A gasp of pure dread escaped from Zuzana Slánská’s throat as she rose to her feet. She uttered the words, “Old age is not for the weak of heart,” then, her eyes fixed on Radek, her lips barely moving, she said: “There is an island in the Aral Sea twenty kilometers off the mainland called Vozrozhdeniye. During the Soviet era it was used as a bioweapons testing range. On the island is the town of Kantubek. Samat’s contact in Kantubek is a Georgian named Hamlet Achba. Can you remember all that?”
“Vozrozhdeniye. Kantubek. Hamlet Achba.”
“Warn Samat …” Radek was almost upon them. “Oh, it’s for sure I will not survive the stench of another prison,” she murmured to herself.
Around them the waiters and the clients had frozen in place, mesmerized by the progress of Radek and his companions toward the two customers at the small table in the back of the room. Radek, a faint smile of satisfaction disfiguring his lips, reached the table. “I have a gub in my pocket,” he informed Martin. “It is a German Walther P1. You are arrested, Mister. You, also, Misses, are arrested.”
Martin could feel the gentle rise and fall of the deck under his shoes (the laces, along with his belt, had been confiscated) as he waited for the interrogation to begin again. They had come for him at odd hours for the last several days, a technique designed to deprive him of sleep more than elicit information. As there was no porthole in his small cell immediately over the bilges of the houseboat or in the compartment above it, where the interrogations took place, he soon lost track of whether it was night or day. The only sound that reached his ears from outside were the foghorns of passing river ferries and the doppler-distorted shriek of sirens as police cruisers raced through the streets of Prague. From somewhere in the bowels of the houseboat came the dull throb of a generator; from time to time the bulb hanging out of reach over his head dimmed or brightened. Soon after Radek hustled him from the police van to the houseboat, which was tied to bollards on a cement quay down river from the Charles Bridge, he thought he caught the muted cry of a woman coming from another deck. When he re-created the sound in his head he decided it could have been the caterwaul of a cat prowling through the garbage bins on the quay. The grilling sessions in the airless compartment didn’t appear to fatigue the interrogator, a stooped, gaunt bureaucrat with an unshaven face and a shaven skull and an aquiline nose that looked as if it had been broken and badly set at some point in his life. Holding court from behind a small desk bolted to the planks of the deck, he fired off questions in a dispassionate monotone, only occasionally lifting his eyes from his notes. Radek, dressed now in a neat three-piece brown suit with narrow Austrian lapels, leaned against a bulkhead next to one of the two guards who escorted Martin to and from his cell. Martin sat facing the inquisitor on a chair whose front legs had been shortened so that the prisoner would feel as if he were constantly sliding off of it. Bright spotlights positioned on either side of the desk burned into his retinas, causing his eyes to tear and his vision to blur.
“Do you have a name?” Martin had asked the gaunt man behind the desk at the very first session.
The question appeared to have dismayed the interrogator. “What would it serve, your knowing my name?”
“It would permit me to identify you when I file a complaint with the American embassy.”
The interrogator had glanced at Radek, then looked back at Martin. “If you lodge a complaint, say that you were arrested by a secret unit attached to a secret ministry.”
From his place along the wall, Radek had choked off a guttural laugh.
Now the interrogator slid a small Pyrex percolator toward Martin. “Help yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the pot of coffee.
“You’ve spiked it with caffeine to keep me awake,” Martin said tiredly, but he poured some into a plastic cup and sipped it anyway; they had fed him salted rice and not provided drinking water since his arrival on the houseboat. “Your techniques of interrogation are right out of those old American movies that Radek here is so crazy about.”
“I do not deny it,” the interrogator said. “One must not be a snob when it comes to picking up tricks of the trade. In any case, it has been my experience that these techniques work in the end—I say this as someone who has been on both sides of the interrogation table. When I was arrested for anticommunist activities by the communists, in four days they were able to convince me to admit to crimes I had not committed using these very same techniques. And what has been your experience, Mr. Odum?”
“I have no experience with interrogations,” Martin said.
The interrogator sniggered skeptically. “That is not the impression your Central Intelligence Agency gave us. Their chief of station in Prague confides to us that you were once one of their paramount field operatives, someone so skilled at tradecraft it was said of you that you could blend into a crowd even in the absence of one.”
“If I were half that good, how come I fell for Radek’s pitch at the airport?”
The interrogator shrugged his stooped shoulders, which raised them for an instant to where they normally should have been. “Perhaps you are past your prime. Perhaps you were preoccupied with other thoughts at that particular moment. In any case, if you had not hired Radek—”
“For the equivalent of one lousy U.S. dollar an hour,” Radek groaned from the wall.
“If you had not hired him, you would surely have wound up in one of the three taxis we had positioned outside. The drivers, all of whom call themselves Radek, work for us.”
Martin identified a piece of the puzzle that was missing: How could Radek’s service have known he would turn up in Prague? Obviously the CIA chief of station had been talking to his Czech counterpart about Martin. And the chief of station reported to the Deputy Director of Operations, Crystal Quest. Which brought Martin back to what he’d told the late Oscar Alexandrovich Kastner in the windowless walk-in closet on President Street a lifetime ago: I’d like to know why the CIA doesn’t want this particular missing husband found.
“Your station chief,” the interrogator was saying, “claims you are no longer employed by the CIA. He says you are a freelance detective. It could be true, what he says; it could also be that they are simply denying any connection to you because you have been caught in the act. So tell me, Mr. Odum. What weapon systems were you contracting to buy at the Vys
“Zuzana Slánská sells generic medicines.”
“The woman you call Zuzana Slánská was never legally married to the doctor Pavel Slánský, who, as you surely know, was convicted as an enemy of the state during the communist period. Her real name is Zuzana Dzurova. She assumed the name Slánská when she learned of Pavel’s death in prison. As for the generic medicines, we have reason to believe they are a front for one of the most prolific weapons operations in Europe.” The interrogator pulled a report from one of the cardboard file boxes on the desk, pried a staple loose with his thumbnail and extracted the third page. He fitted on a pair of rimless reading glasses and began to quote from the text. “… operating in conjunction with Mr. Taletbek Rabbani in London, who claims to be selling prostheses at cost to third world countries …” The interrogator looked up from the paper. “It is surely not lost on you that both Mr. Rabbani’s prosthesis operation in London and Zuzana Slánská’s generic medicine operation here in Prague were funded by the same individual, a Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who until recently was living in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan River in order to shelter himself from the gang wars raging in Moscow.”