by David Archer
The guards ordered someone to step out, and Randy heard a voice he would know anywhere.
“Sure, no problem,” Noah said. He walked out of the room and stood while he was handcuffed, then let the guards take him by the arms and walk him through the hallway.
Noah was taken into the same room Randy had just left, and three armed guards kept him covered while his cuffs were removed and he was suspended by his arms from the same chains that had held Randy only moments before. Captain Fedorov, who had questioned him when he had first arrived, stepped into the room and smiled at him.
“Hello again, Mr. Winston,” Fedorov said. “I trust you've been comfortable?”
“Not bad,” Noah said. “I needed to stretch, though, so this feels pretty good.”
“I wonder if you know, Mr. Winston, what the single greatest hardship is for an intelligence agent in the modern world. Would you care to guess?”
Noah made what he considered a facial shrug, a sort of grimace that indicated a complete lack of interest. “Coming up with new lines like that one?”
“No, but that is a nuisance, at times. Actually, I am speaking of digitalization. The very fact that so much information is now stored in computers in digital form, rather than on paper, means that there's always a risk that some foreign agency might be able to get into those files and corrupt them. Take, for example, fingerprints. Most people believe it was your FBI who first started storing fingerprint information in computers, but it was actually the Japanese. We were second, and there's actually substantial evidence that your FBI got the idea from us. However, having such records only in digital form makes them vulnerable to those despicable creatures known as hackers. These people are able to get past all of our defenses and modify any record in any database. In our example, fingerprints, this means that your fingerprints actually tell us nothing at all about who you are. Since our own hackers have managed to crack the FBI fingerprint database, we were able to run yours against it, and all it told us is that you're supposedly one Samuel Winston.”
“I coulda saved you a lot of trouble,” Noah said. “If you had asked me, I would’ve told you that’s who I am.”
“But we both know that you are not,” Fedorov replied. “While I may not know for sure who you are or who you work for, there is absolutely no doubt that you're an American agent. The electronic weapons you carried, they speak of American development, and so do the earpieces you were wearing. Even just the fact that you were attempting to steal the event schedule for the execution of five other American agents is enough to confirm what we already know. It appears to me to be obvious that you were planning to attempt to rescue your compatriots as they were being transported to the place of execution. Am I correct?”
“Dude, what on Earth are you talking about? The stun guns are something I bought on the black market, because I just don’t like to kill anybody when I rob them, and the earpieces let me and my buddy talk to each other if we got separated, you can buy those at Radio Shack. The only thing I was trying to steal was money. Word on the street says there’s at least a hundred million rubles in that office somewhere, so we thought we’d try to find it.”
Fedorov chuckled. “In order to steal the equivalent of a million American dollars, you decided to break into one of the most secure prisons in the world? Really?” The look on his face was one of incredulity.
Noah smiled. “It does sound kinda stupid now,” he said, and then he added a conspiratorial wink, “but if we’d gotten away with it, it would’ve been awesome. We would’ve been legendary, you know?”
Fedorov stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Well, I had to try this the easy way,” he said. “Now we’ll do it the hard way.” He picked up a device from a table nearby and brandished it at Noah. “This is the latest thing in electronic pain stimulation. It uses over fifty thousand volts of direct-current at less than ten milliamps, which stimulates every pain-sensing nerve in your body but without doing any lasting harm. Now, would you like to tell me the truth about who you are, or should I demonstrate?”
Noah tried to look scared. “Oh, come on, man,” he said. “I'm telling you the truth, we're just thieves, That's all. Why the hell don’t you believe me?”
The twin prongs of the device brushed lightly against Noah’s shoulder, and even through the thick clothing he could feel the jolt that threatened to rip off his skin. He didn’t even bother to try holding back the scream.
Fedorov drew it back and looked at him. “Who do you work for, Mr. Winston?”
“I work for myself, man,” Noah screamed at him. “Hell, Harold works for me!”
“Harold, yes,” Fedorov said. “I'll be talking with Harold a bit later. For now, I'm concentrating on you.” The prongs pressed against Noah with more force, this time, and the resulting agony was greatly multiplied. Again Noah screamed, while deep inside, he was forcing his mind to explore and embrace the pain.
Some years earlier, Noah had read a book on pain management that suggested the best way to endure pain was to embrace it, draw it in, make it an absolute part of your inner core being. The author had not been able to explain the concept clearly in words, but Noah thought he could instinctively understand. He had suffered pain in the past, but never truly been tortured until now, so he put the concept into practice the best way he knew how.
While he was screaming on the outside, his mind was analyzing the pain on the inside. He was thinking about different parts of his body and comparing the level of pain in one part to the level in other parts. When he found that it was the muscles in his chest that seemed to be hurting the most, he concentrated on those muscles and focused on the agony they were experiencing, and he was gratified to realize that accepting the pain actually made it bearable.
Each time Fedorov hit him with the device, Noah forced himself to examine and embrace the pain. By the time it had gone on for an hour, Noah had reached the point of being able to ignore most of the agony completely. Where Randy had felt as if he was being torn apart, Noah was able to convince his mind that he felt only a dull ache.
“Tell me who you work for,” Fedorov said again.
Noah forced his head up and looked Fedorov in the eye. “I work for no one,” he said. “If you want to charge me, charge me. If you want to try me, try me. It won’t change anything.”
Fedorov gave him a smile that would have frightened any other man. “You were charged the moment you were arrested,” he said. “You were tried the moment you first saw my face. You were convicted the first time you lied to me. You were sentenced to die before you ever entered a prison cell. Two days from now, when your friends are taken out to hang, there will not be five nooses on the gallows. There will be seven.”
Three hours later, after a session similar to the one Randy had already had that morning, Noah was carried back to his cell and dropped on his bunk. He laid still until the guards had closed his door, then hurriedly got up and rushed over to it. With his ear pressed against it, he could hear voices in the hallway, and it was only a moment later that he caught Jenny’s voice as she was taken out of her cell.
He waited until he was sure the guards were out of earshot, then called out. “Marco?”
There was no response at first, and he was about to call out again when a series of soft noises caught his attention. It sounded like someone was tapping on the concrete wall, but then there were scratches, and then more tapping.
Noah’s logical mind caught the pattern. Three quick taps, three scratches, and then three more taps. Someone was spelling SOS in Morse code. A memory surfaced of a movie he had seen when he was a child, about prisoners of war using a similar system to communicate with each other. He listened closely and realized the sounds were coming from the wall on the right, which is where the table was placed in his room. He sat down in the chair beside it, picked up the only object he could see that might work, and used the blunt end of the pencil to send:
NOAH HERE
A moment later, the sounds began
again. This time, they spelled out MARCO HERE JIM NEXT CELL.
WHERE JENNY
OTHER CELL AND RANDY DAVE ONE MORE
GOOD TOGETHER
ANY NEWS
WE DIE TGTHR
O GOOD NO TRIAL
NO FSB ORDER
SARAH NEIL
NO WORD SAFE EMBSY
PLAN
YES CAN U TELL OTHERS
ONLY JIM CODE
Noah thought for a minute. Jenny and her men were in the same cellblock, but the only one Marco could talk to was Jim Marino. In order for Noah’s plan to work properly, he needed to find some way to let Jenny and Randy and Dave know what to expect.
* * * * *
It was almost a quarter of one by the time Sarah’s phone rang, and she answered it instantly. “Da?” she said.
“I have to tell you, your accent is atrocious,” Monica said. “Okay, sweetie, I'm in town. Let’s get together and see what we can figure out.”
“Fine,” Sarah said. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Meet? Right here at the damned airport. How long will it take you to get here and pick me up?”
Sarah blinked. “I—probably about a half hour.”
“That's fine, I'll grab a bite to eat. JetBlue doesn’t always offer an in-flight meal that I like. Call me on this number when you get here and I'll come right out.”
The line went dead and Sarah told Neil that she was going to pick Monica up at the airport. He was doing something on his computer and merely nodded in response, so she hurried out the door and got into the Lifan she had stolen the night before. She was just about to back out when Neil came running out the door and caught her attention.
“Hey,” he said. “The police are bound to be looking for that car by now, so I rented you one. When you get to the airport, dump that thing in long-term parking and go straight to the Avis Russia office. Just show your Marcia Winston ID and they’ll give you a Nissan SUV. That’ll be a lot safer than stealing one car after another.”
Sarah grinned at him. “That's why we call you the genius,” she said, and then she took her foot off the brake and drove away.
Getting to the airport didn’t take as long as she had expected, and she was glad to see that the Avis office was actually quite close to the long-term parking area. She parked the Lifan and locked it, then went nervously into the car rental office. When she gave her name, the girl at the counter smiled brightly. Sarah was handed a couple of forms to sign, her driver’s license and passport were copied, and then she was taken outside and told to choose the vehicle she wanted. She picked the Nissan Armada and was driving out of the lot only a minute later.
She took out her phone and called Monica as she was approaching the terminal, and spotted the tiny woman waiting at the curb when she got there. She seemed to have only two bags with her, and she tossed them into the back seat before climbing in the front beside Sarah.
The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then Sarah put the vehicle in gear and drove out of the airport. “Blows my mind you had so much power,” Sarah said. “You look like a little kid.”
“Then I'm sure you know where that power came from,” Monica replied. “Look, Sarah, I don’t expect you to like me at all, especially after what I did to you, but I'm here to help your husband. He saved my life, so I'll do whatever I can to help you get him back. Okay? Truce?”
“We don’t need a truce,” Sarah said, “because no matter how I feel about you, we're not enemies. When it comes down to it, you and I are on the same side, now. If I didn’t believe that, I couldn’t have called you at all.”
“Fair enough. Now, tell me the rest of the situation.”
Sarah took a deep breath. “Noah and Marco were arrested last night, like I told you. Jenny and her team, three men, were arrested a few days earlier on the charge of assassinating the deputy defense minister.”
“The one who defected, right?” Monica asked.
Sarah glanced at her in surprise, unaware that she would have known about something so potentially devastating, but she shrugged it off. “Yes. Jenny and Team Cinderella were sent over here to make sure everything went okay on that mission, but when they were arrested after Kalashnikov was supposedly assassinated, all the suspicion landed on them. We were sent over here to try to rescue them, get them back, but there was no way to break them out of Lefortovo prison. Noah and Neil looked at every possibility, and there was just no way to get it done without starting a war. That made Noah look at the possibility of snatching them while they were being taken to Red Square for hanging, but even that would be pretty much impossible. They bring the prisoners out one at a time, in different vehicles. It would take at least a platoon of soldiers to be able to get them all, and again it just seems impossible to pull it off.”
“Wait a minute,” Monica said. “If Noah decided it wouldn’t work, what was he doing inside the prison to get arrested? Don’t look so surprised, I've done my homework. I can get into an awful lot of government computer networks, so I know that's where he and Marco were caught.”
Sarah sneered at her for a second, then went on. “They were arrested inside the prison, because that was part of the plan. The only way we can pull off this rescue is to have Noah and Marco on the inside, but that means I have to take care of everything that goes on out here. It also has to be done without any further connection to the United States government, which is why I'm acting as a rogue agent at the moment, and before you ask, no; the Dragon Lady is not aware of what we’re doing, she honestly thinks Noah has been captured.” She glanced at Monica one more time. “That's where you come in. Noah said if I could get hold of you and play on the fact that he kept you alive, he was certain you’d be willing to help. Since you got to keep your network of operatives intact, that means you have assets and access to assets that we're going to need.”
Monica stared at Sarah. “That little shit,” she said. “So, he is inside the prison with Marco. Was he too stupid to realize that he will be tortured in there?”
“He knows that,” Sarah said. “They both do. In this case, though, they both consider it a necessary evil they have to put up with in order to be in the right place to make this rescue happen.”
“Then, fill me in, honey,” Monica said. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner I get back to my kids.”
CHAPTER NINE
“So, we still have no idea when they will be taken out of the prison, right?” Monica asked. “Isn’t there anybody who would know what the schedule is?”
“We weren’t able to find anyone, no,” Neil said. “They don’t keep any information in computers at that place, which actually makes them a lot smarter than they look, but it still screws me as far as trying to get any intel.”
Monica nodded. “But it's supposed to happen on Friday, right? Is that part still correct?”
“As far as we know,” Neil said, “they still hang on Friday, yes.”
“Okay. We know that each of them will be in a separate vehicle, so trying to grab them on the way to Red Square is probably not going to work. The only time we know for sure they're going to all be together is when they're led up onto the gallows. Geez, I miss the good old days when all I had to do was figure out how to manipulate one country against another.”
“Come on, Monica,” Sarah said. “You’ve got to have somebody under your control that can help us pull this off.”
“Yeah, well, it would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to worry about starting World War III. Let’s face it, kids, any action we take to rescue American agents is going to create an international incident. With the way the U.S. has fallen into disfavor with so many other countries lately, it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that the UN could issue sanctions against us. Just the very fact that these are American agents…”
Sarah and Neil both stared at Monica. “I know that look,” Neil said. “That's the look Molly always gets when she has a brainstorm.”
“Monica? What is it
, what did you think of?”
Monica looked from Sarah to Neil and back again. “The fact that they're Americans,” she said. “Right now, everything is based on the fact that they're American agents. Their identification says they're Americans, the way they talk, the way they act, it also is American, right?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “What are you getting at?”
“Holy…” Neil said. “I see it, I see it.”
“Exactly,” Monica said. “What we've got to do is eliminate America from the equation. We've got to dump evidence into Russia’s lap that says none of these people are genuinely Americans.”
Sarah shook her head in confusion. “Do what? How is that going to help anything?”
“Because it removes the spectacle. If they're not American agents, then the Russian government gains nothing by putting on this big public execution. They gain even less if we can show that they're not only not Americans, they're actually Russians.”
“Yes!” Neil said, bouncing in his chair. “We hand the Russians their own freaking conspiracy theory, by creating enough evidence that these are Russian agents who were sent to assassinate their own defense minister or whatever, just so that they can justify starting a whole new Cold War. That's freaking brilliant!”
“But that's not the plan!” Sarah shouted at them both. “Noah says we have to snatch them either just before their ride to Red Square or right after they get there. The whole reason he and Marco went inside the prison is so that they can try to get the rest of them ready when the time comes.”
“But this plan is better,” Monica said. “It will still work the way Noah wanted, but it takes away a lot of the risk. If the execution won’t get as many benefits, they're not going to be so all fired excited about doing it that way. If we can move fast enough, we can get the Kremlin to cancel that execution. They’ll make some kind of excuse about having to investigate further before the sentence is carried out, something like that, but they’ll cancel the public execution.”
“But how does that help us?” Sarah asked. “If they don’t bring them out for the execution, it's going to be even harder to get to them.”