The Doomsday Box

by Herbie Brennan

  They were in a narrow, empty back alley, neatly lined with refuse bins. “I think we’ve thrown him off,” Danny said breathlessly.

  “Who do you think he was?”

  Danny shrugged. “Dunno. Russian Mafia?” He kept what he was really thinking to himself. Whoever had taken Opal and Michael were obviously no friends of Cobra. That was very clear from what had happened. As an undercover CIA agent, Cobra was at the sharpest end of his profession, in constant danger of his cover being blown. But the men hadn’t seemed to be after Cobra himself. They’d made directly for Opal and Michael, giving Cobra the opportunity to walk away. It looked for all the world like some sort of kidnapping. Maybe it was the Russian Mafia after all. Maybe they targeted people who looked like tourists and held them for ransom. They might have overheard Opal or Michael speaking English and made an impromptu plan. Cobra could not have interfered: not only was it three against one, but he could not afford to draw attention to himself.

  Hard on the heels of the whole little mystery came an even more important question: where had the men taken Opal and Michael? And what could Danny do about it? He’d twisted and turned so often while they were running, he no longer had the slightest idea where they were. Except that they were in a strange city in a strange country where they didn’t know the language.

  “What are we going to do?” Fuchsia asked, echoing his thought.

  That was the million-dollar question. They were on a secret mission, so they could hardly walk into the nearest police station and report a kidnapping, could do nothing that would draw attention to themselves and put their mission at risk. They couldn’t even ask the embassy for help. The most urgent thing seemed to be to try to rescue their friends, then contact Mr. Stratford and see if he could arrange another meeting with Cobra. But what could they do to rescue their friends? “I don’t know,” Danny said. “I don’t even know where they’ve taken them.”

  “I do,” Fuchsia said. “They’ve been taken to a big, rectangular, yellow brick building with a clock on top of it.”

  “What?”

  “They’ve taken them to a big, rectan—”

  “How do you know that?” Danny interrupted her. Then he realized. “Oh.”

  She smiled delightedly. “I think I’m getting the hang of it, Danny.”

  Danny frowned. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  Danny was experiencing a rising excitement. “Where was it? Did you see a street name or anything?”

  But Fuchsia shook her head. “No, just the big yellow brick building.”

  “What about a sign on the building itself?”

  “Nothing. At least I didn’t see anything. I mean, there were no obvious signs like ‘Harrods’ or ‘Royal Liver Insurance.’ Although it did look a bit like an insurance company, now I come to think of it.”

  “Like offices?”

  “Yes, like a big office building.”

  “Was this, like, hidden away somewhere? In the country? Were there armed guards and stuff?”

  Fuchsia shook her head again. “No, it’s in a city square. Not as big as Red Square. No guards or anything like that. There were cars outside, and people just walked in and out. Like ordinary offices.”

  Danny put a thoughtful arm around her shoulder, and they began to walk out of the alley. Why would the Mafia take Opal and Michael to an ordinary office building? A public place with people walking in and out. Why would criminals expose themselves openly like that? For Danny it was getting more bizarre the more he tried to think it through. An idea occurred to him. “Could you track the route the car took on a map?”

  Fuchsia stopped walking. “I don’t know, but it’s worth a try. Do you have your Moscow map? I didn’t bring mine.”

  Danny pulled Mr. Stratford’s pack from his pocket and extracted the map. Fuchsia stared at it for a long time without speaking. Eventually she said, “Lubyanka Square. Not too far from St. Basil’s, really. I think it’s a big yellow building in Lubyanka Square.”

  “Okay,” Danny murmured, “let’s see if there’s anything about it in the book of words.” He pulled out the little guidebook Stratford had included and flicked through its listings. He wasn’t really expecting to find Lubyanka, but there it was. He skimmed through the list of important facts about the square and felt himself go chill. “Are you sure? Are you sure it was Lubyanka?”

  “No, I’m not,” Fuchsia said. “But couldn’t we go there and find out? I mean, the building will either be there or it won’t.”

  Danny thought for a moment, then decided not to worry her until he was absolutely sure. “Good idea,” he muttered.

  It took them some time to find their bearings after they left the alley. Moscow street names were posted only in Cyrillic, which didn’t tally with their map and meant as little to them as Egyptian hieroglyphs. They tried twice asking directions in English, but received only blank, suspicious looks. Eventually they found their way to the river, and a distinctive church enabled them to locate exactly where they were. Another three-quarters of an hour and they were in Lubyanka Square. It was dominated by a huge, rectangular yellow brick structure that might have been a massive office building. It even had the clock on its façade that Fuchsia had mentioned.

  “That’s the building I saw,” Fuchsia said quietly. “What do we do now? Go in and ask for our friends?”

  Danny shook his head soberly. “I don’t think so, Fuchsia. That’s secret-police territory. Your yellow building is the Moscow headquarters of the KGB.”

  Chapter 26

  Opal, KGB Headquarters, Lubyanka Square, Moscow, 1962

  Opal was afraid. The men had separated her from Michael and bundled her unceremoniously into a room furnished only with an ancient desk, two chairs, and a wooden filing cabinet. The single window was shuttered, padlocked, and lacking curtains. There was linoleum on the floor, stained brown in places, worn in others. Above her head, the room was lit by a cold neon tube. When she tried the door after the men left, she discovered—not altogether to her surprise—that it was locked.

  She stood for a moment, wondering what to do. The men had handled her roughly—she was bruised on her left arm—but given no indication of who they were or what they wanted from her. She had no idea where she was, why she was here, or what was going to happen to her.

  She walked over to the filing cabinet and tried each of the four drawers in turn. All of them were locked. She moved behind the desk and tried its drawers, but they were locked too. The chair behind the desk was worn old leather, but more comfortable than the straight-backed wooden chair in front, and she sat down in it heavily to gather her thoughts.

  “Nyet!” screamed a raucous voice out of the air.

  Opal jumped to her feet, her heart pounding. She looked around fearfully, but could see nothing of the hidden speaker. Or the hidden camera, for it was now obvious her every move was being watched. Where was this place? She walked to the other side of the desk and stared at the wooden chair, wondering if she would be allowed to sit on it. But for the moment she decided not to try. She returned to the door and tried it again. It was still locked. She stood staring at the wall. It was painted a dull, uniform brown, chipped and scratched in places. She strained her ears to listen, but there were no sounds beyond the door or anywhere outside the room.

  After a long while she returned to the wooden chair and placed a tentative hand on its back. She had grown tired of standing, but she was still afraid to sit down in case the voice shouted at her again. She hesitated.

  There was a rattle behind her, the sound of a key in the lock. As she turned, the door opened to admit a thick-set man in his forties, wearing an ill-fitting suit. He nodded at her briefly, locked the door again, then walked behind the desk to sit in the worn leather chair. No hidden voice screamed at him. “Please take a seat, Miss Harrington,” he said in flawless English, with a distinct Russian accent. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  He knew her name! He watc
hed as she sat down on the edge of the wooden chair, grateful to relieve the ache in her legs, but still wary. She said nothing. Some instinct warned her to wait. It was disturbing that he knew her name. It was particularly disturbing that she had no idea how: she had not been searched, questioned, or asked for identification before they shoved her in here.

  “Let me introduce myself,” he said pleasantly. “My name is Menshikov. And you, I believe, are Miss Opal Harrington, a young lady who has come a long way to visit us in the Soviet Union?”

  Opal took a deep breath. Part of her Shadow Project training was designed to help her stand up under interrogation (although everyone had insisted she would never need it), and a prime rule was to find out as much as possible from your interrogators before answering any questions. Starting with who they were. “Mr. Menshikov,” she said firmly, “I demand to know where I am and why I have been forcibly abducted and brought here against my will.”

  “Actually, it’s Colonel Menshikov, Miss Harrington. They called me in on my day off, so I am not wearing my uniform.” He held up a hand in mock protest. “I know, you are thinking this man has not the bearing of a military colonel, and I suspect you are right. But I am a colonel in the KGB—that is the Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, which is our country’s national security organization—and here there are perhaps more opportunities for promotion if one does not look the part.” He smiled at her, showing less than perfect teeth.

  Opal felt herself go cold. Colonel Menshikov had no need to explain what KGB stood for: she’d seen enough spy movies to know exactly. And what it stood for at the height of the Cold War was terrifying. For now, the colonel was obviously playing with her, and not very subtly. The soft approach to find out how naive she was could be followed at any time by stronger measures. But the real mystery was why she was here. How did the KGB know her name? Why were they interested in her at all? An even more disturbing thought occurred. Although she never felt like one, her work with the Shadow Project made her a spy. Spies were tortured and shot in the Soviet Union.

  Except that she’d never spied on the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union no longer existed in her time.

  Abruptly, Opal decided to play along with Menshikov’s ingratiating approach for as long as it lasted. She desperately needed to know what had happened to bring her into this room. Only then would it be possible to find a way out of it. She forced her body to relax and even managed a small smile. “I can’t begin to imagine why the KGB would be interested in me.”

  Menshikov stood up, pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket, and used one to unlock the top drawer of the filing cabinet. He extracted a manila folder, which he threw onto the desk as he sat down again. “Your file,” he said conversationally. “Slim at the moment, but perhaps with your cooperation we can flesh it out a little.”

  “You have a file on me?” Opal failed entirely to keep the shock from her voice. “Where is this place?”

  “You asked before. I thought you might have guessed by now. This is KGB headquarters. Part of the building is administration offices, part is a prison, part consists of interrogation rooms like this one—where, I hope, we will not have to delay you for long.” He took a newly sharpened pencil from the breast pocket of his jacket and used it to flick up one corner of the folder. Inside she had the briefest glimpse of what looked like a single sheet of paper. Then he let the corner drop. “I have only a few questions for you, but before we get to them, let me tell you some things that will, perhaps, reassure you.” The smile again, to every appearance completely genuine. “Would I be correct in assuming that my mention of the KGB has left you a little . . . shall we say, apprehensive?”

  Opal forced herself to smile back, although she doubted her attempt was as convincing as his own. “Perhaps just a little.”

  Menshikov sat up and said briskly, “I’m afraid, as an organization, we have not been very skilled in”—he hesitated for the first time, suddenly frowning—“public relatives? Do you say ‘public relatives’?”

  “Public relations,” Opal corrected him.

  “Ah, yes, public relations. Forgive me: my English is very poor. As a result, there have been many misconceptions about the activities of the KGB. You will no doubt have heard that we torture prisoners, is this not so?”

  It was Opal’s turn to hesitate, but only for a moment. If she was to get anywhere, she had to give the impression of total honesty. “Yes.”

  “Then let me assure you,” said Menshikov expansively, “this is not the case. KGB officers are expressly forbidden by our founding legislation to cause any physical harm to those in our custody, for whatever reason they are under investigation.”

  Opal’s instinct was to let him talk, but he looked at her now without speaking further. With a mild sensation of panic, she heard herself ask, “What about mental torture?”

  To her surprise, he actually laughed. “Ah, the deprivation of sleep, the loud music played endlessly through speakers, the humiliation through the removal of clothes, the forced stress positions . . . you have heard of all these things, no doubt?”

  She had. “Not true?” she asked.

  “Not true,” Menshikov echoed. “We rely almost entirely on the willing cooperation of those we need to question.”

  “So if I wanted to get up and leave now, you would do nothing to stop me?”

  “Oh come, Miss Harrington, you toy with me. You know there are questions I must ask you. You are obviously a sensible young woman, so it is my hope and expectation that you will cooperate with me. I fear that unless you choose to give me satisfactory answers, I am forced to detain you here until you do—that is my job. I am simply telling you that you should have no fear of torture, physical or mental, during your stay here.” The easy smile came again. “Unless you count the food, of course, which I’m afraid is quite dreadful.”

  “But nourishing,” Opal suggested ironically.

  “Indeed,” he said, a little blankly. He drew the file toward him and flicked it open. Then he took a thick-barreled fountain pen from his breast pocket, unscrewed the top, and set it down beside the pencil by the folder. “Now, Miss Harrington, tell me all you know about psychotronics and time travel.”

  Chapter 27

  Michael, KGB Headquarters Basement, 1962

  It was cold. Michael’s breath plumed in time to the rise and fall of his chest. His arms were shackled at the wrists and pulled above his head by a slack chain attached to a pulley on the ceiling. His ankles were also shackled, in this case to an iron bar that left his feet spread about a yard apart. The bar was, in turn, chained to fittings sunk into a concrete block beneath him. There was nothing painful about the shackles themselves—all four felt, if anything, a little loose—but the wrist chain meant he was unable to sit or even squat, while the bar prevented his taking so much as a single step across the room. He could bend, he could turn, but these were the only movements permitted.

  His arms hurt from being held up at an unnatural angle. His legs hurt even more.

  The cell was somewhere in the basement of the building where the three men had brought Opal and himself. It was windowless and lit only by a single dim bulb hanging from a length of electrical cord in the middle of the ceiling. The walls were whitewashed, with a splattering of curious brown stains. The floor was of worn stone flags. There was only one item of furniture, an old wooden chair.

  Michael bent his knees to take some of the strain from his legs. Although he could not bend them much, it helped a little, but only for a moment. The problem was, bending his legs left him hanging from the chain that held his wrists, so that his arms immediately began to spasm and his shoulder sockets felt as if they were on fire. He endured it for as long as he could, then straightened his knees. His legs began to ache again.

  Turning round on his own axis helped a little too. He could manage that fairly easily since the ankle bar was fixed in such a way as to allow a full 360-degree rotation. There was just enough chain to permit him to shuffle his feet.
With a little concentration he could use the movement to turn slowly so that he faced each blank wall in turn. In one of them there was a steel-clad door with a sliding hatch at head height. Michael knew this had to be an observation hatch, although it had remained closed since he became aware of it. Michael even knew where he was, or thought he did. He was in a subterranean cell of the Lubyanka Prison, which formed part of KGB headquarters.

  The classrooms of Eton College seemed very far away.

  Despite his pain, he came close to a smile. It was in a history lesson at Eton that he’d learned about the KGB and their Lubyanka Prison. An old Soviet joke had stuck in his mind:

  Why has KGB headquarters got the best view in the whole of Moscow?

  Because from the basement you can see Siberia.

  Siberia was where the Soviets kept their prison camps, the dreaded gulags, where dissident political prisoners spent brutal years of hard labor in subzero temperatures. Those who survived the Lubyanka itself, that was. The Lubyanka was where suspects were questioned, sometimes with such ferocity that they died.

  Michael stopped his circle. The result was always the same. He could change position slightly, but ultimately it made no difference. He could ease one ache a little, but only at the expense of starting another. There was no easement, no letup. The pains had crept into his back and chest, and while no single pain was unbearable in itself, the combination of aches never stopped. There was a term for what was happening to him, and it diverted him to try to remember it. Eventually he did. He was in a ‘stress position.’ If you had to endure a stress position long enough, you would tell your captors anything.

  He had no idea how long he had hung in this stress position. He thought it must be at least an hour, although it might well have been longer. It certainly felt longer. Time stretched endlessly when your body was filled with pain. He wished he had one of the Shadow Project’s psychotronic helmets. With that he could leave his body and its ills. Without it, he was trapped.