DeSola shook his head. “You have declared war against people whose business interests run counter to your own,” he said. “You were at an impasse—business could not continue to grow as long as they controlled the neighborhoods and the industries that they did. You need more than insurance fraud, extortion, banks and heroin. You need marijuana, cocaine, prostitution, the automobile trade. True?”
Nokivov inclined his head. “Yes, of course.”
“Then war was inevitable,” DeSola said bluntly. He spoke with his hands. “The final trigger doesn’t matter— it had to happen. And now that it has, it must be won.”
“And your interest in this is purely revenge?” Nokivov asked, settling back into his chair, as if he anticipated a long conversation.
“Not purely,” DeSola said, shrugging. He waved a hand to indicate his lavish home, then leaned forward as if he were about to take Nokivov into his confidence. “I am a legitimate businessman. Oil, shipping, real estate— I don’t need the criminal activities that they do. They believe that since I am a Mexican, I should be on their side.”
He grunted and shook his head wearily. “In fact, having them running all over the landscape committing crimes puts me in a worse position—it casts an unfavorable spotlight on all Mexican and Mexican-American business activities.”
Nokivov said, “The same as with the Italians.”
“Yes. I have ships delayed all the time because DEA agents are searching them from stem to stern looking for drugs. People in my employ are stopped by INS agents because of their skin and hair color, when they’re trying to get to work or running errands for me. I pay my people well, and it’s insulting to them and to me to be treated this way.”
“But you do not seek redress within the Mexican power structure?”
“Neither within it, nor outside of it,” DeSola countered. “I understand the historical forces at work here, and the economic ones. My people have come to California for generations, seeking fortune, a better life.” He looked pensive for a moment, perhaps remembering his own family history. Nokivov respected his silence, and waited for the other man to continue.
“They don’t always find it,” DeSola said softly. “They move into ghettos, or purely Mexican neighborhoods. There are turf wars. They are unemployed, or underemployed, and they turn to crime to feed their families, to put bread upon their tables. Their fathers, their uncles, their brothers were in these gangs, and they grow up in them.”
“As with the original Mafia,” Nokivov asserted again.
“I understand it,” DeSola went on, “but I don’t like it and I want to see an end to it in my lifetime. This is where you come in. There has never been a criminal organization like yours in the United States. You have the potential to break the back of the Mexican gangs once and for all— to liberate my people from generations of servitude.” He’d thought about this a lot, and had come to the conclusion that the criminal gangs would continue as long as there was profit to be gained. He wanted to cut into that profit, to make it more expensive to stay in a gang than to get out of it and go into legitimate business. If that meant that the Russians controlled the nation’s criminal interests, that was all right with him. He knew somebody would. He just didn’t want it to be his people. “I want you to do this,” he said.
“It will mean that many will die,” Nokivov promised him.
“That many more will live free of this scourge,” De-Sola said firmly. “It’s worth it to me.”
“How do you propose to help us in this action?”
DeSola rose and crossed to a large safe that stood on the floor behind his desk. He spun the dial quickly, and opened it. He removed a large canvas bag from inside it, brought the bag back to the glass-topped coffee table, and unzipped it.
It was filled with hundreds.
“This is a million dollars,” he said. “Consider it a down payment. I have forty-nine more bundles like this, set aside. Fifty million dollars cash. With that money, I expect that you can buy the best weapons, and soldiers to use them. Information. Intelligence. The law. The courts. I don’t care if they die or go to jail—I just want them gone. Echo Park, the Latin Cobras here in Sunnydale, the Inglewood Raza . . . all of them. You can start with the Cobras, though.”
“You understand that I do have an agenda of my own,” Nokivov said, intrigued by this man’s proposition . . . and by his money.
“Of course.” DeSola gazed at him. “I believe that your agenda complements my own. I don’t think there’s anything you want that would inhibit you from acting toward what I want.”
Nokivov thought. He didn’t think DeSola was wrong. And he could certainly use DeSola’s money. The industrialist was right—fifty million could buy a lot of help, and he saw a certain poetic justice to taking it from the hands of a pure capitalist.
He accepted the bag from DeSola’s hands and forced it closed around the bulging stacks of cash, zipping it tight. It was heavy—ten thousand hundred-dollar bills had real weight.
“We have an agreement, then,” he said. He extended his hand, and DeSola accepted it.
With this kind of backing, the war might be brief indeed. And when it was over, Teodor Nokivov would be the undisputed crime boss of southern California.
Then the real work could begin.
Chapter 12
Los Angeles, 2000
ALINA VISHNIKOFF SCRUBBED HER FACE, DRIED IT ON A fluffy towel, and then left the bathroom. She had her own bedroom and her own bathroom, and while these rooms didn’t look like the rooms she’d seen on television, she understood from her parents that this sort of luxury had been virtually unknown when they had grown up in the Soviet Union. She had complained, saying that the rooms on TV shows were much more colorful and lively, filled with posters and pillows and stuffed animals, and why couldn’t she go shopping for some of those things? Her father had responded by taking the television out of the house altogether, and telling her she had work to do. Alina always had work to do. It was, in many ways, the only life she had ever known. She knew that other sixteen-year-olds went to school. She never had. Her mother and father had taught her what they thought was important that she know—Russian and English, Soviet history, mathematics and science. This had all taken place in the house here at Mount Vernon and Fairway—her memory of life before coming to America, of living in Bulgaria in that tiny, cramped apartment above a butcher shop, was limited to brief flashes that rose in her memory now and again.
Before she went into the lab this morning—now that her mind had been set down this path by the fluffy richness of the towel, one of the few capitalist luxuries her parents allowed themselves—Alina returned to her room. All of the necessities were there, but little else: a bed, a closet for her clothes, a dresser for other things, a bookshelf for her textbooks, a desk at which to study. In the desk there was a drawer, and on the bottom of the drawer—underneath the bottom, so she had to pull it out, empty it, and turn it over—she had taped a photograph. Alina knew enough about American teenagers to know that most of them would have taped a singer or an actor, a celebrity of some kind, there, if one were going to tape anything. But celebrities meant nothing to Alina Vishnikoff—even when she heard the names, she had little idea who they were or what they represented.
The picture Alina had taped there, torn discreetly from a magazine that some visitor or worker had left in the house, was of a place. This place was called, according to the magazine, the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon, she gathered, was a special place to Americans, and she could see why. It was an amazing sight—a vast rip in the fabric of the Earth, a mile across and immensely deep.
In this photo she couldn’t see the whole thing; it clearly extended beyond the photograph’s borders in both directions, and the bottom wasn’t even visible. There were some gnarled evergreen trees in the foreground, and then the earth just dropped away, and across the enormous expanse there was a far wall, with striations of red and pink and brown and white.
She had studied eno
ugh geology at her parents’ direction to know that she was looking at a geologic record of the planet itself, each band of color representing some era in which sediment piled up atop the last layer. She suspected the whole thing had been revealed over the eons by the river cutting through the middle of it—a powerful river indeed, if it were true. That, or an earthquake of impossible magnitude, were the only forces she could imagine would have torn the Earth’s crust in that way.
In addition to the purely geological spectacle the picture represented, and the evidence of incredible forces beyond any control of humankind, there was a third aspect to it that drew her—there were no people in evidence. Certainly one had taken the photo, and the assumption she gathered from the bits of the article she had seen was that the Grand Canyon was much visited by people from across the globe. But there were no human habitations present.
Alina had never been—except crossing the ocean in an airplane, a trip of which she had little memory—in a place from which one could not see the houses of others. She had never stood on a spot where all you could see in every direction were the works of nature instead of man. Someday, she thought, I should like to stand there, just there where the photographer stood, and turn in a circle and see nothing, nothing at all, that was built by people.
As she dreamt about it, her gaze happened to fall on the simple dial clock that stood on her desk, and she realized she was perilously close to being late to the lab. She hurriedly replaced the drawer and tossed the contents back into it. She’d reorganize them later.
She shut the drawer and rushed across the house to the lab, which was downstairs in a room that would once have been a dining room. The upstairs was family space, but the downstairs had been transformed over the years into a warren of offices, file rooms, computer rooms, and the lab. From the outside the house looked like any suburban ranch house, but on any given day more than a dozen people worked inside it.
Today, she had been told, would be the beginning of something big. The People’s Project would—finally, her father said with a beaming smile—reach fruition.
She was late, and her parents were waiting for her when she got there. But the occasion was too momentous, too joyous for their anger to last. She bowed to them both and took her place behind the Reality Tracer. This version of the machine—about the size of a toaster oven, all stainless steel and illuminated control panels—was warmed up and hummed softly. Her mother came forward and attached electrodes that dangled from it on cables to Alina’s forehead and temples, and wrapped a cuff around her upper arm, like a blood pressure test, except that this cuff was also connected to the Tracer. It was tight, but not uncomfortably so, and Alina nodded to indicate that she was ready.
She had been told the full history of the People’s Project since childhood—since it became apparent, at least, that she was the missing piece that could make it work. She knew that Soviet scientists, monitoring schizophrenics in insane asylums across the Soviet Union, had noticed a surprising similarity to many of the so-called visions they saw and voices they heard. They catalogued these similarities, and then the study was expanded.
People who saw things, or heard things, but were not institutionalized, were included in the study. Then writers and artists, poets and musicians—people who pulled images and ideas seemingly from the ether—were drawn in, when it became apparent that some of their ideas resembled the visions in intriguing ways. Fictional characters, fairy-tale images from great paintings, all seemed to have doppelg‰ngers in the lunatic ravings of the insane.
And so the theory was put forth: what if these people weren’t seeing specters from the depths of their own imaginations, but were instead tapping in somehow to other worlds, other realities where these things were real?
As the study was enlarged further, theoretical physicists got into the act with their own concepts. One of these, which quickly earned wide acceptance, was parallel universes. In some way, this theory claimed, whenever a person made a life-changing decision, a new reality was created in which the decision was made in a different way. The result was an infinite number of alternate realities, some in which evolution itself progressed down remarkably different paths.
There were universes, it was hypothesized, in which monsters ruled the world and people were enslaved to them, or prey, or had ceased to exist altogether. There were other universes in which people had developed amazing powers, either physical, mental, or both.
Whatever could be imagined by humans existed somewhere, in one of those realities.
And if people could see and hear fragments of those realities, or “alternities,” as some began to call them, then people could travel to them, through them.
Which was where the Reality Tracer came in.
If travel to these alternities was possible, then a device of some kind could theoretically be developed to open the doors. The military applications were immediately apparent—monsters or unlimited numbers of soldiers could be imported into our world to fight wars; enemy soldiers or unfriendly politicians could be dispatched easily into other worlds. And there were peaceful uses to which the Tracer could be put as well, extending the scope of human knowledge, curing disease, putting an end to the fear of death.
The only problem was, the machine couldn’t be made to work.
They got closer and closer. They learned how to create portals, but they couldn’t get anything to go through and come back. Experiments showed that when they did put things through, they were changed, distorted horribly. It seemed impossible to pass through in the same state as one left one’s own reality. No one dared test it on humans, since the results were likely to be so grisly.
But the Soviets spent decades on the problem, and gradually made progress. Someone named Markov, with whom her parents had worked, made the final connection—positing that since the people who had first exposed the existences of these other realities achieved mental connections with them, then the power of the mind had to be brought into the overall equation. So he tapped the USSR’s most powerful psychics and hooked them up to the Tracer to direct its field mentally.
Still, no luck, although there seemed to be marginal improvement in the generation of portals.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the birth of Alina to parents who were both gifted psychics, her mother Valerya had thought to test Alina’s own psychic abilities. What they found astonished both of them. Her powers far outstripped their own—as an accident of her birth, Alina was perhaps the most powerful psychic the Soviet Union had ever seen.
So from a young age, they had worked with her, developing her abilities, hooking her up to the Tracer to test and retest their theories. They had come closer and closer to this day, the day that practical application of all they had worked on would come into play. There were still limitations, grave ones, but they couldn’t be fully explored until the system was operational.
For instance, there was a distinct geographical limitation—the Tracer couldn’t be made to pluck the president of the United States out of his existence, unless it was located within a few miles of the White House. And even then, the Tracer’s “aim” was inaccurate. Alina could direct it at, say, politicians, but the chances of snagging the president were no greater than of capturing the president of a high school class.
These difficulties could be overcome, her parents believed, with trial and error, with practice. Live, online practice, not continual testing. She had to be doing it, for real.
So it would begin. Once begun, her parents feared, the world would soon know of the Tracer. The United States had been the ideal place to work, its much-vaunted privacy laws allowing them to function free of government interference. But once the officials knew what was in their midst, the Vishnikoffs were sure, they would swoop down and take it away. There was only one place that the Reality Tracer would be safe, one place where the Vishnikoffs would be valued and allowed to continue their work.
A Socialist Soviet Union.
Restored to it
s former, pre-Andropov glory.
It could happen—it would happen. But it would be expensive.
Only one nation had the money to rebuild it, to allow Russia to recover from its current economic blight, and draw together the satellite states that had split off from it. The United States had the capital. The Vishnikoffs, and their supporters, including Teodor Nokivov and his arm of the Mafiya, had the will and the inspiration.
So the Reality Tracer’s first job would be blackmail. Beginning today, Alina would begin snatching the youth of Los Angeles. When public terror and concern had peaked, the Vishnikoffs would demand billions, and assistance, and acceptance for the new Soviet state.
The Americans would have no choice but to agree, or continue to lose their teens one by one.
A youth-oriented culture like the West’s would never stand for that. Without teens, the economy would grind to a halt. They would discuss it for a few days, but they would give in.
Alina set to work.
As her captors bathed her, Salma de la Natividad still didn’t know if she was a princess or a prisoner.
She had been alone in the big room for almost an hour, she guessed. Finally the doors had opened and people had begun to spill in. They chattered with each other, and made conversational sounds at her, though she couldn’t understand a word of it. They seemed to have no interest in learning her tongue, or teaching her theirs. It was almost like she didn’t really matter, except as a way to pass the time.
Now, nine lovely young women in sky-green robes held Salma’s arms behind her back. When she tried to struggle free, they only held her more rigidly, laughing amongst themselves at her efforts. An army of muscular men in loincloths, their heads and bodies shaved, brought in tank after tank of hot water, which they poured into a large, hammered metal tub.
The tub full and steaming, the men left the room and the young women stripped off Salma’s clothes. One of them sprinkled petals from a large yellow flower into the tub, and Salma found the fragrance as they struck the warm water sweet and calming. Salma tried to break free again, convinced that she was being somehow drugged by the flower petals, but she couldn’t break their grips and she gave up after a moment.