by Rob Sinclair
‘You really should go check on Chris. The stakes are simple. You toss your gun, probably all three of us live. You don’t…well, all three of us might end up dead right here.’
The twitch in her face told me that this registered with her. Orders were orders, but she knew that I could pull the trigger just as quickly as she could. We would both be down and out for good. Chris would probably die of exposure if he didn’t come round soon. The collateral damage of the lives of both her and Chris were not worth it. Better to regroup and come back after me later.
‘Fine,’ she said.
‘Go on then. Toss it. Off to the left.’
She did so, hurling the weapon. I heard it smack into the ground well away from where we were standing. That was good enough for me. Even if she wanted to go and find it and fire after me, it gave me plenty of breathing space.
I lowered my weapon, but still kept myself ready for a wave of attack. I slowly began to step away, one small step at a time. She did the same, neither of us breaking eye contact until we both faded away into the darkness.
We were probably still only twenty yards away from each other but I fancied my chances from there. As soon as I could no longer make out her shape, I turned around and ran, heading back to the station platform.
By my reckoning, I only had two minutes until my train arrived.
Chapter 18
The food was good. The best I’d had in weeks. A true gastronomic delight. Fresh bread and some sort of meat and vegetable stew. I had no knife or fork, just used the bread to scoop up the bits and to soak up the gravy. I didn’t care. I just wanted, no, I needed, to eat.
But after five big mouthfuls, I could take no more. My belly felt bloated. It gurgled away, unused to the sustenance that was sloshing around inside it. I forced one more piece of meat down, but it seemed to stick in my throat. I knew that if I tried to eat any more, it would only end up back in the bowl in front of me.
I felt disappointed. Defeated. But I knew that even the small amount I’d managed to eat would do me the world of good.
If I could keep it down, that was.
‘You’re done already?’ said a voice – a female voice – with a condescending laugh.
A strange woman. I hadn’t even noticed her come into the room. I’d been too engrossed in gorging my way through the food that had been put in front of me. But her voice – it felt familiar. And like the unseen man who had so often been in here with me, her English was perfect.
‘Depends how long we’re going to be here for,’ I said. ‘Give me a few minutes, I’m sure I can finish it off.’
I’m not sure whether I’d intended my words to come out as confrontational or playful. She must have thought the latter, because she laughed again as she sat opposite me, behind the desk. I was disappointed with myself for that. For speaking at all. Ever since I’d come here I’d tried not to communicate with them, no matter what they’d thrown at me. Now here I was on the brink of flirting. Maybe it was a direct response to their gesture of giving me some real food.
Maybe it was because of the person who’d asked me the question.
There was no bright light in the room this time. I saw that the room was square with dirty white-painted walls and a smooth concrete floor. It had no furniture other than the desk and two chairs, and only one other occupant aside from me and the two ubiquitous guards at my back: the woman.
She was dressed for the office in a tight black skirt and white shirt. She had dark, silken hair held in a tight bun. Her cheek-bones were high, her eyes penetrating, her lips full and rounded. She looked Eastern European – Russian? She looked beautiful.
Yet behind her sparkling eyes I saw a creepy darkness that was so out of place with the rest of her dazzling features. And despite my initial openness, that made me mistrust her all the more. Because I knew at first sight that this woman was a snake. Her looks were her deadly weapon, no doubt about it. I wondered how many men she’d suckered in her short life. She couldn’t have been older than thirty.
‘I know you’ve had a rough time in here,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t have to be like that.’
This time I stayed silent. I didn’t want to play her game.
‘You can have food like that all the time,’ she said. ‘If you want.’
I didn’t say anything to that either. Whatever reason they had to now be hospitable wasn’t for my benefit, however they tried to play it.
‘You don’t want to go back to how it was before. Do you?’
I pushed the half-eaten bowl of food across the desk, toward her, away from me. A signal to her that I was done here. That I didn’t want their hospitality.
‘You know that they’re not coming for you,’ she said, sterner this time. ‘Mackie and the others. They’ve left you here to die, Carl.’
Her words slapped me in the face. How did she know my name? I’d never told them my name. How did they know about Mackie? No matter what they’d done to me, I hadn’t given them anything.
But it wasn’t just the names she’d used. It was what she’d said. That no-one was coming for me. Because doubt had been creeping into my head more and more. I was having a hard time convincing myself otherwise. Hearing this woman say it made it all the more real.
Why hadn’t they come for me?
The only other time I had been captured on a mission had been my fateful assignment to bring down Youssef Selim. On that occasion I’d been gone a mere three days before I was rescued.
‘Come on, Carl. You like this food, don’t you? Don’t you want to be eating food like that every day?’
I did, but at what price would it come?
‘Come on, don’t go shy on me now. We can go back to the way it was before if you like? The interrogation room. The questions. The water. We’ve talked about this before, remember?’
‘What do you mean, remember?’ I spat. ‘This is the first time I’ve seen you.’
She laughed again. That same condescending laugh, mocking even.
‘Oh, Carl, think about it. Put the pieces back together.’
She went silent but her wicked smile remained as she stared at me intently. I got a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach. From the food or her words, I wasn’t sure. It was surreal. My head was a confused mess and yet it was like I knew what was coming. But I wanted to be wrong so badly that I tried to push the thoughts to the very back of my mind, tried to ignore the inevitable.
But I couldn’t. I had to know.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘How long have you been here?’
I racked my brain.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘Well, how long do you think? Two weeks, three, four?’
I had no way of knowing the answer. But that wasn’t the point. I could see where she was taking this conversation. And more than anything, I felt scared.
‘Something like that,’ I lied.
‘It’s been nearly nine,’ she chuckled. ‘You’ve been here two months now.’
She let it hang there. I knew what she was doing. Disorientating me. Toying with me. Trying to create doubt in my mind. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been there. But nine weeks? Could it really have been that long? And if it had, what the hell had happened to me in that time? I seemed to have so many blanks in my memory.
Nine weeks?
‘This isn’t the first time we’ve met,’ she said. ‘It’s not the first time we’ve had this exact conversation even. Do you really not remember?’
I searched my brain for a memory that made sense, but it was all a scramble. Thoughts were coming and going without taking hold.
‘No. This is the first time we’ve met,’ I said again, wanting to believe it, but no longer sure that it was the truth. I certainly couldn’t grasp a memory of ever seeing this woman before and yet, in a way, her voice and her pretty face seemed so familiar to me.
‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ she said.
My br
ain clunked and whirred, cogs turning, trying to figure it out. I felt so useless. What was happening to me? What had they done to me?
‘The water,’ I said.
It was the last thing I could get to. The water being poured onto my face. The knowledge that I was going to drown. It seemed so distant to me now and yet it was the last thing that was there in my head. I couldn’t even remember how I had come to be sitting in front of this woman now.
‘The water,’ I repeated. ‘That’s the last thing I remember.’
‘They really messed you up, didn’t they?’
They? Like she wasn’t part of it!
‘Carl, this isn’t the first time we’ve met. You’ve been in here with me every day for almost a month. I’ve been trying to help you get your head straight. You’ve been making great progress. The interrogation, the waterboarding, was weeks ago. All of that was weeks ago. Check your wrists if you don’t believe me.’
I looked down. The marks were unmistakeable. Each wrist had several rings of lumpy, whitened flesh, blending into one another. After the waterboarding these would have been open wounds. I could still remember the feeling of the blood trickling over my hands, over my feet, as I writhed against the restraints, trying desperately to free myself.
But these wounds had healed. These scars were several weeks old.
‘What happened to me?’ I asked, trying to hold it together.
‘Nothing happened. You’ve been in here with me. Talking. Recovering. They really went to town on you. We thought we’d lost you at one point.’
I had tried to hold out. I had held out over countless interrogation sessions, countless bouts of torture, all of the disorientation and other mind-screwing techniques. But it looked like it had all been in vain. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to think about what had been done to me. But more importantly trying not to think about what could have happened during the lost period.
The period of time, weeks, that my mind was deliberately omitting from my memories.
Because it looked like I had been broken. And I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
‘But you’ve been doing great in here, Carl, since all that nastiness stopped. You’re well on the road to full recovery, I’d say.’
‘Who are you?’ I said. Though in my head, I really meant, What?
‘Carl,’ she said, leaning forward, her pretty face contorting into a look of menace, ‘I’m all that you’ve got.’
Chapter 19
I slept for a good part of the journey to Omsk, only coming out of my cabin when I needed food. Chris’s wallet had provided me with enough cash to last me for a number of days. The train arrived in Omsk at just past ten in the morning.
The sun was out, the sky was deep-blue and the cold had lifted to somewhere not too far below zero. Compared with what it had been two days ago, it felt positively balmy.
I remained alert as I left the train and the station, looking out for any sign of people who might be waiting for me – whether other passengers on the train or the people milling about off it. I’d been sure there would be a welcome party for me. Chris and Mary had known where I was going. But I saw nothing. At least no-one who looked like they were there for me. It made me feel uneasy, even though it certainly made my life simpler.
I still had a lingering doubt in my mind about whom Chris and Mary were working for. Their actions told me that in all likelihood they had been sent by my boss at the JIA, Mackie. If the two of them had been with the Russians then they surely would have just taken me back to the same hellhole I’d run from? But if that were true, that they were from the JIA, then just where were the Russians? Why weren’t they after me?
I headed off on foot towards the safe house I’d been using some months ago when the plan to infiltrate RTK had first begun. It was an apartment in a better-off part of town that Dmitri had rented under an assumed name.
I’m not quite sure why I went there, other than it was somewhere familiar and a place that might hold some answers. Answers as to what had happened to me. And to Dmitri. I hadn’t seen him since we’d first been taken. I’d been told by the Russians that he died at RTK, but I had no way of knowing whether or not that was the truth. It seemed plausible. He’d certainly been in a bad way back at RTK, far worse than me.
I’d prepared myself that going to the apartment might simply be walking into a trap. But I wasn’t about to run away from my problems. I was ready to face them head on. Now I was back on familiar territory, away from my prison cell, I felt like the home advantage was all mine once more.
Omsk wasn’t my home, but it felt good to be back in a place that was familiar. It felt like real civilisation rather than the barren tundra I had travelled through over the last few days. And that fortified bunker that had been my prison for the last three months.
During my confinement I’d always been taken through the same short and narrow corridors to the same worn rooms. I’d only come to appreciate the full expanse of the complex during my escape. It was a simple concrete monstrosity, probably one of the original gulags from the Stalin era. From what I had seen it certainly wasn’t being used in the same way that it would have been in that bygone time, and yet its repressive past seemed to ooze from its walls still. It was a place that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life.
And I would never be taken back there alive.
It took me just over an hour at a brisk pace to get to the apartment. It would have been forty minutes but for the fact that I stopped off at a shoe shop on the way to buy some trainers. Taking off the too-small boots and swapping them for the soft fabric trainers was heavenly. Together with the thick socks from Chris, walking felt like floating on air.
The apartment was on the fourth floor of a six-storey block that lay on the corner of a busy crossroads. A handsome pre-war building with high sash windows and wrought-iron balconies, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in any of the hippest and trendiest European cities. A nice building in a nice area that was well kept.
Over the years of travelling to far-flung places I’d come to recognise that many often-overlooked mid-sized cities have rich histories and architecture, often mimicking their nearby, more illustrious neighbours. Omsk was no different.
The apartment building was nice, for sure, but it wasn’t top-end luxury. It didn’t have a concierge or security, for instance. That would have been counterintuitive for a supposedly safe location where a certain level of discretion was required. It meant that I was able to get into the building without any issues.
Getting into the apartment itself, however, would be a different story. I had no key. The door had two locks: a standard latch and a five-lever mortice deadlock. I couldn’t pick them both. I had neither the tools nor the skills.
The latch would be easy enough to kick through. The lever mortice lock, not so. I knew from past experience that it simply wasn’t possible to break one of those with only the force of your foot or shoulder. You had to rely on the frame or door itself failing.
Your best bet was usually to kick against the hinges side of the door. People generally pay much less attention to the quality and strength of their hinges than they do their locks. Kick at the hinges side and often the door will snap straight off the frame, with the locks still intact. A small part of me wished that I was still wearing the thick steel-toed boots. They would have come in handy for breaking down a door. But doing so would also create noise. And draw attention. And I didn’t want to do that.
In the end it wasn’t even an issue. Because it turned out the door was unlocked.
I’d turned the handle whilst I stood contemplating what to do. I’d only done it because it would have been careless to assume the door was locked and not even try. And to my surprise, it swung open right before my eyes.
As soon as I stepped into the apartment, though, the initial pleasure at my good fortune dissipated when I saw that the place had been ransacked. It had only been partially furnished back when Dmitri and I had been sta
ying here, just basic, necessary furniture, no real fittings or personal touches. But what there was had been completely trashed, turned upside down. Sofa cushions were torn to shreds, their contents strewn across the lounge area. Splinters of wood from the smashed bookcase, dining table and chairs lay everywhere. Holes had been punched through walls, the plaster ripped off in great chunks. In the kitchen, the cabinets had been pulled from the walls, the appliances broken into pieces. Crockery had been smashed and scattered across the floor.
Whoever had been there had gone to town. And it was a short list of candidates. Either one or the other. My own agency knew of this place; they had been paying for it. And the Russians, of course, would have been looking for this place since the day I’d been captured. But whichever party had done the trashing, the main question was: what had they been looking for? And had they found it?
Dmitri and I had been staying at the apartment for a number of months whilst we put together our plan. We had always been so careful about what evidence of our identities and our work we kept there. That wasn’t a procedure just on this mission but on every single one.
Something niggled about the mess and destruction that I looked at. If whoever had done this was after information of some sort – and my own agency would have known we kept nothing there – why had they gone to so much trouble to destroy everything? Turning a place upside down is one thing, but this felt more deliberate. The way I saw it, either this had been done simply to make a point, or because someone was trying to blinker me. Pull the wool over my eyes, send me in the wrong direction.
But about what?
And that was when I noticed something odd. In the kitchen, tins, packets and jars had been burst, broken or torn open and the contents spread across the room. A creamy puddle oozed from a spilled carton of milk. The remnants of meals clung to large shards of broken plates. But I noticed no stench, no sign of mould or rot. The food looked relatively fresh. Which meant that the apartment had been trashed recently. Probably within the last couple of days. Someone had been living here.