Tim took a few drags on the cigarette and, to Frank’s great amusement, turned a little pale as he fought the desire to cough. Frank really didn’t know if Tim was a smoker, but Russian butts would catch up to anyone fast, smoker or not. After a few more minutes, Frank got up and headed for the nearest subway. In the station’s men’s room, Frank entered a stall, dropped trow, and took the slip of paper from his pocket, noting the address: 25 Bolshaya Spasskaya. Frank concentrated a moment to try to place it on the map he’d studied back in Idaho but was interrupted by Boris, another of the Russians he had encountered in the park after Stalin’s funeral. It’s not far. I will guide you.
Frank scowled as he pulled up his pants and wadded up the note in some toilet paper before flushing it down the can. The help was nice, but Frank was used to being in control. Of course, maybe that was an illusion, and he wasn’t in control at all. Maybe the folks in his head were more directly guiding his hands when he shot, or drove, or piloted.
He shook his head and washed his hands before he left the restroom. There was no time for this. Maybe when he got back to Mountain Home he’d have a sit down with Danny about it. It felt like his relationship to the voices was changing, but honestly, it could have just as easily been the travel and lack of real sleep.
At Boris’s urging, Frank took the subway three stops, switched trains, and went another two stops to the Komsomolskaya stop — right back to the Kazanskaya train station, in fact. From there, it was a tram and a decently long walk to get to the little two-story townhouse at 25 Bolshaya Spasskaya. Frank gave it a good look as he approached, and approved of the choice — detached on one side with a driveway heading into the back, good sightlines up and down the street, a roof that looked easy to access, but without any windows overlooking it directly, and the featureless brick wall of a factory on the other side of the small back garden. Mrs. Stevens had done a fine job of finding a safe house.
Frank walked up and knocked on the door. A few moments later, Mrs. Stevens herself opened the door. “Dimitri, my brother!” she exclaimed, wrapping him in a hug. “Come in! So good to see you! Are you hungry?”
Frank laughed and allowed her to lead him inside, closing the door behind him. Mrs. Stevens turned toward him, her smile instantly gone. “Oh, Frank. We have a problem.”
“Shit,” Frank said, dropping his suitcase. “What’s wrong?”
Tim and Ekaterina entered the small reception room from what Frank assumed was a dining area. Both looked worried, particularly Ekaterina. “We had problems coming here,” the girl said quietly.
Frank looked past them into the other room, then turned back to Mrs. Stevens.
“Where’s Maggie?”
7
On Liteyny Prospekt in Leningrad, a mere block from the Neva River, a gray-and-beige building sat towering over the thoroughfare, casting shadows over the streets nearby. Leningraders hustled past its thick wooden doors with their heads down. Conversations ceased for the block between Shpalernaya and Zakharyevskaya streets. No eye contact was made with the uniformed MBG guards at the doors, nor with the three or four men loitering on the street near the bus stop or at the entrance across the street.
The shadow of the Bolshoy Dom — literally, “the Big House”—wasn’t just cast over the streets. Its imposing shade was infectious.
And it was worse inside.
Maggie Dubinsky sat in a single cell no more than eight feet by four feet. A narrow barred window, high up on the wall, overlooked an internal courtyard that housed a handful of black sedans and a couple of large black trucks. MGB soldiers drilled there in the morning. The afternoons were for outdoor torture and firing squads. She saw one of the executions and heard four others. Blessedly, her captors kept her cell firmly in a null zone; the emotional roller coaster of people facing death — sudden, painful, bloody death, full of terror and sorrow and rage — was too much even for her, detached as she was from her own emotional state.
Or, perhaps, detached as she once was. Four days of deprivation and torture had reacquainted Maggie with emotions she’d long thought she’d left behind. Not that she showed it, of course. She was still Maggie Dubinsky, and she wouldn’t be giving the bastards the pleasure any time soon. The cold cell, the waterboarding, the strip searches by rough, calloused hands, the electroshock, and the beatings — they’d all been taken without a word. Oh, she’d cried out. She’d screamed and tore at them when they came. She’d fought with every ounce of her being. Over the course of four days, three men had been carried out of her cell due to their injuries. She’d paid for it, of course. She figured she’d suffered at least three cracked ribs, a sprained ankle, and a dislocated shoulder that she’d slammed back into place against the concrete block wall. But she gave as good as she got, if not more, and dammit, that was a source of pride.
But there was fear. There were many more violations male guards could yet inflict upon a woman, and aside from one set of wandering hands — hands attached to quickly broken fingers — the Soviets hadn’t gone there. Yet. She had no doubt that she’d seen her last days of freedom, and that whatever life left to her would be short and painful, unless the MGB fucked up.
So far, they didn’t seem to be the fuck-up types, though. The null field was always on, the guards always at attention, weapons drawn and trained. She understood the rhythms of the prison now, the shift changes, the meal times, the questioning and torture sessions. She always looked for flaws or inconsistencies, listening for them whenever they decided to throw a bag on her head when they moved her from place to place. Even as the fists rained down on her, she looked through swollen eyes for an unsecured weapon, a briefly opened avenue of attack or escape.
Nothing.
Maggie hated being scared. She hated the weakness of it, the taste it left in her mouth. So she did everything she could to not think about it. She jogged in place, watching the torture in the courtyard. She’d even managed twenty push-ups that morning, despite having just fixed her shoulder the night before. She screamed through the second set of ten, and it felt like absolution. Purification.
If nothing else, she knew Ekaterina had escaped, because by now they would’ve thrown it in her face if she hadn’t. “We have your traveling companion, of course,” they’d told her the first night. “We will do things to her you can’t imagine.” Maggie had spat at the interrogator and told him to show her the prisoner or be called a coward. An hour later, another interrogator had asked her who she was traveling with. To think, the very least they could have done was to trade notes before heading in to see her. She felt professionally insulted, and told them so. The first of her cracked ribs was worth the look on the MGB man’s face.
She knew Katie had escaped, at least temporarily, but only due to a quirk of timing. They’d arrived outside Primorsk via a Finnish fishing boat, using the early spring darkness as cover. Like Frank, they’d been given the floating suitcases and wetsuits from Mrs. Stevens, and had managed to find easy shelter in the deep pine forests lining the water. They’d changed into filthy peasant clothes and had walked into Primorsk to catch a creaky old bus into Leningrad without issue. Katie had made some noises about wanting to storm the Bekhterev Institute — the girl was strong enough now to throw a car into the second story of the building — but they were under strict orders to avoid the Soviet Variant headquarters at all costs. So they’d made a beeline for the Moskovsky train station and had booked shit-class tickets to Moscow.