PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies Read Online Free Page B

water. It was as white and polished as a tooth, having been capped recently by a squadron of Turkish workers after Yeltsin’s troops had shelled and nearly gutted it. Shiv and Timofey passed the Pizza Hut and the arch commemorating the battle against Napoleon at Borodino. They were leaving the city. Now Timofey knew he was committed. The hoodlum wouldn’t let him go. He knew this as surely as if he were sitting in the car beside him. If the world of the atom were controlled by random quantum events, then the macroscopic universe through which the two Zhigulis were piloted was purely deterministic. The canister was heavy and the straps that supported it were beginning to cut into Timofey’s back.
    He could have even more easily evaded Shiv at the exit off Kutuzovsky Prospekt; then on the next road there was another turnoff, then another and another. Timofey lost
count of the turns. It was like driving down a rabbit hole: he’d never find his way back. Soon they were kicking up stones on a dark country road, the only traffic. Every once and a while the Moscow River or one of its tributaries showed itself through the naked, snowless birches. A pocked and torn slice of moon bobbed and weaved across his windshield. Shiv paused, looking for the way, and then abruptly pivoted his car into a lane hardly wider than the Zhiguli itself.
    Timofey followed, taking care to stay on the path. He could hear himself breathing: the sound from his lungs was muffled and wet. Gravel crunched beneath his tires and bushes scraped their nails against the car’s doors. The hood slowed even further, crossing a small bridge made of a few planks. They clattered like bones.
    Timofey’s rearview mirror incandesced. Annoyed, he pushed it from his line of sight. Shiv slowed to a stop, blinked a pair of white lights in reverse, and backed up just short of Timofey’s front bumper. At the same time, Timofey felt a hard tap at his rear.
    Shiv stepped from his car. Pinned against the night by the glare of headlights, the boy appeared vulnerable and very young, almost untouched by life. Timofey detected a measure of gentleness in his face, despite the lunar shadows cast across it. Shiv grimaced at the driver of the third automobile, signaling him to close his lights. He walked in front of his own car and squeezed alongside the brush to Timofey’s passenger door.
    “We have to talk,” he said. “Open it.”
    Timofey hesitated for a moment, but the lengthy
drive had softened his resolve and confused his plan. And there was a car pressed against his rear bumper. He reached over and unlocked the door.
    Shiv slid into the seat and stretched his legs. Even for short people, the Zhigulis were too goddamned small.
    “We’re here?”
    “Where else could we be?”
    Timofey turned his head and peered into the dark, looking for the businessman’s dacha. There was nothing to see at all.
    “All right, now hand over the stuff.”
    “Look, let’s do this right—” Timofey began, but then comprehension darkened his face. He didn’t need to consider an escape: he understood the whole setup. Perhaps he had chosen the coward’s way out. “I see. You’re as foolish as a peasant in a fairy tale.”
    Shiv opened his coat and removed from a holster in his sport jacket an oiled straight blade nearly twenty centimeters long. He turned it so that the moonlight ran its length. He looked into the mark’s face for fear. Instead he found ridicule.
    Timofey said, “You’re threatening me with a knife? I have enough plutonium in my lungs to power a small city for a year, and you’re threatening me with a knife?”
    Shiv placed the shaft against Timofey’s side, hard enough to leave a mark even if it were removed. Timofey acted as if he didn’t feel it. Again something dark passed before Shiv’s eyes.
    “Look, this is a high-carbon steel Premium Gessl manufactured by Imperial Gessl in Frankfurt, Germany.
I paid eighty bucks for it. It passes through flesh like water.