The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  That wasn’t true. Korolenko hadn’t come close to marrying anyone. In fact, he hadn’t had a relationship in years, unable to form any worthwhile attachment to anyone or anything aside from work.

  ‘Well, if you feel the urge come upon you, we have some willing inmates here at the moment. There is one Kazakh woman in particular. Breasts like snowy peaks. She is a screamer . . .’ He shook his head, looked to the heavens and added a soft whistle.

  A single bare light bulb burned in the overhead socket mounted on the angled concrete roof of the stairwell. It failed to keep at bay the shadows, which clung to the corners like living things cowed by unspeakable terror. The walls were painted a red that reminded Korolenko of clotted blood. The red stopped halfway up the wall; above it, the concrete was a dirt and grit-caked white. The air was bone dry and laced with ancient dust and the pungency of human excrement. Korolenko found the nostalgic familiarity of these sights and smells from his younger days oddly reassuring.

  The stairwell ended in a heavy steel door with a sliding metal plate at eye level. Colonel Ozerov slid back the plate and received a visual ID check from the single bloodshot eye of a security guard on the other side. Bolts greased for silent operation were released and the door swung open soundlessly. Beyond it, the concrete corridor was lit much like the stairwell—bare light bulbs burning at regularly spaced intervals. The walls also shared the stairwell’s bleak color scheme. The most significant difference was on the floor, where a thick brown carpet had been laid to reduce the conveyance of sound. The air was still and as utterly quiet as death itself, and the smell of human excrement was almost thick enough to slice. Both Ozerov and Korolenko kept absolutely silent. They signed the security guard’s schedule and made a mental note of the cell number holding prisoner 98987.

  Korolenko counted down the numbers on the cell doors as they passed. Up ahead, a guard peeped through the judas hole into a cell. Not liking what he saw, he drew his rubber truncheon, opened the door and rushed in. Korolenko heard a series of thumps and slaps, along with a grunt and a few cries. The cell was number 163, the one holding the prisoner they were here to see. The guard backed out just as they arrived, closing the thick concrete door silently.

  ‘What’s going on? How’s the zek?’ Ozerov asked under his breath.

  Korolenko noted the use of the abbreviated slang for prisoner—tyurzek. Yes, McDonald was now truly in the system.

  ‘He fell asleep,’ the guard whispered, his anger mixed with nervousness at the unexpected presence of the two high-ranking officers. The prisoner’s wakefulness was his responsibility and he had been derelict in his duty.

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Ozerov frowned with disapproval at the man. ‘See that this crime is not repeated.’

  ‘Yes, Comrade Colonel, ser,’ the guard whispered, his back ramrod straight.

  Ozerov shook his head in disgust and turned to look at the prisoner, putting his eye against the judas hole. Satisfied by what he saw, he beckoned Korolenko forward to have a look. The cell, two meters long by a meter wide, was so brightly lit with banks of high-watt globes behind grated recesses in the walls and ceiling that Korolenko’s eye began to water after just a few seconds. Congressman Lawrence McDonald was standing in the center of the cell, the low ceiling forcing him to stoop. There were fresh welts on his face and his chest was heaving, trying to capture a breath.

  The cell itself was bare. A bench too narrow to lie on jutted from the wall opposite the door. The only furniture was a plastic bucket—empty. McDonald, bare-footed, still wore his gray suit pants, though his shirt had been confiscated and replaced by a graying undershirt. His face was dirty, and fresh blood seeped from the wound on his cheek. His hair was unkempt and he wore a week’s worth of beard. It was hot in the cell under all those lights and he was sweating. As Korolenko watched, the congressman shifted his weight from one foot to the other and his hooded eyelids drooped and then closed. He had just fallen asleep standing up.

  The colonel backed away from the door and made a gesture to the guard, who stepped forward for a peek. When he saw what McDonald was doing, he swore under his breath, unlocked the cell and rushed in. Korolenko heard slapping sounds. The congressman made a muffled grunt. The guard backed out of the cell, keeping his eye on the prisoner, and again closed the door behind him.

  Korolenko took another look at the congressman through the judas hole. The man’s face was red and he looked angry, but he stood where he’d been told to stand and he was getting the very simple yet terrifying lesson: sleep was forbidden.

  ‘After seventy-two hours without sleep,’ Ozerov observed, ‘he will beg us to kill him.’

  January 30, 2012

  Courtyard Miami Airport South, Miami, Florida. Akiko handed over the passport, opened at the page on which the visa had been affixed. She watched Ben take it and examine it, holding it close.

  ‘People actually read this language?’ he commented.

  ‘Mind if I have a look?’ asked Tex, sitting at the dining room table, a large map of the Russian Federation spread out in front of him.

  Ben handed it over, saying, ‘Looks like writing reversed in a mirror.’

  ‘Wait till you hear it spoken. Did you have any trouble getting these visas?’ Tex asked Akiko as he examined the document.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Money dissolves Russian red tape—the more you pay the easier it gets. I paid a lot and they issued them within a day instead of the usual three weeks. What about the tickets?’ she asked, surveying the hotel room. Backpacks and clothes were piled here and there, some of it still carrying labels and tags. Various items had also been purchased for her, a goose-down jacket and pants among them.

  ‘Easy: US Airways to London’s Heathrow, and then British Airways to Moscow. Paid with the Radio Shack corporate AmEx. Less chance of being flagged on NSA watch lists. The flights were booked—I had to buy business-class tickets to get you on. You leave Miami International tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Akiko asked, eyebrow raised.

  ‘The quicker the better,’ said Tex. ‘Even though we used a hard-to-trace payment method, air tickets have been issued in your names using your passport numbers. Who knows what kind of filters the NSA have running to keep tabs on Ben. And perhaps you. We’re playing it safe, remember. If I’d had my way, you’d have been on that plane today.’

  ‘We need to get all our documents photocopied—four copies of every thing—so that Ben and I can keep duplicates of each other’s papers, as well as our own,’ said Akiko.

  ‘Why the caution?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Russia isn’t America, or Japan,’ Akiko replied. ‘When I was last there, I was stopped by a policeman. He asked to see my passport. I showed it to him. He confiscated it because he said it “contained irregularities”. I was told later at the Japanese embassy in Moscow that the police often do this—authentic passports fetch a high price on the black market. Identity theft is big business in Russia. We have to be careful.’

  Tex agreed.

  ‘Where are we staying?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve booked us a suite at the Moscow Park Hyatt,’ said Ben. ‘Nothing special, except for the room rate.’

  ‘It was expensive, wasn’t it?’ Akiko said.

  ‘Keeps the honest folks out.’

  Akiko smiled. ‘Moscow is the most expensive city in Europe. It is also the business hub for that part of the world. On the weekends, many of the hotels reduce their rate by half. How much was it?’

  ‘A very reasonable US$1800 per night.’

  ‘Maybe Yuudai and Curtis left you all that money because they knew this was going to be a pricy exercise,’ Tex suggested.

  ‘Or maybe the people at the Park Hyatt know a sucker when he rings them,’ said Ben. ‘What about credit cards? Can we use them? Does the NSA’s reach extend to Russia?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Tex.

  ‘But there are other problems. Every third night we stay in Russia we have to report to the tourist
police,’ Akiko informed them. ‘It’s the law and the hotels stick to it.’

  ‘The place sounds friendlier by the minute.’

  ‘How did you go with Lucas’s Gainesville friend?’ Akiko asked Ben, changing the subject. ‘Did he have any advice?’

  ‘Don’t bother was his first suggestion.’

  Akiko’s face darkened.

  ‘Hey, Stalin made 20 million people disappear in Siberia. And we’re looking for one person.’

  ‘So you got nothing worthwhile?’ Tex asked, diplomatically stepping in.

  Ben sighed, leaned over the map, took a pencil and circled a body of water three-quarters of the way across the eastern end of Russia. ‘Apparently this is one area worth poking around in.’

  ‘Lake Baikal,’ said Akiko. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘It’s a very exciting place if you like fresh water. The lake apparently contains one-fifth of the world’s supply of it. It’s also very popular with ticks—millions vacation there every summer. It’s such a pleasant area, in fact, that quite a few gulags were located here. The inmates were used as slave labor in the local forestry industry. Your mother being Japanese and looking not too dissimilar to the local Mongol population—no offense, Akiko . . .’

  ‘None taken.’

  ‘ . . . there’s a chance she could have been sent to one of the camps here. Grundy also suggested sniffing around Ulan-Ude.’ Ben circled the town just above the top of Mongolia, and another town hundreds of miles further to the east. ‘And over here, north of Khabarovsk. Making things trickier, the positions of the gulags weren’t indicated on any maps. I guess because they never expected tourists.’

  Akiko was suddenly struck by the magnitude of their task, which Ben’s sarcasm only accentuated. They’d be wandering around an area larger than the United States, asking questions of people who were notoriously distrustful of strangers. What were the chances of success? Nil, if she understood Ben correctly.

  ‘I looked on the web. It’s currently minus thirty degrees in Khabarovsk,’ Akiko heard Tex say. ‘Ben, you won’t have experienced cold like that in Miami.’

  ‘You’ve convinced me. Let’s not go.’

  ‘Pack thermal undies and you’ll be fine,’ Tex replied.

  ‘Any ideas how we move around?’ Ben enquired. ‘I don’t see any roads on this map.’

  ‘The sub-zero temperatures will help,’ said Akiko. ‘At this time of year, the rivers are all frozen solid. They use them as roads. Lake Baikal is one gigantic ice rink. There are also trains.’ She leaned over the map. ‘See? The Trans-Siberian Railway connects Khabarovsk and Irkutsk—that’s the main city at Lake Baikal.’

  ‘Once you’re incountry, I want to know where you’re both headed,’ said Tex. ‘If something happens, I need to know where to look for you.’

  ‘We’ll send postcards,’ said Ben.

  ‘The postal service out there will be at least three weeks behind your movements.’ Tex was thoughtful. ‘SMS me. Keep it short. It’s worth the risk. What are you going to do first?’

  ‘Grundy thought it would be a good idea to check into the Lubyanka,’ said Ben. ‘Who knows, maybe someone scratched a clue into a cell wall.’

  No one smiled.

  ‘And if that fails,’ he continued, ‘there are always the prison records. We might find someone prepared to give us a look.’

  ‘At the Lubyanka? Don’t hold your breath,’ said Tex.

  ‘We might get lucky.’ Ben shrugged. ‘And if not, it’ll be a short trip.’

  Ben turned and walked to the window, frustrated. Miami International Airport was just across the expressway. They’d be back in a week with nothing to show for it. What they were planning was plain dumb and somehow his dead father had manipulated him into it. A Continental 747 landed on the runway parallel to the expressway, its engines screaming in reverse, a plume of water mist and vapor billowing around the wings.

  He felt a presence behind him. He knew who it was before she spoke.

  ‘Thank you,’ Akiko said.

  ‘Thank you for what?’

  ‘For everything you’ve done; for everything you will do.’

  Ben turned to face her. ‘I’m not Curtis Foxx, Akiko. He ran into burning buildings to save people. You still don’t get it . . . I’m way too selfish to do anything like that.’

  January 31, 2012

  NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland. Lana swiped her way into the briefing room with her right hand, a thumb drive keeping the fingers of her left hand occupied. A buzzing sound followed by a green light on a panel at eye level told her the lock had disengaged and that she could enter. She pushed through the door and saw two men sitting at the pale, rose-colored wood table, waiting for her. One was Sam Whittle, her section head, a guy who must have had something compromising tucked away on the current NSA director because she had no idea how someone so inept could remain on the payroll, let alone climb through the ranks. The other man was a complete stranger.

  ‘Ah, Englese,’ said Whittle in his distinctively nasal voice. ‘Where’s your partner?’

  ‘Down in Texas, sir.’

  ‘Still? I wanted to tell him his transfer had come through.’

  ‘Transfer, sir?’ Lana asked, puzzled.

  ‘He’s going over to the dark side—FBI. I see you didn’t know.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Lana. She was surprised, but sanguine about it. The Bureau was the best place for Miller Sherwood, the bullshit fiasco in El Paso—the reason for his absence—proof of that.

  The stranger with Whittle gave a polite cough.

  ‘Okay, well, moving right along, this is Mr Buck from CIA.’

  ‘Mr Buck,’ said Lana.

  ‘Ms Englese,’ Buck replied.

  Whittle sat back, slouched, his fingers interlocked across a beer belly, his unfashionable black-framed glasses pushed up on his head, holding back a mane of long gray hair that should have been chopped off long ago.

  Lana passed her investigator’s eye over the CIA man. He was in his early sixties; so, close to retirement. He wore a blue business suit, white shirt, red silk tie. The suit was quality: microfine wool fabric and tailored; the tie, silk. He was short, lean, somewhat rodent-looking with sharp features, dyed brown hair, some old scarring on his neck. He had the look of a man who’d seen combat in his time. He also looked too well paid, a fact confirmed by the plain black Mont Blanc refillable pencil that lay across a leather-jacketed notepad on the table in front of him.

  Lana took a seat opposite the two men. She glanced up at the screen on the end wall. The hard drive was running so she inserted her USB thumb drive into the laptop on the table between them.

  ‘What have you got for us today?’ asked Whittle, a smile on almost non-existent lips.

  ‘Just to recap, a former RC-135 pilot by the name of Curtis Eugene Foxx, recently deceased, was a person of interest to the Agency. There were indications that Foxx may have had privileged information, perhaps even classified material, concerning the crash of a Korean airliner in 1983 that he passed to his son after his death. The son is one Benjamin Harbor of Key West, Florida, a charter pilot.’

  Both men agreed with a nod.

  ‘The source of these indications or the nature of the material wasn’t included in my brief. And while the enquiry has had a low priority,’ she continued, running her finger over the touch pad on the laptop and opening up the file, ‘I can confirm upfront that I believe sensitive material not only exists, but is in circulation.’

  Buck shifted in his seat, somehow more keenly focused.

  ‘Take us through your thinking, Investigator,’ said Whittle.

  Both men listened intently as Lana outlined what her investigation had uncovered, mentioning Ben Harbor and the items bequeathed to him by his late father, Curtis Foxx, and concluding with the key to a safe deposit box.

  Up onscreen, these objects appeared as captions within unconnected squares.

  ‘A safe deposit box,’ Buck repeated.

  �
��It was numbered 007,’ she said. ‘I managed to acquire the key to this box, which was held at a branch of the Bank of America in Orlando. There was nothing in it. Whatever the contents might have been, Harbor had already removed them.’

  ‘What do you think was in it?’ Buck asked.

  ‘A tape,’ Lana said.

  ‘A tape of what?’

  ‘Using surveillance equipment, we tracked Harbor to a radio station on Key West where he tried to have the tape played. This proved unsuccessful. My partner and I subsequently approached Mr Harbor and asked for the tape. He declined to hand it over, claiming it was unreadable and had been thrown out.’

  Lana paused to collect her thoughts, using the growing flow chart up on the screen to help her order them.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Whittle.

  ‘No, sir,’ Lana replied. ‘While my partner and I were interviewing Harbor at his place of residence, he received a call on a cell phone he was trying to hide. We managed to trace the call. An employee of the Homestead Florida Radio Shack purchased the phone, plus two others. The owner of this Radio Shack is Lieutenant Colonel Dallas “Tex” Mitchell, USAF, retired, the last surviving crew member known to have flown with Curtis Foxx.’

  Lana noted that Buck seemed agitated as he scrawled some notes.

  ‘Investigator Sherwood and I believed that Mitchell, being somewhat experienced with NSA methods, had established a closed communications network where he, Ben Harbor and a third party might communicate with each other with some degree of security.’

  ‘Why did Mitchell think the NSA might be snooping around?’

  ‘Because my partner and I interviewed him early on in the course of our investigation,’ said Lana.

  ‘How do you know Mitchell and Harbor had contacted each other prior to the establishment of the cell network between them?’ Whittle asked.

  Lana took a deep breath and launched into sanitized details of her first meeting with Ben. She then moved on to the money trail, which led to the former Chobetsu radar operator, Yuudai Suzuki, and to Akiko Sato, the daughter of one of the passengers onboard KAL 007.