“He’s being brought to the gymnasium as we speak. They found him hiding like a coward in his basement. Everyone else is being assembled according to your instructions. We can go whenever you’re ready.” Mikail looked around the room, then looked at Todd, then at Clay, and motioned with his hand toward the hallway.
Todd took Vladimir’s place escorting the hostage, and the whole entourage walked through the office, past an unlocked door, then moved into a long hallway that was dark and only faintly lit by the emergency lighting recessed in the ceiling. As they passed under evenly spaced orbs of light they went into and out of the light and the darkness in regular succession, occasionally stopping or slowing to open doors or turn down hallways as they wound through the maze of the prison. Clay found himself, for no apparent reason, beginning to shuffle his feet, as though he had leg irons. Dead man walking, he thought. It was an eerie and frightening feeling and he could not help thinking that he was a condemned man, walking to his execution.
The others, the youths, were practically stoic in their quiet, as though they were going over something in their minds, mulling some decision. Only Todd seemed unable to stand the silence. He nervously fidgeted with his hand on Clay’s arm before he began speaking a little too boisterously. “You’re probably a little freaked out right now, aren’t you? That’s OK. I would be, too. Imagine how I felt, for example, when you showed up at our door in that storm. We’d already been planning our little takeover for a long time when you showed up, you see. And here you came, just in the nick of time.”
Clay heard the implication but hadn’t yet figured out whether they had come to believe him. He turned his head to look at Todd for some clue, but he couldn’t make out the guard’s features in the dark with only one good eye.
Todd gave him a clue. “I was pretty sure that you were a spy sent by American intelligence. It was just a matter of deciding which outfit you were with.”
Clay decided to press his case, but cautiously. “I was with me,” he retorted blandly. “Only me.”
“Yes, maybe. But how could we have known that? A man who takes pictures… he could be anyone, couldn’t he? And besides, it didn’t matter. It’s not like you’re innocent, Clay. The sign did say you’d be shot if you didn’t stay five hundred feet away. I even told you that myself, and you agreed. You even asked for it! Remember? Either way, of course— ”
“The pictures were innocent, a stupid mistake, and I was dying,” Clay intoned.
“Well, you still are, Clay,” Todd shot back, laughing at his own wit. “I guess, in the end, we all are, but some sooner than others.” Clay buckled again, causing Todd to have to stop and shake him violently, as a warning to keep moving.
Todd went on, “Anyway, the whole world is about to go bottom-side-up and you’re getting a ringside seat, at least for the opening bell… aren’t you excited?” Clay looked at him. Layers of incomprehension were turning into utter confusion. The pieces of fact and truth that he thought he held were being scattered one by one. He wondered to himself if this might be, perhaps the moment when he stepped off into the abyss.
“Is there any way we can do this,” Clay asked, “without the chit-chat?”
“I doubt it,” Todd replied dismissively. “You see, we weren’t expecting the main event until Tuesday. Didn’t you say you were a Democrat, Clay? I forget… Oh yes, I remember… you said you were whatever I wanted you to be. It probably would have been better if you were CIA. I mean, you probably would have lived longer. You would have had some value then,”
Still no real comprehension.
“Anyway, Tuesday and your ringside seat… We were planning for it all to happen later, but the storms happening together as they did, well, that pushed up our plans considerably.”
No comprehension.
“But then we had to take over the town, and that took a moment, so—”
“Enough, Fedya Leonivitch,” Mikail snapped, and then leaned into two double doors which he’d just unlocked, revealing what in the utter darkness appeared to be a very bright line of light at the place where the two doors met and which grew larger as the doors swung outward into a courtyard where Clay saw, once the bright moonlight had washed over him, laid out in the valley, tucked in the hollow of a range of mountains that rose up and shielded it on all sides, a hamlet that for all the world seemed as if it belonged in the Caucasus Mountains.
Warwick, Russia, America.
Comprehension.
The cold hit them like an icy frozen wave and the snow was still falling, only not as violently as before, and their boots (his shoes) crunched on the frozen snow and ice that had been trampled down by the weight of many feet.
They passed through a gate set in a heavy chain link fence like the one he’d seen when he first stumbled upon the prison, and heavy razor wire reflected the moonlight and the beams from the flashlights. Then they headed down a slight hill on a well-traveled path through the snow and eventually they were on a sidewalk that was packed hard in trampled down snow and ice and Clay had to slow a bit because his prison shoes had no traction.
Arriving at what appeared to be an old school gymnasium, Clay looked around and decided that this was exactly what this structure was. It was the only building in the hamlet that was lighted, but the snow and the moonlight gave the whole town a beautiful, blue shade and the buildings and the town folk could be seen clearly as they moved toward the gym. People were going in, chatting nervously in Russian, and Clay could see armed men—boys actually—all around the place and directing the people into the building.
Once inside, Clay saw that the gym was set up for an assembly with chairs arranged in neat rows covering the floor and there was a small stage to the left but it was dark and the deep red curtain was drawn closed. Clay glanced around and saw that the gym looked like any old American gymnasium built anytime between, say, the 1940’s and 1960’s, with a hardwood floor deeply worn by thousands of feet, and the smell of All-American high school sweat hanging in the air. The main difference between this gym and any other that he’d been in throughout his life was that the signs in this gym were all in Russian lettering, and the scoreboard also seemed to be sprinkled with Russian figures as well. There was an old banner hanging limply on the far wall and Clay wondered what it said. Probably something like “Go Bears! Beat the—“ who? Who would these Russians play in a basketball game? The Chinese? Latvia?
Mikail’s entourage lined up in front of the stage on a low podium as more chairs were brought in. Todd, a little too roughly, forced Clay into a seat and then sat down in the empty seat beside him. Todd seemed to be absolutely loving every minute of this bizarre pageant, as if he had waited for it all of his life.
Clay watched as hundreds of people filed in—the citizens of Warwick, he presumed—and he noticed that they were an interesting mix of young and old, mostly middle class, it seemed, and neither expensively nor shabbily dressed. There were some Asians and what looked like Arabic people among them as well. The crowd resembled what Clay would assume any small town in rural Russia might look like, though their faces showed signs of strain and worry and it was obvious that they were not used to having men with machine guns everywhere.