by Tom Clancy
It is one of Russia’s largest and oldest pretrial lockups, built in the eighteenth century, and it shows its age. Though the seven-story façade that faces the street is well maintained and almost regal in appearance, the cells inside are small and decrepit, the beds and bedding are infested with lice, and the plumbing is unable to keep up with the building’s current population, which is more than three times the capacity for which it was built.
Just before four in the morning, a narrow gurney with squeaky wheels rolled down a green-and-white painted hallway inside the old main building of Matrosskaya Tishina. Four guards pushed and pulled it along while the prisoner on the bed fought against his bindings.
His shouts echoed off the poured concrete floors and the cinder-block walls, a sound just louder and no less shrill than the squeaky wheels.
“Answer me, damn you! What’s going on? I am not ill! Who ordered me transported?”
The guards did not answer; obeying the profane commands of prisoners in their charge was precisely the opposite of their job description. They just kept rolling the gurney down the hall. They stopped at a partition of iron grating and waited for the gate in the center to be unlocked. With a loud click the gate opened, and they pushed their prisoner through and rolled him on.
The man on the gurney had not told the truth. He was ill. Everyone who had spent any time behind bars in this hellhole was ill, and this man suffered from bronchitis as well as ringworm.
Though his physical condition would be appalling to a citizen on the outside, the prisoner was no worse than most of his cellmates, and he was correct in his fear that he had not been hauled from his cell in the middle of the night in order to receive treatment for maladies shared by virtually every other prisoner in the building.
He yelled again at the four men, and again they took no notice of him.
After more than eight months here at Matrosskaya Tishina, thirty-six-year-old Valentin Kovalenko still had not gotten used to being ignored. As a former assistant rezident of Russia’s foreign intelligence arm, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, he had grown accustomed to having his questions answered and his orders obeyed. He’d been a rising star in the SVR from his early twenties until his mid-thirties, achieving the plum assignment of number-two man in their London Station. Then, some months ago, a personal and professional gamble had failed, and he’d gone from meteoric rise to freefall drop.
Since his arrest by internal security officers in a warehouse in Moscow’s Mitino district in January he’d been held at the pretrial facility under an executive order of the office of the president, and he’d been told by those few prison officials that he’d met that his case would be delayed and delayed again, and he should mentally prepare himself to spend years in his cell. Then, if he was lucky, all would be forgotten and he’d be sent home. On the other hand, they warned, he could be shipped east and ordered to serve time in Russia’s gulag system.
This, Kovalenko knew, would be a virtual death sentence.
For now he spent his days fighting for a corner of a cell shared by one hundred prisoners and his nights sleeping in shifts on a bug-ridden cot. Disease and disputes and despair encompassed every hour of every day.
From other inmates he learned that the average wait to see a judge for someone whose case had not been sped up by bribes or political corruption was between two and four years. Valentin Kovalenko knew he did not have two to four years. When the other inmates in his cell learned who he was, a former high-ranking member of Russian intelligence, he would likely be beaten to death within two to four minutes.
Most residents of Matrosskaya Tishina were no great fans of the government.
This threat of exposure and then reprisal had been used effectively by Kovalenko’s enemies outside the prison, mostly at the Federal’naya Sluzhba Besopasnosti, Russian internal security, because it ensured that their inconvenient prisoner would keep his mouth shut while on the inside.
In the first month or two of incarceration Kovalenko had had sporadic contact with his frantic and confused wife, and in their brief phone conversations he’d only assured her that everything would be straightened out and that she had nothing to worry about.
But his wife stopped coming to the prison, and then she stopped calling. And then, he had been told by the assistant warden, his wife had filed for dissolution of the marriage and full custody of his children.
But this was not the worst news. Rumors began filtering down to Kovalenko that no one was working on his case. It was frustrating no one was on his defense, but the fact no one was working on his prosecution was even more ominous. He was just sitting here, in a cage, rotting away.
He worried he would be dead of disease inside of six months.
As the gurney turned to the right and rolled under a recessed light in the ceiling, Kovalenko looked at the guards. He did not recognize any of them, but to him they appeared to be just as robotic as the rest of the staff here. He knew he would get no useful information from them, but out of growing panic he shouted again as they took him through another gate that led out of his cell block and into an administrative portion of the facility.
In another moment he was wheeled into the prison infirmary.
Valentin Kovalenko knew what was happening. He’d imagined this. He expected this. He could have penned the script for this event himself. The late-night rousing. The leather bindings on the gurney with the squeaky wheels. The silent guards and the trip into the bowels of the prison.
He was about to be executed. In secret and in defiance of the law, his enemies were going to remove him from their list of worries.
The massive infirmary was empty of doctors, nurses, or any prison employees except for the men who rolled his gurney, and this reconfirmed Kovalenko’s fears. He’d been taken here once before, when a guard’s rubber club had opened a wound on his face that needed stitches, and even though that had happened late at night, the medical facility had been well staffed.
Tonight, however, it appeared as though someone had cleared out any witnesses.
Valentin fought against his wrist and ankle straps in vain.
The four guards rolled him into an exam room that appeared to be empty, and then they backed out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them and leaving him in the dark, bound and helpless. Kovalenko shouted as they left, but when the door closed, he looked around in the low light. To his right was a rolling curtain partition, and behind this he could hear movement.
He was not alone.
Kovalenko asked, “Who’s there?”
“Who are you? What is this place?” replied a gruff male voice. The man sounded like he was just on the other side of the partition, also on a gurney, perhaps.
“Look around, fool! This is the infirmary. I asked who you are?”
Before the man behind the curtain answered, the door opened again, and two men entered. Both wore lab coats, and both were older than Kovalenko. He put them in their fifties. Valentin had never seen them before but assumed them to be doctors.
Both men looked nervous.
Neither doctor regarded Kovalenko on his gurney by the door as they passed by. They then removed the curtain partition, rolling it out of the way up against the wall, giving Kovalenko a view of the rest of the space. In the faint light he saw another man on a gurney; the second prisoner’s body below the shoulders was covered by a sheet, but he was clearly bound by his hands and feet much the same as was Kovalenko.
The other prisoner looked at the doctors now. “What is this? Who are you?”
Valentin wondered what was wrong with the man. Who are you? Was it not clear where he was and who they were? The better question would have been “What the hell is going on?”
“What the hell is going on?” Kovalenko shouted at the two older men, but they ignored him and walked now to the foot of the other prisoner’s bed.
One of the doctors had a black canvas bag on his shoulder, and he reached into the bag and took out a syringe. With a quiver in his hands a
nd a tightness in his jaw that Valentin could register even in the dim, the man popped the cap off the syringe, and then he lifted the sheet off the bare feet of the other prisoner.
“What the fuck are you doing? Don’t touch me with—”
The doctor took hold of the man’s big toe while Kovalenko watched in horror and utter confusion. Valentin quickly looked up at the prisoner and saw similar bewilderment on the man’s face.
It took the doctor with the syringe a moment to separate the skin from the nail at the tip of the man’s toe, but as soon as he accomplished this he jabbed the needle deep under the nail and pressed the plunger.
The man screamed in terror and pain as Kovalenko looked on.
“What is that?” Valentin demanded. “What are you doing to this man?”
The needle came out of the toe, and the doctor tossed the syringe into the bag. He wiped the site with an alcohol prep pad, and then he and his colleague just stood at the foot of both gurneys, their eyes fixed on the man to Valentin’s right.
Kovalenko realized the other man had fallen silent. He looked over at his face again and saw confusion, but before Valentin’s eyes the face contorted in sudden and sharp pain.
Through clenched teeth the prisoner growled, “What did you do to me?”
The two doctors just stood there, watching, tension in their own faces.
After a moment more the man on the gurney began thrashing against his bindings; his hips rose high in the air and his head jerked from side to side.
Valentin Kovalenko shouted for help at the top of his lungs.
Foam and spit came out of the agonized man’s mouth, followed by a guttural moan. He kept convulsing at the limit of his straps, as if he was trying in vain to expel whatever toxin had been injected into him.
It took the prisoner a slow, torturous minute to die. When he stilled, when his body came to rest contorted but restrained by the straps, the man’s wide eyes seemed to stare right at Kovalenko.
The ex — SVR assistant rezident looked toward the doctors. His voice was hoarse from his shouting. “What did you do?”
The man with the bag on his shoulder stepped over to the foot of Kovalenko’s gurney and reached inside his bag.
As he did this, the other man pulled the bedsheet off Kovalenko’s legs and feet.
Valentin screamed again, his voice cracking and faltering. “Listen to me! Just listen! Don’t touch me! I have associates who will pay you… pay you or kill you if you—”
Valentin Kovalenko shut up when he saw the pistol.
From out of the bag the doctor had retrieved not a syringe, but instead a small stainless-steel automatic, and he leveled it at Kovalenko. The other man stepped up to the gurney and began unfastening the bindings around the younger Russian’s arms and legs. Kovalenko lay there quietly, sweat alternately stinging his eyes and chilling him where it had dampened the sheets.
He blinked out the sweat and kept his eyes fixed on the pistol.
When the unarmed doctor finished releasing Valentin from the leather straps, he stepped back to his colleague. Valentin sat up slowly on the gurney, keeping his hands slightly raised and his eyes locked onto the pistol in the quivering hand of the man who had just murdered the other patient.
“What do you want?” Valentin asked.
Neither of the two men spoke, but the one with the pistol — Kovalenko identified it now as a Walther PPK/S — used the barrel of his tiny weapon as a pointer. He twitched it toward a canvas duffel on the floor.
The Russian prisoner slid off the gurney and knelt down to the bag. He had a hard time taking his eyes off the gun, but when he finally did he found a full change of clothes and a pair of tennis shoes. He looked up to the two older men, and they just nodded at him.
Valentin changed out of his prison garb and into worn blue jeans and a brown pullover that smelled like body odor. The two men just watched him. “What’s happening?” he asked while he dressed, but they did not speak. “Okay. Never mind,” he said. He’d given up getting answers, and it certainly did not look as though they were about to kill him, so he allowed them their silence.
Were these murderers actually helping him escape?
They left the infirmary with Kovalenko in the lead and the doctors walking three meters behind him with the Walther leveled at his back. One of the men said, “To the right,” and his nervous voice echoed in the long and dark hallway. Valentin did as he was instructed. They led him up another quiet corridor, down a staircase, through two iron gates that were unlocked and propped open with waste bins, and then to a large iron door.
Kovalenko had not seen another soul during the entire walk through this part of the detention center.
“Knock,” instructed one of the men.
Valentin rapped on the iron door lightly with his knuckles.
He stood there for a moment, silence around him except for the thumping in his chest and a wheezing in his lungs from where the bronchitis affected his breathing. He felt dizzy and his body was weak; he hoped like hell this jailbreak, or whatever was going on right now, would not require him to run, jump, or climb any distance.
After waiting several more seconds, he turned back around to the men behind him.
The hallway was empty.
Bolts in the iron door were disengaged, the door creaked open on old hinges, and the Russian prisoner faced the outside.
Valentin Kovalenko had experienced a few hours of semi-fresh air in the past eight months; he’d been taken to the exercise court on the roof once a week and it was open to the sky save for a rusted wire grille, but the warm predawn breeze that brushed his face now as he stood at the edge of freedom was the freshest, most beautiful feeling he’d ever experienced.
There were no wires or moats or towers or dogs. Just a small parking lot in front of him, a few two-door civilian cars parked along a wall on the other side. And off to his right lay a dusty street stretching as far as he could see under weak streetlamps.
A street sign read Ulitsa Matrosskaya Tishina.
He was no longer alone. A young guard had opened the door from the outside. Valentin could barely see him as the lightbulb in the fixture above the door had been removed from its socket. The guard stepped past Valentin, inside the prison, and he pushed Valentin outside, and then he pulled the door.
It clanged as it shut, and then a pair of bolt locks were engaged.
And just like that, Valentin Kovalenko was free.
For about five seconds.
Then he saw the black BMW 7 Series sedan idling across the street. Its lights were off, but the heat from the exhaust rose to diffuse the glow of the streetlamp above it. This was the only sign of life he could see, so Kovalenko walked slowly in that direction.
The back door of the vehicle opened, as if beckoning him forward.
Valentin cocked his head. Someone had a sense for melodrama. Hardly necessary after what he’d been through.
The ex-spy picked up the pace and crossed the street to the BMW, and then he tucked himself inside.
“Shut the door,” came a voice from the dark. The interior lights of the backseat were off, and a smoked-glass partition separated the rear from the front seat. Kovalenko saw a figure against the far door, almost facing him. The man was big and broad, but otherwise Valentin could not make out any of the man’s features. He had been hoping to find a friendly face, but he felt certain almost immediately that he did not know this person.
Kovalenko closed the door, and the sedan rolled forward slowly.
A faint red light came on now, its origins difficult to determine, and Kovalenko saw the man back here with him a little better. He was much older than Valentin; he had a thick, almost square head and sunken eyes. He also had the look of toughness and importance that was common among the upper levels of Russian organized crime.
Kovalenko was disappointed. He’d hoped a former colleague or a government official sympathetic to his plight had sprung him from the prison, but instead, all indications now w
ere that his savior was the mafia.
The two men just looked at each other.
Kovalenko got tired of the staring contest. “I don’t recognize you, so I do not know what I should say. Should I say ‘Thank you,’ or should I say ‘Oh, God, not you’?”
“I am no one important, Valentin Olegovich.”
Kovalenko picked up the accent as being from Saint Petersburg. He felt even more certain this man was organized crime, as Saint Petersburg was a hotbed of criminal activity.
The man continued, “I represent interests that have just spent a great deal of treasure, both financial and otherwise, to have you removed from your obligations to the state.”
The BMW 7 Series headed south, this Valentin could tell from the street signs that passed. He said, “Thank you. And thank your associates. Am I free to go?” He presumed he was not, but he wanted to get the dialogue moving a little faster so that he could get answers.
“You are only free to go back to prison.” The man shrugged. “Or to go to work for your new benefactor. You were not released from jail, you just escaped.”
“I gathered that when you killed the other prisoner.”
“He was not a prisoner. He was some drunk picked up at the rail yard. There will be no autopsy. It will be registered as you who died in the infirmary, from a heart attack, but you can’t very well return to your previous life.”
“So… I am implicated in this crime?”
“Yes. But don’t feel like this will affect your criminal case. There was no case. You had two possible futures. You were either going to be sent to the gulag, or you were going to be killed right there in the infirmary. Trust me, you would not be the first man to be executed in secret at Matrosskaya Tishina.”
“What about my family?”
“Your family?”
Kovalenko cocked his head. “Yes. Lyudmila and my boys.”
The man with the square head said, “Ah, you are speaking of the family of Valentin Olegovich Kovalenko. He was a prisoner who died of a heart attack in Matrosskaya Tishina prison. You, sir, have no family. No friends. Nothing but your new benefactor. Your allegiance to him for saving your life is your only reason to exist now.”