The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  “We let the Russians have her!” his boss blurted out, beaming with the enthusiasm of a man who’d just come up with a brilliant idea all on his own.

  Chapter 12

  Three hours later, Friday, March 15, 2002, 2:30 P.M.

  At an undisclosed location, Guangzhou City

  The wrist ties she’d gotten used to.

  When they pulled a black hood over her head, the silky material sucked into her mouth. It tasted sour, as if someone had barfed in it, and she could barely breathe.

  The grip on her arms tightened. They once more swept her from whatever building she’d spent the last few hours in to a waiting car. Someone held her down as the vehicle accelerated through a turn.

  It had been the third time they moved her.

  Anna couldn’t even tell if they were still in Guangzhou.

  She expelled the intrusive cloth with her tongue, and, by taking slow small breaths, managed to keep her airway clear.

  “Well, Doctor?” the man with the braided epaulets said. She’d come to recognize his voice. The cold, quiet of it acted like a slap across the face, forcing her to stop struggling and act rationally.

  “I’m an American citizen, and insist you let me contact my embassy,” she repeated for the hundredth time.

  No one had paid the slightest attention to her repeated demands for access to a phone or offered an explanation of why she’d been picked up. They didn’t even tell her to keep quiet. Their silent treatment persisted whether they were driving her around or sitting her in some room for what felt like hours at a time. It gradually drained her courage to resist. They probably won’t hurt me as long as we’re moving, she tried to convince herself, fighting nausea as they swerved through another labyrinth of turns. But the hammering of her heart sounded so loud in her head they might have been flying over speed bumps.

  The wheels squealed to a stop, they yanked her from the car, and she felt herself rushed into yet another building, the sound of the city cut short by the heavy click of a door behind her. Again they forced her down into a chair and left her alone, still hooded, hands secured behind her back. In the stifling heat the quiet grew so absolute she thought it would smother her. Not so much as a rustle of clothing or a whisper of someone’s respirations kept her company. Nor were there any other noises, the kind she might expect to hear beyond the walls if she were in a busy police station--phones ringing, doors opening and closing, the hum of an elevator, the murmur of conversations. A surge of cold sweat prickled the skin in the small of her back. They’d brought her where there would be no witnesses.

  She fought to control her breathing, the hood beginning to flap in and out of her mouth again, bringing with it that disgusting taste. She didn’t dare try to get up and feel her way about with her feet. If her captors were anything like the secret police in Sverdlovsk, they might have positioned her to tumble down a flight of stairs.

  She shouted as loud as possible, invoking every international law and treaty she could think of that forbade her arrest. She threatened them with the wrath of the WHO, the UN, the US government, and a regular eye chart of letters representing any other international agencies she could think of to strike terror into their hearts. Finally, to finish them off, she repeated the whole thing in Russian.

  No response.

  They left her to stew awhile. She knew the routine. A modern police state let your own worst fears break you down. Back in Russia it had been the same. There she’d been arrested three times.

  Her first offense--possession of the Beatles’ White Album.

  They’d picked her up after class during her initial year in medical school and locked her in a bare room at the police station.

  “Where did you get this contraband recording?” her interrogator had asked when they finally came to question her an hour later. He carefully removed the LP from its distinct cover and held it by the edges as his two partners loomed over her.

  Obviously they’d already searched her apartment.

  “I found it,” she’d answered, having been coached what to say by the music-store owner who had sold it to her.

  Her inquisitor had opened a beige file folder and produced a picture of her in that local music store, its owner handing her an album. “And is this where you found it?”

  But the cover reflected so much light, it showed nothing more than a shiny glare and could have been any record, from Let It Bleed by the Stones to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, both of which she had also bought. Luckily those were hidden somewhere else, and the searchers must have missed them.

  “That’s a Shostakovich concert,” she’d said.

  Her interrogator had frowned, but he let her go, and kept the album.

  The second arrest had occurred a week later, except the charge ballooned to the far more serious crime of selling contraband. They nabbed her after class again, put her in the same room with the same interrogator, and confronted her with the same photograph. “We have sworn testimony that you were trying to peddle this record to the music store.” He pulled the familiar white cover from his brief case and tossed it onto the table, the record itself no longer in it. Rumor had it that the local police chief possessed the finest collection of rock and roll this side of the Urals, all ensconced in jackets of classical music.

  “Your sworn testimony is mistaken,” she’d said.

  “Then perhaps you’d like to swear out a statement against our witness.” He tapped the photo, clearly inviting her to inform on the store owner.

  “But he’s just selling me a Shostakovich album.”

  The third arrest came a month later, the charge now escalated to collaboration with an organized cabal of known contraband dealers.

  She’d been made to look at dozens of photos, all showing people buying records from that store owner, many of them her friends.

  “I don’t know a single one,” she’d lied.

  “Perhaps you would like to think your answer over,” her interrogator had suggested.

  She’d never understood the fear her Soviet masters had of rock and roll. Newscasts over The Voice of America could be picked up without much interference, but anything with Elvis never made it past the iron curtain, at least not officially.

  “Fine, I’ll think it over,” Anna had promised with as much sincerity as she could muster, “but if I don’t know who these people are, I don’t know who these people are.”

  The man sitting across from her had then smiled, his beefy face crisscrossed with maroon veins from either too much cold or vodka, probably both. “Let me point out that you now have a file, Anna Katasova, doctor to be, maybe. You have been suspected of criminal activities on three occasions. If there is a fourth, someone in authority, not me of course, might take this criminal record and use it against you, because not once have you provided us with any useful information. As a consequence, they might decide you are unworthy of the opportunities you have been provided with, and, because of your ingratitude, rescind them. You seem like a nice woman. I would hate to see anyone limit your chances in life, such as blocking your continued enrollment in medical school.”

  Until then the cat-and-mouse maneuvering had been a joke, a harmless conduit for rebelling against authority, something to secretly laugh about with her friends, making her rulers appear ridiculous. But now she knew the real purpose of the game. It wasn’t to ban rock and roll. The music had simply been their bait. They’d declared it illegal and made it hard to find, all to enhance its allure. Then they opened files on anyone attracted to it. That’s what they were after. Files on people that could be held over their heads, used to frighten and control them, to threaten them with the loss of their jobs, careers, and dreams, as much as anyone could dream with their heart and soul squeezed in a vice. “No,” she protested, disgusted by the fear in her voice. “Please--”

  “So think it over. Take another look at these suspects,” he’d said, waving a hand over the photos as if they were a spread of hors d'oeuvres for her to choose fr
om. “If you help us by naming a few who have illicit recordings, it will appear on your dossier, and perhaps that will help protect you.”

  She’d left the station seething with rage, her face on fire from shame. Furious at her naivety for not seeing their trap, she couldn’t believe how stupidly she’d played into their hands, probably just like every other teenage hothead in the Soviet Union.

  The police had never bothered her again. They didn’t have to. She lived in fear of being caught for some trivial discretion, of having her career destroyed, or of being forced to inform to save it. That’s how they won. She restricted herself. Well, she was no longer that frightened woman.

  The urge to pee became unbearable. It felt like hours and hours since they’d plopped her here. She began to shout, threatening to waste the place with bodily fluids.

  The English version of her tirade brought them running. A female aid helped her to a washroom and removed the wrist ties.

  As soon as her hands were free, Anna whipped off that stinking hood and threw it in the toilet, flushing it away before her astonished minder could react. The bowl filled to the verge of overflowing, then a deep gurgle arose from its base, sending a big bubble to the surface, and the pending flood receded.

  The woman screamed at her in Chinese.

  Anna simply glared back at her.

  She sullenly withdrew outside the stall door and slammed it shut, granting her prisoner the privacy of the cubicle.

  Minutes later she returned Anna to the room. Anna recognized it by the aroma of her own perfume and sweat. The space was a cramped, windowless compartment, its walls bare, the white plaster smudged with grime, and the ceiling lacerated with cracks. A solitary light bulb in a steel cage provided light.

  Her jailer brought out the wrist restraints.

  Anna, a good foot taller, went up on her toes, balled her hands into fists and held them in the air, well out of the shorter woman’s reach. Silently, with eyes glaring, she waved them threateningly over the aid’s head, creating the creature she’d once danced in Stravinsky’s Firebird. Her opponent regarded her uneasily, then walked out the door, noisily locking it from the other side.

  More waiting, Anna thought, beginning to pace, grateful to at last move around freely, albeit like a caged cat.

  Minutes later the lock rattled again, and a pair of soldiers entered, one carrying a chair, the other a small table the size of a child’s school desk. They deposited these items in front of her own chair, arranging them so two people could sit opposite each other, then left. It reminded her of a Hollywood movie she saw shortly after coming to America, a black-and-white feature telling of the Nazis’ efficiency in drawing up death lists. The process always started with the setting up of tables and chairs.

  Her keeper with the punctilious English walked in and handed her a pad of paper, along with the pen she herself carried in her purse. “Write an account of everything you do since your arrival in Guangzhou, where you go, who you see, what you say,” he ordered. “Especially explain the purpose of your trip.”

  All present tense.

  Over the last few hours she’d learned that when he got angry, his verbs gave him away. They came out of his mouth in present tense. Her defiance must be getting to him. Good. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said, adopting her best New Yorkese and gearing up to give as good as she got if the guy was about to lose his temper.

  The explosion never came. “You do as told!” he said, his voice strained, but tightly controlled.

  After an hour he collected the half-dozen sheets of paper she’d used in making her account, and handed her a new pad. “Do it again.”

  “Now wait a minute--”

  “You do it again!”

  She muttered and cursed, but repeated the exercise, having no idea why her captor had insisted on it, unless he intended to break her with boredom.

  Another hour passed before he picked up her second version and left the room with it. A half-hour after that he was back. “There are at least fifty discrepancies in your two accounts,” he said, throwing both in front of her, his English once more perfect.

  She spent the next hour explaining such nonsense as maybe it was 10:00 A.M.Wednesday morning when she discussed bird flu and the efficacy of current vaccines for chickens with her infectious disease colleagues at the hospital, as opposed to the second rendition where she’d estimated the time to have been 10:30.

  But then her questioner insisted she had to account for what actually did happen at 10:30.

  “I probably went to the can.”

  “You deny using that time to set up a meeting with the woman in the market?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You never hear the name Wey Chen before?”

  Present tense again. He really must be growing frustrated. Maybe their setup in the market wasn’t the slam-dunk he’d thought it was and he needed her to admit something. Deny him that, and she might get out of here. “No. I never hear the name Wey Chen before,” she mocked, spurred by a sense of having acquired the upper hand.

  His face went rigid at the taunt, and he swallowed repeatedly in an attempt to compose himself. “What is the purpose of your visit here?” he asked seconds later, speaking with glacial correctness through clenched teeth.

  “As I’ve written twice in my statement, to discuss the issue of sentinel programs for emergent infections with the staff of your leading teaching hospital.”

  “You’re lying!” He slammed the folder shut.

  “Look, I’ve had about enough of this,” Anna said, summoning her best show of New-Yorker indignation.

  He reached down into a briefcase at his side, and pulled out a large brown envelope. From this he took out a blown up photograph. “Who is this man?” He threw it on the table between them.

  Anna stopped breathing.

  The picture showed her talking to Terry Ryder back at Kailua beach in Oahu.

  She felt as if time slowed down, and all the air had been sucked out of the room.

  “Identify him, please.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  He said nothing and pulled out several more photos of her and Terry, all snapped so closely together that as each landed on the table, they created a jerky, stop-action animation of her and Ryder’s argument.

  “You seem to be very angry with him, Dr. Katasova,” he remarked as the pile grew, his speech once more impeccable. “Why?”

  Anna felt herself slipping into an abyss. The truth about her conversation with Ryder could damn her as much as a lie, because she didn’t know herself what game he’d been up to, or what else he might have done that could offend the Chinese.

  “Then let me answer for you, Dr. Katasova. We know this man is Dr. Terry Ryder, and that he is the chief advisor on bioterror to your American government. We also know that you have worked with him in the past. Did he send you over here to spy on us?”

  “No! He warned me not to come here, that my invitation might be a setup. Obviously he was right--”

  “Did he tell you to meet with Dr. Wey Chen?” He continued to throw photos on the table.

  “No, not at all--”

  “Did he ask you to pick up false documents intended to inflict harm on this country with false allegations of an uncontrolled pneumonia outbreak--”

  “No--”

  “You of all people know the devastating impact such rumors can have on a country. Travel advisories, the banning of livestock sales if animal carriers are involved, the public upheaval, the fear, the billions of dollars in trade and tourists lost?”

  “But I swear--”

  He threw down another photo, this one of the envelope Ryder had left propped in the sand. “Do you know the contents of this letter?”

  His use of verbs remained as perfect as his enunciation, which now became almost too correct, the way only an expert linguist who has studied English as a second language can speak it. And as he mastered his control of the words, she felt as if he increased his control
over her.

  “No, I mean yes--”

  He cut her off by whipping out a shot of her picking the envelope up. In another she was carrying it back into her condominium. He then pulled out photos that were of the letter itself. “We consider such lies to be the economic equivalent of a terrorist attack. Are you a terrorist, Dr. Katasova?”

  A falling sensation filled her chest. “No, not at all.”

  At the same time, she was thinking that Robert Daikens might pull that sort of counter-intelligence play. But Terry? And would he then involve her? No, she couldn’t believe it, even after what he did in Gabon. Yet neither could she completely dismiss the possibility. As her confusion mounted, she vaguely noted that there were voices coming from out in the hallway.

  Her captor ignored them. “Now I know a person of your reputation wouldn’t willingly break the law,” he continued, all at once sounding apologetic for having put her through the day’s ordeal. “And these photos, combined with what happened in the market this morning, taken by themselves, though suggestive of a conspiracy, don’t prove you were knowingly involved.” He paused, leaned back, and shrugged, “Unfortunately it is not up to me what happens to you. And I’m sorry to say there are still those in China who prefer our old friends to the new. So when they informed your embassy as you requested, it was that of your former homeland they contacted.” He glanced in the direction of the door. The conversation on the other side seemed to be picking up heat. “Your countrymen have arrived. They sound most eager to have you back.”