Prologue Read Online Free Page A

United States signed an appeasement deal in the early 1980s, ceding the central and southern states to Soviet control and agreeing on what was then called “Hong Kong status” for the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Great Lakes states. As part of the deal, and to prevent any East-West holocaust, the United States had surrendered all of their own weapons of mass destruction, which had been quickly seized by international arms inspectors.
She talked cheerfully about the advancements of Soviet science making life better for Americans: the microchip, personal computer, and cellular telephone technology. “Unfortunately, there are revisionists who want to credit Americans with those inventions, but that’s to be expected,” she said.
He was about to thank the girl for her time and really mean it, when she pointed to a picture deVere hadn’t seen. “Soviet medicine and health care immeasurably improved the lot of the thousands of Americans who weren’t able to afford even basic medical services,” she said, pointing to a picture of a spit-and-polish Soviet ambulance in front of a house. Two uniformed EMTs were hurrying with a stretcher carrying a young boy. A young boy almost…Peter’s age.
Suddenly, he was in that hotel in Tulsa , Oklahoma again, sharing a room with his twin brother, Peter...

Peter started coughing again, but this time it went beyond the usual brief racking fit. He kept coughing and coughing, kicking off the bedclothes and falling to the floor. Alarmed, Paul scrambled off his bed and knocked on his parents’ door across the hotel hallway.
“Honey?”
“Mommy, Peter’s coughing a lot.”
His father opened the door, fumbling with his trousers. His mother, hugging her flannel nightgown, shot by him into the boys’ room, where she picked Peter off the floor and placed him back in bed, bending over him to keep him on the bed.
His father appeared in the doorway. “It’s time to call the ambulance,” his mother said. His father nodded and went to the phone in their own room and called the Soviet ambulance service. His mother sat staring out the window into the blackness as Peter writhed in agony under her hand. She kept massaging his head, saying over and over, “It’ll be all right, sweetie, it’ll be all right.” In the next room his father called. And called. And called. And…
“Sir?”
DeVere snapped back. He blinked and looked around until he saw the face of the guide looking up at him. She looked as if something were wrong with him.

“Sir?” she repeated.
“Sorry, lost in thought,” deVere said.
She nodded. “It happens a lot with people of your generation.”
“Old people,” he said kindly.
She flushed, looking at the floor. “My grandfather, you remind me of him.”
“I’m not that old,” he said.
She smiled and took the joke. “No, of course. Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you. You’re good at what you do.”
She nodded. “I think everybody should understand how we got where we are today. It’s important.”
“Agreed,” deVere said.
He went to the bookstore and told the clerk what school his daughter attended, her class number and the assignment code. He looked it up on his computer and burned the disk.

“Why can’t she download it from the site?” deVere asked.
“We try to encourage the students to come to the library,” the clerk said. “Get them out away from their computers for a bit, look around the library some.”
“So you see a lot of parents on their way home from work, do you?”
The clerk sighed. “You’re the eighth today.”
DeVere drove home, tracing his finger around the locked reinforced steel case on the seat beside him. Yes, he said to himself. It’s most important we know how we got where we are today. So the mistakes of the past can not only be avoided in the future, they can be undone.

 

 

Chapter 3

 

Natasha Nikitin wiped the palm of her left hand across her forehead before drying it on her bed sheet. Even stripped down to her