Independence Day (38 page)

Robbins turned when he heard Chalmers enter.

“Hello, Derek,” he said.

Chalmers nodded but said nothing. His eye went to one of the beds. Katya was strapped to it, a variety of sensors attached to her neck, arms, head, chest, and legs. If necessary, her heart, blood, and breathing patterns could be run through MI6 computers in order to assess her level of honesty.

“Give us a few minutes, will you?” Chalmers said.

“Yes, of course. I’ll be upstairs.”

Chalmers looked at Smythson, who was still seated. She met his look.

“Me too?” she asked.

Chalmers nodded.

Katya had not moved since being strapped to the bed. She lay beneath a flannel blanket, her clothing having been removed except for panties and a bra. Her head was facing the wall, eyes shut.

What played through Chalmers’s mind, as he prepared to interrogate Katya, were the choices before him.

In Chalmers’s storied intelligence career, he’d been subjected to a multitude of enhanced interrogation techniques. As a KGB prisoner in 1979, Chalmers wasn’t allowed to sleep for extended periods of time. In 1982, the IRA locked him in a Belfast warehouse for almost a month. There, he was waterboarded and electrocuted, though the memory he hated most was of the time they made him kneel in front of a concrete wall for five days with a lightbulb dangling down in front of him. He remembered crying when they finally turned the lightbulb off, as if it had become his only friend, or a god. To this day, Chalmers never changed a lightbulb, an idiosyncratic remnant of his time in that basement.

Chalmers thus had a view of enhanced interrogation techniques that was less theoretical than that of most others in the intelligence community. He’d been there. He knew what worked and what didn’t. The challenge was that there was no way to know until the sessions began. Chalmers believed all torture could be effective if there was something there in the first place. If there weren’t secrets to be found, however, a prisoner could lead an entire operation down a rat hole simply to stop the pain.

Chalmers could understand Katya having a relationship with someone who had a secret. The question was, did she have real knowledge? It seemed a practical impossibility. How could someone who had to travel all the time, to practice every day for hours on end, be shielding someone with such dark intentions?

The problem for Chalmers was, if he spent the next day trying to get her to confess, he might end up in the exact same place he was now. If she knew nothing, he would get lies in order to stop the interrogation, lies that might misdirect the CIA at a time it needed to be sharpening its focus. He would also destroy any chance he had of eliciting passive but still vital information. If he broke trust with Katya by inflicting pain, she would shut down. He’d been there, and that is exactly what happened. The KGB wanted information he simply did not have. By beating him, his tormentors lost the opportunity to drag other key information out of him.

Chalmers went to a cabinet above the sofa and took out two glasses and poured each half full with scotch. He walked to the bed and lifted the blanket. Gently, he removed the sensors from her body, then unstrapped the bands from around her arms and legs. She remained with her eyes closed, her head facing the wall, motionless.

“Katya,” Chalmers said.

He waited for her to turn her head and look up. After more than a minute, she turned and opened her eyes. The aniline blue of her eyes, against the backdrop of dark skin and jet-black hair, was slightly jarring. She stared up at him.

“Would you like to try some single malt?” Chalmers asked. “It’s made just down the road. It’s quite good. It will calm you.”

Chalmers extended the glass. Slowly, Katya sat up. She took the glass, held it beneath her nose, sniffed it, then chugged it down in two large gulps. She held the glass back out to him.

“More,” she whispered very softly.

Chalmers smiled. He returned to the cabinet, poured her another glass, and brought it back.

“There,” he said as he handed it to her.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

Chalmers walked to the sofa and sat down. He took a sip.

“I saw you perform,” he said. “Paris.”

“Paris. When was this?”

“Five or six years ago, if memory serves.
Coppélia
.”

Katya nodded.

“Franz,” she said.

“Franz?”

“My lover.”

“Ah, yes, in the ballet.”

She sipped from her glass.

“Cloud is not a terrorist,” she said. “I know him. He’s a child. He has the heart of a child. A computer geek.”

“And yet he caused the deaths of a boat full of fishermen. He killed American soldiers.”

“No, I don’t believe it. You showed me pictures, but they could be from anywhere.”

“So I’m lying to you? Those men who took you, they did it why?”

“I don’t know. Ask them.”

“I did. You’re engaged to a terrorist.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head back and forth. “No, I don’t believe it.”

“You seem quite sure,” said Chalmers. “Which makes me wonder is there anything that would convince you?”

“No.”

“So if he himself told you he intended to detonate a nuclear device on the U.S., even that wouldn’t convince you?”

Katya stared at Chalmers across the room.

“You see what I’m getting at, don’t you, Katya? People have secrets. They end up doing things that are quite at odds with what we expect. Secrets. Swanilda has secrets. Franz has secrets. Everyone has secrets. Isn’t that right?”

Katya continued to stare at Chalmers.

“I want to ask you a question. Do you like the United States? I assume you’ve performed there, yes?”

Katya nodded.

“I love the United States. I’ve performed there many times. I would say perhaps fifty or sixty times.”

“New York?”

“Yes, of course, but also other places. Do you know what my favorite place is?”

“No, I don’t. Please tell me.”

“Kansas City. It was my first tour, when I was only fifteen years old.”

“So let me ask you a question. How many people do you think would die if a nuclear bomb went off in Kansas City?”

Katya took a sip.

“I don’t know.”

“I do. If the bomb Pyotr acquired were to detonate in Kansas City, at least a hundred thousand people would die. Of course, in New York or Boston, cities that are more likely to be the target, that number would be dramatically higher. You, just to be clear, will be forever known as the girlfriend, the fianc
é
e, actually, of the man who did this. If you truly were unaware, and you’re lucky, you’ll likely spend time in jail, perhaps a decade or so. You’ll never dance again. And, to be quite honest, if you are stubborn during this particular time period, when every second matters, when every minute is a precious commodity, when the plot could have been thwarted, even if you don’t know anything … if you’re stubborn now, my guess is you will not live to reach the age of thirty. The American government, if a bomb goes off, will erase anyone involved.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. It will happen in the jail itself, most likely. They’ll hang you, then report it as suicide. Or it will happen afterward. You’ll be walking down a street somewhere and a car will pull up, and you’ll be dead. It might even happen in the weeks immediately after the bomb goes off. After all, don’t forget that you’re a ghost now. Nobody even knows you’re alive.

“The time for patience, for discussion over a nice glass or two of scotch, that will be gone. You don’t need to know what he’s doing. You don’t need to have been knowledgeable of his activities. But you must help. If you don’t, and that bomb goes off, you’ll die, and far too young. Moscow, Saint Petersburg, London, Kansas City—you’ll never see them again. All for not being willing to simply listen.”

“You’re threatening me.”

“I’m telling you the truth. It’s not a threat. It’s fact. And you would deserve it. I could torture you, Katya, but I don’t want to. I want you to trust me.”

“How can I trust anyone? If what you say is true, the only person I have ever loved is a monster.”

“You’re thinking too much,” said Chalmers. “Right now, your singular objective should be survival. What I’m telling you is that if you want to live, cooperate. Do whatever you can to help.”

“I want to see your evidence.”

“There’s a folder on the shelf behind you. Read it.”

Chalmers leaned back on the sofa. Katya reached for the folder. For the next twenty minutes, as Chalmers sipped his scotch, she read through it.

When she finished, she stood and walked to the cabinet, poured herself another glass. Then, instead of walking back to the bed, Katya sat down next to Chalmers.

“I will help,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

74

ELEKTROSTAL

“There’s something we’re missing,” said Cloud. “I want the Langley transcripts again.”

“From when?”

“Everything from the explosion on.”

“They’ll be on your screen in a few seconds,” said Sascha.

A green icon appeared, indicating the file from Sascha had arrived. Cloud double-clicked it, then read through the transcripts of conversations from the CIA operations room. His eyes ripped left right with astonishing speed.

“There it is,” he said to himself, seething. “I knew it.”

“How could I have been so sloppy?” he shouted. “There are other agents. They must be the ones who took Al-Medi. Did we track him?”

“Yes,” said Sascha. “We know where they took him. It’s near Pobedy Park.”

Cloud stood up. He grabbed his raincoat from the floor.

“I need the address.”

“What if they moved him?”

“One of them is injured. Perhaps they’re still there.”

Cloud zipped up his raincoat, then looked at Sascha.

“What are you doing?”

“
Don’t you understand what’s happening?
” Cloud screamed. “There are two more agents. We need to remove them.”

Cloud turned and moved to the door.

“Stop!” yelled Sascha. “Don’t be a fool. You can’t go.”

Cloud turned around.

“And why not?”

“You’re the only one who knows where the bomb is going. If they catch you, they’ll dig it out of your head like a peach pit.”

“They won’t catch me.”

“But if they do—”

Cloud shook his head, finally releasing his grip on the doorknob.

“Then you have to go.”

Sascha nodded.

“It’s raining,” said Cloud. “Take the Mercedes. Park a few blocks away. There’s Semtex in the trunk.”

“Semtex?” Sascha asked, anxiety in his voice. “It will—”

“Level the building,” interrupted Cloud. “That’s the idea. You don’t even need to do anything except stick it near the house. The detonator is already wired. Set it, get at least two hundred meters away, detonate it.”

75

MOSCOW

Dewey parked the station wagon on a quiet side street near Moscow University, on the opposite side of the city from the safe house. If FSB was tracking the car, they would find it. When they did, he wanted to be far away.

He grabbed the pistol and cell phone, then climbed out into the pouring rain.

Scanning the street, he put his right hand in the coat and clutched the pistol, finger on the trigger. He took out the cell phone and turned it on, then dialed.

“Hi, Dewey,” said Calibrisi.

“I’m in Moscow.”

“We’re getting closer on Cloud’s location.”

“What about the team you were sending in?”

“They didn’t make it. You have two agents at the safe house. One of them is a case officer, and she’s smart. The other is an operator, but he’s badly injured.”

He walked several blocks, limping slightly, then ducked into a subway station.

“You mentioned someone else,” said Dewey as he moved through the brightly lit station, calm, eyes low to the ground, looking for signs of trouble, hand on the gun, ready, if necessary, to kill again.

“Alexei Malnikov.”

“Have him meet me at the safe house.”

Dewey hung up.

It was late and the station was empty but for a gray-haired woman behind bulletproof glass, waiting to sell tickets. He needed a ticket but didn’t want to risk the chance of being identified. He passed the ticket booth and walked to the turnstile and climbed over it. Looking back, he saw nothing to indicate she’d seen him break the law—or at least nothing to indicate she gave a damn.

On a bench near the tracks, he found a newspaper someone had left behind. It was in Russian, but there, above the fold, was his photo, next to a photo of Katya Basaeyev.

The train to Pobedy Park arrived a few minutes later. The car was empty. At the Pobedy Park station, he got out, then climbed the station stairs back into the driving rain.

The neighborhood was quiet and tree lined. Large stucco and brick homes were set back from the sidewalk, behind small gardens. Halfway down the block, across the street, he saw a white stucco town house with black shutters, four stories tall.

He scanned the quiet street. Except for a lamppost at the corner, it was completely dark. The rain had let up slightly. He waited beneath a large tree for several minutes, studying the house. Just as he was about to cross the street, a taxicab turned onto the road. Dewey flinched and stepped back behind the tree. He placed his hand inside the coat pocket, gripping the gun, finger on the trigger. He watched as the cab approached, then sped by.

In the quiet aftermath, he felt his heart beating fast.

Cool off.

Dewey’s eyes returned to the safe house. That was when he noticed a man. He was across the street, walking by the safe house.