The Doomsday Box (19 page)

He began to examine the other rooms and ran into difficulties immediately. Those closest to Opal's room were all offices—in one of them there was a balding man with glasses working late at a massive desk—but none contained Michael. When he returned to his earlier plan of swooping quickly through the building walls floor by floor, he soon discovered he could not keep mental track of where he'd been. Almost every room was an office, almost all were occupied, and there was a sameness about both the paintwork and the people that made one blend into another. With a sinking feeling he realized that if he was going to search this massive building properly, he needed a different approach.

For a while he tried staying in the corridor he'd found, moving from one door to another, sticking his head through the woodwork to find out what was inside, withdrawing when there was no sign of Michael, then moving to the next door. It was painfully slow, and he quickly discovered branching corridors with their own closed doors and not a single marking he could understand. To make matters worse, the KGB seemed to work twenty-four hours a day, for after an initial lull, he discovered the main corridors were often filled with people, men and women, some in uniform, some in civilian clothing, all busily going about their business. It was confusing in the extreme. It occurred to him within five minutes that he could easily have missed Michael half a dozen times.

Danny stopped to think, pressed instinctively against a corridor wall to avoid a group of women walking past. Now that he'd confirmed Opal was here, did he really need to find Michael as well? They'd both been seized by the same men, which meant Michael had to be in this building somewhere. Surely that was the only thing that mattered? Fuchsia was right when she'd said they needed help from the embassy—some sort of diplomatic approach to assure the Soviets that Opal and Michael were harmless and should be released at once. And now that he was absolutely sure their friends were being held by the KGB, they could get that help. No need to mention time lines or astral projection, of course; they could simply claim they'd seen Opal and Michael taken into the big yellow building in Lubyanka Square and let the embassy put two and two together. Let the embassy figure out why, as well. Danny certainly had no idea why the KGB had taken an interest in them. What he needed to do was get back to his physical body at once and see if they could get a meeting with the ambassador.

All the same he hesitated. Something was niggling at the back of his mind, demanding he should find out if Michael was all right. Danny closed his eyes and sank through six floors.

When he opened them again, he was in Lubyanka Prison.

T
he contrast with the upper offices was striking. Danny found himself in another corridor, this time with plain brickwork and a stone floor relieved only by a strip of plain linoleum. Here too there were doors every few yards, but unlike the wooden doors above, they were faced in metal with grilles at head height. Somewhere, distantly, someone was screaming. The noise echoed hollowly.

Unlike the bustling corridors above, this passageway was empty. Perhaps the prison officials did not work in the evenings, unlike their administration comrades. The scream came again, and Danny felt himself go chill. Perhaps
somebody
was still working. He didn't think the victim was Michael—the sound was too high-pitched. But then again, he had no idea how Michael would sound if he was . . . if he was being . . .

With huge reluctance, almost without willing it, Danny began to move toward the sound. He floated rather than walked, passing easily, almost mindlessly, through obstructing walls and doorways (and on one occasion a short stone staircase). He had mental pictures of some hideous torture chamber, but when he reached his destination, he found himself in another passageway, almost identical to the one he'd just left. The screaming, now almost continuous, was coming from a cell a little way along. Sick to his stomach, Danny floated down the corridor and entered the cell.

There was an old man inside, seated on a wooden bench and wearing only prison trousers. There were ancient scars across his chest and arms and what looked like a burn on the index finger of his right hand. One ankle was manacled to a chain attached to the foot of his bench, but the chain looked long enough to allow him to walk anywhere inside his cell if he wanted to.

The old man looked up as Danny entered, and for a moment Danny could have sworn the prisoner had seen him. He stared at Danny fixedly for a moment, wild eyes underneath an unruly shock of gray-white hair, then began a mewling sound deep in his throat that rose in pitch and volume until it became another scream that went on and on impossibly, as if he had an infinite reserve of breath. There was no one else in the cell, no reason for the old man to be screaming.

Except memories, Danny thought.

Danny withdrew. There was nothing he could do for the prisoner, nothing he could do for anyone while he was in his astral body. Except observe and hope it took a long time to drive anyone as mad as the old man. Michael had only been here for a few hours. If Michael was here at all.

For the next three-quarters of an hour, Danny searched. It was far easier here in one way than it had been above. The prison was a great deal smaller than even a single floor of the building above, obviously no more than a converted basement. Part of it was taken up by a guardroom where two uniformed men smoked and played a listless game of cards. Part, which made Danny sick to his stomach, was devoted to a modern torture chamber, currently mercifully empty. There were also several offices (radio sets seemed to be standard equipment) and a long, narrow, cramped kitchen, which surprised him until he thought about it: even KGB prisoners had to be fed. But while there were exactly one hundred and ten cells—he counted them carefully—fewer than thirty were occupied.

None that he found was occupied by Michael.

Danny felt a surge of relief that almost made him dizzy. Many of the occupied cells housed prisoners in overalls or civilian clothes who would not have been out of place in a conventional jail. Their cells had bunks and toilet facilities, and a few were equipped with tables, chairs, and, in a handful, even bookshelves. Their occupants looked frightened, bored, miserable, as prisoners usually did, but showed no immediate signs of severe ill treatment. But in sharp contrast with these prisoners, there were others who were half-dressed, bruised, and bloody from what were clearly recent beatings. Some were shackled in uncomfortable positions. Two were actually hanging by their arms from the ceiling. It was clear the KGB was ruthless in the methods it employed. He was glad Michael had not been forced to endure them.

Danny floated upward into the ground-floor foyer of the headquarters building above. He'd more than half decided to head back to Fuchsia in the embassy, but it still niggled that even though he was fairly sure now Michael was safe and unharmed, the fact was, he hadn't been able to find him. On impulse he decided to try a few more rooms at random, and since he'd visited none at all on the ground floor, he thought he might start there.

Unlike those on the other floors, the ground-floor doors were large, paneled, and painted a glossy white. Danny passed through the nearest of them and discovered he was in a spacious, well-furnished conference room where a meeting was already taking place. The room was dominated by a large, highly polished oak table strewn with maps. Around it stood several men in army uniforms, some of whom Danny recognized from his meanderings upstairs as KGB. Beyond them, lounging in a leather armchair, was a heavily bearded man in battle fatigues. His uniform carried no insignia of rank, but he was holding a brandy glass and smoking a fat cigar, which in Danny's book meant he had to be pretty important. Near him, another armchair was occupied by a civilian in his early fifties, the only man in the place out of uniform. Between them sat a nervous, fresh-faced young man whose uniform looked brand-new.

“¿Cuándo son enviados?”
The bearded man took a sip of his brandy and smiled broadly. His teeth were very white against the black of his beard.

The nervous young man in uniform leaned across to whisper something to the civilian, who nodded soberly, then looked at his cigar-smoking companion.
“Skoro. Yest' diplomaticheskȏ tonkosti zavershit' v protivnom sluchae amerikantsy ne budet dovolen.”
As the young man translated, the bearded man began another slow smile, which quickly changed into a hearty laugh.

Danny lost interest. Without Russian or Spanish—it sounded like Spanish the bearded man was speaking—Danny had no idea at all what they were saying. It was obviously some sort of military meeting, but there was no reason to—

He stopped, his attention caught by the maps on the table. One was a large sea chart with five circles drawn on it, their common center near the westernmost tip of an island that lay just south of what looked like the edge of a major landmass, but all its features were marked in Cyrillic, so they meant nothing to him. The other maps, without exception, were of the island itself. None of them was named, and he didn't recognize the long, thin, rather drooping shape. A black-and-white outline version of the island had hand-drawn boxes marking three locations: San Cristóbal, Guanajay, and, farther east, Sagua la Grande. This time the lettering was Roman, not Cyrillic, and the place names sounded Spanish. But Spain was part of a continent, not an island, so this had to be somewhere else—probably somewhere off the coast of South America.

Danny tore his eyes away from the maps. Fascinating though this meeting was, it didn't bring him any closer to finding Michael. He made a sudden decision. He'd wasted enough time already. He'd found Opal, and Michael couldn't be very far away. The important thing was to get them out. And that meant getting help from the embassy.

Danny turned away from the table and floated from the room, all the way out of the building. Then he lifted into the air and set a course back to the American embassy.

O
pal awoke with a start as the door of her room slammed back. Two uniformed men burst in, each carrying rifles.

“
Vstavȃ!
” one shouted at her angrily.

She didn't understand Russian, but the meaning was clear enough. She swung her feet off the bed and stood up, silently thanking heaven she'd fallen asleep fully clothed. She doubted very much that these men would have shown much respect for her modesty. As it was, her heart was pounding with fear. Both men looked like brutes. Neither showed the least hint of Menshikov's earlier cool courtesy.

“
Pȏdem s nami!
” the second man shouted. Opal looked at him blankly, and he gestured with his rifle so that she had the sense he wanted her to go with them. But where were they taking her?

She tried desperately to estimate how long she'd been asleep. It felt like a short time, but she vaguely remembered a dream that seemed to go on forever. Could it be morning already? The window of her room had padlocked shutters and a heavy curtain, so there was no way to see if it was daylight outside. Menshikov had promised to return in the morning, so perhaps these men were taking her to him.

As the confusion of sleep fell away from her mind, old fears tumbled in. Menshikov had been courteous and reassuring when her interview began, but when she claimed to know nothing of time travel or psychotronics—how had he known to ask her about either of those?—the mask had slipped a little. Not that he'd threatened her openly, but it was clear he did not believe her denials, and there were veiled hints that continued lack of cooperation might soon create problems. But what worried her far more than these hints was the fact he would tell her nothing about Michael. When she asked, he simply shrugged and claimed Michael was not his responsibility. When she pushed, he told her blankly he had “no information.”

She would have given anything to know if Michael was all right.

The men used their rifles to prod her toward the door, then marched her down two corridors until they reached an elevator. The second corridor had windows on an outside wall, which allowed her to discover it was dark outside. As they waited for the elevator to arrive, she stared out across the lights of the city, trying to estimate the time. By her best guess it seemed to be the middle of the night, but it might be earlier; possibly a lot earlier. But if it wasn't almost morning, when Menshikov was returning, where were they taking her?

Her mind began to feed her stories she'd heard about the interrogation techniques used by totalitarian states. Sleep deprivation was high among them. You were allowed no sleep at all or, alternatively, permitted to sleep only a short time, then dragged awake for questioning while your resistance was at its lowest ebb. Was this what was happening to her now?

The elevator arrived with the sort of mechanical clatter she associated with a railway station. One of her guards pulled aside the old-fashioned trellised doors, and the other pushed her inside so brutally that she almost fell. They took their places on either side of her, closed the doors again, and pulled sharply on a heavy metal knob. The lift began a slow, shuddering descent.

Opal fought hard to control an almost overpowering fear. “Do either of you speak English?”

Neither guard answered, neither guard looked at her.