by Mark Henshaw
Three officers and an administrator were standing in the garage when the car pulled in. Maines was shackled, hands, waist, and legs, which made dismounting from the SUV a challenging task. The prison guards searched him for contraband despite the restraints. When he was pronounced clean, they led him through the halls, his chains forcing him to shuffle. They came off only when he was inside the last room that would ever be his.
The cell was twelve feet long and barely wider at seven feet than he was tall. The bed was a concrete slab extending from the wall covered by a thin mattress. The low desk and seat were also concrete slabs, unmovable, unbreakable. There was no wood in the room at all, nothing for a prisoner to shatter into splinters that could serve as weapons. The shower had no separate enclosure and a timer that turned the water off every minute, so he would have to push a button to keep it flowing. There was television on a low shelf, a twelve-inch black-and-white. He’d been forced to watch the Administration and Orientation Program on Institutional Channel 4 before they’d brought him to the room. Channel 14 was dedicated to religious and psychiatric broadcasts. A quick turn of the dial revealed that a few other channels offered him educational shows and some entertainment programs. He considered that he could smash the television and try to electrocute himself or use the glass to slash his wrists, but he dismissed the thought. Surely some other inmates had tried and the staff would be ready for that. If he failed, they would take his television and he might never get another.
The functionary who had processed him had explained his routine. Twenty-three hours a day, he would stay in the room. He would eat all three meals every day in this space. Refusal to eat would result in an involuntary feeding using restraints and a nasogastric tube they would insert through his nasal cavity. If he found a way to remove that, they would use an anal tube. He could have one hour of solitary exercise in the recreation pen each day if he behaved and submitted first to a strip search. He could read books, even order them from the outside, but only paperbacks, lest he find some malicious use for the book boards inside the covers. He would be allowed letters but only from recipients approved by the prison. He wondered who might write to him. One fifteen-minute phone call per month was permitted, monitored of course. Who to call? He would have to think about that.
Think . . . that was what they truly wanted him to do. Think. A man found himself here because his conscience had lost its ability to torture him, so his country had ensured that his mind would accomplish the task instead. Time, loneliness, and his thoughts would create all the pain they could ever want. It would mount slowly over the years, would never be a sharp agony, just a growing madness that would build inside him until it crushed his capacity to feel joy. One day, he would try desperately to remember what pleasure and happiness were and would find that he could not.
Maines looked out through the four-inch-wide window. He could see sky, but a wall of red concrete bricks blocked his view of the earth. Some days he might see clouds, maybe rain, or a bird, others there would be snow or lightning. The stars would be there, rarely the moon. Earth itself would always be denied him, but he would always see the heavens. But they would be denied him in the end too, wouldn’t they? Maines didn’t believe in God, and hoped that he was right on that score now more than he ever had. If there was some Deity out there, surely He despised a traitor. Then Maines’s eventual death wouldn’t be an end to his punishment but the start of a new kind that would go for an eternity that would make his stay here feel like a small moment.
He turned back to the cell door, now closed and locked behind him. His imagination had been telling him for months now that Stryker or Barron would be there, to mock him or curse him when they finally locked him up. But there was no one.
Maines sat down on the cement bed and closed his eyes. The room already felt smaller than it had five minutes ago.
• • •
Kyra hadn’t asked the Federal Bureau of Prisons to let her accompany Maines into supermax and she suspected they would have refused the request outright had she made it. Such dramatic gestures were the fantasies of fiction and the U.S. Department of Justice cared more about efficiency than drama. ADX Florence was a hole in the ground where men were sent to be forgotten by the society they had done so much to harm, and the actual forgetting would begin before they arrived.
But Kyra had wanted to see where the man would end his life. She was searching for something here, though she didn’t know what . . . closure or understanding, maybe even sympathy. Alden Maines had decided that his country deserved to be hurt. She wasn’t sure she wanted to understand his line of reasoning, but something inside whispered that it was necessary. Kyra Stryker was in a position to do what he had done. Every CIA officer was. Kyra had read about other such traitors, sat through the lectures and heard the dire warnings. Every CIA officer had. And still, some turned anyway. Someday the temptation might reach her and she wanted to be sure she would make the right choice.
Kyra had never seen the Rockies before this morning and she could hardly digest their raw size. Virginia had its mountains, but most were covered by trees that hid their true size from view. Even so, she could see that the Blue Ridge Mountains were just a line of hills compared to these.
Such beauty was the last thing Maines or any other resident of supermax would have seen before they were locked inside for life, and she wondered if the Department of Justice hadn’t chosen this site for that reason, just to add a final bit of punishment onto their sentences.
Kyra pulled the smartphone from her pocket, called up the number she needed from the contacts list, and dialed. “It’s me,” she said. “He’s inside.”
“Ah, supermax . . . our landfill for human garbage. You didn’t go in with him?” Clark Barron asked. The CIA director did not sound surprised.
“I’m done with him.”
“I wish we could forget about our traitors. They’ll be teaching classes about him for the next fifty years. Speaking of which, the Kent School wants you to give a lecture on Maines in the Bubble.”
“Any chance we can get Jon and Kathy to come back in? Guest speakers?” Kyra asked.
“We have to unveil Kathy’s portrait in the Directors Gallery soon. I’m sure the Burkes wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes onstage talking. Well, Kathy will be happy to do it. Jon, not so much,” Barron offered. “Do you want an extra day out there? You’ve got the leave hours.”
“Depends,” she replied without thought. “You don’t need me for anything?”
“We do have a report that some advanced body armor showed up in Libya,” Barron admitted. “Nothing that’s going to change the big picture over there, but not something we like to see. But I think we can handle it without you.”
“I was thinking about driving back. I’ve never seen the battlefields at Shiloh or Chickamauga. I thought I might take the opportunity.”
“Avoid Kansas,” Barron advised. “Swing south through Texas and Louisiana. Barbecue and gumbo country.”
“Noted. I’ll call you from the road.”
“Take your time.” Barron hung up and Kyra replaced her smartphone in her pocket.
She stared at the Rockies again. The winter snows hadn’t melted off the peaks yet. They were tall enough that she wondered if the powder ever melted, even in the summertime. It was a sight fit for a painting, grays and blues everywhere she looked. But it wasn’t home. The greens hills of Virginia were more beautiful still, to her eyes anyway.
The chief of the Red Cell turned away from the prison and walked back toward her rental car. She could be home in three days if she wanted to drive hard. Virginia was two thousand miles east, but she was in no hurry. The world was quiet, for once.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first acknowledgement, as always, must go to my dear wife, Janna, without whom it would be impossible to write the first page, much less an entire book. I love you.
Jason Yarn and Ken Freimann, my agents who keep things moving in a productive direction. Not all o
f my ideas are good ones, and these are the gentlemen who must occasionally prune the tree of my imagination so the good fruit can flourish.
Lauren Spiegel, Miya Kumangai, and Shida Carr, my editors and publicist at Simon & Schuster who are forever professional and encouraging. My work is always better for their having read, edited, and promoted it.
Steve S. for help with Russian language and culture and years of friendship and mentoring. The world is both a safer and more interesting place thanks to him.
My friends and family and those readers who are forever encouraging. I write for you as much as for myself.
The Agency managers and Publication Review Board members who have to read my manuscripts and call out the bits that need to be changed or redacted. Their unfailing politeness makes the review process far easier than it otherwise could be. Their persistent professionalism strongly suggests to me that ex-Agency authors who complain about “censorship” are trying to publish details they know darned well that they shouldn’t and are either just mad that they’re getting blocked, trying to gin up publicity and therefore sales, or both.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JANNA HENSHAW
Mark Henshaw is a graduate of Brigham Young University and a decorated CIA analyst with more than sixteen years of service. In 2007, Henshaw was awarded the Director of National Intelligence Galileo Award for innovation in intelligence analysis. A former member of the Red Cell think tank, Henshaw is the author of Red Cell and Cold Shot. He lives with his family in Leesburg, Virginia.
Visit him at
MARKHENSHAW.COM
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Also by Mark Henshaw
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This, the debut thriller featuring Jonathan and Kyra, follows the CIA outcasts as they race to stop a secret Chinese weapon that threatens to provoke a world war.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Henshaw
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First Touchstone hardcover edition February 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henshaw, Mark, 1970-
The fall of Moscow station : a novel / Mark Henshaw.
pages ; cm
I. Title.
PS3608.E586F35 2016
813'.6—dc23
2015027887
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0031-4
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0032-1 (ebook)