Bob McLeod was one of the best electrical engineers in the country. He’d graduated from MIT, second in his class. Then he had decided to pursue a career in defense technologies. He felt his work should have meaning, help a great cause. And for what? Probably any of the Silicon Valley mediocrities, carrying bachelor degrees from dubious Midwestern online universities, made twice his pay, and climbed the corporate ladder every two years so that he wouldn’t go work for the competition. Huh! How infuriating.
He had been lured by the glamour of a worthy cause, by the thought of doing his job in the service of his country, but he felt he was taken advantage of. Simply put, he had bet his career on the wrong horse.
…22
Major Evgheni Aleksandrovich Smolin was a visiting officer on FSB territory; yet he was treated with the utmost respect and deference. The FSB had been nothing but cooperating, especially since rumors had started surfacing that he’d been assigned to work on a special project with the recently reappointed Defense Minister Dimitrov.
The rumors took only a few days to transcend the invisible border between the Defense Ministry and the FSB, despite their rivalry and physical distance. People talked. With the rumors, of course, in Smolin’s case came the jokes. The latest one was, Why was Smolin promoted to work with Dimitrov? Because his penis enlargement surgery was very successful.
The jokes and the rumors that he used to love before made him a bit uncomfortable now, considering his career had ascended to the point where he wanted to be taken more seriously. He could be a lieutenant colonel in a few months; the damned jokes had to stop. He had been offered the opportunity of a lifetime, to lead his own network of agents on foreign soil. On American soil. This was his time to shine, and he would stop at nothing to get the job done. Mr. Myatlev had been clear; one’s allegiance and duty toward Mother Russia never ends. Mr. Myatlev believed he had what it took to become a national hero; Smolin wasn’t going to let him down; not on his life.
Smolin took the elevator down to the interrogation level. He checked the file he was carrying briefly; the detainee was waiting in Interrogation Room 9.
He walked the semi-dark corridor looking for the assigned interrogation room. Distant wails were tearing the silence of the tomb-like floor. It reeked of chlorine and human excrement, a nasty side effect of extracting information forcefully from people. In there, the interrogators had life-and-death authority over the detainees. If a detainee happened to die during the interrogation, the paperwork the interrogator had to file was simpler than an application for a new parking permit. Human life had no value on this floor; only information mattered.
He opened the door and walked in. The detainee, a young girl, looked at him with fearful eyes. She’d been crying; her face was all swollen and smeared with makeup and tears. Good; she was ready. It shouldn’t take that long.
Without saying a word, Smolin went to the video camera installed in one of the corners and unplugged the connectors. The girl gasped.
“Good,” Smolin said in a low voice, almost whispering. “It’s just the two of us now.”
He reached out to touch her face. She squirmed and whimpered, but couldn’t withdraw too far because of the chain tying her handcuffs to the table.
He touched her cheek, softly, smiling, watching intently how her pupils dilated with fear. Then he grazed the back of his hand against her breast. She whimpered some more, tears flowing freely from her eyes.
“Nyet,” she begged, “please, no.”
“Hmm… ” Smolin responded, feigning offense. “All right, then, let’s get down to business if that’s what you want.”
She blubbered something unintelligible.
“Let’s look at your file.”
He took his time going through the pages, quite numerous for a nineteen year old. He took his time, using time against her, fueling her anxiety. Smolin’s interrogation technique had gained expertise over time, making him one of the most effective interrogators in the intelligence service. He knew how to extract information even from unwilling, non-participative, and unaware targets, people who would later swear they weren’t interrogated.
“Interesting… ” he mumbled, loud enough for her to hear him, but ignoring her.
A long, agonizing wail tore the silence from the hall, followed promptly by the girl’s gasps and quiet whimpers, while she fidgeted pointlessly in her chair.
“Don’t worry,” Smolin said without looking at her, “we won’t get there unless we really have to. It’s messy… I don’t like it. People… well, people can’t control their bodily functions very well when they reach that level of pain, and that is disgusting. I’d rather avoid that if possible.”
He looked at her and liked what he saw. She was pale, her mouth half opened, letting out quick bursts of air in a shallow, rapid breathing, and her eyes were dilated with fear to the point where he couldn’t discern the color of her irises.
“Valentina Davydova, yes?” Smolin asked.
“Yes,” she whimpered.
“Says here you were an orphan, living in the streets after fleeing your foster home. What happened to your parents?”
She sniffled a little and cleared her throat.
“Social orphan,” she managed.
“Huh?”
“I was a social orphan. That’s what they call it when your own mother kicks you out in the street.”
“What did you do?”
“She was a mean drunk. I didn’t do anything but refuse to give her new boyfriend a blow job, that’s all.”
Smolin turned a page in the file. “You were… umm… twelve then, right?”
“Yes,” she confirmed, looking at her hands and sniffling a little. “They picked me up from the streets and put me in an orphanage.”
“Says here within a year or so you ran away and weren’t heard from again until last year. Why did you run?”
“Have you seen an orphanage?”
“No… can’t say that I have, no,” Smolin answered, letting a faint smile flutter on his lips.
He already knew enough about what made his detainee tick. She was strong-willed and had a sense of right and wrong, of pride, and strong self-preservation. She wanted to have a good life. She wasn’t going to sit idle and let people, no matter who they were, ruin her life or play games with her. Smolin knew everything he needed to make her comply, because he knew exactly how he could break her.
“Tell me about the missing years,” Smolin continued, tapping his index finger on her file. “What did you do? Where did you live?”
She hesitated before answering, searching his eyes, as if to weigh how much truth she needed to put in her answer.
“In the streets, mainly. Lived off people’s trash, here and there a kind person would give me money or something to eat.”
“You panhandled? Begged for money at street corners?”
Moscow had hordes of street-corner beggars, polluting the city streets with a constant reminder of the country’s descent into poverty and stringent social issues.
“Yes, I did. Cleaned windshields too.”
“Prostituted yourself?”
A split-second hesitation before she answered, “No.”
“What else? Where did you end up living?”
“Nowhere, just the streets, that’s all. I couldn’t get a place until last year.”
Smolin stood and walked toward her side of the table, then leaned against the table in front of her. He reached out and grabbed her chin gently, forcing her to look him in the eye. She shivered, her whole body trembling uncontrollably.