Zhukov's Dogs Page 2

  “What is this?” I asked warily. As pleasant as she seemed, I knew she was mocking me behind her thin smile, and I didn’t enjoy it.

  “This,” she said, “Is a little thing called therapy.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re joking.”

  “Yes. It’s actually a surprise party.”

  “Well, I’m surprised.”

  Dr. Halliburton made a small laughing noise behind her cruel smile. “You should be. People like you usually go straight to the big electric box.”

  “So, why am I here?”

  My lack of enthusiasm didn’t seem to bother Dr. Halliburton one bit. She waved her hand and said, “Because some people reviewing your case seem to think what happened in Seattle was the result of a temporary loss of sanity. It’s my job to figure out if you’ve merely gone mad or if you consciously betrayed your nation.”

  She sounded like one of those people who dismissed any city north of Des Moines. There weren’t a lot of places inhabitable beyond there, not comfortably at least. Some maps had even been altered to outline the remaining thirty-nine states which had yet to be taken over by snow and ice.

  “Seattle’s a part of that nation,” I said.

  I could see Dr. Halliburton’s eyes light up the second she processed the words. She pried her stare from the tablet she’d been scribbling away on. “Mr. Zhukov,” she began in a sickeningly sweet coo, which put my teeth on edge, “Let me be the first to tell you this civilly. You committed treason, a crime punishable by death and not often given the opportunity for trial. You are not an agent of the Y.I.D., and you are certainly not Lieutenant Colonel anymore. Your only title is prisoner 9-3-5-1-1. Whether or not you remain a number for the rest of—what will undoubtedly be—a very short prison life is entirely up to you. Just say the word, and I’ll declare you mad. If you’d like, we can even bump up the execution to this evening.”

  “Not a very compassionate shrink are you?” I scoffed, slouching back and looking up at the camera in the corner again, wondering briefly who was watching.

  “Compassionate enough to let you know he’s not dead.”

  That yanked my attention quickly back to Dr. Halliburton. The smile she wore took on an even more vindictive curl as she leaned forward to rest her elbows on the table and fold her hands beneath her chin. She took an agonizingly long moment to study my expression, the one I was determined to keep blank despite internal amok.

  “He’s alive, Zhukov.”

  “Impossible,” I said, not giving her a single pause to read into. “He was killed during the raid.”

  “Are you sure? Witnesses to the event say you were quite distraught. Maybe you just assumed he was dead.”

  I probably shouldn’t have laughed at her, but I found it pitiful Dr. Halliburton was already resorting to tricks to get a reaction out of me. As much as I wanted to believe he was alive, I knew it wasn’t possible. Dr. Halliburton kept smiling as she reached into her bag. She pulled out a phone the size of her hand and tapped away at the screen quietly for a minute.

  I was grateful for the silence; it gave me time to come to terms again with everything that happened three days ago and prepare myself to put an end to the shrink’s game. Without a word, she set her phone down on the table and nudged it toward me. I looked at the lit screen and saw she’d placed a call to someone named Howard and set it to speaker phone. On the second ring, a raspy, male voice answered, “Yes, Doctor?”

  “Would you be so kind as to put our guest on the line?” Dr. Halliburton said sweetly, her eyes on mine and mine on the phone.

  “Yes, of course, Doctor,” Howard replied.

  The scuffling tread of feet, the bang of something metal, and the groan of hinges as a heavy door was dragged open. Each sound pulled my patience thinner. With the doctor watching me like a hawk, though, I didn’t dare to clench my jaw.

  “Get up. You’ve got a phone call,” snarled Howard in a tone opposite of the sweet, trained-puppy one he reserved for the doctor. I listened hard at the silence. Nothing. Howard came back on the line. “Kid isn’t moving.”

  “Just put the phone down next to him please, Howard,” she said.

  The phone clacked as it was set on a hard surface and then there was silence again. I looked up at Dr. Halliburton who gave a small wave of her hand and said to me, “Why don’t you say hello?”

  This was all one big, cruel trick. She expected me to crack and push the phone away before having some sort of breakdown. I’d show her it wouldn’t be so easy. I looked down at the phone. Calmly, I leaned forward to set my bound hands on the table. I flashed a bitter smile at my reflection in the screen and looked back up at Dr. Halliburton as I spoke.

  “Hello.”

  “Nik!”

  My smile didn’t falter, but my heart raced. It was a good thing Dr. Halliburton wasn’t monitoring my pulse as closely as she was my face. “An audio track,” I said dryly with my eyes still locked on the shrink’s.

  “That would be clever, wouldn’t it?” Dr. Halliburton said with the slightest shrug.

  “Nik, it’s me!”

  I flicked my eyes down at the phone then back up at Dr. Halliburton. Val was dead. I’d watched him die; I’d killed him. Why, then, was I fighting so hard to keep from succumbing to the shrink’s trick and believing in false hope?

  “Howard, he’s skeptical,” Dr. Halliburton said in a tone of feigned disappointment.

  I couldn’t see what Howard did next, but the sound of Val’s scream was enough to make my imagination run rampant. My fists clenched, nails digging into my palms and knuckles going bleach white. Even if it was a recording, even if none of it was real, I couldn’t bite back the words ripping up my throat.

  “Stop it!”

  Howard either pressed pause or ceased whatever unimaginable torture he’d been putting Val through. Either way, Dr. Halliburton had gotten the response she wanted. Before she could gloat and prod at me further, I had to find out if this was real.

  “November 21st,” I said. The date had absolutely no significance to Dr. Halliburton, Howard, or anyone else in the world other than me and Val.

  “Fritzi walked in. Twice.”

  It was Val. There was no doubt left in my mind. He even had the same smoker’s cough that sometimes surfaced when he tried to catch his breath. I had to bide more time. I had to figure out where he was. I had to do something. My mind was spinning out of control. Confusion, relief, and an insatiable sense of dread made piecing together a single, clear thought difficult.

  “Spare key to the house?” I asked so Dr. Halliburton would think I needed more convincing and not time to plot our escape. I studied the phone in front of me. If I smashed it open, there was a capacitor big enough to act as a tazer. I could zap the shrink with it and run from the room before the Grey Man could restrain me. There was no telling where Val was being held, though, and there was still the matter of all the guards in the hall outside. I needed to find out more from the shrink before I acted rashly.

  “Trick question. The lock was broken,” came Val’s reply.

  Lost in my own head, it was almost too easy for Dr. Halliburton to reach across the table and take her phone away. It was only when the phone was out of reach that I realized I’d been so busy scheming, I’d completely missed my chance to tell Val anything important. Like how I was coming for him, and how I wouldn’t let Howard or anyone else ever hurt him again.

  “Val!” I shouted, my bound hands shooting out to try to take the phone back. The doctor quickly hung up and tucked the phone away in her bag. I lunged forward over the table and grabbed onto her purse with both hands. No sooner did my fingers grip the leather than the silent Grey Man in the corner reached out and jerked me back into my chair.

  Dr. Halliburton snatched her purse while the Grey Man held me still. She examined the bag where I’d grabbed it and even had the nerve to sniff it, as if she was afraid I’d somehow contaminated her precious purse. “Do you have any idea what leather costs these days?”
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  I didn’t care about her stupid bag, and if I wasn’t being held to my seat, I’d eagerly try to steal it again. “Where are you keeping him?” I demanded, giving a defiant thrash against the giant holding me down.

  “You’re a smart boy,” she said as she settled back in her seat. “Where do high threats to national security go?”

  All at once I stopped struggling, body going rigid and a sharp pain twisting in my gut. Val was beyond my help and would have been better off dead if my guess was right. “You sent him to Guantanamo?”

  Dr. Halliburton laughed, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what about this was amusing. She tapped the stylus on her tablet and searched through it for something as she said, “No. Not yet, at least. One step shy of Guantanamo.”

  “He’s on the fifth floor?”

  She nodded, and I relaxed a bit. The Grey Man restraining me seemed to believe I was safe to release, and he returned to his corner while I mulled over all the information just dumped on me.

  “You seem relieved,” Dr. Halliburton said.

  Y.I.D. dogs didn’t feel relief, not after finding out one of their marks was still alive. Even though I knew what I said next would severely affect her diagnosis, I took no shame in telling her and whoever was watching the video feed, “I am.”

  Conference Room C, Eisenhower Building—Washington, D.C.

  Monday, November 9th, 2076—10:33 a.m.

  iden was late. I’d canceled my morning physical training and pushed two debriefings back so I could make it to another one of his spontaneous, “urgent” meetings, and he didn’t even have the courtesy to show up on time. It was shaping up to be one of those stressful mornings when I wished I’d just stayed in bed.

  “Zhukov? What are you doing in here?”

  I looked up at the furry-faced officer who’d poked his head into the conference room, outfitted for fifty and generally used for large special operations briefings. I rose from my seat to reply, a small, courteous gesture that wasn’t necessary, considering how similar we were in rank, but I was a good dog.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Colonel Gully,” I told him. “Brigadier McKee asked me to meet him here ten minutes ago.”

  It was strange, I imagined, for anyone unfamiliar with our hierarchy to be told that a man twenty years my senior was barely two titles above me. Special Forces was a small, tightly structured branch of the military made up of three distinct divisions. Younger agents, like myself, who’d been trained from an early age, were members of the Youth Infiltration Division. As we grew older and gained renown, our officer ranks began to overlap with the General Field and Special Operations Regiment. A sixteen-year-old Y.I.D. major commanded just as much respect as his thirty-year-old General Field counterpart. Both the Y.I.D. and G.F. paid due respect to the elite S.O.R., though, the same majors viewed as the equivalent of an S.O.R. captain.

  Colonel Grant Gully of the Special Operations Regiment was a peculiar, plump man we often referred to as the walrus. With a set of well-maintained whiskers surrounding his mouth and hiding his upper lip, he was always fun to watch when he delivered a speech. His jokes were abundant and entertaining, even if they were crass, simply because of the way his body shook when he laughed.

  “McKee? Pah,” Gully boomed. He opened the door further and placed a hand on his belly as he laughed. “What? Is that new office of his too small?”

  “What’s so funny?” came Aiden’s voice from the hall.

  Gully stepped aside as a red-headed man twenty years his junior appeared in the frame with two thick folders under his arm. He wore the same sleek black suit as Gully and me, each of us with a different pin on our lapel to distinguish rank. The colonel slowed his laughter but didn’t seem pressured to recompose himself. “Ahh, Brigadier, we were just talking about you.”

  “More ginger jokes, Colonel?” asked Aiden. The corners of his mouth tugged upwards into a bitter smile. He stood tall at almost six-foot-two with a narrow face and broad shoulders. His limbs were long and gangly, though, which made his stature awkward to look at and, I imagined, to carry. If Gully was a walrus, Aiden was a giraffe.

  Gully patted him on the shoulder soundly as he spoke. “Tell me. Why do you need this conference room when you’ve got a brand new office one floor up, McKee?”

  “If you must know, I haven’t finished moving into it yet,” Aiden admitted. He’d been a brigadier of the Y.I.D. for a full week now, but somehow still hadn’t settled into the position. Aiden had never been very good at time management. He was, however, good at politely dismissing people he didn’t like. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Colonel.”

  “As you wish. Come find me when he’s finished with you, Zhukov,” Gully said.

  I wanted to tell Gully I had a million other things to do before noon, but like a good dog, I just nodded and told myself I’d have to work one more thing into my schedule. Aiden shut the door behind Gully and immediately groaned, “Christ, his laugh is annoying.”

  “Someone’s in a bad mood this morning,” I said as I sat back down in my seat. There was no need to be as professional around Aiden as I was with Gully, even though he was two ranks my senior. Five years older than me, Aiden was my best friend in the world and had put his life on the line for me more than once. He was the sort of person who’d spend the first half of his day nonchalantly preventing nuclear bombs from detonating in Disneyland, and the second half using his lifetime of espionage training to pick up women.

  Aiden unbuttoned his jacket and collapsed into the seat next to me. He didn’t wear his stress as well as I did and was far more vocal about it. “Can’t imagine why. It’s not like I’m losing more sleep lately than I ever did in the field,” he said with a loud huff.

  “I thought you wanted this promotion,” I said.

  “I did. I mean, I still do and all, don’t get me wrong. There’s just so much damn paperwork.”

  After serving with Aiden for over a decade, I knew how much he hated working at a desk. I too dreaded the day I would have to trade the field for a corner office. Nobody could last in the Y.I.D. forever. When our youth faded, we were typically transferred to the G.F. or S.O.R. as low-ranking field operatives. Aiden’s tactical brilliance, though, made him unfortunate enough to be selected as a Y.I.D. general. It was a highly-coveted position that gave him the authority he’d always desired, but it also pulled him from active duty.

  “Hire an assistant?” I suggested. “All generals are allowed up to two.”

  Aiden’s eyes lit up, and a devious grin spread across his face. He stared into the open air above us dazedly as he said, “Yeah… Yeah. A blonde one… Wait, you said I could have two? Nik, what do you think? Two blondes? Or should I mix it up and get a brunette?”

  Any other day, I’d be happy to play along. Today, however, I was not in the mood. While he was busy going through paperwork and moving into a new office, I’d slept four hours in the last forty-eight and spent my entire morning running around, cleaning up messes made by the battalions I was in charge of. “Aiden, I didn’t clear my schedule so I could help you pick out an assistant. I haven’t slept. I’ve got two debriefings to get to, and both sets of idiots somehow managed to botch the most mundane, simple—”

  “Whoa! Deep breaths, buddy. Deep breaths,” Aiden said, putting his hands up like my frustrations were being physically thrown at him.

  I sighed and worked a hand through my hair. I shut my eyes for a second, taking a deep breath as instructed, and when I opened them again, I saw Aiden reaching into his jacket. He took a look around the room to make sure we were alone before saying under his breath, “You know, if you want, I’ve got something that’ll help take the edge off.”

  Aiden was always good for a morphine injection or a Percocet. While any sort of non-military issued medication was illegal in our ranks, they were more common than any of the higher-ups wanted to admit. Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of drugs unless I needed them to distract me from something like a gaping hole i
n my chest or a bone sticking out of my skin.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told him, waving the offer off. “It’s just been a rough couple of days.”

  “Sounds like it,” Aiden said. He dropped the two folders he’d been carrying onto the table between us. I reached for them, but before I could open the one on top, Aiden’s hand shot out and held it shut.

  “Aiden. Not in the mood,” I said warningly.

  “I know,” he said, bringing his other hand up and raising his index finger. “Which is exactly why, in exchange for the awesome mission I’m about to give you, you’re coming out with me tonight, and I’m going to help you land the prettiest girl. Prettier than that one chick in Istanbul last month.”

  “The gypsy we paid to keep quiet about the beheaded cult leader in the trunk?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  Moments like these were exactly why I liked Aiden. Crude humor and womanizing habits aside, he was a great agent and an even better friend. We’d both been doing this our entire lives, and he was one of the few people who could actually relate to, and sympathize with, just how stressed out I was.

  For the first time in forty-eight sleep deprived hours, a genuine smile cracked my face. Aiden took it as my response. He clapped me on the shoulder with one hand and flipped open the folder on the table with the other. And just like that, we were in work mode again. A seriousness settled between us as I stared down at the elaborate blueprints at the top of the pile, which Aiden wasted no time in explaining.

  “These are detailed diagrams of Seattle, what’s left of it at least.”

  “People still live there?” I asked. History and old timers who’d survived the changes of the world described Seattle as a large city bustling with people and making huge strides in technology. These days, all Seattle had was an abundance of scrap metal and snow.

  Aiden nodded. “Hard to believe, right? Anyone with half a brain got out of Washington ages ago, but there were some people who just moved underground.”