The guards pushed Nate into a wooden straight-backed chair and stood behind him, their hands resting lightly on each of his shoulders. Nash saw the prison guards carried OTs-27 Berdysh 9mm automatic pistols in holsters on their belts. He leaned forward to peek around the guards at the rest of the room, but was yanked back to sit up straight. There were glass-fronted medicine cabinets filled with vials, and surgical instruments neatly laid out on sterile cloths. There was also a stainless-steel table in the center of the room with drainage pipes at either end leading down to drains in the floor, clearly a mortician’s table for performing autopsies. Nate did not like the look of the undulating tile floor gently sloping toward half a dozen drains around the room. He also didn’t like the look of a truck battery on a dolly with a jumble of cables wrapped around the handles, barely visible, leaning against the side of the cabinet. The equipment was incongruous in the gleaming surgical theater; it belonged in a grimy motor-pool garage meant for jumping stalled trucks, not in this room. Nate’s spirit fluttered a little as he imagined what the battery was for. Ignore the damn thing.
Despite his arm and his finger, Nate was in relatively good shape. He had figured out that Benford had probably run a canary trap and had told the three DCIA candidates variants of the same story. With luck, Dominika had passed the word to Langley, hopefully in time to prevent a catastrophe. Nate accepted that this was Benford’s radical, all-out tactic to expose the mole, and he understood he was being used as a “lizard’s tail,” an expendable operative who is jettisoned and sacrificed to protect larger equities. He had not seen Dominika since the interrogation in the little cottage on Putin’s compound, and he was worried that the mole had somehow compromised her. He was also worried about Agnes, and hoped she was safely out of Russia. No. If everyone was blown, he reasoned, it wasn’t likely they’d be putting him through the wringer. He still had agents to protect. If he listened closely, Nate expected he could passively glean an idea from the interrogators’ questions about the status of the mole hunt and of Dominika’s security situation.
Avoiding looking at the battery, Nate tried to prepare himself mentally and physically for the coming cycle of interrogation. They probably would try drugs again, but with luck and discipline, Nate thought he could resist. If Dominika had any influence in managing the interrogation, he knew she would contrive to keep the physical punishment at a minimum, and to limit the sessions for as long as possible as Langley worked on arranging a swap. She must not go too far on his behalf and throw suspicion on herself, however. That was critical.
Whatever the Russians had in mind, he had no doubt he would survive. He was a prisoner in Putin’s Moscow, but this was the modern age and intelligence officers from opposition services were not harmed, according to a strict protocol. Putin may have eliminated hundreds of dissident Russians, but not ops officers of rival services.
Nate knew he had a long stretch ahead before the State Department would get off their pinstriped fannies to commence talks to arrange for his release. He could be in the slammer for a year, five years, ten years, but CIA would never give up trying to get him back. On his return to Langley, there would be medals, a promotion, choice of assignments, but in reality his career would be over. He would be considered too burned coverwise and too burned out psychologically. By then, he daydreamed, Dominika might be finished at SVR and would be ready to retire and disappear into idyllic resettlement with Nate. It was a hell of a long way around to finally start a new life together, but it would be worth the wait. For the present, Nate intended to give his interrogators as much guff as he could muster. He knew by now the Russians probably had identified him as Nathaniel Nash, the last handler of General Korchnoi, one of the best assets the CIA had run in Moscow for fourteen years. They would also know that Nash was a fluent Russian speaker, which would further infuriate them.
All thoughts about civilized outcomes in the basement of Butyrka Prison evaporated when Sergeant Iosip Blokhin walked into interview room three. He was dressed in a camouflage utility uniform and wore polished combat boots. A green nylon web belt was cinched tightly around his waist with a metal snap buckle with the Spetsnaz seal of parachute and dagger. His uniform was starched and crisp, but nowhere was there any badge of rank. His thin hair was slicked back over his bullet head, his scarred forehead dully shone in the bright lights of the room, and his ham-hock hands hung at his sides.
He approached Nate’s chair and leaned close so that their faces were inches apart. Blokhin inexplicably smelled of kerosene—sharp and crisp, not altogether unpleasant. “It is sudba meeting again, American. How do you say it in English?” said Blokhin, in his gravely croak.
“Fate,” said Nash in English. “Been back to Turkey since we last spoke?”
“Not just fate, Yankee,” said Blokhin. “Sudba also means ‘doom.’ ”
Nate looked him in the face. “Yours or mine? Or Major Shlykov’s?”
Blokhin signaled to the guards standing behind Nate’s chair to pick him up and put him into the antique, chipped high chair and wheel it into the center of the room, under a big surgical light. The guards cinched Nate’s wrists to the flat arms of that chair and his ankles to the fronts of the legs with clear plastic cable ties, which Blokhin strained tight. Nate’s felt slippers were yanked off his feet. A sweat-stained leather strap was passed around his chest and buckled in back. It was tight, but Nate could breathe okay. It dawned on him that this might be worse than he’d anticipated: these restraints suggested they were going to try extreme techniques that would make him fall out of this chair if he weren’t tied in. Perhaps he’d be the first CIA officer in the history of the Cold War to actually be tortured in the Butyrka basement. Maybe they’d give him a Trailblazer Award when he got home.
He tested the ties and rocked in his chair, sending it slowly rolling across the uneven floor, just as the door opened and four people walked in, three men and a woman, all senior bigwigs judging by the way the guards snapped to attention. Nate craned his head to see. The woman was Dominika, dressed in a dark suit and dark stockings, a prison-visitor’s badge was around her neck, and it swung as she walked, her heels clicking unevenly against the white floor tiles because of her slight limp. It was like a dream seeing her now, here, like this. Her hair was up as always, and their eyes met for an instant. It would have been the most natural thing for her to walk up to his chair, kiss him on the lips, order his bonds cut, and walk him out of this basement and through the front gates while holding his hand. She’d give him some khren, some grief, like “Dushka, you cannot manage even this without my help?” He smelled a faint whiff of her Calèche perfume in the room over the stench of carbolic disinfectant. He heard the scrapes of chairs behind them as Blokhin pulled Nate’s chair back into the middle of the room, so he couldn’t see the visitors—Nate had also immediately recognized Bortnikov and Patrushev, former and current Directors of FSB. Dominika completed the trifecta as Director of SVR. These officials were here to observe his interrogation? Unheard of. Maybe the Kremlin was panicking, or maybe Benford had bagged MAGNIT, and they didn’t know how and were desperate to identify the American mole. Nate told himself he had to be extra careful—the mole was sitting in this very room, the one with the pretty legs. He had to protect her at all costs.
Nate couldn’t know it was more serious than that. After being berated by Putin and informed that Gorelikov was not the mole, the three Service Chiefs had been escorted to their official cars and had separately driven to Butyrka to observe the interrogation of the American case officer. They instinctively stayed apart to avoid contamination, and they did not speak to one another. Dominika’s head was in a fog; she did not remember the drive to the prison through Moscow streets, did not remember the tea served in the protocol room by the prison director, did not remember the clacking footsteps echoing down endless corridors and littered stairwells. Her head cleared when she entered the white-tiled room and saw Nate in the chair, his purple halo shining brightly. Her stomach flipped when she saw Blokhin and his black wings, waiting to begin. This was another Putin touch, using Blokhin: he hated Nate for what had happened to Shlykov and, most of all, for the towering insult of pitching him in the Turkish jailhouse. He would put greater energies into Nash’s interrogation. The haloes of her colleagues were bleached out with fear. This exercise was like some throwback to the Great Purges of the thirties: all were suspected and accused; one trusted adviser would be destroyed and the others exonerated.