No one had bothered to show him a gun, or even a knife. It was implicit that these things were available if they were necessary. There was no line of thugs waiting to catch him if he tried to run. That would have been superfluous — Bulgachenko was an old man, now, and it was clear to everyone involved he would not get far.
This was all very civilized, very formal. It had the stamp of the former KGB all over it. Bulgachenko found that he approved. This made him want to laugh but he resisted the urge.
“You understand,” the man in the black suit said, “how this is done. You show no sign of panic. You did not scream for help. You did not attempt to overpower me.”
“You sound almost disappointed,” Bulgachenko said.
The man in the black suit shrugged. “These things are easier when the subject is afraid. Fear loosens the tongue.”
“So you wish me to talk,” Bulgachenko said. “If it will spare me pain, I will tell you what you want to know. I understand how torture is done, yes, and I know it is pointless to resist. But you want me to be afraid? No, I am sorry, I cannot help. I was a child in Stalingrad when the Nazis came. I ate the leather soles of my shoes, even though I knew I would get frostbite and lose some of my toes. Later I lived through the purges of Stalin and the blustering of his heirs and the chaos of the second revolution.” Bulgachenko smiled. “I have had a lifetime of fear. I have used up my entire stock of it.”
The man in the black suit nodded. “My name is Pavel Kalin.”
“That means nothing to me,” Bulgachenko said. “Who do you work for?”
“That is not important. Please answer my questions. Where is your agent? Where is Asimova?”
“In Bucharest,” Bulgachenko said.
Kalin shook his head. “She left there some time ago. Where is she now? Where is she headed?”
Bulgachenko closed his eyes. If he could have protected poor Nadia, he would have. But there was nothing he could do. This man would get his answer one way or another. Dear, sweet Nadia. “Tashkent,” he said.
“Thank you,” Kalin told him. “I believe you are telling me the truth.”
“Will you release me now? I am the head of FSTEK, as I am sure you know. If I do not return home soon, there will be questions asked.”
Kalin gave him a sad smile. “You were replaced in that position at midnight, by governmental decree. Your voluntary retirement papers have already been filed.”
“Ah,” Bulgachenko said.
Perhaps he had some small supply of fear left in him, after all.
“You understand. You understand how these things work.” Kalin sighed deeply. “You do not fight. You comply with my requests, answer my questions. This is a problem in itself. Information come by this easily cannot be trusted. I’m sure you understand this as well.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought something out.
A pair of rusty pliers.
“I apologize, Marshal,” the man in the black suit said. “You are a hero of our country. You deserve better than this. But sometimes even heroes lie.”
Chapel woke to the sensation of something poking him in the back, and to a weird unearthly sound, an electronic warbling that rose and fell and occasionally squealed.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on a bed in a spacious, quite comfortable hotel room. They had taken the largest of the hotel’s available suites, one with three bedrooms and a common area as well as a wide balcony that looked out over the center of Tashkent. The rooms were, in fact, quite nice, maybe even better and cleaner than Chapel’s apartment back in Brooklyn. Certainly larger. For a thousand dollars a night it looked like you could find real luxury in Uzbekistan.
Chapel had paid little attention to the rooms once he found a bed. He’d dropped into it without so much as taking his shoes off and fallen asleep instantly.
That explained the pain in his back. He hadn’t taken off his artificial arm. The clamps that held it on his shoulder weren’t designed to be laid on for very long.
He rolled over on his side and found Nadia standing by the bed. She had changed into a simple sleeveless dress, and she held something about the size of a cigarette lighter with a collapsible antenna mounted on one end. She waved it over the telephone on the bedside table, and it squealed in distress.
She placed one finger across her lips to tell him to stay quiet. She switched off the bug sensor and put it down, then unscrewed the mouthpiece of the telephone. With her fingernails she pried out a tiny circuit board with a microphone mounted on it. She snapped the listening device in half.
“That’s the last of them,” she said. She jumped onto the bed and sat down next to him, her legs tucked up underneath her. “Good morning, again,” she told him. “You played your part very well downstairs.”
“I’ve met enough rich assholes in my life to fake it,” he said. He wanted to sit up — felt that would be more appropriate — but he was still tired. “How many bugs did you find?”
“Five. One in each room, including the bathroom, and this one in your phone.”
“That seems like a lot,” Chapel said, frowning. “You think they doubled up because they knew we were coming?”
“No, I think they just know that anyone staying in these rooms is someone they’re going to want to listen to,” she told him. She shrugged. “Uzbekistan. It’s about as close as you can get these days to how things used to be under the Soviets. There is no conception of civil rights in this country.”
Chapel closed his eyes for a second. He tried to force himself to sit up. It didn’t quite work. “What will happen when they realize we’ve deactivated their bugs?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
He opened his eyes again to look at her. She had shifted closer to him, until her knees were almost touching him.
She shrugged. “If they said something, that would be admitting there were microphones here in the first place, and they don’t want to do that. This is just part of doing business in this part of the world. They try to listen to us. We sweep for their bugs. One reason to have so many is that they hope I will miss one.” She smiled. “I didn’t. But tomorrow when we are out, they will plant some more, and I’ll have to sweep again.” She wriggled a little closer, until her knees touched his leg.
Chapel tried to focus. It was hard, with her so close. “How long are we here? How many days, I mean?”
“I will schedule a meeting with my contact here today. This afternoon, most likely, we’ll make the arrangements. Then we can head out into the desert, once we have vehicles, equipment, supplies,” she said, and put one hand on his arm. His artificial arm. Most people, when they touched it, felt that it was colder than it should be, or they sensed that the skin didn’t feel like real human skin. Most people pulled their hand away. They flinched. Not Nadia.
“I should get up,” he said. “We have things to do.”
“Hmm,” she said. Gently she stroked his arm, up and down.
Wrong. So wrong. Not like this, not now — not with Nadia. Not when Julia—
She shifted again, releasing his arm, and he thought he must have misread the signals. Read something into what was happening that wasn’t there. She was just curling up on the bed with him — she must be as tired as he was.