Sverdlovsk, USSR
January 1979
“Where are you dragging me today?” complained Mako. Shivering in the back seat of Boris Nikolayevich’s official black Volga, he sipped hot coffee from a thermos and glanced over at the first secretary. A glass partition separated them from the driver in the front seat and allowed them to speak freely.
“You’ll see when you get there,” replied Yeltsin. “This is going to be the most interesting day you’ve ever spent in Russia, and that includes your degenerate sauna parties at the outdoor swimming pool in Moscow. I hope you’ve been taking notes.”
For once in his CIA career, events were moving along faster than Mako Sloane would have preferred. He was only now coming to realize how profoundly Boris Nikolayevich had been affected by the perfidy of the KGB, and how he hungered for revenge. Not just personal revenge against the conspirators, but revenge against an entire system that he believed had allowed this to happen. Although it would have been a coup of unprecedented proportions, Mako tried to discourage Yeltsin from involving him in any harebrained fantasy of wreaking havoc on the Soviet system from within. Mako was well acquainted with the impulsiveness of the man and feared his new-found enthusiasm might put Nastya and Vasiliy at risk. The zealous self-righteousness of a religious convert had no place in the role that Boris Nikolayevich had assumed.
“Look at it this way, Misha,” said Boris Nikolayevich. “You couldn’t have left Sverdlovsk yet anyway. After what happened at the dacha, we’ve tightened security in the entire oblast, looking for some of the conspirators who escaped. You couldn’t get a hundred meters from the apartment without being stopped at a checkpoint. If you weren’t with me, no telling what might happen to you. So just sit back and enjoy the ride.”
“Got no choice, I guess, but don’t think you’re getting out of finishing the chess game we started at breakfast. The Two Knights Defense always causes you problems, doesn’t it? Your last move was an obvious blunder.”
Boris Nikolayevich turned to his young friend in disbelief. “Misha, think about what I’m showing you. Forget the chess game! Yesterday I invited you to my private classified briefing on the anthrax outbreak. This was documentary proof that we are violating every international treaty on biological warfare there is, and I practically have to force you to attend the presentation. Today I’m going to show you a truly revolutionary project that has profound implications for U.S.—Soviet relations, and you’re more interested in chess. Sometimes I wonder if you’re the same man who saved my family a few days ago!”
“Listen, Boris Nikolayevich. I understand everything you’re doing and why. But you need to rein yourself in,” warned Mako. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to give those KGB bastards reason to come after you again. Only this time it will be the Second Chief Directorate from Moscow, and I won’t be around to put out the fire.”
They left Sverdlovsk behind and drove due east for twenty kilometers. Tall pine trees lined both sides of the highway forming an opaque wall of green. Neither spoke. Boris Nikolayevich was offended that Mako did not appreciate what he was doing for his young friend. Mako in turn was exasperated with Boris Nikolayevich and thought the risk he was running far exceeded the intelligence payoff. Yeltsin’s driver slowed and turned right onto a small unmarked paved road that disappeared into the forest. Around the first bend in the road they encountered a checkpoint. Two more in quick succession made Mako sit up straight. Maybe this would be interesting after all, he thought. That’s a lot of security for a research institute, even a classified one.
As they approached a cluster of buildings ahead, Mako read a large sign on the side of the road, ‘INSTITUTE OF APPLIED GENETICS.’ He glanced over at Boris Nikolayeivch with the unspoken question. Yeltsin just smiled back.
“I’ll let the director give his dog and pony show,” he offered in explanation.
The Volga pulled up into a circular driveway and stopped at the entrance to the main building of the institute. The director and several of his deputies were lined up in front of the entrance wearing white lab coats. Boris Nikolayevich and Mako crawled out of the cramped quarters of the Volga’s back seat and shook hands with the welcoming committee. The director approached Boris Nikolayevich and greeted him deferentially. He turned to Mako and offered his limp hand in introduction.
“Suslov, Nikolay Mikhaylovich, a pleasure.”
Mako took his hand and nodded his head politely without introducing himself as Boris Nikolayevich had instructed him.
“Welcome to the Institute of Applied Genetics,” said Suslov and led his two guests inside.
Nikolay Mikhaylovich Suslov was the nephew of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, Politburo member and party ideologist. That, in and of itself, should have grabbed Mako’s attention and hinted at the high level of political support this particular institute obviously enjoyed.
Mako observed Suslov with amusement. His outward appearance was disheveled with his baggy, wrinkled trousers and worn-out tennis shoes. His long, scraggly hair, unkempt in the best of times, looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. He was the very embodiment of the eccentric scientist and walked around the institute with a diapered rhesus monkey perched on his shoulder, the stench of simian feces following him like a putrid cloud. The monkey, Suslov intimated, represented the crowning achievement of his own scientific career. Sloane stifled a yawn and was singularly unimpressed. A stinking monkey wearing a diaper, for Christ’s sake!
The briefing was unexpectedly interesting, despite Mako’s expectations to the contrary. Dr. Suslov and his team of mad geneticists were attempting to clone a human being, although for what purpose Mako could not imagine. Using newly discovered AEDT (Accelerated Embryo Development Technology), the institute had already created adult clones of a number of species including, rats, dogs, and monkeys. Problems understandably had been encountered with the new technology including the inability of the cloned individual to function effectively as an adult of the species, and the failure of the institute to halt the rapid aging of the clone. Life spans of the cloned individuals were shockingly short. To date, efforts to transfer adult learned behaviors to the cloned individuals through the use of brain extracts and DNA modification had proved unsuccessful, but research was continuing. Mako thought the institute’s research smacked of science fiction and that its goals were unattainable. The director was a believer, though, and his voice was imbued with passion and unbridled enthusiasm. His devotion to the cloning project obviously had become an unhealthy obsession. Suslov, rather optimistically in Mako’s opinion, believed the institute would produce a fully functioning adult human clone within ten years.
Boris Nikolayevich asked a number of questions following the briefing, but Mako appeared detached, almost bored. His lack of apparent appreciation for the institute’s extraordinary successes offended the director. After answering the last of Yeltsin’s questions, he turned to Mako, pointing and shaking his finger at the inattentive VIP guest.
“In ten years I will be able to take a single hair from your head and produce a fully developed, exact genetic copy of yourself. Your own mother won’t be able to tell the difference.”
Mako had a headache and was impatient. “You’ve been reading too many science fiction books, Nikolay Mikhaylovich, or maybe you started drinking too early today,” Mako commented tactlessly.
Mako left that night without warning on the midnight train to Moscow. His departure was sudden and completely unexpected, at least for Nastya and Vasiliy. Mako had confided in Boris Nikolayevich on their way back into town from the institute, and both had agreed it would be better this way.
After a full week in Sverdlovsk, Sloane was emotionally drained and had no desire to go through Nastya’s farewell theatrics, which he knew from experience would be dramatic. He had done it before, of course. Never with Nastya, but there had been others since then. Usually, it was to just to dodge the melodrama of saying goodbye. Sometimes it was to avoid the recriminations of a jilted lover, and on several forgettable occasions it had been to evade the fury of a jealous husband, whose very existence had come as an unpleasant surprise to Mako. Not that he eschewed on principle a tryst with a married woman. No, Mako Sloane was not that small-minded and found affairs with married women far less complicated than encounters with those who viewed him as a prospective husband.
Nastya was as close to a wife as he had ever known, but Mako reluctantly had come to the conclusion that submitting to the marital domestication process would have a deleterious effect on his psyche. It would be, in his estimation, an intellectual and emotional emasculation. There wasn’t much of a chance of either taking place.
He had become quite attached to Vasiliy, however, and the boy followed him around like a puppy. But here too, Mako viewed fatherhood as a random biological event rather than something that required a commitment or presumed any responsibility on his part. Vasiliy would have to find his way in the world without a father, and Mako didn’t overly concern himself with feelings of guilt or pangs of conscience.
Mako thought about Suslov’s unbridled enthusiasm and parting words as he relaxed over a cup of hot Georgian black tea in the first class SV compartment of the Trans-Siberian as it pulled out of the Sverdlovsk main train station and headed toward Moscow. Crazy son of a bitch, thought Mako as he stretched out on the single bed and recalled his last trip on this very train just a few months earlier.
He had already cruised the adjacent sleeping cars for possible female companions and found the pickings slim at best. He decided for once to forego the usual Trans-Siberian tryst to which he had become accustomed in his travels across the fertile hunting grounds of provincial Russia, and reached into his briefcase to peruse the classified report on the cloning project Boris Nikolayevich had furtively handed to him when they bid each other an almost tearful farewell back in Sverdlovsk. Mako wanted to review the report and destroy it before the train arrived in Moscow in a little more than 24 hours.
The pine forests of the impenetrable taiga flashed by outside his compartment window, and the inexorable clattering of the rails produced a relaxing, almost hypnotic effect on him. Mako browsed the executive summary of the report entitled ‘On Efforts to Produce a Human Clone’ and labeled in red ‘Sovershenno Sekretno.’ The report, Mako had to admit to himself, was astonishing, but only from the point of view of science fiction or to contemplate what insanity man was capable of.
Mako smiled as he remembered the diapered monkey Suslov allowed to perch on his shoulders, completely oblivious to the malodorous creature and the horrified reactions of visitors to the institute. The monkey must be one of Suslov’s ill-conceived offspring, realized Mako as he closed the report and began to shred the paper into small pieces.
As he finally dozed off in his private compartment, Sloane looked forward to crossing back into Finland and briefing both Herrin and Mallory on his extraordinary mission. He wondered how much they had picked up about the incredible events in Sverdlovsk and smiled involuntarily as he speculated on their incredulous reactions to Mako’s first-hand accounts of the assassination attempt. If he had composed the operational scenario himself, he couldn’t have come up with a more improbable, yet successful resolution to the mission. Mako wondered when his luck would run out. In his business he knew it was only a matter of time.