For Duty and Honor

by Leo J. Maloney

  “How do we contact these people?” said Grushin. “It’s not like we have cell phones. Not even the guards are allowed to have personal communication devices.”

  “But there is a communications tower,” said Morgan. “And I know where we can get an Internet connection, if anywhere.” He looked up at the window to Nevsky’s office.

  “No,” Grushin said. “We can’t.”

  “We must,” said Badri. “There is no other way.”

  “You people are crazy.”

  “You said you didn’t want to die here,” said Morgan. “Well, it looks like this is our one way out. So. Are you in?”

  “Of course I’m in.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Mom, I’m okay.”

  Alex held the phone up to her ear with her shoulder as she looked through the viewfinder on the camera. A car pulled up to the mansion she was surveilling.

  “I’m keeping safe. I put some professional people on the case. I’m really only overseeing their work.”

  “I know you, Alex. I gave you your middle name, and it’s not ‘safe.’”

  Alex took a succession of pictures of the man who emerged, bald and tired-looking, until he disappeared into the house seconds later.

  “I’m not putting myself in any kind of danger or anything.” She hid her camera back inside her backpack. “Just hanging around Moscow. Taking some pictures to pass the time.”

  The mansion in question was a prerevolution urban manor that took up the whole block. The sun was getting low in the sky, and the shadow it cast reached Alex where she sat, in a park across the street.

  The front door opened once again, and Alex took a photograph of the person walking out—but it was a security guard, who surveyed the street and closed the door once again.

  Alex hid the camera once more and leaned once again against the tree, pretending to be engrossed in a Russian language workbook, early intermediate level.

  “How are you holding up, Mom?”

  “I wish you were here,” she said. “But I keep busy.”

  “How’s Neika?”

  “She’s here. Dug up my all my day lilies yesterday. I had to hose her down in the yard, which wasn’t much of a punishment for her, let me tell you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A young woman had knocked at the service entrance of the mansion. Alex picked up the camera once more and photographed her as she turned around and lit a cigarette. She was young and pretty, blond, wearing heavy makeup and a black dress that, while not indecent, didn’t leave much doubt about what kind of service she was there to perform.

  “Well, I see you’re otherwise busy, so I’ll let you go.”

  The door opened, and the woman dropped her cigarette and ground it into the pavement.

  “No, Mom, I—listen, I’ll call you back, okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  Alex hung up the phone and reviewed the photos. Two clear shots of her face.

  The light was growing dim, and she was tired. Time to call it a day.

  She packed up the book and the camera and walked away from the mansion, then six blocks south before hailing a cab and telling the driver to take her back to Dobrynin’s.

  Alex picked up a baked potato loaded with cheese and mushrooms from a street vendor. She said hello to Agrafena at the counter, receiving a grumble in return, and ate alone in their tiny kitchen.

  Dobrynin pushed his way inside as she was washing the dishes. To say that he was in a foul mood would imply that he was ever not in one.

  “Anything today?”

  She dried her hands and pulled the camera from the bag. He turned his attention to a wall where they had hung photographs Alex had taken on other days.

  “Look, this man,” he said, holding up the camera’s viewer and pointing at a picture on the wall. “Same.”

  “Wish I knew who he was.” Alex finished drying the dishes as he looked at the rest.

  Over the course of the past week, it become obvious that Dobrynin never left the house, or indeed saw anyone. Agrafena, whose relationship with Dobrynin was never made clear—Alex figured wife or sister, but nothing between then suggested any definitive answer—did all the necessary shopping for groceries and other necessities, saw to all of the scant customers in the butcher shop, and also received the meat that arrived on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Dobrynin, meanwhile, cut the meat in the reeking refrigerated room in the back.

  “It’s no use,” Alex said as her host cycled through the picture. “Anyone who’s at all important has tinted windows and brings their car in through the garage.”

  “Those people have no value to us,” said Dobrynin. “Tell me, is it easy to get to Suvorov?”

  “Um, duh. Otherwise what would have been the point of staking him out for fourteen hours a day?”

  He belched, and a foul smell of alcohol reached her nostrils. “Do you think it will be any easier to get to someone important?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Dobrynin turned the camera’s viewer for her to see. “This is weak spot. This is how we get him.”

  She was looking at a pretty girl, smoking, looking worriedly out into the street.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Morgan lay in bed that night with a sense of accomplishment. Things were lining up, and this escape plan seemed increasingly likely. He stared as the ceiling as the spotlight from the guard tower passed over the wall outside, shining in through the windows, casting a silhouette of the bars.

  Men snored and shuffled in fitful dreams. Morgan closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.

  He was awakened by the opening of the cell door. His eyes opened in a flash.

  Something was wrong. It was still dark, no wake-up siren, no nothing.

  Other men who slept as lightly as he did also moved in their bunks, turning to see what was going on.

  Several shadows came into the barracks. They made straight for Morgan’s bunk. He tried to scramble off it and away from them, but in his sleepy state, he was slow and clumsy. They were on him in seconds.

  He was pulled off his bunk and tossed on the floor, hitting it hard with his back.

  By the light of the spotlight, Morgan saw Bortsov looming over him, flanked by four of his his henchmen. Who had let him inside? Did he have that much pull with the guards?

  Morgan moved to roll under the bed, but the goon was faster, and blocked his way. Together two of them held on to his arms. He tried to wrest himself free, kicking and twisting, but they held firm.

  “This is your time to die.”

  “I’m protected,” said Morgan.

  “I don’t see any protection,” Bortsov said, making a show of looking right and left. “Do you?”

  “Nevsky is going to get it from Suvorov, and then he’s going to come after you.”

  “Eh, he will give me a few lashes, maybe. It will sting for two weeks. But you, you will be dead.”

  He was wrong, but Morgan stood no chance of convincing him. He had one chance to save his life now.

  “Help!” Morgan screamed. “Pomogite! Pomo—”

  They stuffed a piece of cloth in his mouth, muffling his voice. Others were awake now, but no one moved to help him. They were all too scared.

  One of Bortsov’s men handed him a rock almost the size of a basketball. Bortsov took it, his shoulders sagging under its weight. He raised it over his head. When he dropped it, it would come down and crush Morgan’s skull.

  “Now you die, Amerikanskyi.”

  Two guards burst into the barracks, shouting. They had heard his cries for help! An intense expression came over Bortsov’s face, and he pushed the rock downward.

  But the guards had distracted the men who were holding him, and Morgan twisted free, rolling out of the way as the rock hit the floor, breaking tile.

  The guards drove Bortsov’s men out first under blows from their nightsticks, then dragged off Bortsov himself. Then they told Morgan to stand and took him outside, across the yard to t
he place where they had shaved him on his first day there. After a few minutes of sitting under guard, the warden appeared. He was wearing a rumpled shirt and reeked of alcohol.

  “You have made yourself very unpopular in your time here. A few weeks and already you have enemies.” He emitted a resounding belch. “I would be happy to throw you to the dogs. Sometimes they even do it in interesting ways. It breaks up the monotony.” He leaned over Morgan menacingly. His breath was heinous. “You see, most people here, nobody cares if they are killed. Me least of all. But General Suvorov has other plans for you. And then you will be regretting that Grushin’s gang did not kill you.”

  Morgan didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response.

  “I would enjoy breaking you. I would also enjoy seeing what Bortsov’s boys would have done. They can be very creative in their punishments. But you are too valuable to us to let die. That is left to General Suvorov.” He turned and walked away, giving an order to the guard as he left.

  They escorted Morgan out of the building and not into the barracks but somewhere else. And Morgan knew where.

  It was a small building, one with only a handful of tiny cells in it, each with a heavy steel door with no openings but a slot low near the ground.

  Solitary. He was going in the hole.

  The guards opened the cell door and he got a peek inside. It was perhaps just big enough for him to lie down, and not comfortably. They shoved him inside and closed the creaky steel door, leaving him in pitch darkness.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The solitary cell was designed to make men crazy, this Morgan knew. He’d seen plenty in his day, and the concept was well familiar to him.

  It doesn’t seem like much, being put in a room by yourself. A naive observer might not even think it would rise to the level of punishment. But Morgan knew. Morgan had experienced it before, and had seen it happen to others. Isolation and sensory deprivation had their way of getting under even the hardest man’s skin.

  Silence makes you sensitive to every little noise, and total darkness makes you see shapes, lights and patterns that are not there. Soon you start to think you heard scraps of voices, people talking to you, sometimes even voices you recognize.

  Morgan sat up and breathed, trying to hold back against the encroaching madness, trying to center his thoughts on his breathing, on feeling the ground under him, on the aches in his body, on resisting succumbing to the despair of his thirst and hunger. You do not know how fast time goes in the dark, when it’s day and when it’s night, and so time seems not to pass at all.

  Thus, Morgan had no idea how much time had passed when the food slot opened and a partial face appeared and whispered, “Hello.” Morgan could just make him out through the slot. He was blond and young, bony and angular, with wispy stubble on his cheek. “Come closer.”

  There was something conspiratorial about the way he spoke, not the barking orders he was used to. Morgan crawled toward him, every movement painful.

  “I heard about what you did,” he said. “In the mine. I do not know what you did to be in this place, but you do not deserve to be in here.”

  Morgan grunted in response.

  “They beat Bortsov very bad. Nevsky is very angry.” He pushed a bowl through the slot. “Here. Take it.”

  Morgan did. By the dim light he saw that is was filled with stew, not the prisoners’ thin, rancid soup, but something borscht-like, filled with meat and potatoes turned pink from the fragrant paprika. Morgan was salivating at the smell.

  “Don’t let anyone see the bowl until I come back tomorrow.”

  “Wait,” said Morgan. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Filipov.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alex Morgan had been searching through high-end escort service websites for—she checked the clock—seven hours now, and she found she’d become inured to the sleaze covered in a veneer of class that these establishments affected.

  She scoured each website. Most had profiles for the girls, and Alex looked through each one, a parade of blondes and brunettes in suggestive poses, faces pancaked with makeup, fake tits in low-cut tops.

  The Internet connection didn’t help either. Dobrynin was not exactly what one might call an early adopter. He’d only switched out his rotary phone because the network stopped supporting it. So Alex used her father’s money to buy a 3G modem, and it could take a full ten seconds to load a high-quality image—which didn’t seem like a lot at first, but became an increasing pain as the photos Alex had to look through reached the hundreds.

  She was now looking through a website designed in a black and gold theme, everything about it signaling luxury. She didn’t even have to open the girl’s profile. Alex recognized her from the thumbnail on the page.

  She called herself Lara.

  “Call them,” Dobrynin said when she showed it to him. “Pretend to be secretary of American.”

  “What if they don’t speak English?”

  “They will.”

  Alex took her prepaid Russian cell phone and dialed the number on the website.

  “Zdrávstvujte.” A woman’s voice. Young.

  “Hello, I need an English speaker, please? Angliyskiy?”

  “Yes, hello, I can speak English. How may I help you?” Her voice was accented in Russian with a gentle inflection of Queen’s English.

  Alex put on her best secretarial voice. “I’m calling on behalf of my employer, Mr. Phillips. I’d like to engage one of your girls for the evening.”

  “Certainly, ma’am. Which girl would that be?”

  “Lara? The fourteenth on the website here.”

  “I’m afraid Lara is not available for tonight.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Not for the rest of the week.”

  “Mr. Phillips is adamant that he wants this girl,” Alex said. “He is willing to pay.”

  “Unfortunately, she is not working tonight,” said the woman. “Mr. Phillips may perhaps be interested in—”

  “Listen,” Alex broke in, letting anxiety creep into her voice, “Mr. Phillips is not a very nice man, and when he sets his mind on something, he doesn’t really take excuses, you know? Things could get really bad for me if I don’t get her.”

  Alex heard dead air on the line. Then the woman said, “Listen, you can’t tell anyone I did this, okay? She’s taking some time off from us, but I know she does freelance. I can give you her phone number.”

  “Really? That would be wonderful.”

  Alex wrote down the number on her computer.

  “Thank you so much,” Alex said. “You really saved my life today.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Alex dialed the number for the fifteenth time, and for the fifteenth time the call went straight to voicemail.

  “This goddamn technology,” Dobrynin said. “Stay. I will make a phone call.”

  He picked up the phone in the shop and dialed. “Let me speak to Sokoloff,” he said in Russian, and she was surprised at the ease with which she understood. The studying was paying off.

  Dobrynin tapped his foot and muttered under his breath while he was on hold. The next words out of his mouth were an insult, and then a deep laugh.

  “How are you, you bastard?” Dobrynin continued. “I need some information. I have a phone number.” He gave the man the digits. “Yes, that’s right.” He wrote something down on a piece of butcher paper and thanked the man.

  “I got a name,” Dobrynin said, now in English, holding out the piece of paper. “Maria Kapustin.”

  “Got an address?”

  “What, I have to do everything for you?”

  * * *

  Alex had been waiting for hours outside the lumpen apartment building when Maria Kapustin walked out the front door, wearing sunglasses about two hours too late for them to be of any use.

  She decided a head-on approach would be as good as any. Maria was walking fast, and Alex had to jog to catch up with her.

  “Maria?” s
he said. The woman looked at her, and the sunglasses could not hide the panic in her eyes. “Don’t worry,” Alex said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  From up close, Alex saw the edge of a black eye peeking out from under the glasses, and purple marks on her neck not quite covered with makeup.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Da. Yes.” Maria did not lessen her pace.

  “I’d really like to talk to you. Can I buy you dinner, or a drink?”

  “I can buy my own, thank you.”

  Alex decided to take a chance. “It’s about the man who did this to you.”

  Maria stopped walking and looked Alex straight in the eye. “What do you know about the man who did this?”

  “I know he’s a bad man,” said Alex. “And I intend to hurt him back.”

  Maria resumed walking. “American girl comes to be a big hero to poor oppressed Russian women?”

  Lying wasn’t going to get her anywhere. “I have my own agenda,” said Alex. “I’ll admit that. This isn’t about you. But you can get a bit of revenge.”

  Maria stopped and opened the door to a place Alex saw was a dive bar. She held the door open. “Well?” she said. “Are you going to buy me a drink or not?”

  They settled into a corner table. The only other customers were the everyday drunks who’d probably already been there for hours. Maria ordered them a couple of beers before Alex could say anything. Then she removed her glasses, setting them on the table, and revealed a dark purple blotch under her left eye.

  “Masha,” the girl said. “That is what everyone calls me. Everyone who knows my real name, anyway. So what is your deal?”

  Alex opted for full disclosure. “I’m looking for my father. I think Suvorov is the one who took him.”

  “If that is true, then I am sorry for your loss,” Masha said.

  “I’m not ready to believe that yet,” Alex said. “What do you know about him?”