by Tom Cain
7
War in the desert was supposed to be all about heat, sweat, and choking clouds of dust. But that was when the sun was up. This was a winter’s night. Carver felt deep-frozen, colder than he had ever been, and the chattering of his teeth drowned out the scrabble of steel against dirt from the spades of the men digging down into the earth.
From where Carver stood, the holes were simply patches of blackness in the blue-gray expanse of the starlit desert.
There were seven of them, the size and depth of open graves awaiting their coffins. Or maybe this was what a goldfield looked like when the first prospectors arrived and started burrowing down for their fortunes. Carver and his men were prospecting, too, searching for the fiber-optic cable, buried somewhere beneath their feet, that kept the Iraqi dictator in touch with his troops.
Carver’s team from the Special Boat Service had been allotted two hours on the ground to break that link. There were fifteen minutes left. And still no sign of any cable.
Carver shook his head in helpless frustration. There was just time to dig one more hole. He was trying to work out where to put it when there was an explosion of deafening white noise, hissing, and crackling in his ear. He could just make out a voice, almost buried beneath the distortion: “We’ve got company, boss. Couple of companies of mechanized infantry, heading directly at us.”
“Do you think they’ve seen us?” Carver asked.
He was already on the run toward the perimeter, needing to see for himself, but the ground seemed to have softened, sucking at his feet like quicksand. His progress was way too slow. He wasn’t going to get there in time. Meanwhile the noise in his ear was getting louder. He wanted to tear off his headphones, but now the lookout’s voice was bursting into life again. “They’ve got mortars. Here we go…”
The desert silence was broken by a series of distant percussive crumps, followed by whooshes, like fireworks streaking into the sky. A few seconds later, magnesium parachute flares burst over the landing zone, scorching Carver’s eyes and leaving the fifty-foot-long Chinooks as exposed in their burning white light as a pair of naked lovers surprised by an angry husband.
Now there were mortar rounds falling all across the landing zone and cannon fire cracking through the night air. Carver could hear a new voice now, one of the chopper pilots, his voice tightening as adrenaline flooded his nervous system: “We’re like coconuts in a shy here. I’m starting up the rotors. You’d better get your men aboard sharpish.”
Carver started issuing orders. He was shouting into his intercom, but he must not have made himself heard because the men weren’t moving and even though the chopper rotors were turning at top speed, they didn’t seem able to lift off the ground, and suddenly the whole landing zone was filled with Iraqis. He couldn’t work out how they’d got there so fast, or why they were speaking Russian at him. He thought he recognized their faces, but they kept blurring out of focus. He pulled the trigger on his submachine gun, but no bullets came out, even though the magazine was full.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The Chinooks were meant to take off with all his men aboard. Then the explosives would blow and cut the cable, turning an imminent fiasco into a last-minute triumph. But that wasn’t happening at all, because now his men had all disappeared and he was alone with the Russians, and they were taking him through a door into a room where there was a log fire burning in an open grate. And he didn’t have his combat gear on anymore, in fact he was stark naked except for a black nylon belt strapped around his waist.
There was a man in front of him, sitting in a chair, and next to him there was a woman, an incredibly beautiful woman in a silver dress. Carver cried out to the woman to help him, but she couldn’t hear him, either. And that was wrong, too, because she was supposed to love him. But she didn’t love him at all. In fact she was laughing at him, and all the men around her were laughing at him, too, and now the woman was looking at him with a new face, twisted, ugly, and hate-filled, and she was screaming, “Hurt him! Hurt him! I want him to suffer!”
The laughter was getting even louder and one of the men was pointing a small black box at Carver, holding a finger above a single white button. And suddenly Carver was filled with a fear that tore at his guts and dropped him to his knees, begging for mercy, though his pleas came out as wordless whimpers because he knew what was coming now-the same thing that always came at the moment that the man with the box pressed the button.
Then the finger moved down. And the agony began again.
8
“You must let me help him, you know.” Dr.Karlheinze Geisel was the psychiatrist assigned to Carver’s case. He turned away from the bed where his patient was writhing in torment, and spoke to Alix in a voice whose overlay of sympathy could not disguise his frustration.
“Come,” he said, and led her out through the clinic to his consulting room.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked, when the door had closed behind them.
Geisel did not answer until they were both seated. Then he said, “You already know the answer to that question. You must tell me exactly what happened to him. How else can I provide the best treatment?”
Alix said nothing. She glanced away, brushing a strand of blond hair away from her face. Finally she turned back toward Dr. Geisel, looking directly at him.
Geisel was all too accustomed to the effects on those whose loved ones suffered serious illness. Miss Petrova had been worn down by the months of worry and uncertainty. Her face was thinner, more drawn than it had been; her complexion was pale, the skin dry and unattended; there were deep, dark rings around her eyes. But, my God, he thought, what eyes.
They were pure sky-blue, but as he looked more closely-purely in the interests of dispassionate analysis, he told himself-Geisel noticed a slight asymmetry. One lid was very slightly heavier than the other and the two eyes were fractionally out of line. This imperfection in an otherwise flawless assembly-her lips were full, her cheekbones high, her nose straight and neat-served to add to, rather than detract from, her beauty. Without it, she would merely have been very pretty. With it, she was mesmerizing.
“I understand,” she said, “but I can’t discuss it…”
“Let me be frank,” he said, steeling himself. “For months you have refused my questions. But if Herr Carver is to have any hope of a recovery, I must have the information I need to treat him. You must understand-I am very used to dealing with patients who require extreme discretion. What you say to me goes no farther. But I need to know.”
“If I tell you, can you make him get better?” she asked.
“No, I cannot promise that. But I can promise you this: If you do not tell me, I have no hope of helping him. The longer you remain silent, the more certain it is that Herr Carver will remain like this forever.”
“I’m only trying to protect him.”
Her voice was little more than a whisper. She was trying to persuade herself as much as him. Her anguish was so stark that Geisel’s human instinct was to reach out and comfort her. But his professional self knew that he must do and say nothing. She had to have the space to find her way to her own decision.
Alix suspected that the timing of his approach was no accident. He must have known that she had been visited by Marchand yesterday, and had realized at once what that must mean. Carver’s bills had not been paid. Unless they were, he would surely be forced to leave. So now there was a ticking clock counting down to Carver’s expulsion, making the need for a cure even more desperate.
Alix struggled to defy the inexorable logic of her situation. Finally, she came to her conclusion.
“All right,” she said. “I will tell you… I tried to escape from a man, a Russian, like me. He was very rich, very powerful.”
“Was?” asked Geisel.
Alix ignored the interruption and what it implied. “He sent his men to take me back. Carver… Samuel found out where I was and came after me, to Gstaad. He hoped to exchange me
for… certain information. The man who had taken me had no intention of making the deal. His men took Samuel and…”
She seemed unwilling or unable to finish the sentence.
“He was harmed?” asked Geisel.
“Yes. They stripped him, blindfolded him, and put him in handcuffs. Then they… excuse me…”
She stopped for a moment to compose herself, blinking rapidly and clearing her throat.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You were saying…?”
When Alix spoke again, she sounded dispassionate, almost matter-of-fact. “They placed a belt around Samuel’s waist. It was linked to a remote control. When the remote control was switched on, the belt gave him an electric shock, very strong, enough to make him fall to the floor and jerk around, with no control over himself. They made him do this in front of me, at my feet, to make him ashamed.”
“How many times did this happen, the shock?”
“Three or four times for sure, maybe more that I didn’t see.”
“Was that all?”
“No, that was just the start. Afterward, they took him down to a room and tied him to a chair. The room was painted white: every wall, the floor, the ceiling, all white. It was very cold, too. They gagged his mouth with a leather strap. They taped his eyes open, so that he could not close them or even blink. They put headphones over his ears. Then they turned on lights, bright lights, right in front of his eyes. And they put noise through the earphones, so loud, without stopping. That was how I found him. He had been like that for almost four hours…”
“I see…” murmured Geisel, thoughtfully. The story was horrific, but he tried not to be shocked by what he had heard. At that moment, in the context of his consulting room, it all had to be looked on as information that might help him reach a more accurate diagnosis. Only that evening, sitting at home with a drink in his hand, might he go back and contemplate Carver’s ordeal in more human terms.
“Now I understand the fear that consumes him,” he continued. “His conscious brain has blanked the torture from his mind, but his subconscious dreads its repetition. Still, there is one aspect of your story that puzzles me… If he was tied to this chair, completely unable to move, how did he escape?”
“I cut him from the chair,” said Alix.
“But there was this man you spoke of, with other men under his command…”
“Yes.”
“So how did you…?”
“I am not your patient,” said Alix. “Our conversations have no legal privilege.”
“Quite so… Still, with one woman and many men, I’m sure that whatever you did, it must have been in self-defense.”
“Exactly. It must have been like that.”
Geisel nodded to himself, coming to terms with what he had just heard.
“There’s something else,” Alix added.
“Yes?”
“I want you to understand the man he was… before all this.”
She paused for a moment, trying to find the right words. Then she remembered that night in Paris again, and looked away from Geisel, her eyes unfocused, her concentration turned inward.
“When I first met Samuel Carver, I was trying to kill him. An hour later, I followed him into an apartment. We both knew that it had been booby-trapped. The explosives were set to detonate within thirty seconds. But I followed him into that apartment, I chose to do that, because I trusted him completely to keep me safe, and I wanted to be next to him…”
Alix turned her eyes back on the psychiatrist, then glanced away again. She was almost talking to herself when she said, “I just want to be next to him again.”
“I understand,” Geisel replied. “And thank you, Miss Petrova. I know how hard it must have been, summoning up such painful memories.”
He stood up and held out his hand to her as she rose. They shook. He did not move away, though, but kept looking at her, as if she were his patient.
“You have been through a deeply traumatic experience, too,” he said. “You will need to talk to someone. Please, if you wish to arrange a consultation, do not hesitate to ask.”
He smiled. “Then you will be my patient, and you can speak as openly as you like.”
“Thank you, Doctor. I’ll bear that in mind. Now, if you will excuse me, Samuel will be waking soon. And he needs to see me there when he does.”
9
Far away in Russia, Lev Yusov was sitting in a dingy bar called Club Kabul trying to explain the significance of an apparently worthless strip of computer paper covered in numbers to Bagrat Baladze, a swarthy, mustachioed, shiny-suited psychopath in his early thirties. What with the noise in the club and the significant quantities of vodka that both men were consuming, it was not easy to convey the value of this document, particularly since Yusov was not willing to reveal its physical whereabouts until Bagrat committed to the deal.
“How can I agree to pay without seeing what I am paying for?” asked Bagrat.
“If the document is real, what will you pay me?”
“Five thousand, U.S. ”
Yusov had hoped for more. He knew the list would be worth millions by the time it reached its final destination. But in a land where American currency held far more value than local rubles, five thousand dollars was more than he would earn in ten years.
“Ten thousand,” he said.
“Don’t waste my time, old man,” said Bagrat, getting to his feet. “You asked what I would pay. I told you. Go screw yourself if you’re not interested.”
“All right, all right!” yelped Yusov, watching his jackpot leave the table. “Five thousand.”
Bagrat turned to one of his henchmen. “You see? He has the wisdom of the old.” He sat back down and pulled a wad of cash from his jacket. He placed it on the table between them.
“Here is the money. Now where is the list?”
Yusov reached a hand behind his back and pulled the envelope out of his trousers. He opened it and took out the list.
“Look,” he said. “First the latitude, then longitude, then arming code. You could fight a world war with the weapons on this paper.”
Bagrat considered this proposition, then nodded. “Okay, we have a deal. Take your money.”
He pushed the wad of cash toward Yusov, who grabbed at it with an eagerness that betrayed his desperation. He looked as if he wanted to make a run for it before the gangster could change his mind. But Bagrat put a hand on his shoulder.
“No need to rush,” he said. “I have more business to do, but you should stay and celebrate. Enjoy yourself… on the house.”
Bagrat picked up the envelope and left. On his way from the table, he shouted at the barman. “Bring vodka for my friend… the special vodka, got that? The best!”
Moonshine vodka, or samogon, is a noxious spirit, brewed in illegal stills all across Russia. Its ingredients include (but are not limited to) medical disinfectant, brake fluid, lighter fuel, cheap aftershave, and even sulfuric acid. Thousands of Russians have died over the years from drinking it, and many more have suffered blindness and chronic liver disease, so that doctors and coroners are not in the least surprised when they come across another case.
Bagrat Baladze had therefore thought twice before throwing away a particularly evil batch of samogon, acquired from a local bootlegger, even though its excessive toxicity had made it unsalable, even to the most desperate drunk. It occurred to him that he had stumbled on an ideal murder weapon.
When Yusov collapsed, an empty bottle at his side, he was carried to a waiting car, which drove to a quiet back street near his block of flats. The American currency was recovered, then he was dragged from the car and deposited on the pavement. The following morning, when his dead body was reported to the police, Yusov was carted off to the morgue. The postmortem was barely even cursory. No police investigation was made. The death of another insignificant drunk was not exactly a priority.
At the 12th GUMO offices, Yusov’s passing was celebrated, rather than mourned. A
new, younger, more cooperative clerk took over his duties.
The clerk had no idea that the missing file had ever existed, let alone been sold to an ambitious gangster who was, even now, trying to work out how he could use it to leapfrog several rungs up the criminal ladder. There were, Bagrat knew, middlemen who specialized in setting up deals between Russians in possession of weapons-conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear-and the wealthy customers who craved them. It was his task now to find one of these traders without alerting other, more powerful criminals to the item he was trying to sell. If the word got out, they would dispose of him as swiftly as he had dealt with Yusov.
So Bagrat Baladze began making inquiries. And the world took a first, blind step on the road to Armageddon.
10
Alix took the bus back into Geneva after another long day at the clinic, then walked across the Rhone River and uphill, through the narrow, cobbled streets of the Old Town, lined with centuries-old houses as tall and thin as books on a shelf. The windows of the chocolate shops were filled with heart-shaped boxes. The boutiques and designer stores were given over to lingerie and seductive dresses. The banks watched over them all, knowing, as always, that everything, including love, had its price.
She stopped for a moment to look at a mannequin in a short black party frock and shoes that were little more than a pair of teetering heels and a couple of slim leather straps.
She had once dressed like that, choosing her clothes with the confidence that came from being sure of their effect. She wanted to be that woman again, with a drink in one hand and her handsome man in the other. But the reflection in the shop window showed a sorry creature, wearing a charity-shop coat and cheap, unflattering denims. Somehow, in the next hour or so, she had to paint on a facsimile of what had been her natural beauty, a fake that would be good enough to fool the bierkeller customers, drunken men with groping fingers who expected a visual treat to accompany their overpriced drinks.