Red Star Burning

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“It’s coming down to me,” declared Maxim Radtsic.

Elana stopped with her knife and fork suspended before her, gazing at her husband across the dinner table. “You weren’t responsible for it going wrong, Maxim Mickailovich: not for any of it.”

“I’m directly below the Director, held the position the longest: even before Gorbachev or Yeltsin came to power.”

“What about Andrei?”

“Andrei has to come too.”

“There must be some other way.”

“There isn’t.”

“I don’t want to. Andrei won’t want to, either. You can’t do this to him.”

“It’ll save us. Andrei, too.”

“How?”

“Trust me.”

“I’m frightened.”

“Just trust me,” said Radtsic, hating the words as he uttered them.

“Kill myself?” echoed Charlie, derision and astonishment combined.

“That’s what I think you’ll end up doing.”

“Bollocks,” rejected Charlie. At the back-too often in the forefront-of his mind had always hovered the expectation of dying. But violently: from a breath-sucking assassin’s bullet or the burn of a back-alley knife or a shattering explosion. But never of killing himself, not even while confronting his now fossilized existence.

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