by Tim Tigner
The photos of Anna had inspired the strategy Victor would use to crack her. He was busy refining the details when his radio sparked to life.
“Team Six to Base, Team Six to Base, over.”
“This is the Base. What do you have, Team Six?”
“We’ve found the nest.”
Chapter 61
NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA
Alex was holding his own. After six days of captivity, he still had his wits about him and his brains within him. Furthermore, he had disclosed nothing of significance, at least not any of the five secrets he deemed most crucial. Ironically, he had obtained one of those secrets during his capture. That one was so poisonous that he not only had to withhold it from Karpov, but Alex had to keep it from himself as well. Doing so proved to be problematic. He found it possible to redirect his conscious thoughts, forcing them to focus elsewhere, forbidding them to scratch the itch. But he was helpless to hobble his dreams. They would wander where they wished.
The rancid facts swirled around his sleeping mind like chunks of fetid meat in a malevolent stew: the quick marriage, his mother’s secret, his father’s distance, the nervous habit, the facial expressions, Jason a Russian, Geneva in fifty-seven . . . Alex had traveled twelve thousand miles to find his brother’s killer. He had found his biological father instead.
Looking at the facts en masse, it was clear to Alex that his mother had consummated an affair with Karpov shortly before her whirlwind betrothal to his father. Given the excitement of youth and the romance of a foreign land, Alex found his mother’s joie de vivre easy to understand. Of course, people may not have been so understanding back then. Keeping the world ignorant—Frank, Karpov, and himself included—must have seemed to be a simple solution to a complicated situation.
Alex had not been expecting anything like this. He had never consciously questioned that his mother’s husband was his biological father, but now he realized that the doubts had been percolating beneath the surface all along. It took a bizarre congregation of horrendous events to bring all the pieces together, but once juxtaposed they formed a perfect square. Perfect? Maybe not. But Alex knew it was a lock. And he knew how to prove it to Karpov. But he had decided not to.
This restraint was not his first impulse. To the contrary, restraint was quite the opposite. He would have spilled the beans on the spot if they had not resumed the water torture before he recovered from the shock. After the Brothers Grimm were done with his bedtime story, Alex had anxiously awaited his next opportunity to tell Karpov the truth, and when that meeting proved to be too long coming, he had even screamed through the door to “Bring me the general!” But when Karpov at last arrived, Alex found intuition holding his tongue.
It took him a while to grasp the intuitive with his conscious mind, but he eventually found a hold. Alex was dangling from the edge of sanity by weary hands. If he suddenly became someone else, if he allowed himself to be Alex Karpov, he was likely to lose his precarious grip on reality. To do anything other than to ignore this new information would be to lose the identity that grounded him—and then it would all be over.
Now Alex was back in the radiation room antechamber, waiting for his father—stop it!—waiting for Karpov to arrive.
To the best of Alex’s knowledge, he had been there once a day, every day, for the past six days. He wished he were certain. Keeping track of time was crucial to his escape plan.
During his Special Forces training, Alex had learned techniques for tracking time. Studies have shown that POWs who keep track of time maintain a stronger bond with their previous lives and convictions than those who lose their orientation. Accordingly, those soldiers who know when they are, are also better equipped to withstand interrogation. No one can hold out indefinitely, but in war, hours can make a crucial difference.
Although his mind had become thoroughly disoriented during the early hours and days of his imprisonment, his body’s clock was still working. He had been trained to pay attention to the fact that his bowels would know what time it was for a day or two, regardless of how many times he was knocked unconscious. Alex used that grace period to pick up on the other cues that would henceforth allow him to scratch hash marks on the wall. He studied the guards’ five-o’clock shadows, sought patterns in the cycles of ambient noise, and tracked the appearance of nocturnal rodents.
Ah, the rodents. The living conditions were, to put it mildly, far from humane. Again, Alex’s military training and experience with a Turk dying in a well had taught him how to cope. He definitely was not enjoying himself, but he was in reasonably good spirits, all things considered. He understood that it all boiled down to what he chose to spend his time thinking about.
Alex’s first rule was to refuse to think about his present condition or to speculate on his future. Full stop. He knew that such thoughts would only stoke the fire that fueled feelings of longing and self-pity. At the end of the day, he might be stuck in the proverbial well again, but at least at this very moment he was not drowning, and the dogs that held him here were no less fallible than the pair he and Mehmet had bested.
One technique he used was analyzing the happenings around him as though he were watching a movie. Rather than sitting in dread, he made it a game to guess what would happen next and to coach the film’s hero accordingly. When he tired of that, he thought back to the cases he had studied or the novels he had read, always third-person experiences with vivid scenes he could step into, thereby stepping out of his own. He did his best to carry those images over into his dreams, leaving that part of his life unchanged, except for the scheduling.
The other thing Alex did to keep his mind busy with disciplined thoughts was working to recall and repeat the names from the Peitho list. After five days of fishing the canals of his mind, he could recite ninety-four of the ’hundred-sixteen.
Then there was torture time. They attacked him physically, and he fought back mentally. When they beat his feet, he pretended he was an Israelite, wandering through the desert on burning sand: salvation just ahead. When they dunked his head it was a river baptism, bringing him closer to God. As for the radiation-room antechamber, well, that was the lion’s den, so call me Daniel. In all cases, he convinced himself that there was a happy ending waiting. The technique kept him afloat. Alex had, after all, survived worse. He knew he would not be able to keep it up for long. Soon the sleep deprivation and lack of nourishment would turn his brain to mush. But he wasn’t planning to be there long. Alex suspected that wasn’t Karpov’s plan either.
Regardless of his mind games, dealing with the pain was all but unbearable. Try as you might, it’s virtually impossible to distract your senses when the pros go to work. But with creativity, faith, and a lack of options, he was adapting to it. Like any physical regimen, each day became easier. The toughest part was knowing he had that escape valve there in his hand. All he had to do was tell Karpov . . .
Psychologically, the Russian roulette was especially tough. Even the Dalai Lama would be pressed to disregard the business end of a revolver pressed to his head. Fortunately, Karpov’s gun backfired, figuratively speaking. It backfired when it occurred to Alex that none of the other tortures they were subjecting him to were seriously life threatening or even physically scarring. That indicated to him that Karpov wanted him alive and unblemished, for some propaganda ploy, no doubt. Thus, he reasoned, the revolver was rigged.
Knowing that he had figured out Karpov’s bluff somehow made Alex more powerful, and his captor weaker. It was a major morale boost. Of course, he still flinched every time Karpov pulled the trigger.
Alex had done something else to increase his power. He had generated it. He had leveraged the fact that they wanted things from him. They wanted the location of the Peitho list. They wanted the location of Anna Zaitseva. They wanted to know if Elaine had betrayed them. And they would want to know that he had changed the Peitho codes in their database.
The tacti
c he employed to generate that power and outwit Karpov was to bury those answers. Alex mentally filed them beneath a pile of potentially, seemingly, possibly valuable information, information that he could cough up instead of what was asked for when the pain was too much to bear. Alex built the disinformation pile wide, and he built it tall, filling his mind with elaborate stories, plans, and conjectures. Red herrings all, he generated them by mixing a healthy imagination with the few facts he did know.
“Tell me!”
“It’s Krasnoyarsk.”
“What?”
“Krasnoyarsk. They’re on to you in Krasnoyarsk.”
“Who’s on to me?”
“The Canadians.”
“What Canadians . . . ?”
Like all games, Alex did not expect it to go on forever. He was playing for time.
Time was what Alex needed. It was his worst enemy, and his best friend. When he concocted it, his escape plan had required him to endure another five days at the Karpov Hilton. It had seemed like forever back then. If one counted how much he aged during those five days, it was probably comparable to five years. But once he had made the plan, once he had decided on the timeline, he, Alex Ferris, was in charge. He was the one keeping himself in the cell, subjecting himself to the best the KGB had to offer, and taking it like a man. That perspective had made all the difference. Now he had almost made it. Now he only had to last until nightfall.
During his second day in captivity, they threw another prisoner into his three-by-five cell with him, some poor soul who was even more expendable than he. The boy could barely talk. Without his gold-framed glasses, it took Alex a while to figure out who he was.
Karpov gave the two of them a few hours to get reacquainted, then he ran Sergey over the coals for a day and a half, returning him briefly to Alex’s side after each new adventure. On Alex’s fourth day, they threw Sergey back in the cell with only a few minutes left to live. Henceforth, when he wasn’t in session, Alex lived with Sergey’s corpse and the sewer rats that enjoyed it.
Barbaric though it was, Alex recognized that the Sergey scenario was a solid tactic on Karpov’s part. He was using Sergey’s torture and death to elicit feelings of guilt, the one emotion that experts know can undermine even the toughest resolve. The unstated argument was that Alex had done this to Sergey when he deceived him in Irkutsk. Alex wasn’t buying. He was here to save the likes of little Kimberly. There was no guilt to be found along that path.
During his tenure as Karpov’s guest, Alex had enjoyed one brief glimmer of sunshine. The custodian who brought his food the second day smiled through the peephole. He smiled with kindness in his eyes, and Alex reckoned that his glance was more nourishing than a T-bone steak. But his friend never returned. Alex figured this had been just one more way of dashing hope, of making him confront the helplessness of his situation. He even began to wonder if it had been a hallucination—the first sign of madness. He would probably never know, so like all other speculation, he put it out of his mind.
Alex had also learned a few things about Karpov during those days. Interrogators try to avoid giving away information about themselves, but they can’t work in a vacuum. Karpov was desperate to know where Anna had gone and what she had done with the copy of the Peitho list Alex had given her.
Alex had tried denying that there was another copy, but the printer server kept a record: two pages, two copies. It was a shame the exit-booth gas had overcome him before he could eat his own printout. Maybe they wouldn’t have checked the server.
Karpov also made a mistake or two. He screwed up by pretending that his men had arrested Anna when she got off the bus, and that she was now enjoying a hospitality suite and recreational program similar to Alex’s own. “We just need you to confirm her story. If your story matches hers, it will confirm that she told us the truth, and then her interrogation can stop.”
It would have worked on an amateur, but Alex had studied the art. Karpov eventually had no choice but to backtrack; otherwise he could not inquire about where Anna had gone, or what she had done with the list. That slip-up bought Alex a day. He held out for another before admitting what Karpov already knew, that she had taken a copy of the list with her. Then Alex denied knowledge of where she had gone or what she had done with the list. It was half-true, and he knew Karpov could sense that. Good.
Yesterday, after a couple hours on the rack—the latest addition to Karpov’s Dark Ages Review—Alex had finally admitted that Anna had stashed the list somewhere on his orders. Alex hoped this would take the pressure off the search for her, but knew that was probably wishful thinking. Today, Karpov would force him to reveal that location—right on schedule. What was in store for him before then? More of the rack? A man could never be too tall.
Alex looked up at the leaden entrance to the radiation chamber and smiled. This was the homestretch. It was do-or-die day, and his soul was prepared.
The door behind him slammed open as if on cue, and Karpov entered. The moment he came into view, Alex could tell that Karpov was thoroughly incensed. This time it didn’t feel like a ruse.
Then Alex saw what Karpov held in his hand, and he knew it was going to be a very bad day indeed. This was not what he had been expecting.
Chapter 62
LAKE BAIKAL, SIBERIA
Victor was pleased. Team Six had found the dacha in the photos at four o’clock on the first day of the search. It was his third day in Russia, Anna’s fifth day in hiding. Father would be proud.
The cabin was only about fifteen kilometers from where Victor had set up base, so he decided to take a jeep rather than the helicopter. If it was Anna, he did not want the noise to give her any warning. Team Six reported that they had not seen Anna, or anybody else, for that matter, but they were sure that somebody was living there as the fireplace was in use and there were two sets of female footprints in the snow.
Per Victor’s instructions, the leader of Team Six met him where they had parked their snowmobiles, down the road from the dacha. “There’s been no activity since our call, sir.”
“Good. Have your partner wait around back while we go to the door. I don’t want to take any chances.”
As they approached the front door, Victor said, “You wait back here, out of sight.” He did not bother trying to explain to the man why a heavy hand could be strategically counterproductive. It was enough that Victor himself knew that the interrogation would start the moment he rapped on the door, and here again he wanted to be more Sherlock Holmes than Gestapo.
When no one answered his knock, Victor shouted, “I can see the smoke from your fire. Please open the door.” He was sure the soldier behind him was rolling his eyes at his geniality, but Victor didn’t care. He wasn’t the ignorant thug.
A bolt drew back, the door opened with a squeak, and there she stood. Even scared and unbathed, Anna Zaitseva was breathtaking. The photographs had not done her justice. They didn’t capture the glow of her skin or the sparkle in her eyes. Actually, at the moment it was more of a defiant glint than a sparkle, but her amber orbs were beautiful nonetheless.
Victor walked past her into the cabin without a word. It took less than a minute for him to determine that Mother wasn’t there. It was just as well. He didn’t want to waste time dealing with an old woman. Coming home to find her daughter gone would be penance enough for her sins. “Where’s Mom?”
“She’s gone for food.”
Victor nodded. It made sense. You could hardly put out an APB for “old woman” but “tall, auburn-haired beauty with large breasts and sultry amber eyes” was a different story. So naturally, Mom made all the contact with the outside world.
In life, even more than in pictures, Anna reminded Victor of the actress Uma Thurman. Uma Thurman with an MD; this girl was in the wrong country. “Put your coat on, Uma,” he commanded.
Anna looked at him inquisitively but didn’t say anything. She
did as he told her. He locked a pair of handcuffs around her wrists as though pinning on a corsage and escorted her from the hideout. Then Victor yelled, “Burn it to the ground” to the senior officer when the angle was right to give him a casual view of her face. He wanted to make certain Anna understood that her life had changed, permanently.
Victor did not speak during the ride back to the helicopter. It was part of his interrogation technique. Let her get uncomfortable. Let her mind run wild while waiting for the next blind lash. Make her want to speak just to fill the painful void of anticipation. He sat beside her on the backseat, opening walnuts with a big pair of rusty pliers, crack, crack, crack. He thought he detected a quiver with each new nut, but he wasn’t sure—the ride was hardly a smooth one. They arrived at the helicopter ten minutes later. It was well below zero, but Anna was sweating.
The helicopter was an Mi-8, which boasted a relatively quiet salon and offered them plenty of room for face-to-face discussion or whatever else might strike his fancy. They boarded and Victor ordered the pilot to fly full throttle for Academic City. His team could take the train back.
Once they were airborne, Victor uncuffed Anna, removed her sheepskin coat and hat, and then put the handcuffs back on.
“Are you comfortable?”
She nodded.
“Alex told me where you were.”
Anna gasped.
“Don’t get me wrong. He did put up a fight, but . . .” Victor let his voice drift off as he shook his head slowly back and forth. Then he took her hand in his. “Tell me about the printout, Anna. Where is it?” he queried with a sickly sweet voice, rubbing one of her knuckles all the while.
Tears began to flow down her face. “I don’t know where it is.”
