The Equalizer (38 page)

And then she'd been caught.

She tried to remember what had betrayed her. It had been a stamp on her forged passport. It had been missing a color. Something like that. She couldn't really recall. It was just a part of the jumbled mosaic that had replaced her coherent thoughts. It didn't matter. They'd trapped her. Taken her to the Kresty Prison on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, two five-story cross-shaped buildings. Not a forbidding place from the outside.

A hellhole on the inside.

Then the questioning had begun. They wanted to know who she really was. Who she worked for. All of the precious information inside her head. She told them nothing. She feigned blackouts and memory loss. She'd been beaten when they'd taken her, and then a guard at the prison had beaten her again before he'd raped her in her cell. He'd been reprimanded, not for the rape, but for the beating. She had used it to her advantage, saying she could not remember anything, feigning disorientation.

Then they'd thrown her into her phantom cell. Her isolation was complete. No light. No proximity to any of the other prisoners. She ate alone and exercised alone. She didn't shower alone. There was always a guard watching her. He was not the one who had violated her. She had not seen him again. Maybe they'd shipped him off to an ice hut in Siberia. Or killed him. But even that thought gave her no solace.

The darkness and isolation had taken its toll on her. She had felt it draining her of strength, blunting her emotions, dimming her thoughts, hour by hour, minute by minute. It was hard to sleep on the low pallet with a mattress so thin it was barely a pad. There was a toilet in one corner. Nothing else in her cell. Her memory loss had become real. They had not tried to interrogate her again. But she had heard whispers. Among the guards in the exercise area. She had heard a name: “
Arbon
.”

And it had struck dread in her.

It was a name she knew. Everyone in the intelligence community knew the man's name.

An interrogator.

A monster.

And then they'd come for her in her prison cell and hauled her up off her pallet and taken her out of the cell block, in her black prison shirt and pants, like pajamas, down corridors she'd never been before and through a big steel door and out into a bright moonlit night. She had breathed in the night air, so cold but so sweet, looked up at the myriad stars like spilled diamonds above her. They'd thrown a black hood over her head. She'd been manhandled by two of the guards to some kind of vehicle; a van, she thought. She'd been helped up into the back and thrown down to the cold floor. She had curled up into a fetal position, one she knew so well, and had heard the van's motor start up.

It wasn't a long drive. She was able to calculate it at just over an hour because she counted the seconds off in her head. There was a loud, agonizing creak of gates opening that she could hear even inside the van. Then the vehicle rolled forward about a hundred yards and stopped again.

She waited.

The back doors of the van were opened. Hands reached for her, dragging her out of the vehicle. She stumbled as she stood up straight. The concrete was cold on her bare feet. Two guards marched her through an outside area. She strained to listen. Heard the distant, mournful whistle of a train. They were near railway tracks. She could hear nothing else but the wind gusting. She was taken inside a building. The sounds of the guards' boots echoed. A large space. Then she was shoved along a long corridor and down a series of metal stairs.

Another corridor, and they stopped her. She heard the rattle of a ring of keys, then a lock being turned. She was pushed forward and forced down onto a chair. The hood was removed.

She sat in a twelve-by-fifteen windowless room. There was a metal table in the center with two folding metal chairs at it and two more metal chairs against a blank green wall. A single lightbulb hung on a short electric cord from the ceiling. Two armed guards she had never seen before, in army uniforms, walked away from the table to an open doorway. She could see a slice of the green-walled corridor beyond it. She expected them to switch off the light as they left, plunging her into her familiar darkness, but they didn't. The first guard went through the open doorway. The second turned and looked at her, flat eyes in a doughy face.

“Arbon,” he said in a nasty whisper, and closed the door.

The key turned in the lock.

Serena Johanssen shivered with fear.

It was better in the dark.

*   *   *

Granny sat in the cockpit of the AH-64 Apache helicopter on the edge of a wooded area near Lake Ladoga outside Saint Petersburg on the Volga River. He'd flown it to this location from Kemijärvi Airport in Lapland. Control had greased a few palms. The local authorities believed the helicopter was being flown by two Finnish pilots en route to Saint Petersburg. The chopper was screened in three directions by trees, but it was vulnerable from the river. Except Granny didn't think anyone would be rowing across the river with a windchill factor of minus-forty below. It was a two-man cockpit and Granny sat in the back pilot's seat. The copilot was a young Company agent named Hastings who had the personality of a doorknob, but he'd been on twelve missions for Control and had come back from all of them. Granny didn't like partners for the same reason McCall didn't like them. They tended to get killed. But Control had insisted it was a two-man extraction.

Granny liked the AH-64. It had a nose-mounted sensor suite for target acquisition and night-vision systems. It had a self-sealing fuel system to protect against ballistic projectiles. It had a .30-millimeter M230 chain gun carried between the main landing gear under the aircraft's forward fuselage. And besides the Hydra 70 rockets, it carried AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. Granny liked those, too. What he liked best was the IHADSS system the chopper carried, which he always thought of as “Bad Ass.” It was an Integrated Helmet and Display Sighting System built into the pilot's helmet. Granny tapped his helmet with his fingers, as if to make sure it was still on his head. He could slave the chopper's 30 mm automatic M230 chain gun to the helmet, or to the copilot's helmet, making the gun track head movements. He could control the firing with the TADS/PNVS, Target Acquisition and Designation, Pilot Night Vision System. The Arrowhead system was newer and more sophisticated, but it had not been installed in this AH-64 bird, which was on the elderly side, having been built by Boeing in 1998. But it would get the job done. Granny would use the TADS/PNVS system to fire the Hellfire missiles. They had different semi-active laser variants—AGM-114K high-explosive anti-tank, AGM-114 KII with external blast fragmentation in sleeve, and the AGM-114K MAC, Metal Augmented Charge—enough firepower to cause a lot of damage in a very few seconds. They had a range of eight thousand meters. He would line the target up on the semi-active laser homing millimeter wave radar seeker, giving the controls over to Hastings. He knew the facility would be camouflaged, but he had put his own laser system into the AH-64 and this would be a good test for it.

Now he had to wait. He took out a crushed pack of Lucky Strikes, the ones from the 1940s, when they rivaled Camels as the number-one selling cigarette in the United States. He looked fondly at the front of the pack with the distinctive red circle with
LUCKY STRIKE
in black lettering. Beneath it was written “It's toasted,” as if that made it any better for you. It didn't have the L.S.M.F.T. (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco) on the package, so it was from a carton manufactured before 1945. Granny had a supplier in Cairo who shipped cartons to him. Where the Egyptian got them, dating back to the 1940s, and in good condition, Granny didn't know and didn't care. He offered Hastings one. The kid shook his head. Probably bad for his two-hour a day workout regimen. Granny lit one up, blew out smoke, wondered just how black his lungs must look by now. Not that he cared about that, either. He cared about few things. Saving this Company agent's life—he cared about that. He didn't know her. But he'd found out in the briefing session that she'd been bold and fearless and at the eleventh hour she'd been caught. That had been a year ago. Now they had a chance to get her out. Even though the bigger mission had been running for almost six months, the extraction phase Control had put together in under thirty-six hours. They'd moved her from Kresty Prison outside Saint Petersburg.

Bad idea.

Control had given Granny rough coordinates for the location. They were not exact. And they didn't know how long she would be kept there. The window for her rescue could be very short. Probably only a couple of hours, maybe less.

Granny looked once at the glowing dial of his Omega diver's watch. Almost midnight.

“Come on, Control,” Granny muttered under his breath. “Our little girl's time is running out.”

In the next moment he heard Control's terse voice.

Granny took a deep drag on the Lucky, crushed it out, and tapped his copilot's helmet.

“Good to go,” Granny said.

A moment later the AH-64 chopper lifted off the ground.

*   *   *

The Citroën pulled up to the big iron gates of the abandoned automobile factory. General Palkovnik Ivan Dymtryk of the Sovietskaya Armiya stepped forward with an uncharacteristic thrill of anticipation. He would actually be seeing the legend, in person, for the first time. He knew his description, of course. All Soviet military officers did. When the man stepped out of the back of the Citroën, the general was not disappointed. He was a tall, striking figure, a black beard closely cropped to a chiseled face. He wore a dark gray fedora. There was a single diamond earring that glittered in his right ear. He was a little heavyset. He wore his signature long black overcoat, which broke over the ankles of his black boots. He wore black gloves. He carried a slim steel briefcase that almost glowed in the soft darkness. General Dymtryk couldn't see the man's eyes from this distance, but he knew they were like chips of black ice.

Dymtryk knew the man's real name was Vladimir Gredenko, but he was probably the only Russian soldier in the abandoned automobile factory who did. The interrogator was known throughout the intelligence world as “Arbon,” which meant “devil” in Russian, or rather, an English bastardization of the Russian word. It was said he got the nickname because his victims would scream and scream while he tortured them and the terrifying wails were like those of the Tasmanian devil's nocturnal cry.

From the front passenger seat a younger man emerged. He was blond and slight and wore his own trademark dark brown leather flying jacket, black jeans, and boots. General Dymtryk knew his name was Josif Volsky, an ex-FTB officer, Arbon's bodyguard, assistant, and constant companion. It was whispered they were lovers, but no one dared voice the suspicion aloud. The driver got out, lit a cigarette, and waited.

Volsky's eyes darted everywhere, sweeping the area ahead of them, looking for the smallest anomalies in security. He would find none. General Dymtryk looked at his face. It was said that Volsky was even more of a sadist than his boss.

The two men strode up to the Russian general. Arbon's eyes looked up at the camouflage nets covering the old brick building. He nodded. Up close, the man gave off a charisma that was chilling. General Dymtryk suddenly felt ill at ease, almost sick to his stomach. He knew everything was in order. It always was with Dymtryk. But the presence of the interrogator made him queasy.

“Is the prisoner here?” Arbon asked in Russian.

He spoke in a deep, guttural cadence. His voice was a little hoarse. It was rumored he had lung cancer. That he smoked three packages of Belomorkanal cigarettes a day.

“She is, Arbon,” General Dymtryk said.

He knew the great man liked to be called by his nickname. He nodded curtly and waited. A cold wind blew through the courtyard of the derelict plant. General Dymtryk suddenly wanted to get his famous visitor inside as quickly as possible.

“Follow me, please.”

The general strode across the broken cement of the courtyard. There were forty soldiers in position around it. They were not expecting any trouble, of course, but General Dymtryk wanted to assure Arbon that he was well protected.

It was even colder inside the old factory. The three men walked down echoing steel catwalks over a large area, past abandoned shapes cloaked in darkness, rusting metal frames, pieces of fractured cars rotting along with the building. There were armed soldiers stationed every few feet who stood at attention. General Dymtryk could tell they were in awe of the great man who swept past them, his black coat swirling around his ankles. They actually
saw
him in person! It would be something to tell their grandchildren. The general wondered if they would also describe the screams that he had no doubt would emanate from the room in which the young woman waited.

Their illustrious visitor did not speak as they walked down the catwalks and then along one last corridor to the room. There were two soldiers stationed outside it. They stood aside, unable to take their eyes off the interrogator's face, which by reputation was as familiar to them as any movie star. General Dymtryk unlocked the door. Josif Volsky went in first. The folklore had it that he tasted Arbon's food before he did, drank the first sip of wine or vodka, undressed the women before he would allow his mentor to proceed. Volsky returned to the doorway and said something softly to Arbon that the general could not hear. He thought he saw the ghost of a smile on Volsky's face. The interrogator just nodded. They all moved inside.

The girl sat at the table, her hands on it. As she looked up with lackluster eyes, she started to tremble. She couldn't help it. She knew who this man was. Control had burned his description into the minds of all of his agents. She knew his real name and his nickname: the
Devil
. Terror burned in her eyes. She swore to herself this monster would learn nothing from her. And wondered how many other intelligence agents had vowed the same thing silently to themselves before their unbearable agony began.