Coercion

by Tim Tigner

  “I don’t understand why you can’t go with me, Alex.”

  “We have to get at least one copy of that list out of here. Splitting up doubles our chances. Besides, together we would draw more attention than alone, and we need to leverage every advantage we can find. Don’t you worry. I’ll be watching. If you get stopped at the gate just tell them Major Maximov released you. If that doesn’t work, I’ll show up and try to bluff us both out.”

  She didn’t look convinced, and Alex didn’t blame her. He wasn’t either.

  “And you’ll be right behind me?”

  “Once I see you catch the bus back to town, I’ll be walking out the door myself. Believe me, I want out of here just as badly as you do.” Alex sounded so confident he almost convinced himself.

  Five minutes later Alex felt the weight of the world slip from his shoulders as he watched Anna board a bus. She had passed through the exit booth wearing the perfect combination of righteous indignation mixed with fear and relief on her beautiful face. Now the Peitho victim list was out, and Anna would be okay—as long as she followed his instructions.

  Alex had read the bus schedule the day before. It ran to and from the metro every ten minutes weekday mornings and afternoons, bringing workers in and out. And there was one now. Alex Ferris takes on the KGB, and wins! His daily billing rate had just doubled.

  The next bus approached as scheduled, exactly ten minutes later. He had felt all six hundred seconds but had not doubted that the bus would come. There were advantages to the precision of a military economy. Alex was pleased to see that there was also a jeep on approach. It would add to the confusion. Ironically, it looked like the same one he had ridden in, or rather under, a couple of hours earlier. The ships that passed in the night had come full circle.

  Like the entry, the compound’s exit was an intimidating gauntlet. It was a glass booth with magnetically sealed doors at both ends. With the combined distraction of a busload of passengers and a jeep seeking entry, Alex stepped into the exit booth. His timing couldn’t have been better.

  Standing there before the guards, his mind screaming, “Just buzz me through,” while his face struggled to remain indifferent, he waited for the clicks that would set him free. Was this what restaurant lobsters felt like?

  As the first door locked behind him, Alex began silently singing to himself. One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beer . . . But instead of hearing the second click, the one announcing his freedom, he heard a car door slam. Alex followed the guard’s gaze and turned around to see a man in a general’s uniform running toward him. This couldn’t be good. His uniform was probably real. The general stopped before the door and stared in at him. Alex met his eye and saw a flash of recognition. Again? He was feeling more famous than Michael Jackson.

  Then the booth began filling with gas.

  Chapter 57

  PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

  Victor lay on the guest room bed and busied himself by tossing Elaine’s antique teddy bear up into the air, playing chicken with the ceiling fan. Two doors down, Elaine was reading Dancing Shoes to her sleepy-eyed girl, as oblivious to her impending fate as a fish to a hook.

  Victor had weighed the decision for a week, the risks and rewards of another murder. In the end, the possibility that Elaine had assisted Alex tipped the scale against her. That pissed Victor off. They had a deal, an arrangement, a quid pro quo. He didn’t kill Kimberly, and she was his bitch. If she had reneged, all bets were off.

  Victor’s change of plan, his decision to disappear, had toppled the first domino. Once he oversaw the remaining sabotage at United Electronics and MicroComp, his Knyaz job would be complete. He would have assured Knyaz AG’s position at the forefront of three booming industries. His twenty-percent interest would be worth billions. He could buy his island, have women flown in and out with the groceries and trash, and enjoy the rewards of his life’s labor. It would be perfect—unless someone was looking for him.

  The way to avoid that, of course, was to tie up every loose end. Yarik had taught him as much. The only person left in America who might suspect his identity was Elaine. Alex’s meddling had frayed the knot. She could be the difference between a carefree life in a bungalow, and a cowering life in a fortress, between breathing easy, and holding his breath. He gave teddy another toss. No, not that tough a decision after all.

  The time to act was now. Completing the sabotage would take a week, ten days at most. Then he would pay daddy a surprise visit to deliver the news, pick up his Knyaz AG stock, and vanish. Once comfortably and anonymously ensconced in his new island life, he would contact his KGB boss and inform him of his decision to retire. Victor was still three years short of twenty years of service, and his action would be highly irregular, but they would let him go. Since his KGB boss had no knowledge of Peitho, Victor’s results had appeared miraculous. He had allowed his boss to take the credit for those miracles in Moscow, and that put him in Victor’s debt big time.

  Victor had spent two prior evenings in and around Elaine’s house, studying her from the shadows and learning her routines. After putting Kimberly to bed, she would change into her bathrobe and slippers and begin drawing a bath in her deep Roman tub. Then, while the tub filled, she would zip down to the kitchen to pack Kimberly’s lunch and flip through a magazine over a cup of tea. Tonight, Victor would slip from the guest bedroom into the linen closet in the master bath while she sipped her tea, completely unaware that she only had minutes to live. Her god had nothing on him.

  Once Elaine finished her tea, she would come back upstairs and hop in the tub with the water still running, waiting for it to hit the perfect level. When she moved to turn the faucet off, Victor would slip out behind her and release Medusa. Even if she should happen to see or sense his approach, there would be little she could do. One paralyzing puff and it would be over. While she lay paralyzed in the tub, he would slit her wrists with a razor blade.

  Her death would look like a cut-and-dried suicide to the investigating detective. There would be no struggle, and she would be in the bathtub of her own accord, as was her normal routine. Lord knew the police were gullible enough to lap that easy explanation right up, at least if the Frank Ferris murder were any indication. Victor was not pleased that the kid would find her mother that way. It would be traumatic, to say the least. But in the end, Kimberly was going to lose her mother anyway, so what did it really matter?

  The only tactical downside to the plan was that there was no way for him to work sex into the equation. He had thought about using one of the killer condoms Yarik had sent him. Thought about, hell, he had racked his brains for a way to use one. Unfortunately, the evidence of copulation would raise too many questions. Given all the other events that had happened, the police might not buy into the heart-attack scenario that the condom supported. Such a shame. Victor still remembered the note that Yarik had attached with the shipment—for use in sexecutions—and laughed. It did have a ring to it. He launched the teddy bear again.

  The sound of a filling tub snapped Victor out of his fantasy. It was like the starting gun at a sporting event. As he rose from the bed, Victor realized that he had an erection.

  A minute later he heard Elaine’s soft footfalls going down the stairs. They were music to his ears. He felt like a maestro conducting a symphony of one—until his pager chimed a dreaded note, and the music stopped. Oh, how he hated that thing. He snatched it from his belt and read the unwelcome text: 001-111 SU326 SFO-SVO 2300 !!! “Nnnooooo,” he mouthed a long, silent scream. It was a message from his father, urgent, priority one, drop everything else. He was booked on Aeroflot flight 326 for Moscow departing San Francisco in, he checked his watch, less than two hours. He would have to leave immediately. The “!!!” was clear enough: Drop everything and get to the airport at once. There were to be NO excuses.

  Victor looked at his watch again. The tub took close to ten minutes to fil
l. There would not be time to dispose of Elaine properly. Victor refused to make the amateur mistake of deviating from his plan. That was how fools got caught. He would just have to pick up where he left off when he returned. Oh, but how he wanted to do her now. The juices were flowing, the plan was in place, and he was ready for action. Suppose he were to disobey his father . . .

  PART IV

  Chapter 58

  NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA

  Bloop . . . bloop . . . bloo-bloop . . . God, he hated that sound. Alex couldn’t see, or smell, or taste, so the maddening bubbles were all he had. Bubbles and pain. Was that laughter in the background? Or was his mind conjuring phantoms, desperate for some diversion from the sound of his own ebbing life?

  Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop . . . When he was nine, he had overinflated the back tire of his Schwinn Sting-Ray and blown it up by mistake. Though his hands had stung, it was the “POP!—hiss” that scared him. He had dropped the bike and run home from the gas station with tears in his eyes . . . His lungs felt like that tire now. Would they make the same POP!—hiss?

  Bloobloobloobloo . . . With his lungs at their limit, his carotids began thrashing like shackled snakes, and his neck began to crawl. Then the vipers latched their fangs on his optical nerves, and his eyes began to swell. Alex could take no more. I’m sorry, Anna . . .

  Icy water sluiced his sinuses, sending shock waves surging through his skull. As their reverberations tore at tissue and bone, cascading flashes of searing white pain climaxed in an electric crack, and then—

  Alex jolted back into consciousness and a screaming headache. This was the third time he had gone through this. Or was it the fourth? It was tempting to pray for it all to be over, but Alex refused to let it come to that. He still had a mission to complete. People were relying on him. One hundred and sixteen names on a list.

  As his world of pain came into focus, Alex realized that he was not hanging upside down this time. There was no barrel of icy water below. That was progress. The second environmental factor to break through the fog and fire to register on his bewildered mind was the horrible smell of sewer gas. Then the events of the past few—hours?—began to come back to him: the dunkings, the beatings, the blackouts.

  Alex sat up. He was in a dark, damp box with crumbly concrete walls and a rusty iron door. He heard water dripping behind him but did not have the energy to turn around and inspect the source. He did not want to move at all for fear of bumping his tortured feet again. Tortured feet, that was it. That was what had awakened him. He had rolled in his delirium and slapped a raw foot against a rough wall.

  As he sat there in the dark, images of the torture sessions began flashing through his mind like a medieval slide show. Stop it, Alex. Don’t think about what they’ve done to you, or what they might do to you next. Focus on how you’re going to beat them. He would have liked to say those words aloud, if for no other reason than to confirm that he could still speak, but he knew they would be listening, so he kept the pep talk to himself.

  He heard footsteps and felt his heart begin to race in response. Then he heard a stubborn dead bolt scrape aside. The door groaned open, and Alex saw the bottom halves of two beefy soldiers.

  “Get out here,” one soldier said.

  Alex took a meditative breath and crab walked out of the cell trying to keep the weight off his wailing feet. As soon as his shoulders cleared the door, the soldiers lifted him off the ground by the arms and sat him down on a small triangular stool in the middle of the room. They cuffed his hands behind him.

  “Do not move.”

  Alex was in a round room with eight doors. Six of the doors were similar to the one that led to his own suite—short iron portals with heavy rusted hinges. Misery had company here. The six looked toward the center of the room like so many hopeless eyes, gloomily awaiting the answer to the question that now taunted Alex: Who or what would be coming through the main door?

  It was time to find out. The soldiers opened the main door and took flanking positions outside. Then a man in the uniform of a KGB general walked into the room. He wore an appraising look on his handsome face that seemed to say, “So you’re Alex Ferris. Let me have a look at you,” but he said nothing. He just stared.

  Alex recognized the general as the man who had captured him in the exit booth, but this second glance also gave him the impression that he knew the face from somewhere else. The plot was thickening.

  The general took a long, slow walk around Alex’s stool, then grabbed a chair from the side of the room and sat it down a couple of feet in front of Alex. “I am General Vasily Karpov of the KGB. You are Alex Ferris of the CIA. It’s time we got acquainted.”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “I’ve come a long way to meet you, Vasily.” Alex saw a flash of displeasure cross his captor’s face at the disrespectful use of his first name. There was something in the gesture that Alex found familiar. Perhaps their paths had crossed when he was with the CIA. Alex decided to put the momentary imbalance to work in his favor. “I know you from the Middle East, don’t I, Vasily?”

  The guards tensed in the doorway like bulldogs on leashes. They wanted a sign to attack, but none was forthcoming. “No, you don’t. Tell me, Alex, why are you here?”

  Karpov was offering him the choice between a pleasant conversation with a general and immediate return to the company of Frick and Frack. Smart guy.

  Alex realized he was about to play a game of high-stakes brinksmanship with his hands bound behind his back and half his cognitive power tied up with pain suppression. Lovely. “I’m investigating a murder. What did you think I was doing here?”

  “Whose murder?”

  Alex knew it would be foolish to push for answers to his own questions, or to refuse outright to answer Karpov, but by asking questions himself, he was rewriting the rules. Perhaps he would find the right button and provoke an unscripted response.

  Alex saw Karpov pulling at the hair on the backs of his fingers and realized he wasn’t the only one under stress. Fancy that. “My brother’s murder. Did you kill him?” Alex was not sure where he was going with this. He’d had no time to analyze or to plan. He was flying blind on intuition, hoping he didn’t crash into a mountain or stall an engine. It was dangerous, but he would be in danger no matter what he did. Intuition was all he had.

  “Of course not,” Karpov said. Then he smiled. “My son did.”

  “Your son?”

  “My son, Victor. Why—”

  “Oh, you mean Jason?” Alex interjected, hoping to rattle Karpov. The general just nodded, appearing nonplussed.

  “Why were you looking for your brother’s murderer here?”

  “My brother left a note. Was Yarik a friend of yours?” This time Alex got a flinch, and this time he recognized the face. Tumblers began falling into place, freeing locks in his mind and opening doors that Alex did not know were closed. As they swung open, his situation fell under a completely new light. Was it possible?

  There was a buzzing in the background, but Alex ignored it. This was too big. His mind was sprinting, his pores were sweating . . . the noise came again.

  “Answer me! What did the note say?”

  With some effort Alex brought his eyes back into focus. “Have you ever been to Geneva?”

  “Your brother left you a note that asked if you had ever been to Geneva?”

  “No, Vasily, I’m asking you: Have you ever been to Geneva?”

  “Not in your lifetime. Now—”

  “The note said, ‘The problems come from Irkutsk.’ Alex’s voice was shallow—not the best for this sort of game, but it was all he could muster. He looked up to watch Karpov’s face while he asked the next question, and saw that the general was giving him a funny look. “When?” Alex asked. “When were you in Geneva?”

  “Nineteen fifty-seven.”

  Karpov kept talking, but Alex did not hear. He could not process a
ny more information than what his own mind was throwing at him. If he weren’t a professional investigator . . . if it hadn’t been bothering him for so long . . .

  Even as the soldiers picked him off the stool and wrapped the rope around his ankles, Alex hardly noticed what was going on outside the confines of his mind.

  Chapter 59

  NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA

  As Karpov stood before the armored entrance to the interrogation suite, he found himself remembering the rumpled bed in Anna’s apartment and picturing what had happened there. He was a professional interrogator, but this one was going to be personal. Alex had crossed the line.

  Alex had now enjoyed a full twenty-four hours of Knyaz hospitality. According to the professionals, it took that long for a prisoner’s new reality to sink in. Alex had already endured a rough stay, but now Karpov would really start turning the screws, Spanish-Inquisition style.

  Karpov was secretly handicapped as to how far he could turn. Because he was going to frame Alex for killing Gorbachev, he could leave no traces of torture or coercion on Alex’s body. That meant no chemicals, no cuts, no scrapes or holes, or even significant bruises. It was a shame, and it was a challenge, but Karpov was always up to those.

  Alex’s round-the-clock torture began with a dark, damp, decrepit old cell that was too short to stand up in and uncomfortable to lie in. Water dripped constantly from a small hole in the cell’s ceiling down to an open sewer pipe on the floor, one just large enough for the rats to use. The trickle was Alex’s drinking water, his washing water, and his toilet. Aside from the drip . . . drip . . . drip, the only other attractions in the cell were the Judas peephole and a trough bolted to the door. The trough caught the tasteless slop that a custodian poured in through a pipe once a day to keep Alex alive. The pros said holding cells were supposed to dishearten, humble, weaken, and drain their occupants. Surely his version would rate a ten.