The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  The guards pushed Nate into a wooden straight-backed chair and stood behind him, their hands resting lightly on each of his shoulders. Nash saw the prison guards carried OTs-27 Berdysh 9mm automatic pistols in holsters on their belts. He leaned forward to peek around the guards at the rest of the room, but was yanked back to sit up straight. There were glass-fronted medicine cabinets filled with vials, and surgical instruments neatly laid out on sterile cloths. There was also a stainless-steel table in the center of the room with drainage pipes at either end leading down to drains in the floor, clearly a mortician’s table for performing autopsies. Nate did not like the look of the undulating tile floor gently sloping toward half a dozen drains around the room. He also didn’t like the look of a truck battery on a dolly with a jumble of cables wrapped around the handles, barely visible, leaning against the side of the cabinet. The equipment was incongruous in the gleaming surgical theater; it belonged in a grimy motor-pool garage meant for jumping stalled trucks, not in this room. Nate’s spirit fluttered a little as he imagined what the battery was for. Ignore the damn thing.

  Despite his arm and his finger, Nate was in relatively good shape. He had figured out that Benford had probably run a canary trap and had told the three DCIA candidates variants of the same story. With luck, Dominika had passed the word to Langley, hopefully in time to prevent a catastrophe. Nate accepted that this was Benford’s radical, all-out tactic to expose the mole, and he understood he was being used as a “lizard’s tail,” an expendable operative who is jettisoned and sacrificed to protect larger equities. He had not seen Dominika since the interrogation in the little cottage on Putin’s compound, and he was worried that the mole had somehow compromised her. He was also worried about Agnes, and hoped she was safely out of Russia. No. If everyone was blown, he reasoned, it wasn’t likely they’d be putting him through the wringer. He still had agents to protect. If he listened closely, Nate expected he could passively glean an idea from the interrogators’ questions about the status of the mole hunt and of Dominika’s security situation.

  Avoiding looking at the battery, Nate tried to prepare himself mentally and physically for the coming cycle of interrogation. They probably would try drugs again, but with luck and discipline, Nate thought he could resist. If Dominika had any influence in managing the interrogation, he knew she would contrive to keep the physical punishment at a minimum, and to limit the sessions for as long as possible as Langley worked on arranging a swap. She must not go too far on his behalf and throw suspicion on herself, however. That was critical.

  Whatever the Russians had in mind, he had no doubt he would survive. He was a prisoner in Putin’s Moscow, but this was the modern age and intelligence officers from opposition services were not harmed, according to a strict protocol. Putin may have eliminated hundreds of dissident Russians, but not ops officers of rival services.

  Nate knew he had a long stretch ahead before the State Department would get off their pinstriped fannies to commence talks to arrange for his release. He could be in the slammer for a year, five years, ten years, but CIA would never give up trying to get him back. On his return to Langley, there would be medals, a promotion, choice of assignments, but in reality his career would be over. He would be considered too burned coverwise and too burned out psychologically. By then, he daydreamed, Dominika might be finished at SVR and would be ready to retire and disappear into idyllic resettlement with Nate. It was a hell of a long way around to finally start a new life together, but it would be worth the wait. For the present, Nate intended to give his interrogators as much guff as he could muster. He knew by now the Russians probably had identified him as Nathaniel Nash, the last handler of General Korchnoi, one of the best assets the CIA had run in Moscow for fourteen years. They would also know that Nash was a fluent Russian speaker, which would further infuriate them.

  All thoughts about civilized outcomes in the basement of Butyrka Prison evaporated when Sergeant Iosip Blokhin walked into interview room three. He was dressed in a camouflage utility uniform and wore polished combat boots. A green nylon web belt was cinched tightly around his waist with a metal snap buckle with the Spetsnaz seal of parachute and dagger. His uniform was starched and crisp, but nowhere was there any badge of rank. His thin hair was slicked back over his bullet head, his scarred forehead dully shone in the bright lights of the room, and his ham-hock hands hung at his sides.

  He approached Nate’s chair and leaned close so that their faces were inches apart. Blokhin inexplicably smelled of kerosene—sharp and crisp, not altogether unpleasant. “It is sudba meeting again, American. How do you say it in English?” said Blokhin, in his gravely croak.

  “Fate,” said Nash in English. “Been back to Turkey since we last spoke?”

  “Not just fate, Yankee,” said Blokhin. “Sudba also means ‘doom.’ ”

  Nate looked him in the face. “Yours or mine? Or Major Shlykov’s?”

  Blokhin signaled to the guards standing behind Nate’s chair to pick him up and put him into the antique, chipped high chair and wheel it into the center of the room, under a big surgical light. The guards cinched Nate’s wrists to the flat arms of that chair and his ankles to the fronts of the legs with clear plastic cable ties, which Blokhin strained tight. Nate’s felt slippers were yanked off his feet. A sweat-stained leather strap was passed around his chest and buckled in back. It was tight, but Nate could breathe okay. It dawned on him that this might be worse than he’d anticipated: these restraints suggested they were going to try extreme techniques that would make him fall out of this chair if he weren’t tied in. Perhaps he’d be the first CIA officer in the history of the Cold War to actually be tortured in the Butyrka basement. Maybe they’d give him a Trailblazer Award when he got home.

  He tested the ties and rocked in his chair, sending it slowly rolling across the uneven floor, just as the door opened and four people walked in, three men and a woman, all senior bigwigs judging by the way the guards snapped to attention. Nate craned his head to see. The woman was Dominika, dressed in a dark suit and dark stockings, a prison-visitor’s badge was around her neck, and it swung as she walked, her heels clicking unevenly against the white floor tiles because of her slight limp. It was like a dream seeing her now, here, like this. Her hair was up as always, and their eyes met for an instant. It would have been the most natural thing for her to walk up to his chair, kiss him on the lips, order his bonds cut, and walk him out of this basement and through the front gates while holding his hand. She’d give him some khren, some grief, like “Dushka, you cannot manage even this without my help?” He smelled a faint whiff of her Calèche perfume in the room over the stench of carbolic disinfectant. He heard the scrapes of chairs behind them as Blokhin pulled Nate’s chair back into the middle of the room, so he couldn’t see the visitors—Nate had also immediately recognized Bortnikov and Patrushev, former and current Directors of FSB. Dominika completed the trifecta as Director of SVR. These officials were here to observe his interrogation? Unheard of. Maybe the Kremlin was panicking, or maybe Benford had bagged MAGNIT, and they didn’t know how and were desperate to identify the American mole. Nate told himself he had to be extra careful—the mole was sitting in this very room, the one with the pretty legs. He had to protect her at all costs.

  Nate couldn’t know it was more serious than that. After being berated by Putin and informed that Gorelikov was not the mole, the three Service Chiefs had been escorted to their official cars and had separately driven to Butyrka to observe the interrogation of the American case officer. They instinctively stayed apart to avoid contamination, and they did not speak to one another. Dominika’s head was in a fog; she did not remember the drive to the prison through Moscow streets, did not remember the tea served in the protocol room by the prison director, did not remember the clacking footsteps echoing down endless corridors and littered stairwells. Her head cleared when she entered the white-tiled room and saw Nate in the chair, his purple halo shining brightly. Her stomach flipped when
she saw Blokhin and his black wings, waiting to begin. This was another Putin touch, using Blokhin: he hated Nate for what had happened to Shlykov and, most of all, for the towering insult of pitching him in the Turkish jailhouse. He would put greater energies into Nash’s interrogation. The haloes of her colleagues were bleached out with fear. This exercise was like some throwback to the Great Purges of the thirties: all were suspected and accused; one trusted adviser would be destroyed and the others exonerated.

  Blokhin had put on a full-length leather slaughterhouse apron and tied it tightly around his waist. He pulled on heavy black rubber gloves, then wheeled the battery from the corner of the room and uncoiled the cables. A red star was embossed on the side of the battery. The cable ends were clamped to the battery terminals. The opposite ends terminated in dull copper alligator jaws that were wrapped in red felt, which Blokhin dipped into a bucket of water, soaking the felt wraps thoroughly. He touched the felts together, but no Hollywood sparks dramatically arced and snapped. Instead, the felts started smoking from the current, quenched by Blokhin’s dipping them into the bucket again. There was a sour, metallic, burned toast smell in the room. Nate heard a chair scrape behind him and willed Dominika to stay still. How long could he last? How long would Domi stay in her seat? Come on, baby, hang tough.

  Blokhin casually leaned against the arm of Nate’s chair. “I require one thing from you, Amerikanskiy,” he said softly. “The name of your agent in Moscow.”

  Nate smiled at him. “The name’s a secret malys, you small prick; that’s why we use the word ‘agent.’ ”

  Blokhin’s eyes narrowed, and his face flushed. He touched a felt pad to each side of Nate’s left ankle and looked as Nate’s back arched and his left leg involuntarily shot out straight. The electric shock was excruciating, half hammer blows and half pulsing muscle spasm that engulfed his whole leg. Shit, this could go on for days. Blokhin removed the felts, and the sudden cessation of pain and spasm was a heavenly relief. But anticipating the next one was enough to drive one mad, which was the point of using shock—the prisoner’s dreading the next jolt.

  Blokhin dipped the felts in the water again. “The name of the mole? We have all day and all night, until the battery goes dead or you lose your mind, whichever will come first.”

  Nate remembered how good Blokhin’s English was. Nate shook his head to clear it. “You’re an ass-picking gorilla, mandjuk, dickhead.”

  With a snarl, Blokhin pressed the felts on the insides of Nate’s thighs, an inch from his scrotum. Nate’s torso curled forward in a rigid bow against the chest strap, and his lower body started shaking spasmodically, the current running through his skeletal muscle fibers triggering synchronous contraction. The pain between his legs was all-encompassing, radiating through his penis, which immediately stood straight up, followed by a loss of bladder control. Blokhin removed the felts and stood back, avoiding the trickle of urine under Nate’s chair. The American raised his head, straightened, and looked at Blokhin through wet hair, which had fallen over his eyes.

  “I require the name, Yankee,” said Blokhin.

  Nate shook his head. He couldn’t take much more of the felts. And he was terrified that Dominika would soon react to save him. Only one hope: piss Blokhin off so much that the Spetsnaz sergeant would either kill him or so seriously damage Nate that the interrogation would cease, at least temporarily, thus distancing Dominika from a catastrophic reaction. The button would be Blokhin’s honor. Give it a try, hurry. Save her. His crotch burned and his thighs twitched uncontrollably. During the last spasm it felt as if he had pulled a muscle in his back.

  “This is why we pitched you in Istanbul,” said Nate hoarsely in Russian, to give the insult more edge. “You are no man of honor, certainly not worthy of belonging to the Spetsnaz brotherhood. Ty zhenshchina, you are a woman.” If he ever got out of this, Domi would be sure to give him grief over that.

  Blokhin’s eyes goggled at the insult, and he cast aside the battery cables, kicked over the battery cart, spilling the water bucket, walked over to a cupboard, and drew out a meter-length of rebar. His eyes were unblinking, like a lizard’s eyes, and his scarred forehead was a livid purple.

  For what we are about to receive, thought Nate, looking at Blokhin’s face.

  Blokhin hit him with the length of the steel bar across his left shin, causing a comminuted fracture of the tibia, shattering the bone into several pieces inside the leg and tearing the interosseous membrane that stabilizes the tibia and fibula, essentially rendering Nate’s left leg below the knee the approximate consistency of cooked pasta. Nate roared in pain, but it was a throaty roar of defiance, not the keening wail of a terrified prisoner. Nate looked at Blokhin as he roared, as if he would tear his throat out with his teeth, but the blocky trooper was unfazed—he handled the ribbed length of the rebar in both hands, lovingly, like Benny Goodman held his clarinet.

  Blokhin appraised Nate’s left leg, which was already swollen and purple and bent unnaturally to one side. Nate could feel the grooves in the arm of the chair as he dug his nails into the soft aluminum; other men and women had clawed against the pain as he was doing now. For all Blokhin’s many talents for mayhem, sophisticated interrogation was not his specialty. “I require the name of the Russian traitor working for the Americans,” he said.

  Nate lifted his sagging head, and a bead of sweat dropped off his nose. Pain radiated up his leg to his gut. “You’re supposed to ask the first question before you hit the prisoner, zhopa, asshole,” he whispered.

  Faster than Nate could tense up, Blokhin brought the rebar down on Nate’s captive left hand, rebreaking his little finger, shattering three of five metacarpophalangeal joints where the digits meet the palm, and pulverizing the small bones of the intercarpal articulation of the wrist. Nate’s ruined hand swelled immediately, and his knuckles became dimples. The pain was overwhelming, sharp, electric, radiating up his arm to his armpit and across his chest, the associated nerves reacting to the crushing blows of the steel bar. Roaring like an animal made him hyperventilate and helped the pain. The cable tie on his left wrist was now cutting into his flesh as his hand turned purple.

  Nate growled as Blokhin leaned close, coyly resting the tip of the rebar on Nate’s undamaged right forearm, a hint of more to come. “The name of your asset in Moscow?” asked Blokhin.

  “Someone close to the top,” stuttered Nate, “but I cannot recall the name, so fuck you.” Through his pain, Nate heard the three senior officials behind him stir in their seats. That was it; Putin suspected everyone, even his closest advisers, and he was treating them just as Stalin had habitually denigrated his lieutenants. That’s why they were present—to observe and sweat a little, for Putin’s amusement. But where was the august Gorelikov? Was he above suspicion? “Wait,” slurred Nate, as Blokhin tightened his grip on the rebar. “There is one name I know. Conspirators meet at Blokhina’s house, your mother’s house, after the sailors leave.”

  More stirring sounds behind him. The American would pay for his smart mouth.

  Blokhin walked behind Nate’s chair and looked at the three senior officials with a sneer. Bortnikov was fidgeting, whether from witnessing the beating or from anxiety was unclear. Patrushev’s face was ashen: the PhD and former engineer had no stomach for this. Egorova’s handsome face was a disinterested mask, her crossed legs were still. She looked bored. She was the only proven killer in the room, and since their New York trip, Blokhin had wanted to overpower her, then hog-tie her, then break her bones. He would see if he could get her to vomit over Nash’s beating.

  Openly opposing Egorova was not feasible now, especially if the rumors of her relationship with the president were true. Oh yes, Blokhin had been briefed on many things. Besides the two guards, a young Kremlin aide with cat’s eyes was standing against the wall, observing the Security Council members intently. He would doubtless report back to the president. And there were three smoked glass globes in the ceiling concealing cameras. Blokhin scanned their
faces again, turned, and without any windup hit Nate from behind on the point of his right elbow, snapping the constraining cable tie, splitting open the olecranon, the tip of the elbow, like a burst roasted chestnut, and subsequently dislodging the synovial joint between the head of the radius and the radial notch of the ulna. Nate’s arm hung limply off the armrest, his elbow joint in pieces and severely dislocated. He would have been unable to lift his arm even if it had flopped into a flame. Nate howled in pain but stopped himself, trembling, and managed a croaking laugh, which enraged Blokhin, who swung the bar in a flat arc at Nate’s left shoulder not covered by the chair back, fracturing the acromion and shattering the coracoid process of the clavicle. The shock made Nate pass out with a spectral groan, and his head and chest flopped forward until restrained by the leather strap around his chest.

  Dominika and Patrushev got out of their chairs at the same time, but Patrushev strode to the door, slamming it behind him as he left. Weak stomach? Or guilty panic? Dominika instead walked around Nate to face him and raise his lolling head with a finger under his chin. She kept her face neutral—Blokhin was watching her like a mastiff—but her heart beat wildly as she felt Nate’s sweaty face and saw his eyebrows, cracked lips, and his closed eyelids, the eyelids she used to kiss to wake him up. No emotion, show nothing, my God, she couldn’t sit motionless and watch him be ground to a paste by this Spetsnaz maniac, she couldn’t, she’d confess to save him, he’d be sent back and Forsyth could patch him up, it didn’t matter what happened to her, but no! that’s what this was, a trap, Nate would tell her so, Benford the same thing, Gable would bellow it from Valhalla, stay whole, we’re all spies, spooks, ferrets, survival is worth any price, defeating Putin’s monstrous snake pit is worth anything, even if you have to watch Nate die, forgive me, dushka, ya lyublyu tebya vsem serdtsem, I love you with all my heart.