Agnes nodded. “I’ll follow your orders, but there’s one more thing,” she said. “I love you.” Nate looked at her for a long beat, trying to say it with his eyes. That white forelock, Jesus. He turned away.
The subaltern stood up, the signal. It was time. As the surprised students looked on sullenly, two militiamen stepped behind Nate and grabbed him tightly above the elbows, spun him around, and walked him through a door at the end of the dormitory lobby. He didn’t resist, husbanding his strength. Agnes didn’t look at him, and the last thing he saw as he was pushed through the door was that no one had seized her. Thank Christ. Nate was led down a manicured gravel path through a dense stand of pines, their fresh scent competing with the salt air. Nate thought he could see glimpses of water through gaps in the trees, but the militiamen yanked him straight whenever he looked to the side. At the end of the path, quite alone, deep in the forest, stood an ornate Russian log cottage with decorative fringe tracing the steep gables, a pair of casement windows with rustic diagonal muntins and a polished wooden door with wrought-iron hinge straps and a grated speakeasy. Fucking Hansel and Gretel. The guards opened the door and pushed him into a deep armchair upholstered in dark-green fabric. Nate looked around the spartan living room with a single couch and two end tables. A framed picture of Lenin hung on the wall in front of Nate, the unsmiling portrait of him while in exile, around age fifty, with the piercing stare, the goatee, the straight mouth without a trace of mirth or mercy.
The bare logs on the walls and along the pitched ceiling were light-colored and polished, their gleam lighting up the room in the afternoon light. This was a secluded guesthouse, or perhaps the personal quarters of some caretaker. The two militiamen stood on either side of the armchair and pushed him back down into the chair when he tried to get up, apologetically saying toileta. He wanted to look around the cabin for escape points, and to test the degree of free movement allowed him, but for now, no dice. Nate knew this was going to be hard or easy, a sophisticated interrogation or a basic police-level interview. He expected the latter, for starters. A lot was going to depend on his attitude, the mood and skill of the interrogators, what exactly they wanted to know, and the urgency of their inquiries. He planned on sassing them, pissing them off, and holding out for as long as possible.
Early in training, Nate had attended classes in interrogation—resisting it, not inflicting it. The instructor, an Argentine operator—with a perpetually flicking eyelid and improbably named Ramón Lustbader (named by his mother after silent-screen star Ramón Novarro) with an attitude worse than Gable’s—had told the class that the bottom line was that everyone eventually gave it up; it was just a matter of how long you put up with the pain or drugs. Classically, the goal was to hold out forty-eight hours, an artificial period ostensibly long enough for a blown asset or a compromised network of assets to exfiltrate, but that was largely outdated film noir, Cold War theatrics.
In actuality, Ramón said, it was the pain of physical punishment—and the ancillary techniques of sleep deprivation, starvation, and extremes of hot or cold—that broke prisoners. The mysterious and feared psychotropic drugs such as ethanol, sodium thiopental, amobarbital, and scopolamine that reportedly could compel prisoners to talk, and that could, after prolonged use, plunge the human brain to the cognitive level of one of the lesser apes, in reality did not compel subjects to begin blurting the truth. Rather, these drugs unlocked memories, reduced inhibitions, and heightened suggestive responses that could, in the hands of a skilled interrogator, prompt the blurting of desired information. Common sleeping gas at the dentist, nitrous oxide, had the same effect.
Lustbader’s eyelid pulsed as he lectured the class. “If you focus on a thought or person, or on an external object, really obsessively focus, the mind can effectively counteract the effects of the interrogation drugs that coincidentally quickly spike in effectiveness, then dissipate dramatically. Coming out of it feels like rising to the surface after a deep dive. The euphoria at that stage, the rush back to the light, is the danger period where the ebullient subject is most likely to be susceptible to elicitation.” He looked at the trainees who were dreaming of future glories in the field, or thinking about lunch. “Unless they want to turn you into a gibbon monkey—though I suspect some of you in this class are already halfway there—they cannot top you off with more drugs for another twelve hours, without risking harm.”
None of the students ever dreamed they would in the course of their careers have to recall Ramón’s words.
* * *
* * *
When SUSAN sent the encrypted flash message detailing MAGNIT’s verbal report about a CIA case officer infiltrating the compound to contact an American-handled mole, code-named CHALICE—a mole who somehow knew the closely held identity of Admiral Audrey Rowland—Gorelikov was amazed. The tenacity of the Americans to recruit sources deep inside the corridors of the Federation never seemed to abate. Unmasking this CHALICE was not going to be easy. As much as Gorelikov had run MAGNIT meticulously as his own asset recently, there were an infinite number of potential leaks and points of entry into the case: a dozen GRU handlers from the early years, twice as many supervisors, records clerks, the Security Council staff, and technical experts evaluating MAGNIT’s voluminous reporting. But none of these people was on the VIP guest list for the Cape Idokopas weekend gala. The two hundred guests were service chiefs, ministers, and the slobbering siloviki around the president. But who knew about MAGNIT? Bortnikov of FSB, that idiot from the GRU, the president. But that is not how secrets are lost: mistresses hear things, people get drunk and brag at a party, the president himself might comment on MAGNIT to an old friend from the Petersburg years, and the bird is out of the cage, impossible to trace back to the source.
There was one thing: Egorova did not know MAGNIT’s name, which provisionally exonerated her and meant that Gorelikov could depend on her to assist in the counterintelligence investigation, but there was no time to fiddle with suspects and interviews. CHALICE had to be identified and wrapped up within the next five days. Word from the Washington rezidentura was that the derogatory stories had been loudly trumpeted by a US press corps with a taste for political calamity: Senator Feigenbaum and Ambassador Vano were out of the running for DCIA, and VADM Rowland would begin congressional confirmation hearings immediately.
Gorelikov contemplated the audacity of the Americans to send an operations officer into Russia, to the president’s compound, to brazenly meet an agent to scoop up MAGNIT’s true name. The bastard case officer being held in the Gorki cottage in the woods was the key: the identity of CHALICE had to be ripped from his throat. Gorelikov had quickly assembled three experts in interrogation methods: a doctor from Moscow State University who specialized in psychotropic drugs; a psychologist from the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry; and a behavioral scientist from Section 12 of Line S in SVR, the illegals directorate. Meanwhile, the honored party guests were arriving by limousine, shuttle bus, or personal helicopter, each according to their place on the food chain. And one of them was CHALICE. Gorelikov frantically summoned Egorova, and briefed her on the situation, and together they hurried through the woods to the cottage. Egorova was smart and capable. Gorelikov saw the color drain from her face as she instantly realized the imminent danger to MAGNIT.
* * *
* * *