“Yeah,” Pacino said. “You’re probably right.” His stomach growled. “Crisis or no crisis, I’m hungry. Are you?”
“Too bad we can’t go to the Irish pub,” Allende said.
“But we can order takeout,” he said.
Colonel Vanya Nika, GRU, on detached duty to the FSB, the officer who’d been in tactical command of the raid on the GUM mall hostage situation, cinched up his red tie and examined himself in the full-length mirror. He decided it looked good with the dark gray suit. He glanced at his shoes, and they were flawlessly gleaming and shiny.
He walked from the bedroom to the loud sounds of the kitchen at breakfast. His son was arguing with his older sister, and the baby babbled in her highchair. He smiled at his wife Katyusha and kissed her on her cheek. She gave him a flustered smile in return.
“Will you be on time tonight?” she asked.
“It will probably be late,” Nika said. “The boys want to meet out for a drink, which will lead to food, and more drink.”
“Be careful, darling,” Katy said. “I don’t like you out on the streets late at night.”
“It’ll be fine,” Nika said. “I’ll have my driver standing by.”
“I’ll wait up for you,” she said. “You can tell me all the awful things you and your boys said and did.”
Nika knew there was no sense arguing with her, that she was a tired young mother who needed her sleep. She always told him she’d rather talk to him than sleep. And she was enthusiastic for more than just conversation, he thought, with the three children as proof.
He kissed his older daughter, ruffled his son’s hair, and waved a kiss at his messy infant daughter, who would have ruined his suit had he gotten within kissing range. He left the apartment by the front door, descended the steps from the second floor, and left the building by the front entrance. A black town car was parked at the curb, his driver, a young junior sergeant, standing at the door handle, waiting for him.
The driver came to attention and saluted. “Good morning, Colonel.”
“Good morning, Sasha,” Nika said, smiling at the youth. “Lubyanka, please.”
It was a pleasant ride through the city, the warmth of September not yet giving way to the coming cold of October in Moscow. The traffic was light, and they arrived at the Lubyanka before 0750.
Nika left the car, entered the wide entrance doors and submitted his identification to the biometric scan of his index finger’s fingerprint and his right retina. He was waved on to an elevator lobby, where he entered an elevator car to the subbasement. Once there, he walked down a cinderblock walled corridor to a door to the locker room, where he carefully removed his suit, stripping down to his underwear and socks, and donned the freshly washed and pressed coveralls left in his locker for him. He put on his heavy black boots, zipped up the coveralls and checked his reflection at the sinks, nodding at himself.
He left the locker room and walked down a long hallway until he reached Room 101, where again he put his index finger on the print reader and stared into the retinal scanner. The door clicked and whooshed open. Nika walked into the anteroom of the interrogation facility, past rows of tools and implements. He could already hear the screaming from the other side of what was supposed to be a sound-proof door twenty feet away. He opened the door and quickly shut it behind him.
A Chinese woman was in the center of the room, strapped into a heavy wooden chair. The arms of the chair flattened to small tables, where her hands were immobilized by finger-holds. He could see that all her fingernails had been removed. The screaming was intense, he thought, reaching to a bin on a sideboard and finding ear plugs. He put them in and looked up to see the night watch officer, Major Yevgeny Borislav.
“Good morning, Yevgeny,” Nika said, speaking loudly to be heard over the screaming. “Any progress?”
“Nothing yet,” Borislav said. “We finally stopped asking questions. We let her marinate in her pain. She should be closer to breaking soon.”
“I’ve got it from here, Yevgeny. Thanks.”
Nika made tea for himself while he waited for his technician to arrive. GRU Senior Sergeant Felix Sanya arrived a few minutes later. Nika asked about how things were at home for the younger man, whose wife had just given birth, and neither one of them had had more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep for the last month. Nika sympathized, laughing at the craziness of parenting. Finally they were ready to get to business.
“Let’s try dunking her,” Nika said.
The seat Jingmai Lin was strapped into was multifunctional. It could be lifted up by a small bridge crane and the mechanism could turn the chair completely upside down. The crane would then bring Lin to a large sink where the chair could be lowered, immersing Lin in the water up to her chest.
Sergeant Sanya operated the chair and brought the inverted chair over the water. Nika leaned in close to her, but rather than make eye contact, she clamped her eyes shut.
“Who is your controller?” Nika asked. “Who is your contact in Russia? Or contacts?”
Jingmai Lin kept her eyes clamped shut.
“Take her down, Sergeant,” Nika said, glancing at his watch, figuring thirty seconds should be a good starting point.
The chair lowered and Lin’s head submerged into the water up to her waist. Nika looked at his watch, and at thirty seconds after he’d ordered her dunked, he gave Sanya a thumbs-up signal. Sanya hauled the chair out of the water.
Nika looked at Lin’s face, dismayed to find her unconscious. Usually, losing consciousness wouldn’t happen until the dunking lasted ninety seconds, or two minutes. He felt her throat for a pulse, but there was none.
“What the hell?” he shouted to Sanya, who brought the chair back to its starting position. Nika slapped Lin several times, but she didn’t respond. He checked her mouth, and a broken glass ampule fell out.
“I’ll be goddamned, she took a suicide dose. Didn’t the night shift check her mouth for suicide pills in her teeth?”
“We thought they did, Colonel,” Sanya said. “It could have been back in her cheek or under her tongue. Can we revive her?”
Nika sniffed at Lin’s mouth. “It’s cyanide. So no. It’s over. I’ll make the report to the third floor,” he said. “Take her to the morgue and have her cleaned up. There might be some value in her body. The White Chinese might give us some concession in exchange for it.”
It had been a long shot, Nika thought, as he discarded his coveralls in the laundry bin and dressed himself in his suit. Still, it would have been career enhancing to have gotten a confession from the White Chinese woman. They could have broken open the Chinese cell operating in Moscow. But at least her attempt to kill Vostov had failed. The news was that Vostov had come through surgery and was resting comfortably. Nika approved. He wasn’t much of a fan of that creep Melnik, he thought.
President Dmitri Vostov operated the switch to raise his hospital bed to sit up straighter. His new staffer, Irina Kovak, handed him the phone.
“The White House switchboard is putting you through to President Carlucci,” she said.