Coercion (31 page)

It took fifty-two seconds for him to find the cheat-sheet taped to the bottom of the pencil holder.  LuV2KiL confirmed that he had selected the correct office. 
And Lazy wins the game while Ferris takes the set
.

Although there is nothing so frustrating as being denied critical information by an unresponsive computer, the opposite is also true.  Alex was feeling good.  Once inside the system, he ran a search for the fourteen-digit sequence that was “his number.” 
Nothing!
  Alex let out a long, slow sigh of relief and then performed a second search.  This time he used “Kimberly Evans” and he got a hit.  Three minutes later Alex had two hard copies of a network file listing names and numbers.  The file was titled “Peitho.”  The name meant nothing to him, but the contents were everything.  He would have to look up Peitho later. 

The Peitho list was a long one, but it was not outrageous.  Relieved as he was to learn that there was not an army of forced combatants out there, Alex was nonetheless overcome by a wave of pity for the hundred or so souls laid raw before him.  Then a second wave struck, only this time it was inspiration.

It took two minutes for Alex to change a random digit in each of the one-hundred-sixteen Peitho codes.  It was one of the simplest things he had ever done, and yet undoubtedly the most significant single event of his life. 
One small mouse-click for man
…  For kicks, he destroyed Yarik’s cheat-sheet and changed his network password to “Ferris1” before logging off.

Now Alex had a new priority in life: getting the list of Peitho victims out of Russia.  He spent ten minutes packing the list of names into his brain as a type of insurance, hoping it would be sufficient for passive recall if disaster struck.  What else could he do?  Within a few feet of where he was sitting there was probably equipment that could compress the data onto a microdot he could swallow or implant beneath the skin of his forearm, but there was no time for that.  A swift retreat was clearly
the winning wager at this point.

Alex had one more thing to do before leaving.  He needed to find a uniform.  His own clothes were a wreck after riding beneath the general’s jeep. 
He would be a fool to attempt marching out the front door looking like a chimney sweep, and marching out was exactly what he planned to do.

A quick search of Yarik’s office was unproductive, but he struck pay dirt in the office to the left of center.  Three minutes later Alex Ferris, IPI, was a general in the KGB.  The rank of general was much too conspicuous for his tastes, but there
was nothing he could do about that, so he pressed on.  It was time to get the hell out of Dodgenik. 
I’d like to cash in my chips, please
.

Anna was in the midst of a lovely dream when she awoke to a nightmare.  Someone was pounding on her door.  Talk about déjà vu.

Owing to her dream, her first thought was an optimistic one: could it be Alex?  She looked at her watch.  It was only six o’clock.  Alex had left three hours earlier.  Was he done already?  It was possible, but he wouldn’t be pounding on her door … unless it was urgent.  Maybe she had slept through the soft knocks.  Perhaps he needed help.

The pounding resumed.  Surely it wasn’t
Vasily again … but it really didn’t sound like Alex either.  Both of them were more subtle than that.  Vasily was nothing if not tactful, and the Alex she knew would have thrown pebbles at her window or climbed up the fire escape.  Anna felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.  What if they had caught Alex and tortured him into giving up her name?  What if the KGB had come to take her away?  No, no, there hadn’t been enough time for that.  What then?  The rapists from the roadblock!  Perhaps they had finally tracked her down and had come to finish the job … one way or the other.

The pounding came again.  Anna could not ignore it.  If it
was bad news, it would remain there waiting for her, but if Alex needed help, he needed it immediately.

Anna put on her bathrobe and went to the door.

“Where is he?”  Vasily asked the moment she opened the door.

How did he know about Alex?  Was this personal, or professional?  Why was he holding up that big black pen?  “What are you talking about,
Vasily?”

“Do not play games with me, Anna.  Either produce the American, or step aside.”  A KGB Major stepped into the doorway beside
Vasily, making it clear that this was not a misguided courtship game.

“Get on with your foolishness,” Anna said, and moved aside.  She had no idea how
Vasily had learned of Alex, but she was thrilled that Alex had outwitted Vasily by leaving so early.

The Major went to the kitchen and then the bathroom.  He said nothing but gave
Vasily a single negative nod.  Vasily walked over to stand by the folded cot and the box of medical supplies that rested in the corner of the room.  Then he shifted his gaze to her bed.  Was it obvious two people had been sleeping there?  Yes, she feared, it probably was.

When he turned back toward her,
Vasily wore a twisted smile on his angry face.  “I’ll ask you for the last time, here, where … is … he?”

The emphasis on the word
here
hit Anna like a slap in the face.  No doubt that was Vasily’s intent.  She willed herself to remain calm and composed.  Vasily could certainly do whatever he wanted to do, but she did not have to give him any satisfaction.  “Whoever he was, he’s gone now.  Where he went, I have no idea.”

Vasily
merely nodded.  She expected him to shout at her, perhaps shake or slap her, but he did none of these.  Instead, his eyes flared and he walked over to the shelf that displayed her beloved collection of glass figurines.  He picked up the unicorn and locked her gaze.  When Anna didn’t flinch, he flicked it to the floor where it shattered at her feet.  Without breaking eye contact he slowly reached for another figurine, arching his eyebrows and tilting his head as he did so.

Anna felt her lower lip begin to quiver, but she did not break eye contact.  If
Vasily was looking for weakness or remorse he had failed, all he was getting was rage.  He seemed to sense this.

“I,” smash, “am,” smash, “very,” smash, “disappointed,” smash, “in,” smash, “you,” smash, “Anna,” smash.  Then he turned his back to her and moved toward the door.

“Take her away, Major.”

“Take her away, Major.  Confine her at The Complex and wait for my arrival.”

“The Complex.  Yes, Sir,”

Maximov
’s tone was obedient for Anna’s benefit, but Vasily caught a questioning look in his eyes.  All Vasily said was, “I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”  He had shown weakness once before.  He would not show it again.

“Very well, Sir.”

Vasily shut the door and sat somberly on Anna’s bed.  It was obvious that two people had slept there.  Two people.  Huh.  That sounded so innocuous.  The woman he loved was sleeping with the man he hated.  Hated?  Yes, hated.  Alex had made it to Novosibirsk.  A week ago.  That meant Yarik had not.  One week—to bag Yarik and bed Anna.  Hated.

Vasily looked at the bits of crystal on the floor, the smashed figurines, and thought of his fallen friends.  He had pushed Igor too hard, and it had killed him.  What was he thinking, trying to Peitho the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?  He had gotten cocky.  Now he had pushed Yarik too far, and had killed him too. 
Bring him in unblemished
, he had ordered.  He had gotten greedy. 
And then there were two
.

But they were so close, so close.  And he still had Victor.  Vasily felt his blood pressure rising unexpectedly as he thought of his son.  A moment later he understood why.  Victor’s incompetence had brought about this mess.  If Anna didn’t cooperate, if she didn’t give him Alex, he would summon Victor.  Let the boy clean up his own mess.

Despite this morning’s setback, the Knyaz were still on course.  His overall strategy of using Alex as a lever to pry Anna into the Kremlin was still sound and salvageable.  In fact, he could still win Anna’s heart and have Alex in jail by nightfall if he played the interrogation just right.  That was why he instructed Major Maximov to take Anna to The Complex.

Maximov
would not take Anna there by way of the gravelly road Vasily had used an hour earlier when he went to retrieve Medusa.  Maximov would walk Anna through the main lobby of the KGB building, giving her a false hope he could later snatch away.  He would walk her past the lobby elevators and down the long hallway that ran the length of the first floor and continued along the back.  Once they reached its far end they would board a service elevator which, according to its buttons, would take them either two levels higher or two levels lower.  Major Maximov would push and hold both the -1 and the -2 buttons long enough for the computer to identify his thumbprints.  Then the doors would close, a special light would illuminate, and the elevator would descend to a secret level.  When the doors opened, Anna would find herself looking into the mouth of a long stone tunnel.  This was the back entrance to the Knyaz headquarters, the one they almost always used, and it virtually cried out, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

Vasily
was proud not just of the tunnel and the headquarters at the other end, but of the clever means by which he had acquired them.  Like most everything else of note he owned, they were the spoils of a strategic campaign.

If there is one constant that applies to leaders and governments throughout the world and across time, it is this: whatever they do well for their people, they do even better for themselves.  When the government of Russia built the peoples’ bomb shelters in prep
aration for the nuclear war their strategists thought inevitable, they created metros, deeply buried metros, in all of Russia’s first-strike cities.  When they built the Party leaders’ bomb shelters, they found the hardest location within fifty kilometers of the city center, and then built themselves an escape tunnel to reach it.

Novosibirsk’s elite bunker was located beneath the ten meters of hardened concrete that formed the foundation of its nuclear power plant.  When
Vasily built the new KGB office a few kilometers from there, he ensured that it rested directly above that escape tunnel, presumably so that the top KGB brass would also have access to it.  Then, as soon as the building was completed but before anyone had moved in, he faked a radiation leak at the nuclear plant, Peithoed the children of a couple government inspectors, and voila, the bunker became the Knyaz’s headquarters, and the abandoned access tunnel made it invisible.

This morning,
Maximov would whisk Anna to The Complex through the last three kilometers of the forgotten tunnel in a glorified mining cart.  He would know to leave the headlights off, making the silent five-minute commute feel like an endless journey to the depths of Hell.  By the time she reached the other end she would feel like she was buried alive. After a couple claustrophobic hours alone in a dark cell, she would be thrilled to see him.  Then the fun would start…

The road or the woods?
  The road or the woods?  Alex was facing a dilemma.  His exit strategy from the KGB compound was bold and simple; out the front door.  The dilemma was selecting the route that gave him the best chance of getting that far.

It’s hard to judge distance while riding beneath a jeep—kind of like judging descent when falling from a plane—but he figured the KGB complex was no more than three miles from the nuclear power plant, and probably closer to two.  That fit with his recollection of the map.  If he took the road he increased the risk of
encountering a patrol, but he would probably reach the building before daybreak.  That would increase the odds that he could slip in the back door unobserved.  On the other hand, if he went through the woods he wouldn’t need to worry about patrols, but then his last hundred meters would be fully exposed.

He looked to the heavens for guidance and chose the road.  Eighteen breathless minutes later he arrived undetected at the back of the central building.  Whether the patrols were infrequent, or he was just lucky, Alex did not know or care.  Freedom was
but a few feet away, and conditions were favorable.  He tapped the Peitho printouts in his breast pocket with a sense of profound satisfaction.

Once he passed the front gate, he would take the bus to the metro and the metro to the center of Novosibirsk and the US Consulate.  There he would work with the officer-in-charge to get himself on a plane home. 
Then he would team up with a couple of Agency friends and pay a visit to his old friend, Jason Stormer. 
Yes, just a few steps more…

Alex took a moment to catch his breath, and then held it again while sliding Yarik’s card through the reader.  The red diode turned to green with a friendly click, and he slipped
inside.  You couldn’t get much closer to the fire than this. 
He was cookin’
.

Alex found himself standing near the toe end of an L-shaped hallway.  There was an elevator a few yards farther down the dead-end hall to his right.  To his left the hallway ran about ten yards and then turned right.  Alex did not want to risk taking more than a moment to shake off the cold and get his uniform in order; the elevator doors could open at any time.

The hallway lights were still working on their nighttime dim setting, indicating that not many people had arrived yet, if any. 
Excellent
.  Now he had to work his way to the front of the building undetected and find a window from which he could watch the front gate.  There he would wait for either a changing of the guard or the arrival of a large group of people before attempting his bold frontal retreat.  Just a walk in the park, nothing to be nervous about.

Alex had a
general’s uniform and a colonel’s ID.  That wasn’t perfect, but at least the Soviets didn’t share the Americans love of nametags. 
No reason to worry, Alex, guards never pay much attention to people leaving, right?

Alex turned the corner into a long corridor and began his homeward march.  No sooner had he done so than the hallway lights brightened.  Had he tripped a motion detector?  Activated a surveillance camera?  Run out of luck?

It was a long corridor, probably fifty yards or so.  He was comparing his plight to that of a Superbowl coach when he spotted the illuminators at the far end of the hall.  Two people were walking in his direction.  Defensive linemen?  Time to punt?

Alex continued walking as before,
trying to get an early read.  They did not look like a security detail; one of the two was in uniform, the other was not.  Alex began willing them to turn into an offices before they reached him, and he slowed his pace to improve those odds.

Natural, natural, try to look natural.  What!  Holy shit!  It’s Anna
.

The KGB officer with Anna had his right arm tightly around her left bicep; it was not a gentlemanly escort.  The sight flipped a switch in Alex’s brain, releasing chemicals and reactivating the predator within.  Alex felt like Texas. 
Don’t mess with me.

The pair was ten yards away and closing with no
one else in the hallway.  Alex turned to the doorway on his right and pretended to fumble in his pocket for keys.  Then, as the couple walked past behind him, he whipped his right elbow back and around and smashed it into the man’s nose with all the might he could muster.  The crack was sickening, but only Anna was there to hear it.  Fortunately she didn’t scream.  Alex continued his pivot and caught the KGB Major by the throat as he dropped.  Squeezing hard and moving fast, Alex used his free hand to open the door.  Then he propelled the stunned officer inside.

“Close the door, Anna.”

Alex had planned to pinch the man’s carotids until he passed out, but now he saw that this would not be necessary.  His elbow had punched the cartilage from the Major’s nose up into his brain.  He was dead. 
Wow
.  Alex knew that this was possible, but he had never done it before—it was hard to find volunteers for practice.  His drill instructors would be proud.  Alex felt nauseous.

He looked up at Anna and felt a rush of affection. 
Was there an emotion that wasn’t flooding his brain this morning?  No time for those now
. 

“Are you okay?”

Anna nodded.  Her eyes were wide as saucers.

He took her arm and led her to a chair. 
“Why don’t you sit down for a second.”

Alex looked around. 
They were in a storage room full of dusty metal desks and filing cabinets and other odds and ends. 
Someone was watching over him
.
  He grabbed the major’s corpse by the heels and dragged it to the back of the room where he stuffed it into the foot-well of a desk.  Then he paused in thought, nodded to himself, and ducked back under the desk for a demotion.  A moment later Alex was a major.  Now he was under ranked versus Andrey’s identification—he couldn’t use Maximov’s ID since the guards almost certainly knew him—but at least he was less conspicuous.

He walked over to where Anna was sitting and crouched in front of her.

“What happened?”

“They came looking for you,” she began, sobbing.  Then Anna pulled herself tog
ether and told him everything.

When she got to the scene where she stood her ground against the general, Alex added
toughest
to the list of superlatives he could use to describe Anna.  When she had finished Alex took both her hands and said, “I’m so sorry to have gotten you into this, Anna.  All I can do to make it up to you is help you to get out of it safely.  Do you trust me to do that?”

“Of course I do.”

“Good.  Here’s what you need to do…”

After Alex finished he made her repeat everything back, twice.

Anna seemed stunned, but then who wouldn’t be.  Her life might never be the same again.  It certainly wouldn’t be anytime soon.  Although they needed to move, he gave her a minute to breathe deeply and let his instructions sink in.  He needed the minute himself to figure out one last problem.

When at last Anna looked up, Alex handed her a copy of the Peitho list.  “Anna, on your way out of town, I want you to go to the church and hide this in the spine of the big Bible when nobody is looking.  It’s my backup.”

“Okay.  Why there?”

“Your apartment is clearly out, as is your mother’s.  And you can’t entrust it to friends without endangering them.  The US consulate
isn’t an alternative because they will have it watched the moment they find you missing. Actually the KGB probably has somebody permanently inside.”

She nodded again.

Poor girl
.  He had dragged her into the deep end of his dangerous world.  It was time to change the subject.  Alex looked at his watch: ten-to-nine, time to get moving.  “All right now, you need to compose yourself.  You’ve got to walk out that front door looking calm and relieved.”

“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, and this 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.

“Hey, it’s not going to come to that.  These guys are not going to question your story.  The thought that you could have overpowered Major Maximov would never enter their macho minds.”

“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.

“Look, Anna.  About our earlier conversation …”

I love that
woman
, Alex thought, as five minutes later he watched Anna pass through the exit booth.  She was the perfect picture of righteous indignation mixed with fear and relief.  He had gotten the list out!  Now Anna should 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.

Alex watched as the bus disgorged a dozen early arrivals—mostly women he noted with surprise—and picked up one beloved passenger.  He smiled with satisfaction as the door swung closed, and the old bus pulled away.

He would wait for the arrival of the next bus, and make his exit in the throng of activity. 
One ticket to freedom, please
.

The 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 be 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.