Overkill (35 page)

The first rule of interrogation, from the point of view of the subject, is never say anything. That may sound trite, but it is a perfectly valid piece of advice. Once you tell an interrogator
anything at all, he can build on it and if he’s any good he can confuse you to the extent that you can’t remember what you told him, how much he knew already, and how much he’s
guessing. And if you reach that stage you have no hope at all of recovering the situation.

Orlov knew the rules just as well as Richter did, and as far as Richter could see the best thing he could do, bearing in mind that they were going to kill him anyway, was to try to mislead them
as much as he could. Unfortunately for Richter, it was going to be a painful process, because before he could spill the fake beans, to confuse a metaphor, he was going to have to be
‘persuaded’ by Yuri. If Richter had been in Orlov’s position, he would have been very suspicious indeed of a rapid surrender.

‘Once again, Richter. Tell me what you know.’

Richter shook his head. Yuri was smiling again and Richter realized he was just beginning to enjoy himself. Two more blows rocked Richter’s head from side to side, and the stars started
getting brighter. Despite what may be seen in films, there is a limit to the number of severe blows to the head that can be tolerated before unconsciousness supervenes. Yuri was very big and very
strong, and Richter could feel himself getting near the point where the blackness would envelop him.

He was dimly aware of hands lashing his arms to the side of the chair, and then the work began in earnest. After the fifth or sixth blow Richter stopped counting and concentrated on keeping
awake. When Yuri finally stopped, after a sharp command from Orlov, Richter hung his head and played dead. The way he was feeling, it wasn’t any effort at all. Someone grabbed Richter’s
hair and pulled his head back. ‘He’s out. You want me to wake him?’

‘Leave him for a few minutes. I doubt,’ Orlov added, chuckling, ‘if a few slaps across the face are going to bring him round. There are some smelling salts in my bathroom
cabinet, on the bottom shelf. Get them. Oh, and bring some towels and put them on the carpet. He’s bleeding quite a lot.’ Richter’s face was still too numb for him to feel
anything as delicate as a stream of blood running down it, but he could still taste the blood in his mouth. He wondered briefly and inconsequentially what sort of a state his clothes were in.

When the towels had been positioned to Orlov’s liking, Yuri thrust the bottle of smelling salts under Richter’s nose. He snorted, then opened his eyes. Or rather, his eye. His left
eye seemed to be struck tightly shut, probably by drying blood. Orlov was still smiling. ‘And again, Richter. What do you know?’

Richter tried to speak, but all he managed was a croak.

‘Water. Get him a glass of water.’

Richter took a couple of sips, and coughed.

‘We’re waiting.’

Richter tried again. ‘Did you hear about the Irish tap dancer? Fell in the sink and—’

Yuri started again, harder this time if anything, and Richter could feel himself slipping away. Orlov stopped him.

‘Well, Richter?’

Richter shook his head. Yuri started again, alternating between Richter’s face and stomach. And the pattern was repeated, time and again. Richter passed out at least twice, possibly three
times, and was revived each time with the salts. His whole head throbbed, as if some great pump was inflating and deflating it, and his stomach ached as if he’d been kicked by a donkey.
Richter could feel his will to resist slowly ebbing away.

All he wanted, all he wanted in the world, was for them to stop. Silently Richter cursed Yuri, and he cursed Orlov and most of all he cursed Simpson for getting him into this thing in the first
place. The one thing Richter couldn’t do was blame himself because he had to keep angry if he was going to have any sort of control left, and he had to have that control because when he
finally told them, he had to tell them what he wanted to, not what he knew. So Richter cursed, and he cursed again and again.

Yuri’s fists must have been aching by that time, because Richter was dimly aware that the blows had changed. Instead of the solid thump of flesh and bone, it was a stinging, slicing pain.
He opened his eye cautiously and saw that Yuri had a bucket of water and a hand towel. He had moved his chair round so that he was more comfortable, with the bucket in front of him. Two blows, one
left, one right, wet the towel, wring it out, two blows, one left, one right, wet the towel. Yuri looked as if he could go on all night. Richter knew, quite certainly, that he couldn’t. He
had to stop it, and he had to stop it soon.

And suddenly it did stop. The reeking, penetrating odour of the salts forced Richter’s head up, and he looked at Orlov. ‘That, Richter, was just for starters. Yuri is now going to
start breaking your bones, starting with the fingers. Unless, of course, you feel like talking a little?’

Summoning what strength he had, Richter nodded. He couldn’t allow Yuri to do anything to his hands. He couldn’t see any way out of the house, but if Yuri smashed his hands, that
would be it. He would definitely die, without being able to do a thing about it. With his hands, there was always a chance.

‘You mean you will talk, Richter?’ Orlov asked and Richter nodded again.

‘Good, good. I thought you’d see things my way, eventually. Wipe his face, Yuri, and then give him another drink of water.’

If Richter had been looking for a ministering angel, Yuri would have been right down at the bottom of his list of likely candidates. Wipe Richter’s face he did. He used the wet towel, but
to Richter it felt like he had taken a rough file to it. A file wielded with most of his very considerable strength. The only benefit seemed to be that by the time he’d finished Richter could
open his left eye again. The glass of water helped, but only a little. Richter knew that what he had to do was to take as long as he could to tell the tale. That way he could recover some of his
strength before Yuri took him away to play.

Orlov spoke. ‘Well, Richter? We’re waiting.’

Richter coughed and shook his head. ‘Where – where do you want me to start?’

‘At the beginning, Richter, at the beginning. Where else?’

Situation Room, White House,
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

As soon as Walter Hicks left the Oval Office, the President moved over to the desk and depressed a key on the intercom. ‘I’m on the way down,’ he said,
and walked out of the office. Two minutes later he entered the Situation Room, a small, wood-lined underground chamber, some twenty-five feet long by twenty feet wide, located in the basement of
the West Wing of the White House, directly under the Oval Office. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a hardened or bombproof facility, and is only designed to be used in the early stages
of a crisis.

‘How’s it going, John?’ the President asked, walking across the room.

John Mitchell, the tall grey-haired Vice-President, looked up from his copy of the
Washington Post
. The Vice-President is invariably placed in charge of crisis management and he had been
running the Situation Room since Walter Hicks’ first meeting with the President. ‘Absolutely nothing new, Mr President. Despite what the CIA believes, there are no indications of any
unusual military activity anywhere in the CIS. We’re just sitting here twiddling our thumbs.’ He gestured at the White House staff and senior military officers sitting at desks in the
room.

‘I’ve just seen Karasin,’ the President said.

‘And?’ Mitchell looked interested.

The President shrugged. ‘And nothing. He asked to see me because Russian satellites had detected our escalation to DEFCON FOUR and wanted to know what it was all about. He claims to know
nothing about any threat to the US, and I think he’s probably telling the truth.’

Mitchell grunted. ‘I’ve said it before, Mr President, and I’ll say it again. I think the CIA is paranoid about this so-called covert assault. I don’t believe there is a
threat to America, and I think we’re just wasting our time. More importantly, we’ve now alarmed the Kremlin for no good reason, which will do nothing for our international relations. My
recommendation, Mr President, is that we stop this nonsense, stand down to normal readiness, and tell the Russians it was all just a false alarm.’

The President nodded. His Vice-President was no fan of the CIA, or any of the other intelligence organizations. ‘I hear what you say, John, but I disagree. As long as there is even the
slightest possibility of any threat to the security of the United States, I’m going to take whatever steps I think are justified. Right now, that’s DEFCON FOUR, and a meeting of the
National Security Council here at the White House in thirty minutes.’

Orpington, Kent

Richter told Orlov about Newman, and the suspicions SIS had entertained about his death. He went slowly through his time in Moscow, telling him about the few
inconsistencies he had found on the body – the injuries that weren’t there but should have been.

Orlov interrupted. ‘That’s not enough, Richter. I grant you that one of his legs would have been likely to break, but there is no certainty in the matter.’

‘Quite right, Vladimir,’ Richter said. ‘Perhaps I should have pointed out that by then I was just looking for indications as to how the man had been killed. I knew as soon as I
looked at the corpse that it wasn’t Newman.’

‘How?’ Orlov’s voice was a soft, silky purr.

‘Attention to detail, Vladimir. That’s where a lot of high-powered schemes fall down; attention to detail. Your SVR colleagues picked some poor sucker who was unfortunate enough to
be about Newman’s height, weight and colouring, and I’ve no doubt they checked to see if Newman had any distinguishing marks. Because none were obvious – no scars, tattoos and so
on – they assumed that he hadn’t got any. If they had bothered to look, they would have found that he had had an ingrowing toenail removed years ago. The corpse your people thoughtfully
provided for the Embassy had all ten toenails.’

‘I see,’ Orlov said. ‘I take your point. The whole scheme, of course, was not of my doing but I was kept informed of the operation. I will see to it that the appropriate steps
are taken in Moscow to reprimand the operatives responsible for this.’

Richter nodded. ‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy that, Vladimir.’ The Russian made an impatient gesture. ‘Continue.’ Richter asked for more water, more as a delaying
tactic than because he actually wanted any, then finished off Moscow and told him what SIS knew about the overflight of north-west Russia by the Blackbird. Richter sang the praises of the
SR–71A fairly loudly, partly because he wanted to annoy Orlov just a little, to try to make him slightly less critical of the lies he was soon going to start telling, and partly because
dragging the story out bought him just a little more time, and time was something he needed a lot of.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Orlov, impatiently. ‘The American spy-plane can fly high and fast, we know that. It was fortunate for the Americans that we were not prepared for such an
intrusion. It would have been a different matter if they had met any of our MiG–31 interceptors.’

‘No doubt, Vladimir, no doubt,’ Richter said. Orlov looked at him sharply, but Richter wasn’t smiling. He couldn’t smile. He didn’t think, the way his face felt,
that he would ever smile again.

He covered the diversion of the Blackbird to Lossiemouth, and dealt with the insistence of the Ministry of Defence on seeing the films shot by the aircraft cameras. Up to that point, he
hadn’t really told Orlov anything of importance, or anything he hadn’t already known or hadn’t guessed. The difficult bit was just about to start.

‘So,’ Orlov said, ‘what did your so-called experts think of the films?’

‘They were puzzled,’ Richter replied, which was true. ‘And they still are.’ Which wasn’t quite true. ‘The only significant feature on the films shot by the
Blackbird was the removal of a small hill which had been on previous satellite films of the area.’

Richter saw Orlov stiffen almost imperceptibly. ‘So?’

Richter tried to inject a little puzzlement into his voice. ‘The Americans believe the hill was the test site for a new type of nuclear weapon, but that’s not our take. Our
experts’ reading of the seismograph records suggests that the weapon test was just a blind, using a conventional medium-yield weapon to conceal what you’ve really been up to.’

‘Which is what?’

‘We still aren’t sure, but we believe that the hill wasn’t a hill at all. We think that it was a camouflaged site, covering some sort of covert installation, which you have
since decided to remove. Then you detonated a surplus nuclear device to cover up the fact that the hill – or rather the installation – had vanished.’

Richter could see Orlov start to relax, so he spun him the rest of the yarn that he had been working on ever since the lights had come on in the bedroom. He told him that SIS suspected that the
installation had been a test site for a portable phased array radar unit, designed for early warning of either orbital or sub-orbital missiles or intruders. He expounded on the potential of such a
device to avoid detection by reconnaissance vehicles, its value to Russia and the possible illegality of such a radar under the terms of the SALT agreements.

Orlov started nodding before he got halfway through the tale, and Richter hoped it was to convince him that he was right rather than an expression of his appreciation for Richter’s
ingenuity.

‘We obviously don’t know any more than that at the moment, but we’ll find out, I promise you,’ Richter concluded.

‘I don’t think you will, Richter,’ said Orlov, speaking the absolute truth. ‘You, personally, certainly won’t.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Why are you so
certain that the hill was a camouflaged site?’

‘We aren’t, but we applied simple logic,’ Richter said. ‘You’ve very rarely carried out above-ground nuclear weapon tests, and only then after a lot of preparation
and work. We saw no signs of such preparations near the site. No, what happened in the tundra had all the hallmarks of a hasty cover-up, using a bomb blast to remove the evidence of what you were
doing up there previously. It’s the only scenario that makes sense.’