The warm summer wind lashed against her at this exposed height. One upward gust pulled off her black knitted cap, leaving her short hair whipping against her head. She followed its progress against the light of the streets below as the wind carried it away.
Then she looked down.
Mistake. Big mistake. She grew dizzy and weak and felt her grip slipping. She slapped her face with her free hand.
This is no time to lose your nerve.
She closed her eyes, using the sting on her cheek to center herself, and kept on going. One, two. One, two.
Not that she had too much to worry about. She had a slim body and strong arms and legs, and she left everyone else in the dust back at the training camp when it came to climbing. Height aside, this was routine for her.
Alex climbed one more floor and looked to the right at the balcony on level with her. Was this it? She counted from the top. Yes. Twenty-second floor. This was it.
She edged along the jutting bricks the few feet to the balcony and reached out to grab the railing. She stepped onto the ledge and then swung over, breathing a sigh of relief as her feet landed on solid ground.
“Hello, Alex.”
She was so startled she leapt off the ground. If she had been on the other side of the railing, she’d have fallen off the building.
Diana Bloch, in a maroon silk robe, stood up from a deck chair. “I’d just like you to be aware that one of our snipers had you in his crosshairs by the time you reached the third floor.” She opened the French doors into the apartment and stood aside for Alex to walk through. “Come in. I have chamomile tea steeping for you in the kitchen.”
“Thanks,” Alex mumbled, entering the apartment, “but I don’t drink tea.”
The place was bigger than any apartment Alex had ever seen in the city. She looked back out past the balcony at a breathtaking night view of the bay. Being the head of Zeta Division came with its perks. The interior was obsessively clean and decorated within an inch of its life to look like a design catalog.
Even here in her own home, Diana Bloch was a facade, a front.
“I think you could do with some calming down.”
“Sure.” Alex rubbed her triceps, sore from the climb. “Whatever.” She followed Bloch into the kitchen, where a steaming mug was waiting for her, the string of a tea bag hanging off the side. Bloch pulled it out, letting the excess liquid drip back into the mug before placing the bag in the trash.
“Sugar?”
“Four.”
Bloch dropped in four cubes and stirred. “This was quite unnecessary. You could have severely hurt yourself, or died. We’ve already invested much in your training. It would have been a serious loss.”
“I wanted to see you,” said Alex. “And you kept stonewalling me.” She sipped at the tea. Too hot.
“You are supposed to be in training. Skipping out was quite a feat, by the way. It seems you’ve got your fellow recruits atwitter, wondering how you did it.”
“Bloch, where is my father?”
Bloch’s face took on a pained expression. “Come into the living room,” she said. She sat down at a white leather Barcelona chair and motioned for Alex to sit across from her. “We don’t know where he is. But we’re doing everything we can to find him.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“You know I can’t divulge details of the mission. But he was caught while on assignment.”
“Where?”
“Does it matter?”
“Where?” Alex’s tone took on a hard edge.
Bloch seemed to consider whether to chew her out. She could pull rank at any moment. But instead, she said, “In Moscow. Does that make it better? Does that lessen your pain?”
Alex bit her lip and scowled in anger. “After everything he’s done for the organization. You could move heaven and earth to find him, if you wanted to.”
“There are limits on what we can feasibly do. Your father knew the risks going in, as you will when it’s your turn to go out into the field. But we are doing what we can—”
“Not. Enough.”
Bloch’s eyes went cold. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
“I’ll go on my own if I have to.”
“That’s not a good idea, Alex.”
“I didn’t ask.”
Bloch stood from her seat and dropped ice cubes tinkling into a glass. Then she uncorked a bottle of whiskey and poured. “I know you think you’re ready. Your help has been valuable to us in the past, and you’ll make a hell of an operative someday. But you’re still green. If you go out on your own, I’m afraid you won’t survive.”
“Are you going to stop me?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Then I think we’ve said all we have to say to each other.”
“I suppose,” said Bloch. She unlocked the front door and held it open for Alex. “Why don’t you take the elevator down?”
Chapter Four
Morgan woke to the bark of a guard yelling at him in Russian. His immediate reflex was to punch the man’s lights out, but he was still too tired. So instead he lay disoriented until the guard, impatient, wrested the bent bowl from Morgan’s hands and tossed it down the sleeping quarters. It tumbled, clattering, toward the door.
The message was clear enough.
Morgan stood, shaky from the interrupted sleep but also renewed, if only a little. How long had he been out? The sun was still in the sky, still low, but that meant little out here. The sun was always low. And the wind, even in summer, carried a chill.
He picked up his bowl and went outside into the yard. Men were filing in from the double gates that led outside the camp. The whole procession was hairless like him, although none so recently shaved, so that stubble was already growing in on their scalps and faces. They were shuffling, exhausted from a day of forced labor at the mine. All were skinny, their overalls and coats hanging loosely from their bodies. Their faces were pale, with deep dark bags under their eyes.
These men were broken. Morgan recognized the signs.
Guards oversaw the whole process, carrying their Kalashnikovs, holding dogs on leashes. Even the guards, though young, were stooped, with gloomy, lifeless eyes. Morgan didn’t know if it was from the dreariness of the place—no women, no entertainment, nothing to do but drink in cramped rooms, if they were allowed that much—or the violence they committed against the prisoners. Something about torturing and brutality made men into miserable monsters. He’d seen it often enough.
He wondered whether this was a punishment assignment.
Morgan scanned the group. All were in the same clothes and had the same (lack of) hair, so all he had to go by were faces, and even these looked similar, with sunken eyes and pale skin. It proved just about impossible to pick out an individual from the crowd.
Food was distributed out of a single window by prisoners on meal duty. Morgan wondered if they had spent the day in the kitchen or come back early from work. In any case, it would be a prime position in the camp, the work light and pleasant in comparison to the mines. There was a little more color on their cheeks, too. Morgan guessed that they sneaked food as they cooked.
Morgan clutched his bowl. His stomach growled. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.
The men lined up at the window and Morgan took his place at the end. There was a scuffle to see who would get closer to the front, but at a shout from a guard, under fear of violence, the men took their places, those behind resigned to their position.
As he stood in line, Morgan noticed a group of three prisoners glowering at him, and he felt like the only unattached girl at a singles bar. The men exchanged words and turned away.
He didn’t like it. Any kind of attention in this place was unwanted.
Morgan drew closer to the meal window as the prisoners got their dinner rations. When his turn came, he held out the bowl. The prisoner who was serving, wearing a jumper like his but stained with food, dunked a ladle into the big pot and spooned the contents into
Morgan’s bowl—a stew with vegetables, heavy on onions and potatoes, a few wisps of meat and bits of animal fat, and a thin layer of oil at the top.
The man motioned for him to move along.
Resisting the urge to swallow the portion whole right there, Morgan shuffled off, away from any grouping of prisoners, and sat against the cell block, holding his hand as steady as he could so as not to spill a drop. He’d not had any food in several days.
He tilted the bowl against his lips. They were cracked and split from the beatings he had taken in the past week, but the stew, thin as it was, filled him. Even with the faint odor of rotting potatoes and onions, even with the stringy, gristly meat, it was the best thing he’d ever tasted. He wanted to down the whole thing in one gulp. But he knew that if he ate too fast he’d puke it all up again, so he chewed each solid mouthful twenty-five times before swallowing, and took small sips of the liquid. In his hunger, he lost awareness of everything else around him. All he could focus on was the next mouthful.
He finished the scant portion, tilting the bowl against his lips to get the last drop. It felt warm and full in his stomach, after days of nothing but a trickle of water. He felt invigorated, power flowing back into his muscles.
But at the same time he was aware that it wasn’t enough. Two of these a day would keep a bedridden man alive and comfortable, but for men working all day in the mine, this was a starvation diet.
He wondered how long anyone lasted in here. Every one of the thousand or so men milling around in the yard looked withered and wasted, some more than others.
As he looked around, Morgan caught sight of the three who had been staring at him before. They were crowding around a man—Arabic, of around forty years old. Morgan had noticed him before, off in the corner making his prayers to Allah as others waited in line for food.
The three punks circled him, pinning him against the wall of the prisoner barracks. He was backing off from them, shaking his head. They stepped forward, holding out their hands. Morgan saw the Arab had his bowl in his arms, protected as if it were a baby. The goons wanted it, his only means of getting food, an extra portion for them. Without it, he would starve.
The prisoners around them couldn’t be missing it, but they made a point of not raising their heads. A guard looked at the scene with no more interest as if he were seeing a dog scratch himself. One of the men slapped the Arab in the face and screamed something in Russian.
Morgan pushed himself up off the ground, his own bowl in his hand. Bad idea, getting into trouble on his first day. Plus, he was sore and exhausted. He had every reason not to get involved.
He walked the diagonal over to the men, inserting himself between them and the victim.
“Step off.”
They first looked surprised, then glanced at each other with a blend of confusion and amusement. The oldest of them, a man slender and short like a weasel, spoke to him in Russian.
“No Russkyi,” he grunted. “Amerikanskyi.”
A different man broke in, the youngest and tallest of them, fair-skinned and blond, who looked like the Russian equivalent of an Iowa farm boy except for the tattoo of a snake that peeked out of his overalls on his neck. “American, eh?”
“That’s right. And you’re going to leave this man alone.”
He translated for his confederates and they shared a laugh. “Americans like to think they are cowboys. New sheriff in town, come to do justice. Move away, cowboy, or you die.”
“Step. Off.”
The farm boy turned sour. “This is not funny anymore.”
“Never was.”
“You do not want to pick this fight.”
“Maybe I do.”
The man mugged at his comrades as if to say, Can you believe this asshole? and took a swing at Morgan, trying to catch him in a sucker punch. Morgan was slowed by hunger and fatigue, but not enough to fall for that tired trick. This was a bully, untrained at fighting anyone who knew how to fight back. Morgan dodged and grabbed his arm, using the man’s own momentum to drop him to the ground. Weasel man growled and pounced on him. Morgan pivoted out of the way, kicking his leg at the knee so he fell face first on the dirt ground of the yard.
The third hesitated, casting his eyes on his two confederates. He’d learned his lesson not to rush in. He balled his hands up into fists.
Morgan didn’t give him the opportunity to get close. He rammed the sole of his foot into the man’s chest, causing him to stagger back. Morgan then moved in to deliver a punch that would lay him out flat when someone grabbed his right arm. He saw a prisoner’s overalls in his peripheral vision. He twisted to break free, but someone else grabbed his left. Morgan struggled, but he wasn’t in any shape to wrest himself free of two men who, in spite of the conditions, had been sleeping and eating better than him for weeks now.
Someone new came up to him. He was older than most, as old as fifty. He was skinny as anyone else, but Morgan could tell he was thickset and jowly, with once-fat cheeks. His eyebrows were like two hairy gray caterpillars. He carried himself with all the dignity of a mafia don.
He moved in and punched an immobilized Morgan in the gut.
“You tried to be a hero. But this is not a place for heroes.” He followed this with a meaty right hook to Morgan’s cheek.
He’d have done worse, but the guards sprung into action at last, pulling the men apart from each other and knocking them to the ground, along with Morgan himself. The guards set upon all of them them, kicking them with heavy boots. Morgan took a painful kick in the ribs.
The man who had hit him, the don, was merely shooed away. Morgan went limp as they dragged him off. He didn’t need any broken bones in here.
“You are dead, American!” the don yelled after him. “You hear me? Dead!”
Chapter Five
The siren woke Morgan in the solitary cell they had tossed him into after the fight the night before. With no room to stretch out, he had slept leaning against the far corner of the cell, feet resting against the door. This took its toll on the form of a throbbing pain in his lower back. His left cheek was sore and tender from the punch he took from the don. He stood with difficulty and tried to stretch the pain away to little avail.
Almost on cue, the deadbolt on the door was undone and the door opened, letting daylight flood into the darkness of the cell.
“Time to work, American!”
They pulled Morgan out and escorted him down an L-shaped hallway lined with cells and then out to the yard.
It was still dark, the sky leaden in the horizon where the sun was about to come up. The morning air chilled him to the marrow. The yawning, drooping prisoners lined up outside again, first for the morning count, and then at the food window, this time to get a dollop of potato porridge, bland and lumpy. But it was food, and it was warm.
Morgan kept an eye out for Bortsov’s men, who paid him no attention. Morgan would assume they’d give him extra scrutiny after the day before. This raised alarm bells in his head, but he didn’t have time to ruminate on it before another siren sounded and they lined up for the morning’s meal.
Lacking any kind of utensils, Morgan followed the others’ lead and ate with his hands. Once everybody had gotten their ration, they were lined up again, three abreast, in front of the double gates. An escort of guards surrounded them, one for every twenty or so men. A smaller siren rang out and the double gates swung open. With a shout from a guard, the men set marching. They filed through the no-man’s-land between the inner and outer perimeter fences. Morgan knew how it worked. Anyone caught there would be shot without ceremony or a second thought.
This was not an army, and their march was slow and plodding. Stuck near the back, Morgan couldn’t see where they were going, so he settled for keeping his eyes down on the stony ground to keep from stumbling or stepping on the heels of the man ahead of him.
“You are American, right?”
It was good English, a young voice, right next to Morgan. He turned to his left to lo
ok at the man, in his early thirties by the look of it, with baby blue eyes and dark blond hair coming in on his head. There was something still unbroken in him despite his having the same sunken cheeks and sallow eyes as everyone else.
Morgan didn’t have a mirror. He wondered whether he had the look yet. He would.
“I saw you back there.” His English sounded like he might have been educated in the US. “Standing up to those thugs. Not just anyone would do that for another man.”
Morgan squinted into the dawning sun. A hawk shrieked far above.
“My name is Grushin. I am a journalist. In today’s Russia, that’s enough of a crime to get me sent to prison, but I got a little too inconvenient for even the usual holes they stick us in. So they put me in the gulag.” He kicked a rock, which rolled diagonally and nearly hit a guard’s boot. The guard turned, searching with a scowl for the culprit. Morgan looked away to deflect suspicion. “What are you in here for?”
Morgan didn’t respond. The kid was nice, but as they say in reality shows, he wasn’t here to make friends.
“All right, Uncle Sam. I should know better than to ask.”
Morgan felt the spot where he took a boot the night before. It was aching anew with the strain of the march. He wondered whether he had a broken rib. “You should know better.”
“But I can talk,” he said, grinning. “The guys you attacked. They’re all ex-mafia people. The one who punched you was their leader, Leonid Bortsov. They don’t have much power, although I think their people bribe some of the guards from outside, so that gives them privileges in here. They run the laundry, which gets them away from the worst of the forced labor. One of the perks. The other is that they steal the others’ food and blankets.” He sighed. “Somehow, even this place is not bad enough that men like Bortsov can’t make it worse.”
They marched for forty minutes across the tundra, on cold hard ground. The path was well beaten, so that the low grasses that covered the plains around them did not grow there. Everything around them was flat. Even if he could run, there was nowhere for him to run to, nowhere that would put him out of the line of sight of the guards’ rifles.
For Duty and Honor Page 2
