But the night before, the injections had abruptly stopped.
When he’d been high they hadn’t bothered to beat him. Perhaps because it was pointless to inject someone with a powerful painkiller and then try to inflict pain. But now he knew that, while he felt no pain when high on heroin, the pain was magnified tenfold when coming off it.
When they started interrogating him again, he tried to answer their questions, he really did, but the problem was he had no good answers. So they beat him again, and again, sometimes with a rubber truncheon, sometimes with their fists.
He told them now as he had before all about his meetings with the American named Larry, and about funneling money to the Press Club, he told them everything he could remember, every little detail, but that wasn’t enough. They were convinced he actually worked for the CIA, that he knew more.
He even tried to make up things about the CIA, to tell them what they wanted to hear, but he didn’t know enough about the CIA to make his lies believable.
They gave him breakfast — water and stale salted crackers — but he threw everything up as a jaw-rattling fever and intense stomach cramps came upon him. He felt like he needed to shit, but his body hurt all over, hurt too much to squat over the bucket that sat by his head and which was already full with his excrement.
He moved his cheek a few inches, so that it lay on a new, cooler patch of concrete. Maybe they were done with him. Maybe they’d finally realized that he had nothing left to tell them.
A door opened. Light spilled in. Someone kicked him.
“Get up.” This in Russian.
Marko couldn’t get up.
A hand clasped his hair, yanked him to a kneeling position, and pulled him in the direction of the door.
Outside, four men wearing black ski masks stood around a fifth who was kneeling in the dirt, face uncovered, arms handcuffed behind his back. All the men with the ski masks were armed.
“I want them facing each other,” said the man who, even with the ski mask on, Marko recognized as the leader. He recognized the blue eyes, and the slope of the muscular shoulders, and the pattern of scuff marks on his black boots.
Someone pulled Marko a few more feet forward, until he was facing a young man with shoulder-length brown hair, swollen lips, and teary, bruised brown eyes.
The leader gave Marko a sharp kick in the thigh. “You have been unhelpful. This is what we do to bitches that are unhelpful.” He removed a black semiautomatic pistol from an exposed shoulder holster, aimed it at the back of the head of the unnamed prisoner, and in Russian said, “This is the end of your time on this earth. No God will save you.” The prisoner began to shake. “Your pleas for mercy will go unanswered. After you die, and your blood stains the earth, you will be buried in a trash heap. No one will mourn you, no one will care.”
And then, just like that, the trigger was pulled. The bullet traveled through the back of the prisoner’s head, out the front of his nose, and into the dirt between Marko’s knees. As the prisoner slumped forward into Marko, he drooled blood on Marko’s shoulder.
“OK, now it’s your turn,” said the leader to Marko. “Are you prepared?”
The strange thing, thought Marko, was that, yes, he was prepared. He was so tired, and in so much pain, that he was ready for it all to end.
48
“You,” said Mark, now recognizing the eyes, and the voice — even the slope of the shoulders — of the man who’d tortured him all those years ago. He’d never known the Russian’s name. He did now.
Titov.
Mark had been sure he was going to die that day, but instead he’d just heard the click of a firing pin descending on an empty chamber. In the weeks that followed, the Russians had executed five more men in front of him, some old, one even younger than the first had been. His captors — whose names Mark had never known — hadn’t told him where the men had come from, or why they were being executed. Mark had hoped they were criminals who’d been given the death penalty, and that the Russians had just been carrying out executions that would have occurred anyway, but he’d never known for sure.
Titov had gone back to sitting on the bed. “So all that time, you were lying. You were working for the CIA. As you are working for them — or with them — now. Don’t try to deny it. I know about your operation in Bishkek, about your Navy SEAL friend, the work you do for the CIA there. I’ll know even more soon.”
As Mark stared at Titov, horrified to be face to face with him again and to hear him mention the city where his wife and daughter resided, he recalled that his imprisonment in Georgia had taught him an important lesson — that the only way to avoid being completely controlled by monsters was to stop caring about what they might do to you. He’d gotten to that point in Georgia, when he’d accepted — and even welcomed — his own death, and he’d carried that feeling with him throughout much of his career with the CIA. It was at the very heart of what had made him a good CIA officer.
With Lila in the picture, though, he’d changed. Even if his own life wasn’t worth worrying about, his daughter’s certainly was, and her fate was tied in some small way to his own. He couldn’t provide for her and protect her if he was dead.
At least that’s what he’d been telling himself — until now. With Titov standing in front of him, bragging about how he’d been poking his nose around Bishkek, Mark felt a nearly overwhelming urge to rip the Russian’s throat out, consequences be damned.
Mark eyed Titov for a moment, then said, “When I was a student in Tbilisi, I was helping Larry Bowlan, and Bowlan was working for the CIA. I knew nothing about operations outside of the one I was involved in. I told you everything I knew back then, but you were too stupid to realize I was telling the truth.”
The insult didn’t appear to affect Titov. “You came back to Georgia within two years of leaving. You were spotted in Abkhazia.”
“By then I was working with the CIA. But when you knew me I was just being used by the CIA, by Bowlan.”
“After we kidnapped you, Bowlan searched for you. He sent men to rescue you. He wouldn’t have done that if you were just someone he was using.”
“He did.” Bowlan had leveraged his connections to Georgian rebels to put together a proxy hit squad that had hunted down and decimated the KGB in Tbilisi. All of Mark’s captors had been slaughtered; Titov had only survived because he hadn’t been there at the time.
Mark and Titov stared at each other for a while.
Titov asked, “What happened to you, after you escaped?”
“Why do you want to know?” Mark didn’t understand why they were talking about his distant past instead of the secret military zone in Nakhchivan, or the buildup of Russian forces in the region, or why Titov had killed Larry Bowlan five days ago. And he still didn’t understand what any of this had to do with Katerina. There were too many questions.