“Do you understand all this, Piotr?”
The briefest of head nods told Tracie that, yes, he understood.
27
January 24, 1988
11:40 p.m.
CIA safe house
Moscow, Russia
The key to accomplishing successful physical torture lay in regulating pain. The interrogator’s challenge was to make the subject uncomfortable to the point where he or she would become willing to provide whatever information the interrogator required, but not so uncomfortable he or she lost consciousness or, God forbid, died.
Tracie hated physical torture. The notion that it could very well be her strapped into a chair, on the receiving end of the pain being dished out, was always uppermost in her mind even when she wished it were not so.
Thus far, although Piotr Speransky would likely disagree, Tracie had managed to avoid inflicting any serious, lasting damage on her subject. He was in considerable pain, but that was the whole point. She needed to break him quickly, and to accomplish that she had to soften him up physically so he would be less able to resist the psychological manipulation coming next.
And it was all or nothing. As much as Tracie believed in backup plans, in this instance she had none. If her gambit failed, there would be nothing to fall back on.
After removing Speransky’s duct-tape gag, she had started off slowly, doing her best to play both of the good cop/bad cop roles herself. The bad cop had just yanked fingernails out of Speransky’s hand, leaving him bloodied and whimpering in the torture chair.
The good cop began by speaking quietly, almost soothingly, initially working on nothing more complicated than getting Speransky to provide honest responses to simple, non-confrontational questions. Questions to which she already knew the answers.
Questions like whether he worked for the KGB.
The file Tracie had removed from Yuri Ryakhin’s office at the Arzamas-16 nuclear plant in Kremlyov yesterday had been thin, but still it contained enough information to permit her this line of questioning.
And it had taken little time to establish that, yes, Piotr Speranksy was, in fact, employed by the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency.
“And you work as an assassin for the KGB, is that correct, Piotr?” The key to successful psychological manipulation of a subject was to keep that subject off-balance. That had been Tracie’s goal with the physical torture—to give Speransky no choice but to concentrate on the pain radiating outward from his fingertips.
This would theoretically make him less likely to be able to follow meandering questioning and rapid subject changes in questioning, which would, again theoretically, make him more likely to provide his interrogator with truthful answers.
She walked behind Speransky as she asked the question. Disappearing from sight of the subject after physical torture had been administered could be extremely effective as a psychological manipulation technique. The subject immediately begins to fear a return of the physical pain he’d received earlier.
The human brain was an amazing organ, but it could also be the most effective weapon in a savvy interrogator’s arsenal.
Speransky mumbled something Tracie could not make out, and she immediately bent and whispered into the man’s ear, “Speak up, Piotr.”
He of course had not been able to see her approach, and he jerked against his bindings in surprise at her closeness.
He raised his voice—slightly. “I said I do whatever my superiors ask me to do. Just like you.”
“And your superiors ask you to murder people, isn’t that right?”
“I have been forced to kill, yes. Again, just like you, unless I miss my guess.”
Tracie laughed. She had ignored, and would continue to ignore, his comments directed at her. She was in control of the interrogation, not the prisoner, and she would direct the course of the questioning.
“Forced to kill,” she said. “That’s a good one, Comrade. The fact is you enjoy your work, don’t you? You enjoy raining death and destruction down on the enemies of the Soviet State.”
He shrugged and then winced as the motion reverberated through his injured fingertips and cranium. “I do what I must.”
She stepped back in front of Speransky and smiled coldly at him. “As do I, Comrade. As do I.”
Now Tracie began pacing away from Speransky, then spinning abruptly on her heel and returning to her position directly in front of him. “And this ‘doing as you’re told.’ Does it include the radioactive poisoning of unsuspecting American—and occasionally, Russian—citizens?”
Now it was Speransky’s turn to flash a cold smile. He did it through lips quivering from pain, but he did it nonetheless. “It would be silly to pretend otherwise, my little red-headed cyka, would it not? I already know you forced Comrade Ryakhin to lure me to Kremlyov. Thus, I know you are aware of my patriotic activities.”
Tracie nodded. It was time to play good cop again. “True,” she said. “But there’s something I don’t understand. Weren’t you concerned about contracting radiation poisoning yourself? Handling Polonium-210 more than a half-dozen times? Weren’t you at least a little worried about that?”
He stared impassively and she continued. “I can understand accepting orders from your superiors, misguided though those orders may be. But you don’t strike me as the selfless type, as someone who would willingly sacrifice his own life in service to his country. How could you be sure you wouldn’t end up just as sick—and just as dead—as the men you were sent to assassinate?”
Speransky’s relief at the line of questioning was obvious. Here was a chance to placate his interrogator in a way that would permit him to feign cooperation without actually giving up any useable intel. Tracie smiled inside while keeping her face an unreadable mask.
“There was never any real danger to me,” he said. “Polonium-210’s radioactive isotopes are formed in such a way as to be unable to penetrate human skin.”
Tracie began moving slowly toward a small table at the far end of the room onto which she had tossed her backpack. As he spoke, she unzipped a pocket and reached inside.
He continued to talk as she turned and paced back in his direction, hands clasped behind her back. He had clearly become suspicious but he had no alternative but to continue. “In order to be deadly, Polonium-210 must be ingested by the subject. Inhaled, or swallowed. That was how it was explained to me.”
“And you believed what you were told? It didn’t occur to you to question whether your KGB superiors might simply be using you as a pawn and sacrificing you in pursuit of their own goals?”
“Of course it occurred to me.” He sounded insulted that his interrogator would think so little of his operational awareness. “I took nothing for granted. The first time I met Comrade Ryakhin, we had a little chat that was not so different from this conversation.”
“Is that so?”
“Da, it is so. I was the one asking the questions, of course, and my method of achieving cooperation consisted of placing my Makarov to Comrade Ryakhin’s skull instead of removing his fingernails. But by the time we had finished our little discussion, I felt comfortable that as long as I was extremely careful working with the Polonium, the risk to me was minimal.”
Speransky had gotten suddenly talkative. His desire to extend what he believed to be the “safe” portion of the interrogation was obvious.
And misguided.
Tracie pretended to consider his words while watching his expression change from one of relative openness to suspicion.
“But you would already have known all this from speaking with Ryakhin,” he said slowly. “It was what you were counting on. You had to lure me to Kremlyov, and you knew—or at least Ryakhin knew—that the fear of accidental exposure to radiation would be the one thing that might cause me to override my own concerns and drive there anyway.”
Tracie’s smile was cold and hard. “Very impressive reasoning, Comrade,” she said. “Especially under the circumstances.”
She shrugged and withdrew her hands from behind her back. His eyes widened as he glimpsed what she held: a small, lead-lined spray bottle.
The bottle she had liberated from storage at Arzamas-16.
The bottle designed to hold the deadly solution of Polonium-210.
“So,” she said conversationally. “What you are telling me is that there is little danger to me personally, as long as I am very careful not to inhale when I spray this solution into your mouth?”
28
January 24, 1988
11:55 p.m.
CIA safe house
Moscow, Russia
Speransky’s eyes widened and he recoiled reflexively at the sight of the spray bottle. His head struck the chair-back with a thud and bounced forward. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Where did you get that?” His voice showed little sign of stress, which was impressive. He’d recovered from his initial fright quickly and well, but he’d clearly been rattled. Tracie needed to take advantage of this crack in his composure.
She ignored his question. Undoubtedly he already regretted asking it, since the answer was so obvious.
Instead she said, “You know what surprised me about my visit to Arzamas-16, Piotr?”
He shook his head but remained silent. His eyes remained glued to the little bottle in her hand.
“No, surprise isn’t the correct word.” She stroked her chin as if concentrating. “Shocked might be the better description. I was really shocked at how easy it was for the plant to manufacture a dose of Polonium-210.”
She spoke conversationally. Not friendly, not exactly. But close. Bus stop conversation. Cocktail party conversation. Like two strangers thrown together for a few minutes finding a way to pass the time.
Speransky ripped his gaze from the spray bottle for a second, focusing on her, his fear and confusion plain.
Good.
He returned his attention to the bottle and she continued. “Yeah, it was kind of a long shot, asking Ryakhin to manufacture a dose. I almost didn’t even bother trying, because, you know, it seems like accomplishing nuclear fusion should be a long and complicated process.”
She tilted her head and stroked her chin. “Or is it nuclear fission? Do you know?”
He was breathing heavily, eyes wide, and she shrugged. “I don’t know either, and I suppose it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
He stared at her in horror. She’d taken a calculated risk with this approach, because she had little more than the most basic knowledge regarding the operation of a nuclear plant or the process of creating radioactive isotopes. If Speransky did have that knowledge, it could blow her interrogation to hell.
She felt it was worth taking the shot, though. Despite working on the opposite side of the geopolitical fence, Piotr Speranksy was a lot like Tracie. Uncomfortably similar, in fact. But her experience as an intelligence field operative had taught her that most of the time, case officers were far too busy studying intel needed to complete assignments to waste time learning nuclear physics.
It was worth the risk.
And judging by Speransky’s reaction, her assumption had been right on. He at least seemed to accept the possibility she was telling the truth.
“Anyway, the fact of the matter is,” she continued, “the process is a pretty simple one. It only took a couple of hours and a little arm-twisting, and I had exactly what I needed.
“I gotta tell ya, Piotr, it was a real eye-opener. The fact that somebody like me was able to get something like that so easily, in a closed city deep inside a supposedly fortified Soviet stronghold like Russia...”
She shook her head ruefully. “It really makes you question everything you thought you knew about security, don’t you agree?”
She had been pacing continually, keeping his eyes on the move, trying to prevent him from having any time to reason things through. Keep the subject off balance was Rule Number One of a successful interrogation.
He didn’t answer. At least not out loud. But his face had grown steadily paler as she talked and she supposed that was enough of an answer in itself.
She stopped pacing and stood, feet planted, directly in front of her prisoner. The conversational manner was instantly gone and in its place, a hard brutality.
“So. Now that we’ve laid our cards on the table—those of us who have any cards to play, that is—it’s time to get down to business. I’m sure, Piotr, as a fellow professional, you can appreciate my desire to move things along.”
He was trying to maintain his composure but doing a poor job of it. He was simply too rattled.
Tracie’s voice was quiet and cold when she spoke. “I visited one of your Polonium-210 victims recently, Piotr. He was at the end. Did you know he was in so much pain he’d practically chewed through his own lips?”
Speransky swallowed heavily but said nothing.
Tracie continued. “I want to know the name of the KGB officer who dreamed up the bright idea of using Polonium-210 on American CIA operatives in Russia, of condemning good men to such a painful and unnecessary death.
“That’s what I want to know,” she said. “You will tell me his name. And after you tell me his name, you’re going to tell me where I can find him.”
Speransky finally found his voice. “You must be joking. If you are, as you say, ‘a fellow professional,’ I am sure you must know I cannot give you that information. It will make me a traitor to my country and a condemned man. I cannot.”
“Do I look like I’m joking, Piotr? Do you think I’m risking my life in this country, dealing with the likes of you and Yuri Ryakhin, because I enjoy a good joke? Is that what you think?”
She had begun lowering her face toward Speransky’s as she spoke, and by the time she finished, her eyes were inches from his and she was screaming at the top of her lungs. He blinked as spittle rained into his upturned eyes.
“I promise you that you will not get that kind of information out of me,” he said, his voice shaking. “But even if you could, you would never be able to get close to your target. It is impossible. It would be a suicide mission.”
“I’m touched by your concern for my well-being, Piotr, really. And to think we just met. But why don’t you let me worry about the mission’s difficulty. Just tell me what I want to know and maybe, just maybe, you’ll avoid chewing through your lips in pain as you await the end.”
He shook his head. “I told you, I cannot—”
“Open up,” she said.
“What?”
“I said open up. And while you’re at it, say ‘ah.’ I’m done playing games. It’s time for your medicine.”
The little spray bottle was still clasped in her right hand, and she lifted it quickly, holding it in front of his rapidly blinking eyes. He clamped his jaws together with an audible clack, the muscles in his neck straining.
Tracie laughed. “Really, Piotr? You think you can avoid what you have coming to you? Haven’t you forgotten something?”
He was breathing rapidly, his nose flaring as he tried to draw in air without opening his mouth. His arms shook under their bindings, his injured fingers flopping against the wooden armrest.
“All I need to do,” she continued, “is place this little spray nozzle against your nostrils and squeeze. I’m certain one nostril would be sufficient for my purposes, but my daddy always told me anything worth doing is worth doing right, so I’d probably spray both nostrils. You know, just to be sure.”
She’d been holding the spray bottle perfectly still, and Speransky’s eyes had been focused on it like it held the key to life.
Which, as far as he was concerned, it did.
But now he began shaking his head side to side, as if vehemently punctuating a negative reply.
She thought the psychological intimidation might be just about complete. She hoped so, anyway, because the ruse had nearly been played out. Hopefully a few more seconds of reflection would be enough.
She straightened suddenly and chuckled. “Wow,
Piotr. That was a close one. In all the excitement, I damned near forgot one important detail. I swear, sometimes I can be so scattered.”
Spinning on her heel, Tracie crossed the room to the little table holding her backpack. She pretended to rummage through the bag, although she’d left the item she wanted sitting right on top of her other gear.
“Ah! Here it is,” she mumbled just loud enough for Speransky to hear. She lifted the medical facemask out of the backpack and slipped it over her head, patting it into place over her mouth and nose as she returned to the chair holding her terrified subject.
“Can’t be too careful,” she said, her words muffled as they floated through the mask.
By the time she had crossed half the distance, Speransky had resumed his violent head thrashing. His efforts this time made his previous attempt look half-hearted, and Tracie hoped he wouldn’t break his own neck before surrendering the information she needed.
“Now, Piotr,” she chided. “Don’t be silly. You can’t avoid your medicine forever. I can just stand here and wait for you to tire, then spray the Polonium into your nostrils.”
He continued to shake his head as if he hadn’t heard a word she said. Probably he hadn’t, given his panic level.
“Or I could just do this.” Her left hand flashed forward and clamped onto his forehead, smashing the back of his skull against the chair back. He was much bigger than Tracie but she had all the leverage, and the best he could manage was to grunt and groan as he tried to continue shaking his head.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now, let’s get this over with. I really don’t like how I look in this mask. It doesn’t match my eyes at all.”
She loomed over him and brought the tip of the spray bottle to Piotr Speransky’s nose.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 112