The Asset

by Saul Herzog

  They ran through the trees, staying out of sight of the guards who occasionally shone their flashlights across the lawn, and rounded the building so they could approach from the east. Lance had memorized the schematics and knew the east side loading bay was less important than the front.

  His hope was that it was also less guarded.

  When they got to the loading bay, they stopped and scanned the building. The brush had allowed them to get very close without being seen. A number of military transport trucks had been backed up to the loading bays but the heavy bay doors were still shut and, apart from a few guards, there didn’t appear to be anyone there.

  “Will we find protective clothing if we enter here?” he said to Sofia.

  She nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “I think it’s time to call your friend.”

  Using Olga’s cell, Sofia dialed Vasily’s number and waited. When he answered, she said, “Vasily, can you talk? I’m going to pass you to the American.”

  Lance heard him say, “Wait,” as he took the phone.

  “Vasily,” Lance said. “Are you still being kept on the ground floor?”

  “Who is this?”

  “A friend of Sofia’s.”

  “Why have you brought her here? It’s not safe.”

  “Vasily, I need you to listen to me. Are you and the other scientists still being kept on the ground floor?”

  “We’re in the office, yes.”

  “Can you slip away?”

  “I don’t know. They’re not watching us closely but there are soldiers everywhere. If I’m seen in the corridor, they’ll shoot.”

  “The corridor behind the office leads straight to the east loading bay. Correct?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know if I can get to it.”

  “What if I create a distraction?”

  “I don’t know,” Vasily said.

  “There’ll be a large explosion outside, Vasily. When you hear it, come let us in.”

  “Explosion? What are you talking about?”

  “The east loading bay,” Lance said again, then hung up.

  60

  Consciousness flooded back into Laurel’s body in an overpowering shock of pain.

  She gasped and opened her eyes to the blinding lights. She was still dangling from the rope and the man was back, yanking a syringe out of her arm.

  “There we go,” he said, as calmly as if he’d just given her a flu shot. “Now, I do hope we don’t have to waste any more time.”

  He went back to the wall and pushed the green button. The crank immediately raised her three feet higher above the ground.

  “I don’t know what happened to your legs earlier. There’s some swelling there. I hope we didn’t break anything,” he said.

  Laurel moved her lips but no sound came out.

  “What’s that, my dear?”

  It took all Laurel’s strength to speak. “I said, fuck you.”

  “Ah yes, fuck me. How clever you are. I can see why you were always his favorite.”

  He put his finger on the red button. “This will do some real damage,” he said. “Look how high you are.”

  She looked.

  “That’s it. Look down. It’s quite a drop. And for someone in your condition. I don’t know. Things will start to break. All those tiny bones in your feet. They’ll snap like brittle twigs. You’ll be walking like a gimp for the rest of your life.”

  “Fuck you,” Laurel said again.

  She’d entered some sort of delirious state, where all she could think to do was tell him to fuck himself.

  “I don’t know if I introduced myself to you properly the first time we met,” he said. “My name is Fyodor Timokhin. Direktor Fyodor Timokhin, mind you. I’m not so very important here in Moscow, but I know a thing or two about inflicting pain.”

  He stepped away from the buttons and Laurel felt a sudden rush of relief. Every atom in her body was bracing for the next fall, dreading it, praying he wouldn’t push the button, but knowing he would.

  “You know,” he continued, “we know so much about Levi Roth and his little group, that I’m having a hard time coming up with questions for you that I don’t already know the answer to. Four assets. All dead. Four handlers, all out of a job now, wouldn’t you say? From what I hear, Roth himself’s out of a job. Say what you will about the president, but the man’s not a complete idiot. What use does he have for a secret agency that’s been spread open wider than a virgin’s legs on her wedding night?”

  He moved closer to the buttons and Laurel’s pulse increased.

  “Hmm?” he said. “That’s right. None. None at all. All disbanded. All shut down. Roth’s rivals will be thrilled. I can tell you, we’re certainly thrilled here at the Kremlin. On the top floor, you know what they did? They opened champagne. I tell you all this just by the way, so you know that whatever you tell me, whatever you don’t tell me, it really doesn’t matter. It makes so little difference to us here in Moscow. I mean, it’s all academic now, isn’t it. Roth is finished. The assets are dead. The game is over.”

  He reached up and put his finger on the red button. Laurel knew what was coming. The twisting ankles, the snapping shins, the broken knees.

  “No,” she cried out.

  Tears came to her eyes, and once they started, she couldn’t stop them.

  “Hush, child,” Timokhin said, approaching her, lumbering over like a walrus. He was so large, so tall, that high as she was, he could almost look her in the face. “There’s no need to cry. We’re going to be friends, you and I.”

  Laurel looked into his eyes. “You should know something,” she said.

  “What’s that, my sweet?” he said, smiling at her like he expected her to profess her undying love.

  “You’re looking at the person who’s going to end your life.”

  Timokhin looked deadly serious for a second, like he’d just seen a ghost, then just as quickly, his face returned to its smiles.

  Laurel shut her eyes in disgust, but swore to herself that what she’d just said was the truth. She’d make it the truth.

  “You know,” Timokhin said, going back to the buttons, “as much fun as this has been, I do have a job to get back to.”

  Laurel was so tired of this man and his games. She tried to clear her head and think what was going on. What did he want from her? What was he looking for? He hadn’t even asked her any questions. He’d spent all his time wearing her down without giving away a thing.

  He was skilled.

  If he was really good, she would never know what it was he wanted.

  She might die in that room, not knowing if there was even a purpose to the torture, not knowing if she was holding out, or giving up everything he wanted.

  That was all part of the game. The not knowing. She knew the technique as well as anyone.

  Most people, if they knew they held some prized piece of information, something specific, would be able to take that information to their graves.

  The location of an attack, for example. Countless terrorists had died in black sites taking such information with them.

  But if the information was more general, more vague, more dispersed, like what you’d been eating, what the weather was like, what clothes you wore, most people wouldn’t give up their life to hold onto such secrets. They’d give up that information during torture, and in the process give away far more than if they’d been asked direct questions.

  That was why the interrogator’s first goal was always just to get his subject to talk. About anything.

  “Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” Timokhin said. “Our two countries are going to go to war.”

  Laurel didn’t care what he was saying. What he said might be true, or might be completely fabricated. It made no difference to her there, strung up, dying.

  But she did want to know what he was looking for. If she could figure that out, she could keep it from him.

  “If you go to war with us,” she said, “we�
��ll pound you into the stone age.”

  Timokhin kept smiling. He came close to her again and she was torn between revulsion at his approach, and relief that his hand was further from the red button.

  She had to make sure he didn’t press that button. As high as she was now, if he dropped her, she’d never be able to escape. Her legs would be worthless.

  He looked up at her.

  “My dear, how can we lose a war? When Napoleon brought all of Europe to the gates of Moscow, did we lose? When Hitler launched the largest land invasion in history, did we lose?”

  “When Hitler invaded, you lost twenty-seven million people,” Laurel said.

  Timokhin smiled. “Some people say we lost twenty-seven million. Some people say we lost forty.”

  “What’s your point?” Laurel said.

  “My point is, when the numbers pass a certain point, when they’re so big that even the people tasked with calculating them lose track, do they still matter?”

  “Of course they matter.”

  “Matter to who, my dear? To the dead? Certainly not.”

  “You’re insane,” Laurel said.

  Timokhin came so close she could feel his breath on her skin. It made her acutely aware that she was hanging naked. He could do anything to her.

  “I heard a very interesting rumor about you,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I heard that your face, your lovely, pretty, face, I heard that it’s not really yours.”

  “Oh, it’s mine.”

  “But it was someone else’s first, no?”

  “You believe what you want,” Laurel said.

  Timokhin nodded. “I believe you let Roth give you the face of another woman. You let him give you painful, invasive surgery, just so he could use you to seduce one of his assets who was going off the rails. Isn’t that true?”

  Laurel knew she had to be careful. She was getting emotional. She could make a mistake.

  “Going off the rails?” she said.

  “Didn’t you hear? He was a complete liability. Completely losing it. No one wanted him. Not the CIA. Not the president. Roth thought giving him back the love of his life would soothe his savage soul.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “And the sad part, the part that must really get under your skin, my dear, is that it didn’t even work. You went to Spector, looking like you do, exactly like his lost lover, and it didn’t even work. He rejected you.”

  “Fuck you,” Laurel said.

  “He rejected you, and now he’s dead. All that surgery, all that pain, for what?”

  Laurel raised her knee suddenly, trying to hit Timokhin’s face, but it only made him laugh.

  “And now, after they disgrace you like that, after they humiliate you, erase your face, make you into nothing, into no one, you’re going to hang here and die to protect them.”

  She said nothing.

  Timokhin nodded. “Anyway,” he said, shifting approach, “I think we can all agree the dead do not mourn the dead.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, if I kill you, my dear, it would be a tragedy, would it not?”

  Laurel knew no one would be crying at her funeral but said nothing.

  “But if I killed a million, it would cease to be a tragedy. It would simply be a chapter of a history book. If that.”

  “So you want to kill a million people?”

  “Good heavens no,” Timokhin said, feigning shock. “Do you take me for a monster? Of course I don’t. Only a madman, only a psychopath, would think of doing such a thing.”

  He was staring intently at her face.

  “No scars,” he said.

  She tried to turn away from him.

  “I’d have thought, with all those procedures, they’d leave some mark.”

  She looked up at the ceiling, the machine holding the ropes, the ventilation shaft.

  “Remarkable work,” he said. “You know, I’ve seen your before and after pictures. Between you and me, I much prefer the original.”

  Laurel wasn’t sure how much more of this blabbering she could take.

  “The Great Patriotic War, as we call it,” he said, changing tack again, “killed 26.6 million Soviet citizens. That’s the best number we’ve got. That doesn’t include two million service personnel who are still officially classed as missing.”

  Timokhin let out a snort. He found that amusing.

  “Missing,” he said again. “Can you imagine? Seventy years have passed. There’s no way those men are missing. Two million of them? Where are they? If that’s not optimism, I don’t know what is.”

  “You can talk and talk,” Laurel said, “but it doesn’t change the fact you’ll never beat us in a war.”

  He laughed again. “The point I’m making, my dear, is that we don’t care whether we can beat you in a war. The war killed 27 million of us. Stalin killed another thirty million all by himself. Needlessly. Just for the hell of it.”

  Laurel didn’t know what to say to that. The numbers were true enough, depending on which historian you asked.

  She finally saw what Timokhin was saying. Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler.

  “Who won that war?” Timokhin said.

  Laurel said nothing.

  “Come now. You’re the expert. You tell me, who won the Second World War?”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Laurel said.

  “Hitler died alone in a bunker. Mussolini was executed by firing squad. Winston Churchill was voted out by a landslide. It was one of the biggest election defeats in British history. Think about that, my dear. His party lost almost two hundred seats.”

  Laurel looked at him, the excited walrus of a man with his slimy face.

  “Roosevelt died in 1945,” Timokhin said.

  “I get it,” Laurel said. “They were all gone by 1945. All of them but Stalin. Stalin remained in power. He won.”

  Timokhin nodded. “He won,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Laurel had stopped listening.

  “The people I work for,” Timokhin went on, “that’s how they think. They don’t want to win the way Churchill and Roosevelt won. That kind of victory is hollow to them. It’s meaningless. It does nothing for them.”

  Laurel was barely registering the words.

  “No,” Timokhin said. “The people I work for, they want to win the way Stalin won.”

  She felt like she was losing her mind. She could focus on only one thing. That ventilation shaft. She kept it in her mind, its location, its shape, everything, so that she would remember when the lights were out.

  “She was pregnant, you know?” Timokhin said.

  Laurel looked at him. “What did you say?”

  “That’s how this works,” he said. “I tell you things and you tell me things.”

  “Who was pregnant?” she said again.

  Timokhin laughed and turned off the lights. He was gone.

  And Laurel was left, in her delirium, wondering if she’d heard the words at all or only imagined them.

  61

  Roth’s neighborhood was an expensive enclave for diplomats and senior government officials. Tatyana felt very conspicuous driving around it in her cheap, white rental car. Every house had private security and she expected at any moment to be pulled over.

  When she found Roth’s house, she thought she must have the wrong address. Even small properties in the area sold for well over a million dollars. This was a veritable mansion. She double checked the address to confirm she had the right place.

  She did.

  As far as she’d been able to tell, Levi Roth, Director of the CIA’s Special Operations Group, was 69 years old and had never married.

  This house was an awful lot of real estate for a bachelor.

  There was a car parked at the end of the driveway, a secret service detail, and behind the car was a high iron gate.

  She drove past them without slowing down. She couldn’t see the hous
e from the road but there was a sign announcing the private security system that had been installed. She doubted it included anything that would trouble her.

  She rounded a corner and looked for someplace to park her car that wouldn’t draw attention. There was an entrance to a hiking trail and she pulled in there. It was night, not a likely time for a hike, but it was better than leaving the car on the side of the street.

  She locked it and followed the trail a few hundred yards until she was at the back of Roth’s property. The fence was iron, at least fourteen feet high, but it wasn’t electrified. Tatyana walked along it looking for sensors, either on the fence itself or in the trees beyond. She didn’t see any.

  She found a place where a fallen tree made climbing the fence a little easier but it was still an ordeal getting over it. Her gunshot wound was healing but it was still tender, and when she leapt down on the other side, it throbbed in pain. She checked to make sure it hadn’t opened, but it looked okay.

  She walked through a forested area, careful for sensors or cameras, and emerged onto a beautifully manicured lawn, laid out with symmetrical flower beds lined with topiary.

  At the end of the lawn was a pool. It was covered for the winter but she could imagine how inviting it was in summer.

  She’d never met Roth, and knew very little about him other than what she’d been able to gather over the past few days. She wondered how it was that he’d become so wealthy. A high up position in the CIA paid well, but this house was beyond the means of even the highest salary.

  Perhaps Levi Roth was on the take, she thought.

  She crouched at the end of the pool and examined the house. She knew Roth wasn’t home. There were a few lights on but she guessed they were on timers. Closer to the house were some motion sensors, but they were only connected to lights. She knew in a neighborhood like this, there would be far too much wildlife for motion sensors to be taken too seriously by private security firms.

  The back porch overlooked the pool and she walked up to it. Some lights came on but she ignored them. She sat on one of the wicker chairs and lit a cigarette. It was a nice night, cool but clear, and she knew she wouldn’t have long to wait.