Coercion (34 page)

Victor was pissed.  He had been in a perpetual state of pissedoffness for five days now, ever since
the pager ripped him from Elaine’s execution and brought him to this frozen wasteland.

He had come close to blowing-off his father and going through with the kill.  He had been so psyched up, so excited to see Elaine’s helpless, naked body, to
explain the price of betrayal and look into her eyes as she understood what was happening.  Ooh, how he had yearned to whisper it all in her ear while she watched her own life ebb away into crimson waters. 

He had
hesitated there in her closet, torn between that desire and the fear of his father’s wrath.  Then he focused on the big picture, realized that this trip to Russia would give him the chance he needed to pick up his Knyaz AG stock, and made the decision.

What was the reward for his obedience? 
Life in the freezer.  He felt the way a TV dinner looked before you zapped it.  This doubled his resolve not to be Vasily’s triggerman.

On the bright side, this trip had given Victor the opportunity to catch up with a couple of childhood friends in person, rather than via encrypted telephone.  And the Knyaz shares would soon be in his hand.  Meanwhile, he could look forward venting some of his frustration on the
Zaitseva woman. 

As much as he hated to admit it, Victor did understand his father’s logic.  Victor’s slip-up with Alex had initiated the chain of events that first killed Yarik and now jeopardized the whole Knyaz operation.  Of course, part of his father’s choice of action was probably just venting his frustration about not having Yarik around any more to do this kind of thing, but Victor wasn’t about to bring that up.

On that topic, Victor was still stunned at the news that Alex had bested Yarik.  Victor would miss the old bulldog.  There must be more to the story than what Vasily reported Alex had revealed, but who knows?  Of all the secrets to try to conceal during an interrogation, why would you choose that one?  Regardless, Victor was glad not to be the only Knyaz member Alex had outmaneuvered.

Although Victor left San Francisco Tuesday night, he had not arrived in Academic City until Thursday afternoon, local time.  A lot had happened while he was in flight.  Karpov had ordered an intense, systematic search of the whole region
for Anna Zaitseva once it became clear that she had fled with a list of Peitho victims.  “Find her!  Get the list!  Bring them both to me, intact!”

Vasily
had stationed agents at airports and train stations.  He had them set up road blocks and search hotels.  KGB Agents had interviewed all Anna’s friends and relatives.  Victor knew “interrogated” was probably a more appropriate term, but nonetheless it had produced nothing.  Anna and her mother had vanished.

By the time Victor arrived on the scene most of the agents were standing around scratching their heads, trying to avoid The General
’s flaming gaze.  Their predicament was a tough one.  Siberia was a big region, bigger than the continental United States, and it offered a lot of remote nooks and crannies to hide in.  Without discovering a trail, uncovering any clues, or receiving a big break, the search was a hopeless cause—at least in the short term.

Victor bro
ught a fresh mind to the search and grasped the essence of the problem almost immediately.  He then took a more deliberate, delicate approach than his predecessors had employed.  It wasn’t easy.  He felt like Sherlock Holmes working on the heels of the Gestapo: a lot of dust had been kicked up, and the resulting cloud worked to conceal any clues.

Victor proved his genius on the evening of his second day in Siberia, but only to himself.  He kept his discovery a secret. 
He liked to present things
fait accompli
whenever possible, and especially when his father was involved.  It was the only way to avoid being wrong.

The genius was the insight to go through the photo albums at Anna’s mother’s house.  The
Gestapo
had already done this when they ransacked the place, but they were looking for the Peitho list rather than clues.  They had left the photo albums strewn among a pile of books on the floor.  Victor noted that most of the latter were in English, and filed that fact away for later reference.

After an hour of
relatively thoughtful perusal, Victor had yelled “Bingo!”  The KGB soldiers responded with a clueless look.  “Guess you guys don’t play that here yet.  Give it a couple of years.”  They still looked confused, but to hell with them.  He had found a dacha that appeared and reappeared in photos from different years, even though there was no dacha currently registered to anyone in the Zaitsev family. 

Victor knew the
Zaitsevs had owned a dacha when Anna’s father was still alive, but had sold it years ago after his death.  The KGB had searched it anyway before Victor’s arrival, and had interrogated the whole surrounding village as well.  That was a waste of time.  But this was a different dacha.

This dacha was on a large
lake, a lake that the locals subsequently claimed could only be Lake Baikal.  That was when Victor got an ecology lesson.  Although Baikal’s surface area wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in the global sense—each of America’s Great Lakes covered roughly the same geography—Lake Baikal’s depth was extraordinary.  Baikal was so deep, they explained, that it held more than a quarter of the world’s fresh water supply.  And while none of this was particularly interesting to Victor—it was just a Jeopardy question as far as he was concerned—the fact that the geological anomaly gave rise to thousands of species of flora and fauna that didn’t exist anywhere else, was golden.  Victor had found his big break.

He
rounded up the appropriate experts.  From the position of the sun, the view of the shorelines and the date stamps on the photos, they were able to determine the region of Baikal where the photos were shot.  That gave Victor a grid square on which to focus.  Of course, there was no guarantee that Anna had gone to the dacha, and for that reason he did not tell his father of this discovery, but Victor was certain that he would find her there.  It was only a matter of time.

Victor, a KGB Major by rank, immediately commandeered six two-soldier teams and a helicopter.  It took them three hours to fly the
seven-hundred kilometers southeast to the appropriate section of Lake Baikal.  That seemed to take forever.  He was anxious to bag his victory, retrieve his shares, and head for the tropics.  This was going to be it, he had decided.  Once he delivered the girl, he’d make a quick trip back through California to eliminate Elaine and pack a few bags and then he would vanish.  He could mange the remaining sabotage by telephone.

Victor directed the pilot to land in the front yard of a small centrally located hotel, and then proceeded to appropriate it
as their field post.  Then he called the local KGB office to arrange for a dozen snowmobiles and a jeep.  With that accomplished, he assigned each pair of agents a zone to search, gave them photos of the dacha and instructions on what to do when they found it, and let slip the dogs of war.

“When you find the dacha you are not to approach it.  Is that understood?”

“Yes, Sir,” they replied in chorus.

“You are to sit back out of sight and radio for me.  I will join you to make the bust personally.  Is that understood?”

“Yes, Sir.”

He knew it could take a while. 
There were trails rather than roads that connected many of the dachas to civilization, and the snow was deep.  Victor paced for an hour, fantasizing about life on Emily Island as he waited for his radio to bring good news.  Once he tired of that he sat down to perfect his interrogation strategy.

Victor liked planning interrogations even more than killings.  It was a higher form of art because the opponent was actively engaged.  And it was much less predictable.  People bleed the same, but they talk differently.  Victor likened people to eggs.  Each would be tough under certain types of pressure and crush under others.  Neither of those results was what the professional interrogator wanted.  The professional appraised each egg as a jeweler did an uncut gem.  He sought the right way to
crack the individual and extract what he wanted without creating a worthless mess.

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.”

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 four 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 Vasily, 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 12,000 miles to find his brother’s killer, and 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 Vasily 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, Vasily 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
Vasily.  But he had decided not to.

This restraint was not his first impulse; to the contrary, that was quite the opposite.  He would have spilled the beans on the spot if Frick and Frack had not resumed the water torture before he recovered from the shock.  After the Brothers Grim were done with his bedtime story, Alex had anxiously awaited his next opportunity to tell
Vasily 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 Vasily 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 anti-chamber, waiting for his father—
stop it!
—waiting for Vasily 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 army SERE 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 life 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.

Thanks to his training, Alex knew that although his mind had become thoroughly disoriented during the early hours and days of his imprisonment, his body’s clock was still working.  He knew 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.

Aah, 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-party 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 Vasily’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 Vasily...

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,
Vasily’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 Vasily wanted him alive and unblemished, for some propaganda ploy no doubt.  Thus, he reasoned, the revolver was rigged.

Knowing that he had figured out
Vasily’s bluff somehow made Alex more powerful, and his captor weaker.  It was a major morale boost.  Of course, he still flinched every time Vasily 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 tactic he employed to generate that power and outwit
Vasily 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 a large dose of intelligence information, the windfall from a slide show in Irkutsk.

“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, and 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.  He only had to last until nightfall.

Frick and Frack had certainly tried to wring everything out of him sooner, by fishing hook and shepherd’s crook, oh how they had tried.  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, and without his
Gold Framed glasses it took Alex a while to figure out who he was. 

Vasily
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
Vasily’s part.  Karpov was working 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, and there was no guilt to be found along that path.

During his tenure as
Vasily’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
Vasily during those days.  Interrogators try to avoid giving away information about themselves, but they can’t work in a vacuum.  Vasily 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.

Vasily 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. 
Vasily 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, and he held out for one more before admitting what Vasily 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 Vasily could sense that. 
Good
.

Yesterday, after a couple hours on the rack—the latest addition to
Vasily’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, Vasily 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 home stretch.  It was
do or die day, and his soul was prepared.