Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  Elaine watched the windshield wipers scrape back and forth. Small pellets of hail pounded the roof of the car like buckshot.

  ‘I told Gladden what you said,’ Harrison reported. ‘He said to tell you there was no other way. And that he meant what he said about Sasha needing help.’

  Elaine said nothing.

  Almost halfway to Sheremetyevo, she realized that Harrison was looking into the rearview mirror more and more frequently.

  ‘Are we being followed?’ she asked, turning to look at the car behind them. It was a black Volga, like the one Sasha was driving the night she stopped him beside the bridge. But there were four men in the car, all wearing hats.

  ‘Farewell party,’ Harrison commented. ‘If it’s us they’re interested in, they’re not making any secret of it.’

  Suddenly the Volga pulled out into the middle of the road, forcing a car traveling in the opposite direction to veer aside.

  Harrison swore as the driver of the Volga swerved across their path without warning, so that he had to ram his foot down on the brake pedal. Harrison’s car went into a skid, and before he had mastered it, they were bumping along the shoulder of the road.

  Three men emerged from the Volga and took up positions around them.

  ‘Who are they?’ Elaine whispered. ‘KGB?’

  ‘Leave it to Uncle Guy.’ Harrison sounded his usual unflappable self, but he was having trouble controlling his sweat glands. He was mopping his brow with the back of his hand as he got out of the car.

  Elaine heard him engage in a brief exchange with the Russians. He sounded more adenoidal and antipodean, trying to communicate in a foreign language, and he didn’t seem to be making himself understood. He was saying something in a loud voice about the rights of the western press, invoking the name of his London paper, when an enormous bruiser in a dark overcoat that came down to his ankles slammed his fist into Harrison’s midriff. Guy staggered backward, gasping for breath, and toppled over.

  Elaine immediately leaped for her door and started running blindly along the side of the road, against the direction of the traffic. A couple of motorists started hooting at her. She felt a tug at her coat, but broke loose and stumbled on. Then her head was wrenched back, as if someone was trying to tear her hair out by the roots. She lost her footing and would have fallen on her back, but the man who had hit Guy threw a massive arm around her waist and lugged her back to the others. She screamed and kicked, and he gave her hair another savage twist before tossing her into the back seat of the Volga, climbing in beside her.

  Doors slammed, the engine revved, and suddenly a figure loomed up in front of the car. Through the misted-up windshield, Guy Harrison, his arms upstretched, looked bloated and undefined, like a drowned man floating up from the ocean depths. The Russian driver accelerated, and she saw Guy hurl himself to one side. The men squeezed in on either side of her wouldn’t let her turn round to see if Guy was dead or alive.

  *

  ‘Who are you? Where are you taking me?’

  The first time she tried to ask a question, the big man pulled her hair again. The next time, the smaller man on her left, who was sniggering and stripping her with a rapist’s eyes, stuck his hand between her legs. She spat at him, but the saliva wouldn’t come. They rode out the rest of the journey in silence.

  They found out about Togliatti, she told herself, trying to find some reasonable explanation. They traced the article to me. They’re trying to scare me into admitting something. But she couldn’t shut out the terror that they knew about Luke — and Sasha. She saw him again in the dream, with those hunted eyes, flattened against a tree. Whatever happens, I won’t betray you, she promised. She had to concentrate, focus her mind on anything but him, on the slaughter in Togliatti, on her sister’s wedding, on horseback riding with her father, anything but Sasha.

  They sped into the center of Moscow and dragged her into a house on a street she didn’t know. She said to a man in uniform, ‘I’m an American citizen and I demand to speak to the American consul.’ Everyone seemed to think this was highly amusing. They shot her full of something that was probably supposed to make her talk but instead left her retching all over the well-worn rug. Then a man was booming questions at her in Russian, questions about Sasha that confirmed her worst fears. It helped that she couldn’t understand him very well. She bent her mind to reciting all the poems of Robert Frost she could remember. She had worked her way through the repertoire and was starting over when they brought in another interrogator, who put questions to her in English, but his accent was so thick and his vocabulary so sparse that she didn’t have to feign incomprehension. But she couldn’t miss one phrase. It reverberated through all the questioning.

  ‘We know you’re CIA.’

  But they hadn’t mentioned Luke Gladden. That must mean they didn’t have all of it. Not yet.

  After dark, they moved her to another place in a closed van. Nobody told her where she was going, but when they set her to wait in a sparsely furnished office under the rapist’s eyes and she heard voices raised in argument from a neighboring room, something told her it was the Lubyanka. Funny, she thought. She had read that they stopped bringing prisoners to the Lubyanka after Beria’s death. She felt wonderfully detached from the situation, even from her own body.

  They moved her to yet another room, and she kept repeating to herself, over and over, I won’t betray you, Sasha. I never met you.

  Everything was slightly out of focus. She looked at the man behind the desk. His features were loose and slightly disarranged. He was a plasticine head a child had thrown on the floor in a temper.

  He rapped out some more questions, about when she had met Sasha, when he had started working for the CIA. His Russian was hard to understand, and her attention was drifting, her head was swirling...

  Topchy brought her out of it with a slap that burst her upper lip.

  ‘Give her another shot,’ he ordered Skvortsov, who was holding the syringe with the scolopomin. ‘And get Feliks in here to translate. Maybe he can charm the bitch.’

  This time, the drug had something closer to the desired effect. When she came round, she couldn’t stop talking. She was running from the mouth, the victim of some kind of verbal diarrhea. She tried to talk about anything except Sasha and Moscow. She gabbled on about Great Neck, her family, her problems with New York publishers.

  *

  Feliks was in his own office, leafing through an internal directory, mentally erasing the names of the men who would be removed if Sasha’s plan succeeded. There would still be a security service, of course. He smiled to himself, remembering a London production of a French play he had seen years before, in which a revolution takes place while most of the capital’s leading dignitaries are sheltering in a bordello. When the revolutionaries take over, the only man who keeps his old job is the chief of the secret police. Yes, but there would be no place for the Topchys in the new Russia.

  Skvortsov came barging in. ‘The boss wants you to help out with an interrogation.’

  ‘An interrogation? Here?’

  Nikolsky was even more startled by the scene he found in Topchy’s office. He grasped its essentials at once, however, from the questions Topchy was shouting. The girl was somehow involved with Sasha, and Topchy was bent on using this to destroy him. Feliks had no idea what, if anything, she might have to confess. He had to find out before she started telling them.

  Topchy provided the opportunity, by announcing that he was going to take a leak.

  Feliks followed him out, and found him standing in front of the urinal with his hands on his hips, as if inviting the world to acknowledge how big a man he was.

  ‘She’s not bad,’ Feliks remarked casually, stationing himself at the next stall. ‘Do you think Preobrazhensky was screwing her?’

  ‘I don’t give a shit,’ Topchy said. ‘She’ll confess she was the bitch’s CIA contact. We’ve got pictures of them together.’

  ‘Herein Moscow?’ Feliks asked, i
ncredulous. He couldn’t believe that Sasha, always so careful, so hidden, could have committed this folly.

  ‘Where the fuck did you think?’ Topchy said impatiently, zipping up his fly. ‘Now let’s go and milk the bitch.’

  Feliks could not afford the luxury of analyzing what might or might not have happened between Sasha and the American girl. They were using scolopomin, and he had seen its effects before. With the dosage they had given her, she would soon be telling whatever she knew. At all costs, he had to prevent that from happening.

  *

  A man was leaning over Elaine. His eyes were kind, and his English was so perfect, so soothing, that for a moment she thought it was Guy Harrison.

  ‘Why did you discuss New Delhi?’ he was asking, and then she realized he was just the interpreter, translating for that poison dwarf behind the desk. But he took her hand as he spoke, and somehow his touch, his whole presence, was reassuring. The man in charge started jotting down notes, and in the next instant, the interpreter was bending down, so close she could feel his breath as a warm breeze in the shell of her ear.

  ‘Don’t answer,’ he whispered, and she gaped at him.

  ‘Isn’t it true that you arranged for General Preobrazhensky to attend a clandestine meeting with the CIA in New Delhi?’ the interpreter went on in a louder voice.

  She felt an overwhelming desire to answer. He put his arm around her, as if to comfort her, but the pressure around her throat became more and more intense. She felt she couldn’t breathe. Her senses were muddled. She heard a Russian voice raised in anger, but that came from miles away. The room around her, bleached by the harsh surgical light, turned purple and then black.

  *

  ‘Are you trying to strangle her, fuck your mother?’ Topchy yelled as Elaine blacked out. ‘Get away from her!’

  He rushed over and dragged at Nikolsky’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Feliks said. ‘I must have gotten overexcited.’

  ‘This isn’t the place for your sexual fantasies,’ Topchy roared at him. ‘Try to bring her around,’ he instructed Skvortsov.

  ‘She’s out cold,’ Skvortsov reported. He gave Nikolsky an odd, sidelong look, and said, ‘What was that you were whispering to the bitch before you knocked her out?’

  Feliks tried to make light of it. He slapped his hand over his fist suggestively and said, ‘I just wanted to show her my appreciation.’ But Topchy’s suspicion had been aroused.

  ‘We talked about Preobrazhensky before,’ he reflected aloud. ‘You spoke up for him, as I recall. Why are you trying to protect him?’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ Feliks protested.

  ‘But you’re friends, aren’t you?’

  ‘We served together. That’s all.’

  ‘When did you last see Preobrazhensky?’

  ‘Oh, years ago,’ Feliks said airily. He realized he had made a mistake when he saw the look of pleasure on Skvortsov’s face.

  ‘Skvortsov told me he saw you with Preobrazhensky in the street,’ Topchy said slowly. ‘I was meaning to ask you about it.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Feliks rejoined, wondering if Skvortsov had tailed him to the Bangladesh or the rendezvous outside the Sverdlova metro. ‘That was just a chance encounter. We hardly said two words.’

  ‘You’re not as smart as you think, my dear Feliks,’ said Topchy. ‘Skvortsov gave me no report. I think you have quite a lot of explaining to do.’

  ‘Maybe he’s the one we ought to interrogate,’ said Skvortsov happily.

  *

  When Elaine came round, she could focus, but things had changed in a way that was inexplicable. The interpreter, the man with the round, self-indulgent face who had whispered to her to hang on, was suddenly the victim. He was stripped to his shorts, and they were working him over, concentrating on the soles of the feet and on jabs to the kidneys. Like a counterpoint to his grunts of pain, she heard the ticking of the clock on the wall, and looked up to it. It had to be wrong, she told herself, another element in their efforts to dislocate the senses, because according to the clock, it was more than twelve hours since Guy had started out for the airport.

  ‘I don’t want to prolong this, Feliks,’ she heard the man in charge say to the one they were roughing up. ‘And frankly, I don’t have time to. You tried to sabotage this interrogation, and the reason is perfectly clear. You’re involved in an anti-state intrigue with Preobrazhensky. Both of you, and the little tart over there, are working for the CIA. We’ll stop this nonsense as soon as you confirm what we already know.’

  The prisoner’s only response was his labored breathing.

  The rapist said, ‘Want me to give him a shot?’

  ‘No, there’s a faster way. Get rid of his jockstrap.’

  The scene that was played out in front of her eyes was too graphic for any horror film, though she kept thinking she was in one. The colonel — she must have heard someone mention his rank — went back to his desk and yanked open the drawer. They dragged Feliks forward and spreadeagled him over the desk, so that his testicles were dangling over the open drawer.

  ‘I’ll ask you once more,’ the colonel said. ‘Will you confess that you and Preobrazhensky were recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency?’

  Feliks yelled something that might have been ‘Yes’ as Topchy grabbed the handle of the drawer and made as if to ram it shut. Topchy let him feel the pressure, then relented.

  ‘I see that you’re ready to talk now,’ Topchy said to Nikolsky. ‘Your wife will be relieved — if you ever get to see her again.’ He paused to check that his tape recorder was still running.

  ‘Well, you can sit down over there,’ Topchy told him, releasing him from the drawer. There was no move to return his clothes, and Feliks was still on the edge of panic. He couldn’t resist the urge to touch himself, to make sure he was still intact.

  His whole body was shaking, and he felt a shooting pain from his kidneys. But his mind was working again. He would agree to anything, he resolved, as long as it didn’t threaten the plan itself. Nothing Topchy had said suggested that he knew anything about that. The man was pursuing a vendetta for Askyerov, and didn’t yet realize what he had stumbled across. The girl had actually helped to keep him in the dark. Nikolsky confessed to everything Topchy thought to ask: yes, he was an American spy, yes, he and Sasha were paid every month in Swiss accounts, yes, yes, yes. His compliance stopped them from using the drugs, which would have cost him any measure of self-control. And he could deny it all later. So long as the plan remained secret, there was a fighting chance.

  *

  ‘Find out where Preobrazhensky is,’ Topchy instructed Skvortsov when all the questions had been answered to his satisfaction.

  The general, it transpired, was not at home. He had spent the whole night at Gogol Boulevard, which pricked Topchy’s curiosity. What was Preobrazhensky doing at General Staff headquarters a few hours before the members of the Politburo were due to assemble? Tidying up? Burning files that could be compromising to himself and his father-in-law if there was an inquiry?

  Preobrazhensky was no fool, Topchy reasoned. No doubt the man had guessed what the Politburo meeting was going to bring, and was trying to prepare for the consequences. If even half of what Nikolsky had admitted was true, the young general had plenty of cleaning up to do. Topchy’s attitude toward the confessions he extracted was that of a commercial artist toward his designs: he didn’t necessarily believe in the integrity of the product he was presenting. Nikolsky’s confession was a little too eager, and consequently somewhat lurid. It would serve the purpose in hand admirably, but left Topchy wondering whether there was something he had overlooked.

  He saw now that the whole affair went deeper than he had originally suspected. There was a nest of them, including a man planted in his own office, spying on the Third Directorate! He remembered now that it had been Nikolsky who had reported on the curious events at Kavrov. Feliks had been even more off-handed than normal, trying to divert him with a hot
tip for the third race on Wednesday evening. ‘Don’t trouble yourself about Kavrov,’ Nikolsky had told him. ‘It’s all in hand.’ There were no signs of any irregularities, Nikolsky had insisted. Everyone knew that Suchko was a drunk. There were several witnesses, including a shopgirl he’d been trying to screw, who said he’d been reeking of booze the night he fell to his death. ‘Couldn’t tie a rope, the poor bastard,’ Nikolsky had summed up.

  Topchy thought it smelled funny at the time, but he’d gotten into the habit of relying on Feliks, and he pushed the business out of his mind. Now he experienced an unpleasant, crawling sensation down the back of his neck as he remembered how Preobrazhensky had just stood there, with that vacant look in his eyes, when he had raised this business of Kavrov in the Marshal’s suite at Gogol Boulevard.

  A KGB man with his neck broken in a Spetsnaz base...An army spy inside the KGB itself...An American agent...Where did it all lead?

  Preobrazhensky was the common link. There was something very unsettling, yet also familiar, about that man. Topchy couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  Skvortsov rolled in, waggled his eyebrows suggestively, and snapped a finger against the side of his neck.

  ‘Why not?’ Topchy agreed. ‘We’ve earned it.’ He was tired, and his sciatica was starting to play up again. He kept a couple of bottles in his safe for just such occasions. Fuck the regulations. They weren’t made for deputy chiefs.