Palace of Treason (7 page)

“Her mother can stuff her head with newspaper, to fill out her
kozhukh,
her head shroud,” said Zyuganov in a voice that seemed several octaves too low, as if the devil had suddenly started speaking. Hands trembling, Zareta blinked away the blood from her lashes and wiped her sticky face, seeing the horns and yellow goat’s eyes and the cloven hooves, and wondered how she would ever erase the memory of this brilliant, white-tiled room, or this
chort,
this little black devil with the foul jacket, or how she could return alive to Chechnya, where there would be a reckoning with the council for her betrayal and with her parents’ shame. She could see their faces, but she would be alive, and she told herself that she wanted to live.

Zyuganov motioned for the guard—the soldier’s face was gray—to take
Zareta away, and as she turned toward the door and shuffled past him, Zyuganov put the muzzle of the revolver behind her left ear and pulled the trigger. Zareta dropped in a heap and lay on her face, the prison smock up around her hips.
No dignity in death,
thought Zyuganov,
the little provincial slut.
The guard howled in fright—he had been splattered with something out of the girl’s head—and the matron began vomiting again in the corner. Zyuganov surveyed the pink and dripping room for a second, then hurried out to draft his interrogation report for the internal service—but really for Putin. He wanted to report success and the vital CI information promptly.

Days later, prison administrators submitted a written complaint, requesting that Colonel Zyuganov be censured for excessive brutality and criminal acts including torture and homicide, but the complaints evaporated in the blue-eyed blink of an eye. The president had given him a task, and Alexei delivered. To the grousing officials Putin was reported as saying,
Delat’ iz mukhi slona,
don’t make an elephant out of a fly.

Young Alexei had surprised himself by doing well in the distrustful peat bog of SVR counterintelligence, and in time was promoted to the chief’s position. His paranoid grain was well suited to the work. Zyuganov had learned much during the formative Lubyanka years—cunning overlaid his crusty homicidal urges—though his instincts were still firmly in a Soviet Jurassic zone. He understood the politics a little better. He missed the excesses of the Soviet years, and the president was Russia’s best hope to reclaim the majesty and power of the Soviet Union, to restore the red-toothed fury and jaw-breaking brutality that had made former enemies cower.

Very few of the officers working in Line KR could in clinical terms define the worm farm that was Chief Alexei Zyuganov’s brain. A trained psychologist in SVR’s Office of Medical Services perhaps would classify Zyuganov’s monstrous urges as patent malignant narcissism, but that would be like calling Dracula a melancholy Romanian prince. Zyuganov was much more than that, but all his subordinates needed to know was that the whiplash sting of the bantam centipede could come without warning, rages triggered by a perceived slight, an omission in work, an urgent tasking from
the fourth floor, or, especially, opprobrium from the Kremlin—disapproval from the other diminutive narcissist who ruled behind those red walls. People in Line KR paid for any mistake that might even remotely make their chief appear lacking to the president. Zyuganov worshipped Putin like an Aztec worships the sun.

Zyuganov’s deputy, Yevgeny, had been working largely unnoticed in Line KR for three years by the time the toxic dwarf arrived. Zyuganov had kept his eye on him, looking not for talent or initiative, but for unmitigated and abject loyalty. Overly ambitious deputies were a danger: Executioners tend not to trust people standing behind them. Zyuganov tested his hirsute deputy-designate early on by sending a number of ringers into him, some with offers of employment elsewhere in SVR, others to dangle bribes or commissions. The most important tests were the
malen’kiye golubi,
the little pigeons who whispered slander against Zyuganov himself, or who proposed plots against him. Yevgeny reported them all to Zyuganov, promptly and without omission. After an interim year of tests and snares and traps, Zyuganov was satisfied and promoted Yevgeny to be his deputy in Line KR. Yevgeny worked hard, kept his mouth shut, and did not care about his boss’s sweet tooth for the cellars, straps, and syringes.

Now, Zyuganov sat slumped in his seat in the Line KR conference room, peevishly watching as Dominika—just returned from Paris—made her report on Jamshidi. She willed herself not to wince when she moved, for her ribs were on fire. She briefed four SVR managers—the chiefs of Lines X (technical intelligence), T (technical operations), R (operational planning), and KR (counterintelligence). Line X would prepare intelligence requirements on Iran’s centrifuges for the upcoming meeting with Jamshidi in Vienna.

Dominika gently rejected the Line X suggestion that she include a nuclear-energy analyst during the upcoming debriefing. Jamshidi was untested and would be too skittish to accept a new face this soon, she argued. She assured the gathered chiefs that she could manage the initial technical details until the case was
utverdivshiysia,
more completely institutionalized, with Jamshidi completely under the yoke. They grumpily agreed to wait, for the sake of the operation.

Zyuganov looked past the chiefs at her, appraising, weighing, calculating. Of course she wanted to handle Jamshidi alone. She was monopolizing the case; she would in turn trot over to the Kremlin with the intelligence, soliciting—
ensuring—
Putin’s favor. He contemplated the delicate situation. Egorova was essentially untouchable. He would have to be careful—ordering the unsuccessful Paris attack to disable his statuesque officer had been a calculated but risky action. She didn’t seem to be badly damaged—despite a doubtful report from Paris to the contrary—and in fact had demonstrated that she had her own claws. He had already given follow-up orders to cauterize that operation: Fabio would be floating buns-up in the Canal Saint-Martin by now, his long hair fanned out in the sewage.

Dominika saw the hooked-talon bat wings of black unlimber behind Zyuganov’s head. She sensed his agitation; she knew he was watching, assessing, calculating. Assuring him of her loyalty was folly: He did not expect it, and he would not believe it, from her or from anybody. She would not antagonize him, even though she was certain he had ordered the mugging in Paris—about which she said nothing on her return to Moscow. It showed what Zyuganov was capable of, how far he would go. How little the Service had changed since the purges of the 1930s and 1950s.

In Line KR, there was no specific group dedicated to offensive operations—the Jamshidi Iranian case was an example—so Egorova had conveniently been tucked away and assigned responsibility by default. Zyuganov wanted her occupied, kept in the dark. She would not be included in the other work of the department; he and Yevgeny would see to that. Not so easy keeping her penned up. Not easy at all.
Shilo v meske ne utaish,
you cannot hide an awl in a sack.

With the dim intuition of a sociopathic paranoid, Zyuganov acknowledged that he repulsed her, but that did not bother him. He did, however, want to establish alpha-wolf primacy. So after the briefing, Zyuganov had insisted she accompany him to Lefortovo to observe an interrogation. “You need to learn this work”—he had smirked—“for when you conduct your own investigations.”

“Of course,” said Dominika, determined not to show the panic she felt at returning to Lefortovo. She had been imprisoned there herself and “interrogated,” but she never confessed, never gave in, and was released after six weeks of agony. She had endured refrigerated cells, electric shock,
and nerve manipulation, but in the end she had looked into the eyes of her interrogators, read their colors, and knew she had won.

She followed Zyuganov’s black fog as he scuttled along the same Lefortovo basement corridor she herself had been frog-marched down, the splintered wooden cabinets at each corner still there, into which prisoners would be shoved and locked to prevent them from seeing another passing prisoner, to starve the soul and deny human contact. Dominika kept her face impassive—Zyuganov was sneaking looks at her—and forced herself to keep walking on nerveless legs. The dwarf hurried forward with his nose up like a bird dog in a wet field. They passed the familiar steel doors with the spalling paint, the ones that hid the drains, hooks, and horrors, and rounded a corner. Zyuganov motioned for a guard to open a separate steel door, then continued down the corridor with solid doors on either side. There were none of the familiar prisoner screeches and bellows from behind these doors, no animal eyes peering out from the narrow food hatches. It was utterly silent here.

They stopped at the last of the doors in the corridor and Zyuganov hammered on it with his fist. A steel slat banged open, eyes briefly appeared, then a steel bolt shot and the door opened. Zyuganov bustled in, nodding at a plump prison matron in a too-tight uniform coat. Dominika followed Zyuganov inside, hearing the door slam closed behind her. It was an interrogation room unlike any she had ever seen before, more like a surgical theater. The room was brilliantly lit in a gassy white haze from overhead tubes that cast no shadows. Three-inch square white tiles covered the floor and continued up the walls to the ceiling. The air was thick with fumes that stung her nose and throat—the wall tiles had been mopped down with ammonia. Zyuganov turned to her to gauge her reaction, breathing in the air as if he were in a rose garden.

Along the wall, stainless-steel tables had tools and instruments laid out. A larger table was in the center of the room, beneath a canted surgical light head. A drainpipe ran from one corner of the table into the floor. Zyuganov took off his suit coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He took a brown coat off a hook on the wall and put it on, buttoning the bottom buttons but leaving the tunic top unfastened. Jaunty, with a barnyard smell. He looked at his watch and turned to the matron.

“Ring for the tray before we begin,” he said.

She walked to the wall, pressed a button, and in a minute there was a knock on the door and a second matron entered carrying a tray covered by a cloth napkin. She set it on the stainless table over the drainpipe for bodily fluids and whipped the cloth away.

“
Selyodka,
Captain,” said Zyuganov, “we haven’t had lunch yet.” Dominika, standing just inside the door to the room, could smell the pickled herring and onions over the tang of the disinfectant ammonia. She shook her head and sat in a chair away from the table. Zyuganov was enjoying himself.

“Fetch our guest,” he said to the guard, his mouth full of herring.

They waited two minutes in silence, apart from the wet noises Zyuganov made while he ate. Looking at the back of the dwarf’s little head, Dominika focused on the depression below the back of his skull and just above the start of the cervical vertebrae, the spot she would choose to plunge one of the stainless-steel surgical chisels set out on the side table.

The door opened and the matron pulled a woman into the room. Her hands were handcuffed behind her and she wore only a dirty prison smock and felt slippers.

“
Gospozha
Mamulova,” Mrs. Mamulov, said Zyuganov, wiping his mouth with a napkin. The matron pushed the woman into a steel chair, which Dominika noticed was bolted to the tile floor, and stood behind Mamulova, her hands casually on her shoulders. Zyuganov dismissed both matrons with a wave and turned to Dominika.

“Captain, come here and hold her shoulders.” Dominika frantically thought of some excuse to refuse, but was determined not to falter in front of Zyuganov. She could feel the slight woman trembling under her hands, and wondered what she had done. Zyuganov pulled up a chair to sit facing the woman, their knees almost touching, and leaned forward till he was inches from her face. There was a faint crackling sound when the dried gore on his jacket flaked off. Dominika breathed through her mouth to avoid the smell while trying to recall how she knew the name Mamulov. Who was this woman?

Irina Mamulova was in fact the wife of Russian media tycoon Boris Mamulov, whose communications empire included print and broadcast holdings. Mamulov had massively defied the Kremlin: His reporters had assiduously covered current Russian politics, running successive interviews with dissidents and rival political figures, including the telegenic members
of the punk-rock protest group Pussy Riot after their release from prison. Mamulov’s public opposition to the reelection of Vladimir Putin naturally triggered an investigation into his taxes and overseas bank accounts, which in turn led to the inevitable charges from the Moscow Procurator’s Office of corruption, tax evasion, and theft. The blue-eyed scorpion’s tail was rigid, curled forward, waiting to lance into flesh.