The Oktober Projekt (7 page)

Ten minutes without a response, nothing from Anastasiya or
Alexei except the gentle rustling of papers and the slow steady breathing from
figures standing behind Nick. At least one of them also a woman he decided,
catching a hint of a distinctive perfume. This one not part of the
interrogation team, but one of the invited observers waiting to see what he’d
deliver.

Clearing his throat Alexei broke the spell, his English
containing an American ring. ‘You’re an important man Nick, you’re the Director
of CO8 Nick, so why lie to us?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Nick. ‘I’m a
tourist, take a look at my papers.’

‘London don’t care about you Nick,’ Anastasiya said, the
friendly smile in her voice gone. ‘Your colleague Mr. Alistair Foula is dead,
Nick,’ she reminded him. ‘You and he are British spies.’

‘What did your contact want to sell?’ Alexei demanded.
 

‘You’ve got me mixed up with someone else. I just took a ride
in the wrong car, that’s all,’ protested Nick knowing his cover was shot to
pieces and they were merely warming up.

‘Okay, Nick, we’ll leave it there for today,’ Anastasiya
offered, her charm restored as though she were winding-up a sales seminar.

In an instant they’d bound Nick’s hands and covered his eyes,
then movement all around him as Alexei, Anastasiya and the VIPs solemnly
trooped out before Nick descended back to his cell at double speed. That night
they started with the electronic games; noise mostly and even though his eyes
were covered, Nick could see the strobe flashes. When they stopped the
electronic show Nick didn’t know if it was night or day. Hunched into a corner
he tried to regulate his breathing, reassert control of his senses. But they
wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of gaining any self-control.

Displaying remarkable diligence they instituted a new regime.
With his eyes bound tight, they pushed and tugged him on a slow shambling walk
round the perimeter of a freezing high-fenced courtyard, feet from snarling
guard dogs. Fifteen steps to the first turn, ten to the next, nineteen to a
spot where the cold really nipped his face, and eleven back to where he
started. After his ‘exercise’ they provided water to drink, followed by a
cigarette that he had trouble smoking through burst lips he guessed he must
have received when the Lada went belly up.

The next day or maybe it was night, Nick really couldn’t tell,
nor by now did he care, a different phase of interrogation began. Led again by
Anastasiya but this time she’d brought along some new friends who made him
kneel, facing who or what he didn’t know.
 

‘What did the traitor Lubov wish to sell?’ She asked, and Nick
knew there was a sharper, intense edge to her question.

‘My name is Peter May,’ Nick said, ‘I’m a visitor, a tourist. I
don’t know why you’re asking me these questions.’

Strange how the first kick, hard to the middle of his back
brought no pain. Nick smiled. Actually smiled as the foot laid into him again,
fiercer, lower or higher, it made no difference. He was happy because they’d
stripped him naked, taken his clothes, boots, and he knew they couldn’t have
found the SIM because they weren’t sure what Lubov’s treasure entailed.

‘Nick, you’re doing yourself only harm,’ Anastasiya informed
him. ‘Think of your wife, how is she going to cope if you go home a
cripple?’
 

‘I’m not married, I live with my mum.’

Nick received another kick for his efforts; not to his back,
but swung fiercely into his crotch, the pain made him vomit. No warning, no
favours.

He fought back in his head, denying everything around him, even
his own existence. His eyes weeping from the pressure of the rag were sticky at
the corners, and he told himself it was all part of an established game, the
rules accepted by both sides. They knew he had something to confess, Nick knew
it too, it was just a matter of finding a compromise so they believed they had
won and he’d be left to heal and sent home without a mark on him. He vomited
again.

‘Clean him up,’ Anastasiya commanded.

A bucket of cold water was tossed over him, ripping Nick’s
breath out of his lungs. Weak, his chest and legs wet, Nick felt two pairs of
safe hands grip his arms and he was shuffled out. They took him down a passage
of no considerable length to another room, this barely larger than the last,
just as sparse; at its centre, a plain metal desk and chair. On one corner of
the desk two typed confessions with a cheap fountain pen lying neatly
alongside. From behind Nick a pair of hands ripped off the rag around his eyes,
the sudden rush of light forcing him to squint and cringe. In the room, though
he never saw them, he could sense a number of observers behind him, one of them
the woman wearing her heady brand of perfume. Painfully he opened his eyes
letting them adjust; the first thing he saw was the desk with someone dressed
in an army officer’s uniform staring up from his seat, calmly and quite
detached assessing Nick’s condition.

‘I commend your resilience, Nick,’ said the officer, ‘But your
stupidity to a lost cause is a quality I am unable to admire.’

‘You have been abandoned by London,’ Anastasiya said.

Cocking his head to one side Nick saw her for the first time,
standing by the desk; mid-thirties, smartly dressed, neat blonde hair that
seemed yellow in the light, large dark glasses and her arms folded across her
chest, as though she could not get warm. She reminded Nick of an academic,
someone who takes study seriously and he bet himself a fiver she was GRU and a
trained shrink as well as a killer. Moving his head ever so slightly, Nick
could just make out a large close-cropped thug in urban combats, either special
forces or one of the permanent staff, a large ring on his middle finger.

‘You are a criminal, a murderer, you killed two military
personnel on the highway trying to escape,’ the officer said, his opening
bonhomie forgotten. ‘In Russia we treat killers differently, you should realise
that.’

‘Is this a military court of law or a civilian one?’ Nick
asked, wondering why they’d omitted the one in the Puffa jacket outside Lubov’s
door.

A punch whipped into his mouth coming unseen from his right,
popping out a loose tooth, opening up his lips once more. Further punches
flowed freely and a deep burning pain ran through his calves as someone
enthusiastically set about them with a baton. Unable to hold his weight, his
knees buckled and he sprawled on his side. From this angle Nick decided his
tormentor wielding the baton was also special forces, some of them had that look,
young and keen, his bright eyes sunk under thick brows.

‘You should sign the statement, Mr. Torr,’ the officer advised
Nick as he was dragged back on his feet, blood dribbling down his chin onto his
naked chest. The statement in a final draft was pushed in front of his puffy
swollen eyes, his crimes read out in a methodical voice. Nick wearily shaking
his head suffered one last blow of frustration, delivered expertly to his
damaged rib and he couldn’t help a terrible scream that somehow got passed his
bloated tongue before he passed out.

Dragged unceremoniously back to his cell the guards left Nick
in embarrassed silence. He came round propped against a freezing wall, a thin
blanket that had once distantly belonged to the Red Cross draped around his
waist and legs, while across his bruised chest they’d tucked a towel already
stained by his vomit and blood. The statement he refused to sign, the record of
his criminal actions as they called it, sat next to him and somehow he found
the energy to scrunch it and throw it into a corner. Above his head a small
window made of clear glass blocks. And while his mind closed down all the
barriers through which they were trying to break into his past, he watched the
night drip slowly into the corner of each thick glass square, distorted
particles of streaky cloud racing across a swollen moon.

After his refusal to sign his confession Nick’s captivity
entered a new dimension. Nudged awake by a boot at some point into a long dark
night, three of them pinned Nick down taking an arm apiece and one to his legs
as a strange hand felt for a vein, then the puncture as a needle entered his
arm. As the drug entered his system he watched them float out of his cell,
grotesque figures who’d stepped straight out of fairground mirrors, before a
heavy darkness claimed his mind.

It was the light in Nick’s head that troubled him the most. He
didn’t care about the deafness in one ear, the pain eating its way through his
body, or the thought of death locked in his mind. He wondered if the light had
come after another beating with a kick to his head, but couldn’t be sure. He
even thought, though this was far too a strong description for the fragments
that went through his mind, he imagined that he had died, and this was his
personal hell. But he knew it wasn’t because he had no belief for God or the
Devil, knowing that the only two absolutes are birth and death, and having had
one he was now most surely moving quickly towards the next.

If only the light would go from inside his eyes. Tomorrow he
would demand to see a doctor. A stronger light seemed to flash around his skull
and he realised they were administering short doses of electric current. His
name, he fought for a piece of it, nothing came. He dug deeper, but he saw only
a face that he knew had once been his own. There came no name with it either.

 
Footsteps and
voices. A disjointed voice periodically checking his condition, breaking off
from questions he seemed to be answering. How much Nick craved sleep. The
windows were boarded, painted white, preventing him from distinguishing day
from night. This phase marking the end. Nick knew the signs from his training.
Once you’re denied the ability to appreciate light and dark there is nothing
left for you, except the serious questions and serious pain before the
confession you inevitably make. Everyone does finally, he recalled, some with
relief others with hate; fighting every word that left their body, denying,
struggling until the very last. Trying to turn his head to guard himself for a
blow or punch, he realised he had lost all movement.

‘Lubov had material for a senior ex-officer only,’ mumbled
Nick.

‘What did he say?’ demanded the army officer.

By a low table holding a digital recorder, Anastasiya and
Alexei stared at him with the same impassivity they had shown since the first
day of his capture.

Weakness, nothing but his own weakness, Nick told himself,
cursing his body, its betrayal for tricking him into talking. He tried, really
made an effort not to speak, but something was pulling answers over his swollen
tongue, his inflamed gums that somehow dulled his words, threw them into the
empty white space of the room without form, without shape; a peculiar language
all his own.

‘Why Nick? Why an ex-officer, Nick?’ Anastasiya asked walking
slowly, her steps sharp, acute, a perfect counter balance to her unhurried
voice as she came and stood at Nick’s side.

‘Tell us, Nick, then we don’t have to put you on trial,’ urged
Alexei.

Trying to speak, but denied by the shape and swelling of his
mouth, Nick, with much effort shook his head. Slowly, with measured
deliberation Nick said, in a feeble parched croak,
‘Lubov had evidence,’ repeating it in a weak voice that he refused to
accept as his own, especially for Anastasiya bent close to his mouth.

A temporary lull followed his admission, a hiatus Nick vaguely
registered from the ceasing of the blinding light behind his eyes. Defiantly,
straining the individual muscles in his neck, Nick brought his head up a
fraction, just high enough so he could register a blur of figures gathered
around a low table as a murmured discussion bubbled on. Opening his cracked
lips, forcing a sound past his thick tongue, Nick uttered a single fractured
word. ‘Mole.’ There, Nick chided himself, you’ve gone and done it now, aware
that this could be the only analysis of why Lubov wanted to deal only with an
ex-senior officer from the Service. Then he sensed all the world had stopped to
listen, everyone in the room had turned to hear what he had said.
 

‘You’re saying the traitor Lubov had evidence of a Moscow
agent, Nick?’ Alexei checked, returning to him, laying a proud hand on his
shoulder. ‘That what you’re telling us?’

Nick wasn’t sure what he was telling them anymore, knowing that
he’d have less of the electrics, drugs and beating if he played along. ‘Yes,’
he mumbled.

‘Where is the agent? Do you have the agent’s name?’ A voice
from behind him asked, the woman VIP again, trailing her perfume as she moved
closer, her mellow voice reminding Nick of a schoolteacher who had once attempted
to teach him art.

From deep inside, Nick summoned up a last strand of resolve
that he used to shake his head in denial. ‘No one knows, only Lubov,’ he
muttered in his strange distorted language. ‘Lubov… Lubov was the evidence.’

‘That is why Lubov wanted to meet an ex-officer,’ Anastasiya
decided for them all, the problem solved.

Exhausted with his effort, Nick was breathing heavily and gave
the feeblest of smiles as he nodded in agreement. Carried back to his stinking
cell, Nick wanted to cry for help but his ribs were too inflamed, his throat
too dry and for the moment he couldn’t prevent himself toppling on his side,
slipping softly into a longed-for world of sleep and release.
 

Transferred during the night, Nick lapsed in and out of sleep,
finally waking in a military hospital ward and a clean bed. A nurse on seeing
him awake promptly marched over and ordered him to drink, holding a cup and
feeding straw as he sipped a sweet milky watery mixture. Displaying the bedside
manner and charm of a commissar, she said he would probably be in her charge
for a week. With a disgusted wrinkle of her broad nose she asked Nick if the
clear sack of clothes dumped by his bed were his? And if Nick’s ribs hadn’t
felt as though they’d explode he’d have hugged her, for the sack contained not
only the clothes he’d been wearing when captured, but at the bottom, one pair
of very muddy boots.