Rasputin's Shadow Read Free Page A

screen with deadened eyes. Within moments, he’d paid his tab and staggered out of the bar, vaguely aware of where he was, but dead certain about where he needed to be.
    Somehow, he managed to make it from Queens to Manhattan and all the way to East Ninety-first Street and the big, noisy throng that pressed against the police barricades. His chest heaved with anger, fueled by the intense passion on display all around him, and he joined in, making his way deeper into the crowd, pumping his fist in the air as he took up the familiar resounding choruses of “
Izhetsy
,
ubiitsy
” (Liars, murderers) and “
Pozor
” (Shame on you).
    Before long, he was at the front of the crowd, right up against the barricade that protected the consulate’s gates. The chants had grown louder, the fists pumping the air more vigorously. The whole effect, combined with the alcohol swirling through his veins, turned almost hallucinogenic. His mind wandered in all kinds of directions before quickly settling onto a very satisfying image, a revenge fantasy that spread across him like wildfire. It warmed him up from within and he found himself nursing it and allowing it to grow until it consumed him like a raging inferno.
    Through tired, foggy eyes he noticed a couple of men by the consulate’s entrance. They were eyeing the crowd and conferred briefly before retreating behind closed doors.
    Sokolov couldn’t help himself.
    “That’s right! You run and you hide, you godless swine,” he hollered after them. “Your time’s running out, you hear me? Your time’s running out, all of you, and you’re going to pay. You’re going to pay dearly.” Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he slammed his fist repeatedly against the barricade. “You think you’ve heard the last of us? You think you’ve heard the last of the Shislenkos? Well, think again, you bastards. We’re going to bring you down. We’re going to wipe you out, every single last one of you.”
    He spent the next hour or so there, screaming his tired lungs out and shaking his weak, tired fists. Eventually, his energy drained and he slunk away, his head bowed. He managed to make it back to the subway and then to his apartment in Astoria, where his doting wife, Daphne, was waiting for him.
    What he didn’t realize, of course, what he wasn’t conscious of even though he should have known better and would have known better had it not been for those four last shots of vodka, was that they were watching. They were watching and they were listening, as they always were, especially at times like these, at gatherings like these where crowds of undesirables could be taped and analyzed and catalogued and added to all kinds of sinister lists. CCTV cameras mounted on the walls and roof of the consulate had been rolling and powerful directional mikes had been recording and, even worse, undercover agents of the Federation had been roaming the crowd, mimicking the protesters and their angry shouts and fists all while studying the faces around them and picking out those who merited a closer look.
    Sokolov didn’t know any of that, but he should have.
    Three days later, they came for him.

2

    Federal Plaza, Manhattan
    I know they’re called spooks, but this guy was starting to feel like a real ghost.
    I’d been hunting him down for a couple of months already, ever since that day at Sequoia National Park, at Hank Corliss’s cabin. The day Corliss blew his brains out shortly after telling me who he’d reached out to in the matter of getting my son Alex brainwashed.
    My four-year-old son.
    Takes a particularly vile specimen of humanity to do something like that. Corliss was damaged, I’ll give him that. He was a living, breathing wreck of a human being. He’d been through a tragic, devastating nightmare while running the DEA’s operations in Southern California. Using my son, heinous as it was, came out of a twisted obsession he had for revenge. He’d paid the ultimate price for his