Last updated on 2024-12-06
Chapter 49: Road Talk
The forest embraced Rudy and Ksenia, framed and amplified their speed, and hid them as they ran to Petrozavodsk.
Rudy had never ridden with a headset before, never had anyone to talk to so easily as he pushed through the wind… at least not anyone real. Talking on the headset was unlike other conversations. It wasn’t like Astrakhan, where they had faced each other over a restaurant table and see each other’s eyes. It was like talking on the phone, except he could feel her breathing, her ribs expanding and contracting against his back. It was like talking in bed, except it was broad daylight, world rushing by, they had to balance and watch, and they could not think of sleep, could not know when they could next afford to sleep.
Ksenia always rode well. Just as she immediately leaned into turns and made herself feel to Rudy like a natural extension of the bike and himself, she sensed the need to restrain her conversation, to let questions and answers come slowly, to let Rudy and herself concentrate on the road and remain alert for surprises.
That was why she didn’t speak about Astrakhan at first, and why Rudy did not bring it up again, not for a while. They talked their way toward that moment with gentler details. She told him about working with Andrei all through university, applying her language skills and innate business sense to a financial scheme that grew from insulating the Galich Craneworks from economic chaos to managing internation investments and trade, legal and illegal, for the gang that turned into Black Crane. He told her about his happy falling in with Galina Filipovna and Vitaly and the Irkutsk team, his fight with the Dmitris, and the launching of the Ring Group. He used names, she used names—there was no need for them to hide information about their organizations from each other, because, as Ksenia said, the state would likely have completely dismantled and devoured their organizations by the end of June. The leaders would be exiled or dead, the willing talent drafted into service of the state or vassal gangs, the assets destroyed or subsumed into government possession or doled out in small portions to toadies. The Ring Rudy had helped build—and he told Ksenia about replacing Isaac Gennadyevich, drilling under the mountains, repairing the kindergarten, building the waterworks, chopping wood with Ivan Ivanovich, commissioning Margarita’s Kitchen, developing a supercomputer from scratch—would likely remain in operation: other scholars would eagerly accept the opportunity to take charge of the world’s largest supercollider, and a great scientific institution would feather Putin’s cap as great academic endeavors had his Soviet predecessors. Serve the state, run, or die—Ksenia saw no alternatives under this autocracy.
Ksenia mention doing business overseas and visiting her parents. “I moved them five years ago. They wanted to travel while they still had the energy; I wanted them out of Russia, safe, off the radar. They’ve seen the world. I shipped Papa’s Ural with a new sidecar to Cape Town and Sydney; they rode all around South Africa and Australia.”
“Where do they live?” Rudy asked.
“Nowhere… everywhere. Mama speaks more than Papa of finding a regular home, but they both say they won’t settle until I do, until I get out of the business and make grandchildren.”
“Well, I suppose you’re out of the business.”
Rudy and Ksenia were quiet for a while, through two villages, past a fish truck, past goats stampeding away from the road as the motorcycle roared by.
They talked about artificial intelligence and the backdoor routes that had led both of their organizations to develop the same invention and the same schemes: model the markets, government actions, patterns of corruption, get a step ahead of rivals, make more money. Ksenia still noodled with some statistical linguistic theories by a congenial old professor whose faith in Marxist inevitability survived the collapse of the Union undimmed (“Fractals are complex,” the old professor said. “So it history”). When she asked Pasha to apply some of Black Crane’s growing computer power to some old problems from her professor’s research, they ended up with a machine that could generate the Gettysburg Address from an analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s prior corpus and contextual writings of the mid-19th century. That analysis morphed into their own forecaster, a prediction machine…
“Software that could see our machine coming, two systems that could talk to each other the way they could talk to us.”
“You talked with your machine, too?” Ksenia asked.
“Yes. I told it I was dead. The machine didn’t buy that.” Rudy kept his eyes on the road, watching for cars coming around the bends of a long S-curve. he recalled the conversation with the SR1. “I told the machine about you. It looked around for you, found nothing in its databases. But it guessed we must be alike somehow.” Cow by the road, brakes, in case more cows were waiting to storm the pavement, but no, just one brown beast. “And the AI asked what we would do if we found another system like itself. That’s what made me think of what I told you, and your people, last night: maybe the machines contacted each other. We are not for you. We are not to be. Maybe they saw trouble and destroyed themselves before we could harm them, or ourselves.”
“Would we destroy ourselves?” Ksenia asked.
A blue tractor, belching dark clouds of smoke barely above the straw hat of its driver and the uprights of the empty hay rack it towed on a wobbly trailer, plodded along the lane in front of them. Rudy gave the bike more benzin and zoomed left, around, and back into the lane before a semi appeared over the next hill in the oncoming lane.
It wasn’t until noon, past Vytegra, after a long silence through the marshes on the south end of Lake Onega, the Svirsk Bay, that Ksenia said, “I had no idea you would be in Astrakhan. I thought you had gone back to America. I thought the pain of what happened to your friends was too much for you to look back. I might have done the same to a place that had hurt me so.”
Rudy said nothing and kept his eyes on the road, as he had all night and all morning.
“When I saw you, at the bookstore, I was 17 again. For a moment, I forgot all about my work. I only wanted to hold onto you, to say how sorry I was that I wasn’t there in Suzdal with you, that I couldn’t steady you, help you, do whatever you needed in that moment to keep your wits and get home safely. I wanted to grieve with you. We had such a wonderful week together, with you, with all of you Americans, even that ridiculous Ashley.”
Yes, even Ashley, he thought.
“Only for a moment. After we arranged dinner, I hurried through my checklist and told my people not to disturb me for the rest of the evening.
“I saw you on the sidewalk outside the restaurant before you saw me. I had a moment just to look at you, ten years older. You were past your grief. You radiated happiness and confidence. You were Rudy with the sledgehammer in the basement of the old monastery in Suzdal, but now with a bouquet in your hand, five white roses—I could count them from across the street.”
Ksenia leaned forward, as if to whisper. But her voice, still soft over the speaker in his right ear, seemed to drown out the engine and the road.
“When you reached for my hands at the table…”
Rudy usually let Ksenia’s pauses breathe, let her form and finish her thoughts while he watched the road. This time, though, he interrupted. “No, you reached for my hands.”
Rudy felt Ksenia jolt a little behind him. “No, you—really? I remember it clearly. The waitress took our menus, walked away, and you took my hands. That’s how I’ve always remembered the moment.”
“I’ve always remembered it the other way.”
Ksenia laughed. “We both remember it. Maybe that’s all that matters. And I remember that every sensible thought left my head. I thought, why not? Why not fall in love? Why not admit I already had, ten years ago, and pick up now where I should have then? Why not hold your hand as you held mine and never let go?”
Rudy felt Ksenia sit back a bit. She removed her hands from his waist and gripped the seat rail. Rudy felt the slight shift in the bike’s balance, and he leaned toward the handlebars automatically to compensate. They both needed space for what she had just said, and there wasn’t much space on a motorcycle.
Rudy thought he understood why Ksenia would lean back, breathe, and stay silent for a minute. Then she told him everything.
“Rudy, I brought you to Astrakhan. We’d heard of a ‘Repairman,’ a smart technician who built the Ring’s computer networks and physical security that we couldn’t crack. He built the physical hacks that started popping up in various cities, at headquarters of certain gangs who found their bank accounts suddenly emptied or their communications leaked. And he traveled by motorcycle.
“We put out the feelers. We requested the consultation. We fabricated an entire consulting firm out of one of our shell corporations to make the request look legit. We would give him an audience, squeeze all the information out of him we could, then dispose of him and go after the Ring Group with everything we acquired.”
“When you mentioned the motorcycle, everything you’d said came together—in Irkutsk, working for the Institute, working for a strong woman who sent you around the country, coming to Astrakhan to meet a potential client downtown, and the motor, early at eight, so you couldn’t afford to stay out carousing all night, ha ha—I realized you were our target. You were the Repairman.
“And I was having dinner with you.
“Someone from our team would be shadowing me. Someone would see me there with you. Someone would recognize you the next day, and when Black Crane hauled you off for questioning, they’d haul me off, too, thinking I was planning to defect and double-cross the gang.
“I had to protect myself. And as I walked to the washroom, I realized I had to protect you.”
“You…” Rudy struggled to take in this confession. “You canceled the Astrakhan deal?”
“As I said, it was no deal. It was a trap. But yes, I canceled it. I canceled the whole operation. And to stop people from asking questions and reviving the operation, I removed Black Crane’s leaders and took over.”
“Removed?”
A minute passed before Ksenia continued. “I walked straight past the washroom, through the kitchen, and out to the alley where I started making calls. I was in the air 30 minutes later, back in my Moscow office before midnight.
“And the next morning, I walked into the boardroom, shot all three of my superiors, and told the two remaining execs, ‘I’m in charge now, and here’s why.’ I dropped on the table documents I’d spent all night assembling to take down the chief and his two lieutenants. It wasn’t that hard—I just had to frame their general venality and corruption as part of a plot to undermine the organization and sell out to another rival group. That was my launching point to pivot our attention away from Ring, to go to war and absorb two other groups. I made us into Black Crane. And I kept Black Crane off Ring’s back for ten years. No hacks, no hits, nothing.
Ksenia leaned forward again and wrapped her arms around Rudy’s chest. “That’s how I protected myself, Rudy. And that’s how I protected you.”
They rode in silence as the forest closed in again, giving them only glimpses of the great lake to their right. They reached one long stretch of the road that had been pulverized back to rock and dust and not yet repaved; machinery sat idle and scattered along both shoulders for an entire kilometer. Rudy focused avoiding ruts and potholes. Ksenia held on to him tightly. When they crawled over the gravel mound that lifted them back to undisturbed pavement, when he got the motorcycle back up to regular cruising speed, Rudy wiped the dust from his visor.
“How many men have you killed?”
“Too many. Not enough. That’s why we’re on this road.”
* * *
The highway ended at Voznesenye, at a river dock. Halfway across the channel, a ferry plied the still water toward the opposite bank, less than half a kilometer away. A sign indicated the fare but no schedule. Rudy stopped the motorcycle One car, a blue Saab, waited by the guardrail close to the gate, its driver leaning on the hood, ignoring the couple arriving on motorcycle, watching the ferry recede. No one else was in sight.
“River Svir,” Ksenia said, free of her helmet, headscarf and face and voice in the open air again. “We could boat down this river to Lake Ladoga, into the Neva and out through St. Petersburgh to the sea.”
Rudy squinted at the signs and down the channel. “No bridge?”
“Not here. Not for many kilometers downstream. All woods and swamp, no main road to Petrozavodsk for another couple hours.”
Behind them stood a gray metal bus stop, a green shack advertising tire repair but showing no signs of activity, and a little blue grocery store. Its doors stood open; in the dirt yard to its left, marked off by blue metal railings, sat red plastic chairs around two red tables under a red Coca-Cola canopy supported by a single central pole. He turned again to the river, the retreating ferry, the man waiting by his the Saab. Rudy’s watch said 13:20—he’d lost track of time during Ksenia’s telling of Astrakhan, but the gravel had slowed them down. If the ferry unloaded, came right back, and made another trip without waiting, they might be moving again after 14:00.
“Not a good spot,” Rudy said quietly, leaning close to Ksenia’s ear but keeping his eyes on the turnaround next to the grocery and the road they’d followed in, the only way back out.
“I know,” she replied just as quietly. “But the ferry is still the fastest route. Pull up behind the Saab, and let’s get some lunch, o.k.?”
Ksenia stepped back as Rudy kicked the bike to life again, circled around her, and pulled up to the Saab. Motor off, he dismounted but continued to look across the river and back along the road. He jumped when Ksenia touched his arm. She looked worried, but she said, “We’ll be o.k. We can sit out back, come out when the ferry returns. Now… lunch?”
Rudy nodded, and they crunched across the gravel to the grocery. The store smelled of fish and old fruit. The shelves were close together and sparsely provisioned. They took two plastic-wrapped tuna sandwiches and two Cokes from an upright cooler and the last orange—a fat one, nearly grapefruit-size—from the produce shelf that they left with just a couple sacks of apples, two brown bananas, and a few limp bunches of lettuce. The old kerchiefed woman at the cash register never lifted her eyes from the counter and took their rubles without a word.
Outside, Rudy and Ksenia circled the store. No one sat under the red canopy in the blue-railed courtyard. A thin stand of trees separated the riverside from the west-bank houses. Rudy might have preferred to sit in the shade there, but there were no fences to make clear where the store property ended and where back yards began, and he didn’t want to trespass and draw any unnecessary conversations. On the north side of the store, the store owner had fenced off an area for grass and weeds to do battle; the weeds were winning. Outside the fence, a footpath cut across the short grass to a tin outhouse that stank up the entire back half of the lot. Rudy didn’t care to soak in that stink by sitting in those trees out back, but Ksenia handed him her portion of the lunch and headed toward the outhouse without any hint of disgust. “I’ll be by the shore,” he told her and walked back toward the bike.
Rudy marveled at Ksenia’s apparent adaptability… but he also recoiled. Her adaptability included killing men. He’d seen her do it last night. She’d just told him she’d done it ten years ago. She’d committed those murders—and how many more would she tell him about if he pressed the question?—to save his skin. That didn’t make him feel any better. It made him feel worse. How could this be the same girl he’d taken to Galich? How could this be the same girl who’d written that message and buried those bottles on a moonlit island at midnight? How could he be on his motorbike with this woman who carried a pistol and had used it right before his eyes to kill a man, had used it before and would surely use it again if she thought it was necessary?
“There you are,” Ksenia said right behind him. Rudy jumped again—would everything Ksenia did alarm him now?
He hadn’t heard her coming through the grass to where he’d sat, past an old leaning power pole, behind a bush, near a leafless birch trunk. Ksenia looked around, looked at the bike just ten meters away on the other side of the guardrail, looked up the road—no other vehicles had queued up yet behind the bike and the Saab—then sat down on the ground beside Rudy, knees up, heels of her shiny boots digging a centimeter into the soft dirt.
Rudy handed Ksenia her sandwich and set the orange between them. He unwrapped one triangle-half of his sandwich and took a bite. Onions crunched—he thought there was more onion than tuna, and it tasted distinctly like the shop itself. He managed a couple more bites, then gave up. He cut the orange in half with his pocket knife and washed the shop taste away with citrus and Coke. Ksenia ate her entire sandwich and finished the half of Rudy’s that he hadn’t taken out of the plastic.
The ferry appeared to have stopped on the east shore. Its bow pointed back toward their side, but it did not appear to be moving. Rudy kept his eyes on that far shore. He needed a sense of distance to speak.
“When I left Suzdal, a little part of me kept waiting for the moment when I’d realize what a dumb thing I was doing. An American hops a motorcycle and heads for Siberia? Dumb. I’d wake up lost, or in a snowstorm, or behind bars, or maybe all three, and robbed blind to boot, and I’d think, why didn’t I just get on that airplane and go home?
“Or an illegal immigrant goes to work for a college turned crime gang, hacking gangsters bank accounts to finance a particle collider. When would that go wrong? When would I wish I’d just gone to Moscow and flown back to America?
“But that moment didn’t come. When my fire went out on the coldest February night in the cabin, when I watched Leonov murder the Dmitris moments before they would have murdered me, even when you disappeared in Astrakhan—in 20 years, I never got so stuck or hurt or in so much trouble that I just wanted to wish it all away and wish myself back onto that plane.”
The ferry didn’t move. Neither did Rudy. He felt Ksenia’s eyes on him.
“And now?” she asked. “Has that moment come?”
Rudy swallowed hard and bowed his head. “I… I can’t…. I should be happy that you are here, that we’re together. You’ve saved my life, three times. Now I’m saving your life, I guess. But right now… what you’ve become, the price of… my life. Is any life worth… all this death?”
“Absolutely,” Ksenia said with immediate conviction. “The hit men last night? Yes. The thugs who ran the organization before I took over? Yes. The others… yes. Every one of them. They were bad men, bad as the Chechen bastards who killed our friends on the bus. I have only killed bad men, doing bad things.”
“And killing them was not a bad thing? Running Black Crane is not a bad thing?”
“Would you tell me that your Ring Group did no bad things, that you did no bad things for them?”
“We do not kill people. I’ve never killed people.”
But even as he said it, before Ksenia asked, “Really?” Rudy thought of the Dmitris, of Leonov’s men chasing those thugs down the street and gunning them down below his window. The Dmitris were bad men. They had it coming, right? The Ring Group never pulled the trigger, but how much chaos had they unleashed to further their ends?
Ksenia looked around again. No additional cars had joined the queue. The man still sat on the hood of his Saab, out of earshot.
“We have both chosen lives,” she said, “that depend on bad actions. Some worse than others. But I would not undo any of them. I would not turn you down and remain in Suzdal and miss the opportunity that led me here. I would not let the Astrakhan operation go forward and let you die. I would not run last night and let that man kill you.”
“But the price you’ve had to pay, just for me. I owe you—”
Ksenia reached for his cheek, turned his head, made him look at her. “You owe me nothing.” She held Rudy still. He met her eyes, but he said nothing.
Ksenia turned to the dock. She pointed across the water. “Look: the ferry is coming.” Rudy could see white ripples breaking around the bow of the still distant boat.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Ksenia said. “You can turn your bike around and go wherever you think you are safe, or needed. I can walk onto that boat, step off on the other side, and hitch a ride.”
Ksenia paused now, as she did on the road, as if giving Rudy time to look ahead, to check for hazards. “But,” she continued, “we are both doing what we must. We are doing all we have left to do, to save our lives. I would rather we do that together.”
A couple of vehicles growled up the road behind them. Rudy looked—a shabby blue van with tired workmen lolling at each open window, and a girl driving her mother, or her grandmother, in a dusty yellow Volkswagen. Both vehicles queued up behind the motorcycle. The van pulled up a little too close for Rudy’s comfort, barely a meter behind his wheel.
The ferry was halfway across. “Come on,” Ksenia said, getting up and dusting off her jeans. “Let’s make sure those guys don’t treat our bike like a speedbump.” Rudy looked up at her, and for a hard, hard moment, imagined not getting up, waiting for the FSB to track him here and shoot him dead as that birch, not getting up and watching Ksenia leave.
Ksenia was twice as old as when they’d ridden together to Galich. Now he saw clearly in her face every one of those years, harder for her than they had been for him. Does she see the years in my face? he wondered.
Slowly Ksenia leaned down and held out both of her hands. “Rudy,” she whispered. “This is still not that moment. Come.”
He took her hands. She helped him up. They walked to the bike. When the ferry came—excruciatingly slowly, chugging around, backing its gate to the dock, a single crewman fussing with latches and chains before lifting the red swing arm on shore—they followed the Saab, through its noxious cloud of exhaust, onto the deck and pulled right off to starboard at the back. The van and the Volkswagen followed them; no one else pulled up before the ferry launched. The crewman collected their fare—as much to cross the Svir as to fill the tank for another 300 kilometers—and they lurched away from the dock. When the ferry hit the east shore, Rudy and Ksenia were off the ship, on the ground, and out of sight before the workers had backed their van off the ramp. The motorcycle rushed past the dachas scattered on this bank and plunged back into the forest.
Still not that moment, Rudy thought, amazed.