Or who had asked it.
He cleared his throat. Tried to appear scholarly and guessed he managed only terrified.
“I’m sorry, I missed that. What was the question?”
“I said I did not fly all the way from Moscow to the middle of nowhere to waste my time in an office watching some academician sit with his eyes glazed over thinking deep academic thoughts. I came here to see your work with my own two eyes, and would like to do so at the first opportunity.” Kopalev’s gaze was unflinching. It was almost as though he could see right into Vlad’s head.
That was not a comforting notion.
“Of course,” Vlad said. “Let us not waste any more time. We can get started immediately, although I must warn you, my—”
“You are warning me? Did I hear that correctly?”
Vlad felt the blood drain from his face at Kopalev’s comment. All three men had risen from their chairs and Vlad wished desperately he could sit back down for a moment. His legs were rubbery and all that coffee he’d drunk hours earlier threatened to come rushing back up his gullet in an acidy mess.
“Please excuse my poor choice of phrasing,” Vlad said through the roaring in his ears. “Of course I am not warning you about anything. I only meant to advise you that our current test subject, the CIA man you arranged to be transferred here, is still recovering from brain surgery. He may not be responsive at this point.”
The KGB colonel fixed Vlad with a steady glare but said nothing. After an uncomfortable moment the three men exited the front door of the administration building and began crunching along the sanded concrete pathway toward the tunnels and Vlad’s research suite. Vlad now thought he knew how a condemned man felt as he was being secured in front of the firing squad.
They had traveled perhaps twenty feet along the pathway when Kopalev stopped and gazed at Vlad again, this time with a thoughtful expression. “You have already operated on the American?”
“Of course. You said you wanted to see results as quickly as possible.”
“But what about your other subjects? Why dive straight into surgery on the American when you can continue working with lesser subjects first, thus gaining as much useful information as possible from them before moving on?”
He doesn’t even know my other subjects are all dead. Vlad’s breath caught in his throat and for one terrifying moment he was certain he was going to lose consciousness, pass out and drop to the cold ground like a sack of potatoes.
Or a dead test subject.
He almost wished he would. At least then this excruciating deception would be over.
Then he came to his senses. If the KGB colonel discovered progress had been nearly nonexistent over the past year despite Vlad’s repeated assurances otherwise, the excruciating deception might be over but the excruciating physical pain Kopalev would inflict on him would likely just be beginning.
“I…” He was aware of both Kopalev and Stepanov looking at him oddly. “I just felt that sufficient progress has been made to begin working with the American, that is all.”
There was another long pause as Kopalev regarded Vlad through narrowed eyes. Then he turned and continued walking.
“I guess we shill see about that,” he said quietly.
29
Date unknown
Time unknown
Unidentified Soviet military base
Something was wrong.
Ryan wasn’t even fully awake and he could tell something was wrong.
He felt cold. Bitterly cold. Teeth-rattlingly cold.
It wasn’t a normal kind of cold, like the deep-seated chill he felt when he went skiing and got stuck on the chairlift because someone had fallen getting on and they had to shut the damned thing down for a few minutes.
It wasn’t even the kind of cold he’d experienced over the course of the long Russian winter, when the temperatures sometimes plummeted so low at night it was dangerous to leave even a tiny bit of skin exposed for more than a few seconds.
This was a cold that emanated deep inside his body, a cold that was unrelated to the temperature. A cold that seemed somehow infused in his bones. A cold unlike anything he’d ever felt before.
So he knew something was wrong even before he knew where he was or what was happening to him, even as he blinked his eyes in a desperate attempt to stay conscious and avoid sliding back into the darkness lurking just beyond his current semi-conscious state.
He was lying in a bed; he knew that much. He knew also, somehow, that he was not lying in his own bed, the surprisingly comfortable one he’d been provided inside his CIA-assigned Moscow apartment. His safe house. He was not inside his safe house, he could just tell.
He tried to shake his head to wake himself up a little more, tiny little jiggles like he did when he was hung over, but he was surprised to discover he couldn’t manage it. Not even a little bit. His head was completely immobilized.
He tried to raise a hand, to get a feel for whatever had been clamped onto his head to restrain him, and he couldn’t do that, either. His arm had been immobilized, too.
Understanding returned. The memories flooded back. He’d been captured and was being held—against his will, obviously—at a Soviet research facility located far off the beaten path, even for Russia. The transport truck had taken days to get here, which meant he might not even be inside Russia any longer, although there was little doubt he was still captive in a Soviet state.
And if he’d been afraid before, that sensation was easily eclipsed by the terror that descended upon Ryan Smith now. It was mammoth. It was everything he’d ever been afraid of his entire life, all his childhood and grownup fears rolled into one horrifying ball of dread, times one hundred.
One thousand.
Because that crazy Soviet scientist had shaved his head and then drilled a hole in Ryan’s skull and inserted electrical wires designed to manipulate Ryan’s brain, to force him to say and do things against his will that he would never agree to say or do on his own.
And if that wasn’t awful enough, the goddamned scientist had bungled the operation. Protasov had nicked the wrong part of his brain, or drilled through a nerve, or done who the hell knew what, but he’d injured Ryan, and badly, based on the way Ryan felt right now.
He supposed it was technically possible the bone-chilling cold he felt emanating from deep inside was a reaction to the anesthesia the lunatic had used. Ryan’s knowledge of surgical procedure was limited to what he’d seen in a handful of movies and television shows, and he knew there was virtually no level of realism to be found in Hollywood.
And his knowledge of Russian surgical procedure was even less.
But even as he considered the possibility that he was being affected by whatever drugs the Russian had pumped into him, he discarded it. Because the chill inside his body wasn’t the only symptom he was feeling.
Far from it.
His extremities tingled, his fingers and toes buzzing as if he’d grabbed a high-tension wire. His head throbbed and his brain felt foreign to him. It was as though the entire contents of his cranium had been removed and replaced by someone else’s, someone dimwitted and slow. His muscles were spasming, random portions of his body clenching and releasing for no apparent reason as his brain sent confused messages out along his nervous system.
Ryan swallowed heavily and for maybe the hundredth time since being taken by the KGB outside that damned Moscow nightclub—had it really been less than a week ?—he cursed his stupidity in thinking he could get away with having a night out for a few drinks like a normal man in his twenties.
Because he wasn’t a normal man in his twenties. Normal men didn’t risk their lives operating undercover inside the boundaries of their home nation’s sworn enemy. Normal men didn’t leave everything behind, their homes and families and friends, to gather and relay intelligence that could get them killed should they be caught.
And while he hadn’t been killed, he had been caught, and Ryan was starting to believe he’d have b
een better off had the KGB hauled him to Lubyanka and filled him full of 9mm slugs on the night they captured him. That fate would have been preferable to this, to being trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, lost and alone and now badly injured by a quack researcher.
Ryan tamped down on the fear and forced himself to focus. He was never getting out of here; he knew that now. He supposed he’d known it all along. The Russian’s talk of brain tissue manipulation and parading Ryan in front of television cameras to spout propagandist nonsense, as horrible as it sounded, would have at least meant Ryan was alive and well, relatively speaking.
But it was clearly nothing more than the man’s own wacky pipe dream. Maybe it was technically possible to control people’s minds by stimulating brain tissue with electricity.
Maybe.
Someday.
But Ryan knew that day was far in the future. He knew it based on nothing more than how he felt at this moment. If Dr. Protasov came in right now and started pumping electricity through the hole he’d drilled into the side of Ryan’s skull, Ryan didn’t know what would happen, but he knew he wouldn’t magically start parroting the Soviet line and become the American spokesman for all things Communist.
More likely he would stroke out as his overworked nervous system reacted to the excess stimulation, or he would suffer a heart attack, or his brain would burn out and shut down. He pictured his grey matter fried to a crisp like overcooked bacon, black smoke curling out his ears and billowing from the hole Protasov had drilled into his head.
Even that would be better than this.
Anything would be better than this.
Ryan blinked himself back to his depressing reality. He glanced around at as much of the room as he could see with his head immobilized. He wasn’t positive but thought he was inside the same room in which he’d been kept strapped to a hospital bed since his arrival.
In the States a patient who’d just had brain surgery would be moved to a recovery room, where a team of nurses and staff members would monitor his condition closely. Ryan doubted he was being monitored at all, by anyone. He hadn’t been attended to by a single nurse since his arrival in this hellhole, just Dr. Protasov and the creepy little bastard who’d done little but scowl at him and mutter under his breath.
He wondered how long he would lie alone and unattended, unable to move. And as bad as it was, that situation was likely better than whatever would follow, when Protasov would begin zapping electricity through a cable and into Ryan’s brain, roasting the delicate tissue like meat on a spit.
But the sooner someone came and removed the clamps or the harness or whatever was holding Ryan’s head immobile, the sooner he could begin examining his room and everything inside it. Somewhere in this space was an object that could be used as a weapon, perhaps on the wheeled table in the corner, upon which Protasov kept his implements of torture.
Sooner or later Ryan would find that object.
Once he found it he would figure out how to access it.
Then he would kill Dr. Protasov and maybe, if he was really lucky, the creepy little assistant, before turning the weapon on himself.
He was never getting out of here alive; he understood that fully.
He also understood he would have to work quickly. Protasov was doing a tremendous amount of damage to his brain. Soon he would become paralyzed or so debilitated by muscle spasms the Soviets would find him useless and would then execute him. They would kill him without a second thought and dump his corpse into a common grave, just another victim of Protasov’s research.
The thought that he would never be found and that his family and friends would never know what had happened to him was almost as chilling as the deep-seated cold permeating Ryan’s body.
But he discovered the notion of dying didn’t really bother him all that much. If there were any pain at all it would only last for a moment and then he would be gone. He’d always understood that giving his life for his country was a possibility and as frightening as it was to consider, the prospect of continuing on as a human guinea pig or worse, a non-responsive vegetable, was infinitely worse.
So he concentrated on breathing slowly, easily, calmly. He checked out the room as much as possible while biding his time.
While planning.
While trying to ignore the horrible creeping numbness in his fingers and toes and the fact that he was now mostly unable to control the spasms wracking his body.
30
February 3, 1988
11: 10 a.m.
Tunnels under Ipatiev Military Research Facility
Tracie had hours ago begun to suspect the labyrinthine system of tunnels snaking deep underground below the three “subway stations” dotting the Soviet base were segregated by the type of research being done inside the labs, research areas and meeting rooms associated with each.
It made sense from a security perspective. Not only were the Soviets able to hide their work from the prying eyes of U.S. surveillance aircraft by burrowing into the side of a mountain, by keeping the research areas separate they could also prevent scientists and researchers from becoming overly familiar with the other projects ongoing under the base.
Tracie forced her thoughts back to her more immediate concern: finding Ryan Smith. Her plan was simple. She would investigate the subterranean warrens under the three stations until locating him. Unless the Soviets had executed him already—and what would be the purpose of bringing him all the way here if they were only going to fill him full of Russian lead?—he had to be down there somewhere. Tracie would learn all she could about the work being done under this mysterious military base until stumbling across Smith’s holding cell, then she would rescue Ryan and get him the hell out of here.
How she was going to manage all that she wasn’t quite sure. A lot would depend upon whether the Soviets had started torturing the captured operative yet, and upon the extent of his injuries if they had. She’d developed the outline of an escape plan last night, one she thought she could implement if Smith were ambulatory, but the fact was that sneaking inside an active Russian military base had been something close to a suicide mission right from the start, and if they were to have any chance of escaping, the plan would have to remain flexible.
Above ground the base was mostly wide-open, barren both of trees and excessive structures. Still, Tracie felt little concern as she moved between subway stations. This area was relatively far removed from the administration building, and the location of the three stations in the middle of the base—more or less—meant the ubiquitous guard towers were reassuringly distant.
It was a false reassurance, to be sure, since the guards were undoubtedly equipped with binoculars and high-powered rifles, but Tracie preferred not to spend too much time thinking about that. Unless she gave them reason to become suspicious of her, to the guards she would look like just another civilian researcher hurrying between the relative warmth of the stations.
Encountering a patrolling Red Army soldier was always a possibility, but a general sense of lax security seemed to permeate the facility. Given the base’s extreme isolation and the length of time it had gone undetected by the United States, it would have taken an almost superhuman effort maintain strict security standards. Why would the Soviets be worried about security at a base their enemies didn’t even know about?
As Tracie approached Station B she examined it as closely as possible without slowing noticeably or making her activity obvious. As far as she could tell it was an exact duplicate of Building A, right down to the cipher lock on the reinforced metal entry door.
Makes sense, Tracie thought. These buildings are basically just shells covering the tunnel entrances.
She moved to the door without stopping and began pressing the entry code the helpful researcher had used to allow her to access Building A to get her “feminine hygiene products.” She’d been very careful to watch him and memorize the code as he entered it, and she was banking on the entry codes being the same for all three stations
. She guessed they would be.
After pressing the last button she muttered, “Here goes nothing,” and pulled on the heavy door.
Then smiled in satisfaction as it swung open.
Inside the metal shell, a handful of men were clustered around a snack machine in an alcove located next to the elevators, drinking coffee from paper cups and good-naturedly teasing each other. It was close enough to lunchtime that Tracie guessed they were on a break and had no desire to brave the long walk in bitterly cold temperatures to the dining facility located way out at the front of the camp.
In any event, none of them paid the slightest attention to her. She didn’t even think anyone had glanced over at the sound of the entry door opening and then closing, an event that must occur on a semi-regular basis throughout the day, as researchers came and went.
A quick glance around the interior confirmed what she’d suspected: this building—at least the above ground portion—was laid out in exactly the same manner as the first. She was certain that would be the case inside Building C as well.
She moved to the stairs and disappeared through the doors and out of sight of the men taking their break. At this point, Tracie doubted she had much to fear from the civilian researchers by using the elevators, but there was always the possibility she’d get stuck sharing one with a patrolling guard, a scenario that likely would not end well.
Why change a plan that was working?
She hurried down stairs that seemed identical to the ones she’d used inside Building A. The shaft was the same; the iron railings and metal treads were the same. It was obvious the Russians had used the same blueprints to build all three underground facilities.
This time she encountered no one while descending the stairs, and in seconds arrived at another metal door. She peeked through the small wire-reinforced window and on the other side saw a long hallway, again identical to the first hallway she’d seen beneath Building A.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 138