Angelopolis(96)

he had to remind himself that he was the master, and they, these beautiful beasts whose bodies were

stronger than his own, were his prisoners.

II

Under normal circumstances, Yana wouldn’t go to the entrance to the panopticon for any amount of

money. It had been more than two decades since she had last set foot at the nuclear waste facility

known as Chelyabinsk-40, and yet the structure still had the power to fill her with dread. While her

family had always been angelologists, tracing their first efforts to the time of Catherine the Great, she

had an uncle who had been imprisoned in the panopticon as a spy in the 1950s. Stripped of his rights,

he was thrown into an isolated holding cell. He worked both in the reactor and at cleaning up the

nuclear waste that leaked from the facility. The lakes and forests were saturated with radioactivity,

although the citizens of nearby villages were never informed. Yana’s uncle had wasted away with

cancer and been buried at the site. Now most of the trees around the facility were dead, leaving a

wasteland of ashy soil behind. The Russian government had only recently admitted to the nuclear

contamination—for decades it had denied that the reactor existed at all—and newly posted signs

warned of radioactivity. Yana wasn’t prone to doomsday scenarios, but she had the feeling that if the

world were going to end, then the disaster would emerge from that desolate, godforsaken place in

Chelyabinsk.

She halted abruptly before a fence ringed with barbed wire. Making her way into a corrugated steel

outbuilding—a rusted-out shack that served as an entrance to the east tunnel—she pulled out her

wallet and fingered her Russian Angelological Society identity card. At least she could identify

herself, which was more than she could say for the others, whose French identity cards would mean

nothing to these security goons. Getting them in would be difficult. For that she was going to need to

call in a favor or two.

A pair of burly, stupid-looking guards—Russian military flunkies hired by the society in Moscow

—greeted them.

“I have an appointment with Dmitri Melachev,” Yana said, imperiously, daring them to turn her

away.

A guard with bloodshot eyes and the smell of vodka on his breath looked her over, sneered, and

said, “You’re a bit old for Dmitri, honey.”

Another guard said, “His girls always come in the West entrance.”

“Tell him Yana Demidova is here.”

Yana crossed her arms and waited for the guard to place a call to Dmitri’s office. He relayed her

name to another functionary at the other end of the line and then waved them toward some plastic

chairs near an elevator. “Wait there. He’s sending someone up for you.”

Yana closed her eyes and took a deep breath, praying that Dmitri would give her a break. Before

she’d been assigned to angel hunting in Siberia, she and Dmitri had been childhood sweethearts in

Moscow. They had been deeply in love in the way that only teenagers can be—madly, blindly—and

had been engaged until Yana broke things off. Yana had helped Dmitri get his first job as a bodyguard

to one of the high-level angelologists. His career took off from there. Now he was the chief of

security in the panopticon, a man with clout over everyone and everything barring their path, and if

she had to put herself on the line a little to get them inside, then so be it. Besides, Dmitri owed her.

After fifteen minutes of waiting, the elevator doors parted and Dmitri himself emerged. Yana

hadn’t seen him for twenty years, but he hadn’t changed much. He was short and muscular, with sharp

blue eyes and streaks of gray in his hair. She could see that she had surprised him.

“Bring us to your office, Dmitri, and I’ll explain everything,” Yana said, meeting his eye, hoping

that he was still her friend after so many years.

Dmitri nodded and the security guards went to work. They searched the angelologists’ bags and

clothes, examined their weapons, and then allowed them to go into the lift. Dmitri pushed 31, and the

elevator began to descend, moving slowly deeper and deeper into the earth. Yana couldn’t say if it

were her imagination, but she felt as if the pressure of the earth were pushing into her, as if she had to

struggle to breathe.

Finally the doors parted, and they stepped into the east tunnel. Cool air blew through the shaft,

sending a shiver of freezing air over her. She’d forgotten about the descriptions she had heard of the

prison—it was cold, bereft of light, as if one would wither in its sterile darkness. They would walk

for a few minutes through a narrow tunnel, the neon lights playing above, and emerge at the other end.