Coercion (33 page)

Bloop … bloop … bloo
-bloop
...  God, he hated that sound.  Alex couldn’t see, or smell, or taste, so the maddening bubbles were all he had.  Bubbles and pain.  Was that laughter in the background?  Or was his mind conjuring phantoms, desperate for some diversion from the sound of his own ebbing life?

Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop
...  When he was nine, he had over inflated the back tire of his Schwinn Sting-Ray and blown it up by mistake.  Though his hands had stung, it was the “POP!—hiss” that scared him.  He had dropped the bike and run home from the Shell station with tears in his eyes...  His lungs felt like that tire now. 
Would they make the same POP!—hiss?

Bloobloobloobloo
…
  With his lungs at their limit his carotids began thrashing like shackled snakes and his neck began to crawl.  Then the vipers latched their fangs on his optical nerves and his eyes began to swell.  Alex could take no more. 
I’m sorry Anna
…

Icy water sluiced his sinuses, sending shockwaves surging through his skull.  As their reverberations tore at tissue and bone, cascading flashes of searing white pain climaxed in an electric crack, and then—

Alex jolted back into consciousness
and a screaming headache.  This was the third time he had gone through this, or was it the fourth...  It was tempting to pray for it all to be over, but Alex refused to let it come to that.  He still had a mission to complete.  People were relying on him.  One-hundred-sixteen names on a list.

As his world of pain came into focus, Alex realized that he was not hanging upside down this time
.  There was no barrel of icy water below.  That was progress.  The second environmental factor to break through the fog and fire to register on his bewildered mind was the horrible smell of sewer gas.  Then the events of the past few—hours?—began to come back to him: the dunkings, the beatings, the blackouts.

Alex sat up.  He was in a dark, damp box with crumbly concrete walls and a rusty iron door.  He
heard water dripping behind him but did not have the energy to turn around and inspect the source.  He did not want to move at all for fear of bumping his tortured feet again.  Tortured feet, that was it.  That was what had awakened him.  He had rolled in his delirium and slapped a raw foot against a rough wall.

As he sat there in the dark, images of the torture sessions began flashing through his mind like a medieval slide show.  Stop it, Alex.  Don’t think about what they’ve done to you, or what they might do to you next.  Focus on how you’re going to beat them.  He would have liked to say those words aloud, if for no other reason than to
learn he could still speak, but he knew they would be listening, so he kept the pep talk to himself.

He heard footsteps and felt his heart begin to race in response.  Then he heard a stubborn deadbolt scrape aside.  The door groaned open and Alex saw the bottom half of two beefy soldiers. 

“Get out here,” one soldier said.

Alex took a meditative breath and crab-walked out of the cell
trying to keep the weight off his wailing feet.  As soon as his shoulders cleared the door the soldiers lifted him off the ground by the arms and sat him down on a small triangular stool in the middle of the room.  They cuffed his hands behind him.

“Do not move.”

Alex was in a round room with eight doors.  Six of the doors were similar to the one that led to his own suite—short iron portals with heavy rusted hinges.  Misery had company here…  The six looked toward the center of the room like so many hopeless eyes, gloomily awaiting the answer to the question that now taunted Alex:  Who or what would be coming through the main door?

It was time to find out.  The s
oldiers opened the main door and took flanking positions outside.  Then a man in the uniform of a KGB general walked into the room.  He wore an appraising look on his handsome face that seemed to say, “So you’re Alex Ferris; let me have a look at you,” but he said nothing.  He just stared.

Alex recognized the general as the man who had captured him in the exit booth, but
this second glance also gave him the impression that he knew the face from somewhere else.  The plot was thickening.

The general took a long, slow walk around Alex’s stool, then grabbed a chair from the side of the room and sat it down a couple of feet in front of Alex.  “I am General
Vasily Karpov of the KGB.  You are Alex Ferris of the CIA.  It’s time we got acquainted.”

“Yes,” Alex said.  “I’ve come a long way to meet you,
Vasily.”  Alex saw a flash of displeasure cross his captor’s face at the disrespectful use of his first name.  There was something in the gesture that Alex found familiar.  Perhaps their paths had crossed in the Middle East.  Alex decided to put the momentary imbalance to work in his favor.  “I know you from the Middle East, don’t I Vasily?”

The guards tensed in the doorway like bulldogs on leashes.  They wanted a sign to attack, but none was forthcoming.  “No, you don’t.  Tell me, Alex, why are you here?”

Vasily was offering him the choice between a pleasant conversation with a general and immediate return to the company of Frick and Frack.  Smart guy.

Alex
realized he was about to play a game of high-stakes brinksmanship with his hands bound behind his back and half his cognitive power tied up with pain suppression.  Lovely.  “I’m investigating a murder.  What did you think I was doing here?”

“Whose murder?”

Alex knew it would be foolish to push for answers to his own questions, or to refuse outright to answer Vasily, but by asking questions himself, he was rewriting the rules.  Perhaps he would find the right button and provoke an unscripted response. 

Alex saw
Vasily pulling at the hair on the back of his fingers and realized he wasn’t the only one under stress.  Fancy that.  “My brother’s murder.  Did you kill him?”  Alex was not sure where he was going with this, he’d had no time to analyze or to plan.  He was flying blind on intuition, hoping he didn’t crash into a mountain or stall an engine.  It was dangerous, but he would be in danger no matter what he did.  Intuition was all he had.

“Of course not,”
Vasily said.  Then he smiled.  “My son did.”

“Your son?”

“My son, Victor.  Why—“

“Oh, you mean Jason?”  Alex thought he might throw
Vasily with that, but the general just nodded, appearing nonplussed.

“Why were you looking for your brother’s murderer here?”

“My brother left a note.  Was Yarik a friend of yours?”  This time Alex got a flinch, and this time he recognized the face.  Tumblers began falling into place, freeing locks in his mind and opening doors that Alex did not know were closed.  As they swung open, his situation fell under a completely new light.  Was it possible?  His heart screamed
No!
even as his mind concluded
Yes
.  There was a buzzing in the background, but Alex ignored it.  This was too big.  His mind was sprinting, his pores were sweating … the noise came again.

“Answer me!  What did the note say?”

With some effort Alex brought his eyes back into focus.  “Have you ever been to Geneva?”

“Your brother left you a note that asked if you had ever been to Geneva?”

“No, Vasily, I’m asking you: Have you ever been to Geneva?”

“Not in your lifetime.  Now—”

“The note said, ‘The problems come from Irkutsk.’  Alex’s voice was shallow—not the best for this sort of game, but it was all he could muster.  He looked up to watch Vasily’s face while he asked the next question, and saw that the general was giving him a funny look.  “When?”  Alex asked.  “When were you in Geneva?”

“Nineteen fifty-seven.”

Vasily kept talking, but Alex did not hear.  He could not process any more information than what his own mind was throwing at him.  If he weren’t a professional investigator … if it hadn’t been bothering him for so long …

Even as the soldiers picked him off the stool and wrapped the rope around his ankles, Alex h
ardly noticed what was going on outside the confines of his mind.

As
Vasily stood before the armored entrance to the interrogation suite, he found himself remembering the rumpled bed in Anna’s apartment and picturing what had happened there.  He was a professional interrogator, but this one was going to be personal.  Alex had crossed the line.

Alex had now enjoyed a full twenty-four hours of Knyaz hospitality.  According to the professionals, it took that long for a prisoner’s new reality to sink in.  Alex had already endured a rough stay, but now
Vasily would really start turning the screws, Spanish Inquisition style.

Vasily
was secretly handicapped as to how far he could turn.  Because he was going to frame Alex for killing Gorbachev, he could leave no traces of torture or coercion on Alex’s body.  That meant no chemicals, no cuts, no scrapes or holes or even significant bruises.  It was a shame, and it was a challenge, but Vasily was always up to those.

Alex’s round-the-clock torture began with a dark, damp, decrepit old cell that was too short to stand up in and uncomfortable to lie in.  Water dripped constantly from a small hole in the cell’s ceiling down to an open sewer pipe on the floor, one just large enough for the rats to use.  The
trickle was Alex’s drinking water, his washing water, and his toilet.  Aside from the drip … drip … drip, the only other attractions in the cell were the Judas peephole and a trough bolted to the door.  The trough caught the tasteless slop that a custodian poured in through a pipe once a day to keep Alex alive.  The pros said holding cells were supposed to dishearten, humble, weaken and drain their occupants.  Surely his version would rate a ten.

To further Alex’s mental destabilization,
Vasily was making every effort to remove all psychological grounding.  He established no routines, except for the lack thereof.  He scheduled feedings, beatings, and interrogation sessions to take place at odd intervals and to last different lengths of time.  Last night, for example, after one four-hour session, the guards returned Alex to his cell for just twelve minutes before coming to get him again.

The physical tortures
Vasily selected for Alex were classics, tried and true.  Bastinado, beating the bottoms of his feet, caused blinding pain without leaving marks.  As a fringe benefit, this torture also made it very painful to walk, thereby furthering Alex’s sense of helplessness and dashing his hopes of escape.  Vasily was pleased to receive a report that before the third session, just the sight of the cane was enough to make Alex whimper. 
Try and take my girl will you
…

Then there was the water torture. 
Vasily would have dreaded this one himself most of all.  To begin with, the guards hung Alex upside down by a rope with his hands bound to his sides.  Then, after a random interval, they dropped him head first and waist deep into a barrel of icy water.  There Alex thrashed about like a fish on a line until he passed out.  Then the guards pulled him out, revived him, and did it again.  Wash, rinse, repeat… 

Water torture was a great conditioner.  Each dunking was nearly the psychological equivalent of dying, and the headaches it caused were blinding.  Yet, like the bastinado, it left no marks when properly administered. 
Vasily would toss in a few other favorites as the week progressed, but for now it was an acceptable repertoire.  He kept a defibrillator on hand just in case.

Excruciating though these torments were, the physical part of the r
egimen was mundane enough.  For the most part, Vasily left it to the guards.  The psychological tortures, on the other hand, Vasily conducted personally.

Oddly enough, he felt a connection with Alex, an intuitive understanding of his gestures and moods.  Perhaps it was the side effect of a mutual love for the same woman.  Perhaps it was the intellectual parity
Vasily rarely shared.  In any case, that connection facilitated his ability to hone-in on Alex’s pressure points.

The unwelcome corollary was the fact that Alex seemed to have the same read on him.  From what
Vasily could gather, Alex had known someone like him either in Geneva or the Middle East.  Vasily had never been to the Middle East.  He had spent a summer in Geneva during his Academy years, but that was before Alex was born.  It occurred to Vasily that Alex might have cracked during the six-hour warm-up session that preceded their first chat.  It was time to find out.

The interrogation suite had a large round room at its center with eight doors around the perimeter.  The one
Vasily had just walked through opened to a corridor which led to the tunnel that connected the KGB offices with the Knyaz command center.  Six of the other doors led to holding cells, and the seventh was directly across from the entrance.  It had the international sign for radiation boldly painted on its thick leaden surface and looked as inviting as a coroner’s slab.

As
Vasily passed through the interrogation suite, he admired the props: the knives, the cables, and the dunking tank.  Medieval was the adjective that leapt to mind, but it was inadequate.  The dark art had progressed a lot in six hundred years.  He walked to the storage cabinet and selected a revolver.

Vasily
opened the leaden door to find Ferris placed as instructed.  He was alone in the room, sitting on a special small stool with his arms bound behind.  The stool’s tiny surface sloped forward, forcing Ferris to hold himself upright with either his feet, which were in agony from the bastinado, or his hands, which he had to twist painfully against the ropes to gain a hold.  Alex did not have the option of falling to the floor, as a taught noose ran from the ceiling down to his neck.

Vasily
found it effective to let his prisoners contemplate suicide; it distanced them that much further from their god.  Of course, he would not allow Alex to kill himself, but Alex didn’t know that.

Vasily
walked over to his prisoner and removed the noose.  Alex looked at him with an expression that resembled pity. 
Where was that coming from?  Perhaps Alex really had cracked.  Or perhaps that’s just what he wants you to think.
 
Ignore it
.

Vasily
began with the words that would henceforth start every session: “Perhaps we are meant to talk, Alex, perhaps we are not.”  Then he held up the revolver for Alex to see.  With some ceremony, he placed a single bullet in the chamber, closed it, and gave the revolver a long spin.  When it stopped he nodded with satisfaction, placed the barrel against Alex’s forehead, looked him in the eye, and said, “Remind you of Frank?”  Then he pulled the trigger. 
Click
.

There was that look again.  Ignore it!
  “All right, Alex, we talk,” Vasily said, putting deliberate indifference in his voice.  He removed the bullet from the gun, placed it back in his pocket, and set the gun down on the floor.

As with everything that took place during a professional interrogation,
the Russian roulette served a purpose.  Vasily had designed it to shatter any hope Alex might have that he or anything he had to say was particularly important.  Of course since Vasily needed Alex alive, there was no gunpowder in the bullet, but Alex didn’t know that either.

The room they were in was a very special one.  The sign on the door was for real.  This was the anteroom of a radiation chamber.  The army had used the machine in the adjacent lead-lined room during the 1950s to conduct experiments on the effects of radiation.  Stalin had wanted to know how long his men could continue to fight in a nuclear hot zone, and several hundred political prisoners had given him the answer. 

Vasily discovered the machine in 1983, gathering dust in the basement of one of the research centers under his purview.  A very different use for the machine had sprung to his mind, and he had it moved to this location beneath a veil of secrecy.

Acting on
Vasily’s orders, the guards had seated Alex so he faced the lead-shielded door and its radiation warnings.  He wanted his prisoner’s imagination to run wild with the possibilities.  It helped set the mood.

He sat down so that his lips were just a couple centimeters from Alex’s ear, and began whispering a story that would convince the Devil himself not to trifle with
Vasily Karpov.  “We’re ten meters below ground, Alex.  Above our heads is an abandoned nuclear power plant.  I’m sure you’ve seen it.  It is abandoned because people believe that flawed engineering led to the accidental release of dangerous amounts of radiation.  The locals also believe that accident caused the death of twenty-five of their own.”

Vasily
leaned back in his chair and pulled a cigar from his pocket.  He took his time trimming the end, letting Alex’s imagination plow forward before lighting it with a long cedar match.  After achieving the perfect glow, he dropped the chair back down onto all four legs and puffed a few times to get the tip a devilish red.  Then he leaned in and held the business end a few centimeters from Alex’s eye and asked: “Have you ever seen a man die from radiation poisoning?  It’s not a pretty sight.  Kind of like a severe sunburn that runs all the way through the body.  It’s horrible to see the macerated skin peeling off on the outside, but worse yet is the realization that the same process is taking place throughout the body, on the inside.”

Vasily
could tell by the stillness of the air that he had reached Alex with that image, so he continued.  “I’ll let you in on a little secret.”  He paused to exhale a long stream of smoke.  “There was no accident here.  The reactor above our heads had no leak.  I used the machine behind that door to create an illusion.”  He brushed the smoke aside with a magician’s wave.

Alex whipped his head around to strike at
Vasily with a venomous look, but Vasily just smiled back.  “You see, I needed to be sure that I would have a place to work in absolute secrecy.  Fences and pass codes only go so far if a man is determined to get around them.  You proved that yourself just yesterday.  The only foolproof way to keep people out is to make them want to keep out.  And want to keep out they do.  The locals would sooner visit a leper colony than poke around my headquarters.

“Unfortunately even the worst of memories fade, so every year I stoke the legend by disposing of a bothersome chap or two,” he gestured toward the leaded portal.  “In most ca
ses, I leave the scarecrows in until they’re, shall we say, fully cooked.  It takes about twenty minutes.  It is the humane thing to do, you see.  But those who have particularly offended me … well, I leave them
al dente
.

“Using a file prepared for Stalin, I determined that seven minutes is the optimum exposure
for such people.  It takes them twelve to twenty-four of the most agonizing hours imaginable to die.  Here, I’ve brought along a few photos that I thought might amuse you.”  He spread a series of grotesque body shots out on the floor and then stood up and moved aside to leave Alex with nothing but the photos to focus on.

Alex squirmed at the sight of the horrific images; people always did. 
Vasily paced behind him, continuing in the same, nonchalant monotone.  “We immediately take the irradiated trespassers back to the city so they can spend their final hours refreshing the memories of the locals on the dangers of climbing the fence.”

Vasily
saw hope flash across Alex’s face, right on cue.  “I can see what you’re thinking, Alex, but you’re wrong.  There is no chance that you would be able to reveal anything during your final hours.  After that much radiation the human mind is not capable of focusing on anything but the pain.”  Vasily took a long draw on his cigar.  “Are you beginning to see where you could fit into all of this, Alex?”

Vasily sat in his KGB office, enjoying his lunch and reflecting on what he had learned during the three-hour session with Alex.  He was concerned that Alex had help inside Russia.  The surprising thing was, that although Alex admitted to receiving assistance from a man named Andrey Demerko, he truly knew almost nothing about why.  Of course, it had not been easy for Alex to convince Vasily of that fact, but in the end Vasily had to accept it.  No man would have endured that pressure if the release valve were at his disposal.  All Alex had was a name—backed-up by the identity papers they had found on him—and a description.

Vasily
had run Andrey Demerko’s name through the computers while Alex was unconscious.  The result was both startling and concerning.  He was the Foreign Minister’s Chief of Staff.  Why would such a man want to help an American private investigator?  Vasily would mull that one over tonight, Scotch in hand, before the chessboard.

Vasily
knew precious little about Foreign Minister Sugurov.  He was the one member of Gorbachev’s Cabinet who refused protection from the Guards Directorate, preferring instead to use troops from his own alma mater, the Army.  Enter Demerko.  Vasily used to have one of Sugurov’s deputies in his pocket, Leo somebody, but the man had died a few months earlier when a small plane collided with his helicopter, on a Knyaz errand no less.  Vasily had not gotten around to replacing Leo yet.  Apparently, that was a bad move.  He made a note to plant someone in Sugurov’s camp ASAP.