“The planes go both ways. If I wanted to chase this, who would I ask?”
“A lot of the scientists, they’re gone now. But the bugger who ran the program at the end is still around. Real jackal, that one.”
Joost drained the last of his whiskey. It seemed to hit him all at once. He closed his eyes, flicked his tongue across his lips. “Were we ever friends, Ellis?”
Shafer flashed back to a long night at the British embassy, Joost drunkenly wrapping an arm around the ambassador’s wife, whispering in her ear until Janneke peeled him away.
All these years later, he was still a sloppy drunk.
“Sure we were.” The truth could wait. Forever.
“How come you never looked me up until now?”
“I wanted to leave you in peace. But this is too important. So? This jackal who ran the program?”
“What about him?”
“His name, Joost. What’s his name?”
14
FIVE DAYS…
All anyone needed to know about the new Russia was that Lubyanka was still open.
Sure, the Soviet Union had crumbled a generation before, and Russia was now theoretically a democracy. Sure, the very name Lubyanka sent a shiver through Russians of a certain age. The building was synonymous with the bad old days, secret trials and one-way trips to Siberia. No one knew how many prisoners had been tortured to death in its basement cells. For generations, it had served as the headquarters of the Committee on State Security, the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti.
The KGB.
The KGB had vanished with the USSR, replaced by the more polite-sounding Federal Security Service, known in English as the FSB. Yet the FSB was in no hurry to leave Lubyanka. Moving was such a headache. Lubyanka was a beautiful building, conveniently located just a few blocks from the Kremlin.
Besides, many senior FSB officers had a more positive perspective on the KGB than the average Russian. After all, they were KGB veterans themselves. As was Vladimir Putin. He wasn’t about to punish his old buddies. Putin and his oligarchs had more to lose from a revolution than Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet apparatchiks ever had.
So, by any name, the secret police stayed in business. And inside Lubyanka’s walls, the cruelties continued.
The FSB held Wells at Domodedovo through the evening. The airport cell was big enough for a dozen men, but besides Wells, its only occupant was a baby-faced Southeast Asian. Wells tried English and Arabic on the guy, but he only shook his head and pointed to his belly. Wells guessed he was a drug mule. His skin was waxy and soft, like he was melting from the inside out.
Wells had endured more unpleasant cells. This one was warm, quiet, and windowless, a tonic for his concussion. The fog in his mind lifted and the black spots in his vision disappeared. He was left to consider the wreckage of this mission. Had Custer felt this way when he rode over the hill at Little Bighorn? Wells had traveled all over the world and earned only a broken finger and a shaken brain for his troubles.
He hadn’t always won before, but he had never felt so outclassed.
He tried to tilt his anger to Salome and Duberman. But after a few minutes, the revenge fantasy lost its appeal. He changed his tack, closed his eyes, found his favorite Quranic verses. He didn’t believe for a minute that Muhammad had received messages straight from Allah. Yet he sometimes sensed divine inspiration in the text. Not just in the obvious places, the rhythms and melodies of famous Surahs like The Overturning, with its bizarrely poetic promise of the apocalypse:
But contradictions and digressions filled the Quran’s lesser chapters, verses that sounded sweet in Arabic but could barely be translated into any other language. Only a truly confident God would allow such malarkey in His revealed word. I command you to believe no matter what I say…
Wells slept. He must have, for the jangle of metal against metal stirred him. He opened his eyes to see a man in a windbreaker at the bars. Behind him, a digital clock read 00:23. He waved Wells over, cuffed his hands behind his back through the bars, slid the cell door open.
“Bye,” the Asian kid said.
“Good luck.” Though Wells wasn’t even sure what luck would mean for the guy. He might be better off having the package break inside him, a brief euphoria before he tumbled into the void.
“Bye-bye-bye.” Like a toddler who knew only one word.
Wells’s captor tugged his shoulder. Wells looked at him. “You’re FSB, yes?”
“Da.”
“How ’bout you tell me what’s going on?”
“Lubyanka.”
The word even sounded cold. For a moment, Wells considered trying to make a break. But the idea was beyond foolish. He didn’t speak Russian, didn’t have money or a car waiting. He wouldn’t clear the airport before they shot him down. He would get out of this mess with his wits, or not at all. And Duto and Shafer think I’m just the muscle.
They brought him to the center of the city in style, a big Mercedes. The ride took twenty minutes, the Merc’s blue light clearing a path better than any siren. Even as Wells was still getting his bearings, they reached a plaza dominated by a single massive building on its northeastern side.
“Lubyanka,” the FSB agent said again.
“I get the tour? Excellent. Didn’t think that was part of the package.”
The guy patted Wells’s cheek, the touch more menacing than any punch.
The Mercedes stopped at a manned gate on the building’s north side, away from the square. As they waited for the guard to examine the driver’s identification, Wells found himself wanting to be inside. He was tired of the uncertainty of this twilight struggle. If they planned to torture him because they believed he was a spy, or a troublemaker, or just because they could, so be it. Give him a battle to fight.
His wish came true. The gate came up. The Merc rolled down a long curved ramp and stopped before a steel door where two men waited, pale guys with meaty hands and crumpled noses. A heavyweight welcoming committee. They yanked Wells out, shoved him inside, down a long staircase that ended in a narrow corridor lit with dim red bulbs, like a predigital photo lab. Wells figured he had to be fifty feet below street level. With no natural light or sound to anchor him, he would quickly lose any sense of time. They could destroy his sleep cycle in a day or two just by playing with the lights.
A woman stood at the end of the corridor. For a moment, Wells thought he was looking at Salome. But when the guards brought him closer, he realized his mistake. This woman had the same narrow hips, the same confident stance. But she was older, with a pinched nose, a wattled neck. She pulled open the door behind her.
“Ready for a shower?” she said in English.
The guards dragged him through the doorway into a white-tiled room about fifteen feet square, lit with standard white bulbs. A dozen showerheads were mounted from the ceiling. A camera and speaker hung in each corner.