Exoteric Read online

  There would be no one to push Arkady’s wheelchair or drive him places; no one, now, to even discover him when he died. He wondered how long he would lie mouldering on the floor before the stench of decomposition alerted someone. Maybe he would die in hospital instead, processed like a piece of recycling and then swiftly forgotten. Ana was his only named beneficiary, and he had been hers. The bank would keep his savings. His possessions would be auctioned, given away, or destroyed. Every last trace of their lives would be scattered to the wind.

  “Why are we meeting here, anyway?” he demanded, pushing his morbid train of thought aside. “Are you becoming whimsical in your dotage?”

  Zolin chuckled and lifted the strap of a pair of rubber-cased, military binoculars from around his neck.

  “Here,” he said, passing them to Arkady. “I will show you why we are here.” He pointed across the stadium. “Upper tier, middle of the front row—the section across from us.”

  Arkady took the binoculars with a look that made clear how little he appreciated his boss’s mysterious manner.

  He panned the area Zolin had indicated. The crowd there was less demonstrative than the frustrated mob in their own stand. Families and pensioners mainly, wrapped in red-and-white Spartak scarves, chattering and chanting.

  He stopped panning. There. In the middle of the front row was a cluster of men in suits, looking ill-at-ease, and scowling at the crowd around them. All but one of them, that was: Pavel Maslok sat in the centre of the row, smiling beatifically, seemingly absorbed in the game playing out below.

  Arkady watched as he shared a joke with the bodyguard next to him. The other man smiled politely and glanced in the direction his boss was pointing, then resumed scanning the stadium for threats. Maslok looked relaxed and at-ease in a well-tailored blue suit, his shirt open at the collar. Most of his contemporaries struggled to carry off a suit, no matter how much they spent on them. They lacked the bearing for it, and looked uncomfortable in them. Maslok looked as though he had been born in one.

  “What on Earth is he doing here?” asked Arkady, watching Maslok join the crowd in applauding a hard-won corner.

  “Being seen,” replied Zolin. “At some appropriate moment, the television cameras will show him sitting there, enjoying a game of football just like an ordinary person. The audience at home will see him, and think ‘goodness! He is just like me! What an excellent choice to be president!’ The footage will be used and re-used when his accession is announced, to show just how trustworthy and normal he is. That, I presume, is the intent.”

  “I see,” said Arkady, passing the field glasses back. “And is it crucial we be here to watch him do that?”

  “It is always wise to keep one’s enemies in sight.”

  “Don’t be glib. Come on, tell me why we’re here.”

  Zolin smiled. “I thought it might benefit you to see what we are up against,” he explained. “This really is happening, unless we can stop it. He will be president unless you have found something we can use to stop him. So, tell me: what have you found? Can Molchanov’s evidence be retrieved? Or must we resign ourselves to being ruled by a traitor?”

  The crowd around them rose as one as a late tackle from behind sent one of CSKA’s wingers sprawling. Players from both sides clustered around the referee, gesticulating angrily, while the injured man rolled on the grass and clutched his ankle.

  “I don’t know what password Molchanov used for his encryption,” said Arkady, shouting to be heard over the uproar. “I don’t think anyone does. The system he used probably requires a key file to be submitted as well as the password. And that file could be anything: a photograph, a song, a poem—anything. So, even if we knew his password, that wouldn’t be enough.”

  The referee brandished his yellow card like a crucifix, warding off the incensed players, and scribbled the name of the one who’d committed the foul in his notebook. The away stand applauded, pleased to see justice done, while the fans around Arkady and Zolin jeered.

  “It can’t be done: that is what you’re saying,” clarified Zolin, once the noise subsided. “Molchanov’s proof is gone forever.”

  Arkady wavered, reluctant to commit himself—reluctant to tell Zolin his solution. “MI6 will presumably have ample proof, if your suspicions are correct,” he pointed out. “Is there no way to extract the information from them? A little coercion—some good, old-fashioned espionage, perhaps?”

  “Highly unlikely,” scoffed Zolin, sounding peeved that Arkady might think such a possibility had not occurred to him. “Certainly not without Maslok finding out about it. I was counting on you to find another way.”

  An anxious hush descended on the crowd as CSKA lined up their free kick. Arkady watched with the rest of them as the ball was struck. It floated into the area and was punched clear by the Spartak keeper. The fans screeched their defiance and broke into song.

  “There may be another way,” admitted Arkady. “But it is unlikely to work. It would require money, and facilities, and experts, and much more besides.”

  “Well, let’s hear it,” grumbled Zolin. Arkady could tell the noisy exuberance of the crowd was starting to annoy him. Like most members of the Establishment, he didn’t trust Russians en masse.

  “There is only one other place we know the evidence resided: in Molchanov’s head, correct?”

  “Yes, and he is dead.”

  “He is.”

  “Then, what’s your point?”

  Arkady hesitated again. Was he really going to propose the idea he had in mind? Zolin would think him mad, would assume he was unstable, deranged by grief. He cleared his throat and tried to reconstruct the train of thought which had first brought him to his grotesque conclusion.

  “Molchanov was shot through the heart with a 7.62mm bullet. He would have lost consciousness immediately and died within minutes. His body lay on the ice until paramedics arrived. He was declared dead at the scene.”

  “I know all this,” muttered Zolin. “Artyom will be back soon. Do be brief!”

  “He was declared dead at the scene,” repeated Arkady, “and his body lay there until the police arrived. However, somebody—probably one of his bodyguards—called Interval, with instructions for them to collect his remains. They turned up, argued with the police, and took the body away for cooling and preservation.”

  Zolin shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking. He shot Arkady a cautionary glance.

  “Who, or what, is ‘Interval’?” he demanded.

  “Interval is a cryogenics company,” said Arkady with an apologetic cough. “They have a process for refrigerating cadavers and preserving them in liquid nitrogen. The idea is that maybe, in the future, the technology will exist to return their…customers…to life.”

  Zolin snorted, already dismissing the concept. “In other words, they are a morbid gimmick; another way for our oligarchs to waste their money.”

  “Probably,” agreed Arkady. “Many cryogenic clinics opened in Moscow during that decade. We took over from California as the world capital of suspended animation. It seems that where there is money and egotism you find businesses like this. Molchanov was a believer, though. Interval removed the bullet from him and preserved it as evidence. They took X-rays and blood samples, too, and the relatives were able to persuade the coroner no autopsy was required. The cause of death was never really in doubt, and footage of the shooting surfaced online very quickly. Molchanov’s will was explicit about his desire to be frozen—he even had instructions tattooed on his chest—so they proceeded immediately.”

  “All very interesting, I’m sure,” said Zolin, “but I don’t really see where it gets us.”

  Arkady nodded, aware he was trying the older man’s patience. “The man behind Interval is a doctor called Zapad: Roman Zapad, an anaesthetist, member of the Russian National Resuscitation Council, fellow of the Negovsky Institute of General Reanimatology, former head of the Anaesthaesia & Reanimatology Departm
ent at MSMU, and so on. Even if he turns out to be a lunatic or a fraud, he’s a well-qualified one.”

  “I hope you’re not about to say what I think you’re going to say,” warned Zolin.

  “Only this,” said Arkady, keeping his tone placatory. “Molchanov died because he was shot in the heart. Heart transplants are an everyday occurrence now—they’re routine. Animals have been resuscitated after freezing, using Zapad’s techniques. Molchanov’s body was preserved quickly, so there should have been minimal damage. If we thaw him out and nothing happens, so be it. Molchanov misses out on eternal life. He probably didn’t deserve it anyway. But if we can fire up his brain long enough for him to tell us his password, you can bring down Maslok. I don’t know how else you’re going to do it.”

  For a moment they both stared across the arena to where Maslok sat, waving benevolently to the TV cameras. Arkady didn’t need binoculars to see the broad smirk on his face. Arkady and Maslok were the same age, so how was it the President’s Chief of Staff looked healthy, composed, and virile, while Arkady looked and felt so shabby and unsure? Simple, came the answering thought. He is a product of the new Russia, adapted to his environment. You are a relic of the old.

  “Let me be sure I understand you,” said Zolin. “You propose to take Molchanov from his refrigerator, warm him up, put a new heart in him—”

  “And start it,” finished Arkady. “Yes. Like replacing a broken circuit board and rebooting a computer. All the data should still be there—if Zapad’s process is everything he claims.”

  “If it is—if it’s as simple as that—do you not think they would have done it already?”

  Arkady shrugged. “Medical ethics, law, finances, next-of-kin—I imagine there are many impediments. Someone has to be first. Maybe nobody had a good enough reason before. Maybe no one was willing to risk failure. If we fail, it costs us nothing. If we succeed, and he comes back as more than a vegetable, we have a chance at retrieving the information you want.”

  “If we fail and Maslok finds out, it will cost us significantly more than ‘nothing,’” Zolin pointed out. “Still…you would presumably need a hospital, with life support and operating theatres.”

  “Yes. You would need to find a facility. Somewhere discreet.”

  “And your Dr Zapad: what’s to stop him running his mouth off?”

  Arkady shrugged. “ROSCOSMOS has funded research into suspended animation in the past. We tell him it’s for the space programme. Ego will take care of the rest. He’ll want to do this, just to see if he can. If he succeeds, you get rid of Maslok and he gets his place in the history books. If he fails, he keeps quiet unless he wants to be sent to prison for unethical behaviour.”

  “And he’ll abide by that, will he?”

  “If we handle him right. He’s a consultant doctor. I’ve yet to meet one for whom vanity wasn’t an overriding motivation.”

  The crowd around them screeched as one. Spartak had scored. The stands reverberated to the sound of cheering and the stamping of feet. Zolin regarded the people next to him with obvious annoyance.

  Maslok had risen to his feet and was applauding the goal, radiating a good-natured maturity which stood in stark contrast to the animal jubilation of the tiers below him. Arkady saw Zolin glance across at his nemesis, and watched his lip curl into a sneer.

  “Fine,” he said at last, once the crowd had quietened down. “If that’s the only plan we have, we’d better do it. I’ll find you a facility, somewhere away from Moscow. You work on the doctor.”

  “You’re sure?” queried Arkady, unnerved by his boss’s decisiveness. Zolin typically deferred action until he had thought it through at length, considering the consequences and alternatives. Arkady preferred it that way. He didn’t like plunging ahead with no contingency plan.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” snapped Zolin. “If some other way to compromise him presents itself, I will take it—but time is short, and your ‘Frankenstein’ scheme is all we have.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t like relying on miracles, Arkady. I don’t like it at all. But I will not see the nuclear codes handed to that traitor. I will not allow the British their final victory. I will cut this cancer out, and you will be my knife!”

  Arkady shrugged his acquiescence. In truth, he had little left to lose. For decades now, he had borne witness to corruption and avarice, to criminal gangs infesting the bureau, to the innocent persecuted, the guilty gone free. To do so had felt like penance, his and Zolin’s: their punishment for losing the Cold War. Their work for the Investigations Directorate had been tokenistic, stymied at every turn by politics and dishonesty. They had exposed scores of junior officers from the regions as venal and crooked, but the big fish always got away. Now, they were after the biggest fish of all.

  “It’s your call, Zolin,” he said, at last. “You know, I suppose, that, even if we succeed, our careers will be over.”

  Zolin nodded, staring out at the pitch. “For the sake of our dignity, and for Russia’s. This is not just some local nepotism, or a Section Head taking kickbacks. This is not everyday treachery. If we turn a blind eye to it, what would that make us?”

  “It would make us thoroughly modern, I expect.”

  “Well, I am not ready to be so modern as all that. We have done questionable things in our lives, Arkady, you and I; bad things, at times, but always for the good of Mother Russia, always with the people’s interest foremost in our minds. We have been monstrous, perhaps, but we are not monsters.”

  It had the sound of a thought that had been fermenting for some time. Arkady nodded, unsure whether he agreed. Was Zolin now, in the twilight of his career, seeking redemption? Arkady could understand that, but it surprised him. The Section Head had always been dogmatic and uncompromising, possessed of a ruthless moral pragmatism. Did he, too, hear dead men screaming in the night?

  “Well, if God is a Russian, we shall be all right then,” said Arkady, hoping to brighten his boss’s dour mood.

  “If God is a Russian,” replied Zolin, “we will just bribe our way into Heaven.” He gestured towards the pitch, where play had again been stopped while a player was stretchered off. “Have you seen enough here? Can we go?”

  Arkady shrugged. “They’re your tickets.”

  “Let’s get out of here then. We have work to do.”

  *

  “I’ve always thought it to be an interesting question, from a philosophical perspective. It depends very much on one’s outlook on life.”

  Doctor Zapad leaned back in his chair and linked his fingers behind his head, preparing to expound at length. His shirt stretched against its buttons as he did so, gaping here and there to reveal glimpses of pale, rounded torso. He was younger-looking than Arkady had expected, somewhere in his late forties, with thinning, jet-black hair, and a rubbery, over-fed physique. Thick-framed, rhomboidal glasses slightly magnified his eyes, giving him an earnest, anxious appearance.

  They were in his office, sat either side of a cheap, laminated fibreboard desk. The place was meticulously tidy, without a sheet of paper in sight. Everything was retained digitally these days, Arkady supposed. Other than his computer, the only thing sitting between Zapad and his visitor was a small, free-standing plaque of embossed plastic, which read:

  Resurrection will be a task not of miracle but of knowledge and common labour.

  Arkady had expected more from Interval’s premises: something more high-end, more high-tech, better able to impress the company’s wealthy clientele. Instead, it operated out of a squalid little warehouse, across the river in Brateyevo District, sandwiched between a garage and a shop that sold cash registers. Aside from Zapad, the place seemed deserted. The facility’s permanent residents would be somewhere below, in the building’s crypt, their temperature readouts static and unchanging at -196oC. Like flies caught in amber, thought Arkady. Or steaks in the freezer.

  “If we are to understand life,” continued Zapad, “surely we must first understand death.
How can we know what life is, until we can say what it is not?”

  It had the sound of a lecture, perhaps an extract from one of the classes he taught at the University. Arkady gave the doctor a humouring nod and forced himself to play the role of good student.

  “In centuries gone by, death was defined by the absence of a detectable heartbeat or respiration. Perhaps ninety percent of the time, that was accurate—but think of the millions who went to their graves alive! Today, half our emergency room doctors say they have seen one or more instances of a patient, considered deceased, demonstrating spontaneous restoration of cardiac function. As a definition, it clearly will not do. The more proficient we become at resuscitation, the more clearly we demonstrate that absence of respiration is not proof of expiration.”

  He paused to make sure Arkady was following him.

  “In the modern era, we talk about brain death,” he continued, crossing his legs and gazing at the ceiling as he recited. “The absence of intracranial blood flow, the flattening of the EEG. Is that, then, what we consider life to be: recurrent spikes on a computer screen? It seems to me a very miserable description of our individuality, of this phenomenon we experience as ‘life.’

  “Those of us who confront this problem in our work prefer to take an information-theoretic view of mortality. So long as the structural systems which register our individuality persist, we are not destroyed. Our memories, our personalities, our experience of the world: all are encoded in the synaptic pathways of the brain. So long as the brain survives, they remain hypothetically retrievable.”

  “Hypothetically?” Arkady seized on the word.

  “Well, for the present, yes” said Zapad, sitting forward again. “But perhaps I should have said ‘logically’ retrievable. The data is there; what is missing is consciousness. Resuscitate the brain, and the person it describes should return.”