leave these—”
“No, no way!” the foreman interrupted. “I’m not receiving the surplus, and you’re not leaving it here!”
Rudy tried to calm the conflict. “What don’t you need?” he asked. “Those SingSolv crates?”
“Exactly those,” said the foreman. “I’m building a supermarket, not IBM.”
Rudy glanced from the foreman to the driver to Saran, who quietly nodded her encouragement. “Maybe we can help. What do you have?”
Normally, Rudy wouldn’t have expected a stranger to be forthcoming about his business plans. But the foreman was agitated, and Rudy was lucky. “The supermarket will be computerized—registers, warehouse inventory, business office, all connected. But these trucks bring twice, three times what I need, and all too early. No concrete until next week, no walls until July. Leave these materials on site, and bandits take everything before I can install.”
“Well, we’re not bandits. We’re from the university. We’re upgrading our network. Did you get extra cable?”
The foreman laughed scornfully and pointed to the SingSolv crates already pulled from the first container on the ground. “Two universities’ worth.”
Rudy looked toward the containers, then at the foreman’s clipboard. “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand.
Again, the foreman looked from Rudy to Saran, casting a long eye over her gray suit where the wind pressed the loose fabric against her narrow frame. Then, remarkably, he handed Rudy the clipboard. Rudy scanned the sheets and found cable, cable, cable, SingSolv’s best grade, two dozen industrial spools. One worker had popped the first crate open, and Rudy looked inside to confirm the contents. Just one spool was enough to run a couple loops around the entire footprint of the store the foreman was digging.
Rudy sized up the list, the crates on the ground and still in the containers. He got the foreman to mark what he eventually needed and what had gotten on the trucks that shouldn’t have. He thought through the storage spaces he’d seen around the university’s small campus. If they moved it now, he, Saran, the foreman, and these two truckers from out of town would be the only people who knew where it was.
Rudy whispered quick calculations to Saran, who immediately took charge and made the offer. “We buy 20 spools of cable. We store all remaining items in these two containers on campus, securely, no charge, but for a discount on the cable. You retrieve materials you need, you arrange for these guys”—Saran gestured to the anxious drivers—”to come get the surplus. Get your work done by the end of August. After that, any materials left with us become university property. Deal?”
Just like that, they had 20 spools of industrial network cable, the highest grade cable in the Tyva Republic. Saran named a price, refused to dicker, and wrote a check on the spot. She countersigned the truckers’ invoices while the foreman and his men reloaded the container and set it back on the first truck. The foreman went back to supervising his excavation while Rudy and Saran led the two trucks back across town to campus.
Khulan, the campus maintenance chief, brought a forklift and two men, and Rudy spent two hours with them unwrapping pallets, pushing crates to the container doors, and hauling them to storage spaces. Rudy sent the spools Saran had bought to the buildings where he would install them; he consolidated the supermarket foreman’s materials and extras in one shipping container, which Khulan’s forklift could barely get off the truck (Rudy wouldn’t have risked it, but Khulan hooked a couple extra weights on the back of his groaning lift and kept his balance), and they moved that container inside the fence by Khulan’s shop and the motor pool.
Rudy then ran cable for eight hours straight, until sundown, and then all day Friday and Saturday.
* * *
When Rudy had first settled at the Institute, he had stuck close to Irkutsk, exploring every passable road (and a few impassable) within a day’s ride on the weekends. Galya granted all staff generous vacation time, but when a project was hot, Rudy, Vitaly, and Kolya hated to step away and leave Galya short-handed. Except for that brief time around the confrontation with the Dmitris, Rudy never felt trapped in Irkutsk; he loved the city, and the region around it was its own seemingly endless world. He rode around Lake Baikal several times. He headed west a couple summers ago with the vague notion that he might find a route to Kyzyl. He got nowhere near Kyzyl or the Tyva Republic that time, but he did leave tiretracks and footprints across the Mongolian border, then spent a week following the Oka River (the Siberian Oka, leading up to the Angara, the Yenisey, and then the Arctic, not the Oka far to the west, which poured into the Volga and ultimately the warm Caspian) through the mountains.
He had ridden north a couple times to visit his first-winter cabin. On the first trip, the summer after he came to Irkutsk, he couldn’t find the cabin; the summer after that, he found the site, but the cabin was flattened, and there were no traces of the books, the lantern, the stove, the axe….
His work in Irkutsk and his rides around the oblast and the lake and mountains and forest and desert gave him all the world he needed to occupy his body and mind and push back the grief that had driven him here. But when Galina gave him the chance to travel for work, his world expanded, joyously so. He finally saw Kyzyl and its high desert. He memorized distances and gas stations and mechanics shops on the Trans-Siberian Highway. He rode and worked, rode and worked (and took the train when it snowed, though that was never quite as fun as seeing Russia on his own two wheels), and found a thousand ends of the world, places where he could feel far, far away.
But he kept coming back, to do Galina Filipovna’s work, in Irkutsk and on the road. As the Ring Group’s envoy, Rudy connected other institutions to encrypted communications, distributed computing power, secure off-site archives, and, more quietly, protection. In return, the institutions provided their Irkutsk friends with access to their computer networks. Galina Filipovna used that access to expand the data and processing power of her own network. Tumannost, she called it, Nebula, a growing distributed-computing system that all partners could use for big computing projects. Nebula also hid the operations that Vitaly conducted from Irkutsk, quiet raids on bank accounts, manipulations of dark funds and records that usually went unnoticed or were ignored as minor drag on activities too risky and profitable to interrupt with auditing. The more Rudy traveled and recruited and connected, the easier it became to throw occasional investigators far off their trail, down paths that led either nowhere or wrong-where, to thugs who threatened the Ring Group and its academic partners and suppliers.
Rudy didn’t put on salesman’s charm. He just brought his tools, his natural curiosity about equipment and buildings and the new places he got to see, and most importantly, his ability to make things work.
After he demonstrated his ability to find cable, computers, concrete, whatever their potential customers needed for their projects, Rudy got administrators and maintenance people to give him frank assessments of the local protection rackets, which gangs caused them the most trouble. He took notes for Vitaly. Rudy never took action against those gangs himself. He didn’t go to Kyzyl and Krasnoyarsk to bloody noses and break kneecaps. The Ring Group never took such physical action, and Rudy wouldn’t have stayed if they did. Vitaly’s team simply investigated and identified vulnerable targets and plausible dodges. Vitaly would direct Rudy to install bugs or taps on outdoor utility lines or, if security was lax, indoor targets that would give Vitaly’s team access that they couldn’t get solely via remote hacking. They avoided taking action while Rudy was still at a remote site; they let him get out, on to the next town and the next project or back to Irkutsk and his duties on the homefront, before making rubles or bonds or vital records disappear or fall into the wrong hands… or sometimes just robbing one gang to help their partners pay protection money to another gang.
And Rudy got to see the world—or at least the Russian world, most of it, the provinces outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Galina Filipovna refused to seek partners or place equipment or personnel in either of the capitals; too close to the apparatus, to the secret police that Yeltsin’s new man, Putin, was reorganizing, and to the leading criminal oligarchs, the big gangs like the Markovy, the Dudorov cartel, and the new disruptors, Black Crane, who had no known names, not on the news, not on the dark Web, but obvious influence and brutal force in the Europe-facing competition. Let those gangs fight among themselves; track their activities but don’t trip their wires—Galina Filipovna decided she could forge a more secure network and do more good for more academics by working away from the center.
Rudy loved the work and his workmates. He loved coming back to Irkutsk, reporting to Galina Filipovna, settling back into the office to get elbow deep in concrete, studs, and wires, telling Vitaly about what he saw on the road (and Vitaly always asked what Rudy saw and listened enrapt). But he loved the countryside and his time alone in it. Travel and work and fixing things made him happy, happier, he supposed, than he had a right to be.
* * *
Rudy thought the party was going well until Saran put her hand on his leg. Saran’s boss, the dean of finance, was throwing a party at his house on the river to celebrate the new partnership and Rudy’s clever sourcing and swift installation. Saran had talked Rudy up to the rest of her office before the party, and she embarrassed him with praise now in person, in the presence of most of the financial office staff and a few of the engineering and business faculty who showed the keenest interest in the technical details of the new network’s capacity and security and how they could put the system to its best use. Rudy welcomed the technical questions as the easiest diversions from Saran’s praise of his own skills—keep his profile low, talk about the work, the system, the resources available.
Rudy could have done without the extra attention Saran was drawing to him, but she was also the best source of information about the campus’s financial challenges—protection money, personnel inside and the gangs and officials outside whose criminal activities put the biggest strains on regular academic operations. He had toured the city with her for days and worked more closely and regularly with her than with the physical plant staff, who mostly seemed nervous, even intimidated as he led them through the crash project of rewiring the campus. So as they mingled around the buffet, the bar, and the baby grand piano that stood where a dining table might have made sense but where the dean’s wife sat playing a mix of jazz and light classical throughout the evening, Rudy naturally gravitated to Saran’s side, and he found it easy to stifle her embarrassing praise by easing her away from the others to their own little corner of the room, on a small bench by the big window of the dean’s well-appointed house.
“You understand,” Saran said quietly, making sure her words would travel no farther than Rudy’s ears before being drowned out by some exuberant Brubeck and the liquored chatter of a couple-three dozen other minglers, “our greatest challenge will be keeping the full intent of our collaboration secret from the dean until we can remove him.”
Rudy paused with a bottle of beer a centimeter from his lips. It was only his second bottle; he drank nothing stronger, and drank the beer slowly, careful to keep himself more alert and on guard than anyone around him. Saran had been strangely reserved in introducing Rudy to the dean when they arrived at the party. Saran simply told her boss that Rudy coordinated the network refit, offered none of the praise or detail she’d shared with others at the party. The dean shook Rudy’s hand and told him he’d like to talk more later but had to check in with the head campus chef, whose staff he was paying overtime tonight to fill platters and glasses. Saran interjected that she would take Rudy around to introduce him to other guests and whisked Rudy away before he could say anything. Rudy now glanced at the dean, who leaned over to kiss his wife’s bare shoulder and then raised a glass to two men across the room—newcomers, Rudy thought.
Rudy kept his own voice low, kept the bottle near his lips. “You… uh… don’t want me to get in a fight with your boss, do you?”
“No,” Saran said. “Of course not.” Saran’s eyes followed the dean across the room to the men he’d saluted. Rudy looked down, at Saran’s shiny black Mary Janes, at her immaculate white pants and blazer, at the pale rosy cocktail in her left hand.
That’s when she put her free hand on his leg. She leaned into him, hand running down to his knee, and brushed his cheek with her nose. She paused right there, a long moment, not moving, as if letting the picture take hold. “We should step outside,” she breathed, and in one smooth movement, Saran finished her drink, set her glass next to a green vase of orchids, and, before Rudy could pick a reason to protest, before he could think of anything other than to set his bottle down next to her empty glass, Saran took his hand and pulled him toward and out the patio door, past a couple other guests enjoying the night air, down the brick steps toward a wooden gate, out of sight of the rest of the party except maybe the guests above on the patio, who if they bothered to look out across the rough yard would have seen at the edge of the dim outdoor lights Saran’s hands moving across the back of Rudy’s navy jacket—a borrowed jacket, borrowed from Saran, as he hadn’t come to Kyzyl prepared for a cocktail party. Nor had he come prepared for Saran’s kiss.
A few seconds later, when his brain resumed moral and intellectual activity, he pushed Saran gently back, with hands that he discovered had landed on her hips, and took a much-needed breath. “I’m sorry,” Rudy stammered, before he had any sense of what for.
In the faint light still reaching them from the patio, Saran’s eyes flicked toward the patio, then back to Rudy’s face. Without a word, she took his hand again and pulled him out the gate to the road. Most of the city was behind them and to the west; the dean lived in a new neighborhood, a handful of English- and American-style houses on sprawling riverside lots that used to host several more little weekend dachas and gardens. There were no streetlights; Rudy could barely see the pavement in the urban glow that reached them under the clear night sky. But he heard no traffic, and Saran led him confidently through the dark to the other side, to the shore of the river, the Little Yenisey. They were about 10 kilometers upstream from where the Little and Big joined to form the Yenisei proper. Their eyes adjusted, and Saran led Rudy to a dry gnarly trunk cast up on the shore in some spring flood. Ten meters away, the river charged noisy and cold down from the Mongolian and Tyvan mountains that had stopped Rudy two summers ago from biking the crow-flying path west from Irkutsk to Kyzyl. But in the dark, the river sounded like it was right at their feet, and they remained standing behind the drift-trunk, as if at a railing to keep from falling in.
Saran pressed close beside Rudy, one arm around his waist, and he put an arm around her shoulder, as instinct dictates to any two people alone in the dark.
“I wanted to get you out,” Saran said, “before they saw you.”
“Who?”
“The two men who just came in. The local boss’s lieutenant and his trigger man.”
“Local boss…?”
“Mongush. Leader of the top gang here. Our dean of finance is Mongush’s main contact on our campus. As you can see from this house, they have a mutually beneficial relationship.”
Rudy needed a moment to process. “Wait—if the gang owns your boss, how am I here?”
“It took some doing,” Saran said. “A small group of us in Finance and Engineering are aware of your organization’s work. The dean is not. We disguised your affiliation. The dean thinks you are a private consultant. He knows work got done and done well, so he probably wants to recruit you, offer you a position on the inside, with Mongush. His Mongush pals are probably here to check you out… maybe soften you up a bit.”
Rudy shuddered—from the dark, the starry sky, the cool night, the river rush, and now the reminder of how close he always was to trouble in these trips for the Ring Group. Saran squeezed him a little harder, and Rudy had the funny feeling that this small woman was trying to keep him steady. This small woman—right now, she and the dark were all the protection Rudy had.
“Do I go back in?”
“No. I brought you outside to give you cover. Gossip around campus says I have… well, those who saw us leave won’t expect us back.”
Rudy felt a double relief. “So all this… all that… just a trick, right?”
“No. Not entirely.” Saran’s eyes gleamed like the faint sparkles on the river. “I’ve wanted to do something like that all week.”
Rudy tensed up again. With an awkward turn, he let go of her shoulder, snaked out of her arm, and sat down on the large fallen trunk, his back to the river, his eyes on the road and trees outlined in the glow of lights from the dean’s house.
Saran sat down beside him, still pressing close, but with her hands in her lap. “But evidently you didn’t. Who is she?”
It wasn’t just a beer and a half keeping Rudy from keeping up with Saran. He could barely keep ahead of the part of him—a minority part, but a strong minority, bolstered by the dark and the river—that wanted to invite himself back into another kiss. “She…?” he stammered. “No, there’s… you’re… I just… this job—”
Saran put her palm on his chest. “I know when kisses work, and when they don’t, and why they don’t. It’s not this job holding you back.” She tapped one finger against his sternum. “You have someone else in there.”
Rudy’s mind jammed. All he could manage to say was, “I’m sorry.”
“Quit apologizing,” Saran said. In the dark she found his hand again. “Come on. You’ll get lost in the dark. I’ll walk you around to where we parked…” and now her voice slowed, “but only if you tell me who she is.”
He could see her face, midnight blue in midnight, with only the faintest warmth from the house lights. He had the strange feeling that she would pull a story out of him no matter what. Could every interesting woman he met on this continent read minds? Or was it just the women who kept him safe?
He gently reciprocated her squeeze of his hand. He took a deep breath to clear his heart and reset his head. When he stood up, Saran stood up with him. They took a step toward the road, and Rudy’s words started coming out, about Suzdal, about the bell tower, about the test ride and the real ride, to Galich and glimpses of the Olympics on TV, rafting and drinking Fanta and seeing the moon… with Ksenia.
When he paused to catch his breath, Rudy noticed that Saran had taken him around the block and a long way around, detouring down another alley and another block, far from where he thought they’d parked. Evidently she meant what she said: she wouldn’t walk him to his bike until he’d told her who she was.
The story tumbled out, for the first time in this much detail, and somehow it felt right to tell it here, in a city farther west than Irkutsk but which felt even farther from his starting point, to a woman he hardly knew. He had to tell Saran this story, because she was the first woman in Russia to kiss him like that and he felt obliged to give a darn good reason for not kissing her back.
Still, he omitted much, feeling it was enough to say he rode away, around Lake Galich, “and I rode… and rode… all the way here….”
“Ksenia,” Saran said when Rudy’s words finally slowed to a stop. “Kse-ni-a,” she repeated, with soft emphasis. “The name means outsider, but also hospitality. Like my name means moon, but also light.”
They turned a corner, and his bike and her car stood just half a block away, toward the end of the line of cars parked on either side of the street toward the dean’s gate. There were no street lights, but security lights shone out from the dean’s house and other large houses on the street. Rudy saw no one else outside.
Saran walked Rudy to his bike. She turned her face up to his, and he could see her eyes more clearly in the yellow and white yard lights. He couldn’t resist: “Are you planning to kiss me again?”
Saran laughed, and he was glad to be laughed at. “You had your chance,” she said, her eyes dancing and defiant. “With me. Maybe you still have a chance with her.”
Rudy snorted softly and shook his head. “Years ago….”
“And yet—” Saran stepped back from him “—there you are. There your heart is. Waiting.” Saran came back to him, held his shoulders, and looked at him with confidence, sympathy, and friendship forged in two weeks of business and one night, one story. “Write to her. Find out.”
Rudy eyes widened, a little surprised, a little desperate.
“That’s not an order,” Saran said. “Just a suggestion.” Saran held his gaze for a long time, then looked back down the street toward the dean’s house. “Now go. You’ll want to be on the road in the morning.” She stepped away, toward her car, then gave him one more look. “Thank you… for your work.”
“Thank you,” Rudy answered. Then he remembered the jacket Saran had brought from a friend’s closet. He peeled his arms out, folded the shoulders together, and handed it to Saran. “Please return this to your friend. It fit well.”
Saran draped the jacket over one arm and patted Rudy’s cheek with her other hand. “Good luck,” she said.
“Good luck.”
* * *
Rudy stopped for fuel, then packed his gear and switched hotels that last night in Kyzyl, from his original lodging a couple blocks from campus to a dingier place close to the highway. He paid in hard currency and paid the clerk extra to let him lock his bike and his gear out of sight in a storage shed out back. He brought nothing to his room but the clothes on his back and his toothbrush. He threw his clothes on the single wooden chair, washed in a single cold dribble of water from the crusty chrome showerhead, and worked his way to sleep in a narrow but very soft single bed. When his eyes snapped open at four a.m., he relieved himself in a toilet seated diagonally halfway under the sink, a toilet whose flush he had to help along with water from the sink. But by 4:08 he was dressed and out the door and on his bike, coveralls and jacket over the pants and shirt he’d worn to the party. He growled onto the highway, zipped through two roundabouts, over the bridge, and out into the country and the mountains.
He rode steadily, go, go, go, racing along, pushing the bike and feeling it push back through his flesh and bones, pistons pounding sixty, seventy times faster than his heart. Ksenia came to him, her familiar physical impression at his back, but now instead of pointing at the sights, she leaned up close and whispered in his ear, “So are you going to write me that letter?” Rudy shifted for a hill, gunned to the top, and kept going hard. The mountains, the Yenisey valley, the forest along the big four-lane P-255, all blurred by. Toward sunset he stopped to camp by a creek down a side road east of Kemerevo. Before dawn he took off again and made Novosibirsk by 10 a.m., where he stayed for two weeks, upgrading servers at the technical college and tapping phone lines downtown outside two banks favored by the local syndicates. No gang muscle came to soften him up, and no clever women tried to kiss him or (and he thought about this more than Saran’s ruse) get him to write letters to his long lost love.