by Saul Herzog
The Polar Bear kicked the door and it groaned shut.
“Lance Spector,” he said in his hoarse, guttural voice.
Lance weighed him up. He had no doubt the man was armed. If he’d come to kill him, he wasn’t going to have to work very hard.
He took the seat opposite Lance, and from the sound it made, Lance was sure it would collapse under his weight.
“Tell me, Lance Spector,” the man said, laying a document on the table, “What is it you came here to achieve?”
Lance had no intention of telling this man anything, but listening to his questions might provide him with some clues.
“I’ll tell you what I didn’t come to do,” Lance said. “I didn’t come to talk to some Russian thug.”
Medvedev let out a long sigh, like he was very sad to have to deliver this news. “I’m afraid I’m the only one you’ll be speaking to today.”
Lance said nothing. He looked down at the document on the table. It was on fax paper, an executive order bearing the presidential seal, and it gave jurisdiction over Lance to the NSA.
The Polar Bear was playing with the iron ring at the center of the table. It had been used in the past to secure detainees by their handcuffs. If Lance’s arms weren’t behind his back, they might have used it on him.
“I understand you have concerns for the security of this embassy,” he said again. “If you tell me what they are, I can assure you they’ll be handled with the highest degree of urgency.”
“Really?” Lance said.
“Yes, but first I’ll have to take steps to verify that what you’re telling me is true.”
“Verify? What I tell you?”
The man nodded. “I’ll need to know exactly who told you about the threat, who else knows about it, and where I can find them.”
“As if I’d just hand over my sources.”
“How else will I know if what you’re telling me is true?”
“I’m telling you it’s true.”
“Yes,” the man said, “but I have to verify everything.”
Lance looked at him incredulously. Was this a game, or did this freak of nature really think he was that naive?
Something about this man was putting Lance off. He was strange. There was no denying that. He wasn’t right. The way his mind worked, the way he calculated probabilities and made his moves, it was like playing chess with a computer.
“You won’t tell me anything?” the man said.
Lance shook his head. The expression on the Polar Bear’s face brought to mind a scientist examining bacteria in a petri dish.
“I want to speak to the ambassador,” Lance said. “Or the CIA station chief. An American.”
The man’s expression changed. He was like a machine, an artificial intelligence, jumping from one strategy to the next.
He took a pack of cigarettes from his coat and put one in his mouth. Lance knew he was going to offer him one before he did it.
“Can I offer you one?”
Lance shrugged. “All right,” he said.
The man leaned across the table and put a cigarette in Lance’s mouth. Then he held out the flame of his lighter and Lance leaned into it.
“I know things about you, Lance Spector,” he said.
Lance tried to make himself look comfortable. Getting the man to talk was the only way he’d be able to figure him out.
“What do you know about me?” he said.
“I know you’re Levi Roth’s man.”
Lance shrugged. “Maybe I was for a time.”
“Oh, you still are,” the man said smugly. “He’d never let you walk away.”
“And why’s that?”
“Come on,” the man said. “You know why.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You fucked your handler.”
Lance remained motionless. This man was a calculator. He didn’t say something unless there was a reason. What was the reason for this?
To taunt him? To provoke a response? To remind him that Clarice had sold all his secrets to the Kremlin?
“That’s right,” the man continued, wagging his finger in Lance’s face. “You diddled her. I don’t blame you. She was an attractive woman.”
“Fuck you,” Lance said.
“Did you ever stop to think why Roth had her killed when he did?”
“She was selling secrets to the likes of you,” Lance said. “She was a traitor. She got what was coming to her.”
“But what made him pull the trigger when he did?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been too easy on him, Lance Spector. Too forgiving.”
“I forgive him nothing.”
“He knew Clarice was carrying your child when he killed her, Lance. Stop fooling yourself into believing he didn’t. You know better than that.”
Lance spit his cigarette in the man’s face. He swatted it away and laughed. Lance stood up, knocking his chair to the floor behind him. He leaned over the table so that their faces were just inches apart.
“There you go,” the man said, grinning.
If Lance’s hands weren’t cuffed, he’d have wiped the smile off his freakish face. “You better stop talking,” he said.
“Temper, temper,” the man said calmly.
“You conniving, pasty, freak,” Lance said.
The man exhaled a long plume of smoke directly into Lance’s face.
“Now,” the man said, “is there anything else you’d like to tell me before I put a nice, smooth Russian bullet in your thick American skull?”
39
Lance leaned back in his chair and looked across the desk. The Polar Bear’s unblinking, red eyes stared back at him like the eyes of a lizard.
If it weren’t for his enormous size, the paleness of his skin might almost have made him look vulnerable, like a furless newborn mammal, unequipped for the world in which he found himself.
Lance tugged at the chains around his wrists but knew it would do no good.
The man reached into his coat, pulled out an enormous pistol, and pointed it at Lance’s head.
Lance shut his eyes.
This was it.
It seemed about right.
On some level, he’d always known it would end with something like this.
He might not have predicted the seven-foot-tall albino, but the rest of it, the dungeon beneath Moscow, being sold out by his own government, Roth nowhere to be found, that all felt about par for the course.
He was resigned to it.
“Open your eyes,” the man said. “Look at me when I pull the trigger.”
Lance opened his eyes.
The ten-inch-long, steel barrel of a pistol stared him down.
“A Desert Eagle?” Lance said. “A fucking Desert Eagle?”
“What’s wrong with that?” the man said.
In his hand was a Mark XIX, one of the largest and most powerful handguns ever made. It weighed in at over four pounds and was chambered in the .50 AE. Each of its seven bullets was an inch and a half long.
“Nothing, I guess,” Lance said.
“You don’t like it?”
“It won’t be an open casket.”
The man smiled. “Americans,” he said, “always with the jokes.” He stood and took a few steps back away from Lance. “Shame to ruin a fresh shirt,” he said.
Lance nodded. He was ready.
The man aimed.
And then, the room’s steel door swung open, and a big guy in a leather jacket came in. He looked from the Polar Bear to Lance and back.
“What is it?” the Polar Bear said impatiently in Russian.
Up to that point, they’d been speaking in English. Lance registered that the Polar Bear’s Russian sounded unusual. He couldn’t place the accent. He sounded almost as if he’d learned it at an older age.
“Sir,” the man said breathlessly. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”
“What are you talking about?”
<
br /> It was only then that Lance realized what was happening. The air vent above his head was blowing thick, black smoke into the room.
“There are rioters inside the compound, sir. The building is on fire.”
As if to emphasize his point, he began coughing.
The Polar Bear took one look at the air vent, then at the thick walls that separated him from the outside world in four floors of thick concrete, and saw the danger.
He gave Lance one final glare, then pulled the trigger.
40
The crack of the bullet, its sound amplified in the confined space, echoed and ricocheted around the room. Lance’s ears rang painfully.
In the same instant that the bullet was fired, he hit the ground and caught the chair behind him with his legs. He flung it straight up, smashing the single light in the ceiling above.
The room was plunged into darkness.
The Polar Bear swore and fired three more bullets into the room. Lance rolled until he hit the wall, then pulled his left arm from its socket and, wincing from the pain, got the handcuffs down under his feet and back up in front of his legs.
Smoke rapidly filled the room, and the Polar Bear and his henchman were coughing. Lance briefly saw their silhouettes in the doorway against the dim light from the corridor.
“We have to get you out of here, boss,” the henchman said.
The Polar Bear looked at him. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said.
He fired twice more into the room, aiming into the darkness at the spot where Lance had been sitting, then stepped into the corridor.
“Make sure Spector doesn’t get out alive,” he said to his man, then swung the door shut.
The man was coughing violently from the smoke.
“Boss, what are you doing?” he said, stepping in front of the door.
The Polar Bear pointed his gun at him, forcing him back, then slammed it shut and locked it.
Lance was alone with him in the room, the air was running out, and the darkness was complete.
He got to his feet. “He’s a heartless bastard, isn’t he?” he said in Russian.
He took two steps forward to where he knew the chair was and picked it up.
The man lunged behind him, missing him by inches.
Lance, holding the chair with his cuffed hands, swung it hard, hitting him in the head. The chair shattered, and Lance ducked instinctively. He felt the rush of an arm above him and jabbed the man in the gut with two rapid blows.
The man doubled over, and Lance stepped around him, catching him around the neck with the chain of his handcuffs.
The smoke made it difficult to breathe, and both men coughed and gasped as Lance held the chain tightly around the man’s neck. The man clawed at Lance as he slowly dropped to his knees.
Lance put his knee against the man’s back and pushed him mercilessly against the chain, applying so much pressure he was afraid the chain would snap. The man’s struggling grew weaker until eventually it stopped.
Only then did Lance let go.
The smoke had grown so thick Lance had stopped taking breaths entirely. Even if there’d been light, it would have been impossible to see through it.
He went to where he knew the iron ring was screwed into the table and wrapped the chain around it. Then he yanked, over and over, to pry it loose. The table was old, and the wood had softened in the dampness. When the ring came loose, the steel pin holding it in place fell to the ground with a loud clang.
Lance got on his hands and knees and felt around for it desperately. He needed it to break the handcuffs, but his fingers didn’t find it.
He needed air. He refused to breathe, but he knew that at any moment, his lungs could rebel against his will. The muscles in his stomach were already spasming involuntarily, trying to force in air.
Giving in to the temptation would be a fatal mistake.
He forced his mind to focus, and his fingers crept over a long, steel pin. He’d found it.
The cuffs on his wrists were a modern, ratchet design, and he’d paid careful attention to the pawl, the metal prong that prevented the ratchet from turning backward on its gear.
He held the steel pin upward between his feet, then brought the cuffs down hard, trying to strike the spot where the pawl caught the gear.
It took a few attempts, but on his third try, the pin struck the pawl, and the ratchet slipped open.
He shook his hands free of the cuffs, and they fell to the ground.
He went straight to the door and pulled. It was locked.
Fighting the urge to breathe, he leaped on the man’s body and began rifling through his pockets, searching desperately for anything that would help him escape.
He found a pistol in one of the pockets and a keycard in another.
Going back to the door, he searched with his hands for the lock, then held the pistol right up to the keyhole. He pulled the trigger twice. The door was still jammed, so he fired six more times, emptying the gun.
The door swung open, and Lance fled into the corridor. It too was filled with smoke, but the forty-watt bulbs overhead provided just enough light to see.
In the direction he’d come from, he could make out the red light of the elevator button. At the other end of the corridor was an emergency exit that led to a stairwell.
He didn’t have enough air to try both. He ran in the direction of the stairwell and burst through the door.
He made it up one flight before his body began to give up. He couldn’t go any further. He had to breathe. He pulled his shirt in front of his mouth and allowed himself to take the smallest sip of air.
Immediately, he began coughing violently.
Struggling, on the edge of consciousness, coughing and choking at every step, he managed to climb one more flight of stairs before taking another desperate gasp.
The air was getting cleaner as he got closer to the surface. The ventilation system was sucking the smoke to the lowest levels first.
He continued to climb, and by the time he got to ground level, he was almost able to breathe normally.
On the ground floor was a black metal door with a card reader on the wall next to it. Lance swiped the keycard he’d taken from the man, and it unlocked. He opened it carefully, expecting cold, clean air to flood his lungs, but his first gulps gave him the distinctive, acrid taste of tear gas.
Mingled with the smoke, he instantly recognized the all-too-familiar smell of a riot.
He peered cautiously around the door and saw chaos. Guards ran in every direction. Some were armed with launchers they used to fire the tear gas, while others held large riot shields and batons.
Above them hovered a phalanx of metro police helicopters, their high-powered spotlights lighting up the predawn like a prison yard on alert.
He slipped out the door and rounded the old embassy building to the back of the compound. There, a twenty-foot-high wall separated him from the Moscow streets.
Keeping low, he ran along the wall to the corner of the compound, where he was able to leap against one wall, push off it to the other, and climb the full height going back and forth between the two.
At the top, he triggered the sensors, and the security floodlights came on, lighting up the entire perimeter of the compound like a baseball diamond at night, their power supply kicking in with a low thud.
Given the chaos, it hardly mattered.
There were also CCTV cameras along the perimeter, and Lance knew he was being recorded. The footage would already be shooting its way along thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, straight to the desks of every analyst and specialist from Langley to Fort Meade to Quantico.
There wasn’t much he could do about that either.
He lowered himself over the outside wall and dropped to the ground, absorbing the impact. He was on a narrow lane behind the compound and made his way along it. When he reached the Garden Ring, police cruisers blocked the entire street, their blue and red lights flashing in the morning mist. Traffic
was backed up for miles in every direction.
Lance approached one of the police cruisers and spoke in Russian.
“What’s going on?”
“Arrogant Americans,” the cop said. “They took someone.”
“What?”
“There’s a girl down there who says they took her husband.”
“What? Into the embassy?”
“Shocking, I know,” the cop said.
“They think they can do whatever they want,” Lance said.
The cop nodded.
Lance walked on toward the gate, where a crowd was flinging rocks and lighting fires. Some people were trying to climb the gates. The guards inside were firing tear gas out of the compound in violation of the embassy’s arrangement with the Russian government.
When Lance saw Larissa at the front of the group, provoking the guards and yelling at them to let her in, he was impressed.
He made his way through the crowd, shielding his face from the cameras, and when he reached her, she was about to throw a full-blown Molotov cocktail over the gate.
“Easy tiger,” he said.
She took one look at him, and tears flooded her eyes.
41
When Roth arrived at the White House, he sensed he was already too late. He’d thought he was going to the Oval Office, but the aide made him sit in a waiting room an hour before finally coming for him. When the aide finally came, he brought him not to the president’s office, but to the Roosevelt Room.
“Oh,” Roth said when the aide stopped outside the door.
The change in rooms was a signal. It was a step down from the Oval Office, less personal, and as Roth approached the door, he felt a distinct chill in the air.
He was about to knock when the aide said, “They’re expecting you.”
“Oh,” Roth said again.
He opened the door and walked into the room. Before him, arrayed around the conference table like King Arthur’s knights, was the White House Chief of Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of the Department of Defense, the Attorney General, and Sandra Shrader.
The president himself was standing at the head of the table.
“Levi,” he said, indicating the chair at the far end of the table, “take a seat.”