The Hydra Protocol (44 page)

They left him to think about what had happened.

He’d been taken captive by the Russians, by the FSB—the security service. The KGB, for all intents and purposes, just with a brand-new name. There was no chance of escape, now. They would see to that. There was definitely no chance of a rescue. If Pavel Kalin had personally flown to Washington and asked Rupert Hollingshead if he wanted Chapel back, Hollingshead would have no choice but to say he’d never heard of a Jim Chapel. He would disavow the mission. What else could the director do? Admit he’d sent an American agent to sabotage a Russian military installation?

Chapel had known that going in. He’d known it when he’d joined the Rangers, and when he’d started working for military intelligence. It was how the game was played. Once he was in the field he was on his own, responsible for his own fate.

Well. He’d screwed that up pretty well.

Back in Ranger school, his instructor Bigelow had told him about what might happen if he was captured by the enemy. “Don’t expect humane treatment. Don’t expect them to treat you like a normal POW,” he’d warned. “Spies don’t go to country club prisons. They’ll want to know all your secrets, and they won’t ask politely. Now, if they start asking you for classified information, what do you give them?”

“Name, rank, and serial number, right?” Chapel had asked. “I just keep my mouth shut. If they put a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I don’t talk, well, I guess I let them shoot me.”

Bigelow had sighed and shook his head. “They’re not going to make it that easy. They’ll torture you. You’re a tough guy. You can take a lot of punishment, I’ve seen to that. But they’ll have all the time in the world, and it doesn’t take much more than a pair of pliers to make even a tough guy talk. Believe me, you won’t be able to hold out forever. They’ll get what they want, sooner or later. One way or another.”

“So what do I do? Just spill the beans at the first possible opportunity? Save myself from being tortured?”

“Absolutely not. You hold out as long as you can. Every day you resist, every hour, you give your handlers back home more time to minimize the damage your information can do. You give us time to change our codes, or move our troops to a new location, or set up new covers for your fellow agents. Any little crumb of time you can give us is useful. So you hold out. You bear the pain the best you can, and you hold out as long as you possibly can. When you finally do break, well, that’s natural, that’s human. But you think of your country and your duty, and you make the enemy work for it.”

Alone in the dark cell Chapel nodded to himself, promising himself he would fight. That he wouldn’t go down easy.

He had to admit, though, if only to himself—he was scared.

“Are you ready? Let us begin.” Kalin took out his notebook and a silver pen.

He sat on a chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room. The place they’d stuck Chapel was not quite a padded cell—its walls were actually lined with ceramic tile—but it was designed so that an inmate would find nothing inside with which to hurt himself. There was no way to commit suicide there. The windows were covered in thick, impact-resistant plastic. The room’s sole lighting fixture was recessed into the ceiling, well out of reach. There was no knob on the inside of the door. Kalin had to bring the chair in with him, and presumably he would take it with him when he left.

Chapel supposed you could bash your head against the wall until one of the tiles cracked. Use that to cut your own throat. You would need a lot of determination, though. You would need more strength than Chapel had.

“Where’s my arm?” Chapel asked. “When I was detained, I had a prosthetic left arm. What did you do with it?”

“We had to make sure it wasn’t a weapon,” Kalin said. He shrugged. “I’m afraid that in the process of analyzing it, the arm was destroyed. You won’t see it again.”

Chapel inhaled sharply. Then he nodded. He’d gotten by in the past with one arm. He knew how to live like that; he could do it again. There were other, more pressing concerns. “Are you going to feed me?”

“Subject has requested food,” Kalin announced, and made a note of it. “Do you have any dietary requirements? Perhaps religious in nature?”

Chapel stared at Kalin. Did he think Chapel was a Muslim? Or maybe an agent of Mossad? “I haven’t been given any food for more than twenty-four hours. That’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

“Which applies only to soldiers taken as prisoners of war. Are you a soldier?”

Chapel said nothing. He wanted to sit down but that meant sitting on the floor, and he wouldn’t give Kalin the psychological advantage.

“At the moment, we don’t even know your name. Are you willing to tell us your name? Once we have that, we can begin to process you correctly,” Kalin told him. “We’ll know how to move forward.”

Chapel turned his face away. If he admitted to being a soldier, then his presence at Aralsk-30 might be construed as an act of war. He could, instead, fall back on his cover and claim to be Jeff Chambers. But even if the cover held up, that would make him a criminal, a trespasser, and that would give Kalin the right to charge him and put him into the Russian court system. He did not have any faith that would improve his situation.

“All right,” Kalin said. “You aren’t interested in answering questions, I can see that.” He put his notebook away and stood up. “I’m in no rush. We’re really just filling in a few blanks here. Once I have a statement from you, I can file a report, but honestly, it doesn’t matter. Asimova and Vlaicu are dead, and you’re in custody, so there’s no need for alacrity.”

Dead?

Nadia and Bogdan were dead?

That got Chapel’s attention. He whirled around to study Kalin’s face, looking for any sign the man was lying.

If he was, it was impossible to tell. Kalin might have been carved from a block of marble. “You didn’t know, did you? Perhaps you thought they got away. Of course we couldn’t let that happen. We picked up the truck less than an hour after it left Aralsk-30. They were unwilling to surrender, and we had already sustained some casualties, so the order was given to fire rockets on the vehicle. There wasn’t much left of them, just enough to identify the bodies.”

Chapel dropped his head. Nadia was dead. After all he’d done to try to get her and Bogdan safely away, after everything—

“So you see, this is just a formality. But I do like to be thorough. We’ll see how you feel tomorrow, after you’ve spent the night with us.”

“Just let me sleep!” Chapel howled, as they held him down and poured energy shots down his throat. The orderlies laughed and shouted in his face—the words were in Russian, but it didn’t matter that he couldn’t understand; the meaning was clear. Loud music blared from speakers in the ceiling and the light kept getting brighter—then they were throwing ice water on him, dousing him in it until he shivered and cried out, and still they were laughing, laughing—

Sleep deprivation.

It was a kind of torture. Chapel’s head was reeling, and his eyes wouldn’t focus properly. He felt like hell, felt like he wanted to throw up but that wasn’t it, it wasn’t his stomach; his brain wanted to purge, to—to just stop, to—to—

Kalin came in, dragging his chair. The way its legs squeaked on the tiles made Chapel want to cringe in the corner and wrap his arm around his head. He forced himself to stand still, up against one wall, with an expression of stoic indifference on his face.

“Good morning,” Kalin said. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Chapel insisted.

Kalin didn’t laugh. He sat down in his chair and took out his notebook.

“Are you ready to tell me your name?” he asked.

Chapel bit back a profanity.

“Perhaps you’d like to tell me how you met the terrorist Asimova?”

Chapel scowled. “She was no—”

Kalin waited, pen poised over his notebook. “Yes?” he said.

Chapel screwed his eyes shut. Bit his tongue to keep it from moving. He’d come very close to giving himself away, there. Far too close. Sleep deprivation took away your filters, made you say things without thinking about them first.

He had to be very, very careful now. He took the time, let the pounding in his head recede. Waited until he was totally in control again before speaking.

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” he said. A small, pointless act of defiance. But it helped him straighten out his back and stand taller.

“That’s interesting. Especially given what we found when we tested your clothing. Forgive me if this is a bit . . . tasteless, but it’s germane to our conversation. We found traces of semen in your underwear. We also found her DNA—hairs, skin cells. Do you understand what that suggests?”

“That you’re some kind of underwear pervert?” Chapel asked. Childish, he knew. He could have done better if he could just think. Just think straight.

Kalin pursed his lips. “You do understand that you’re under investigation? Anything you say will be subject to verification.”

Chapel looked out the window. Or rather, he looked at the thick plastic that covered the window, and the bars beyond. He could see very little through those barriers. Just a sky the color of rotten tin.

Kalin waited patiently for a while before proceeding. “Subject does not acknowledge that he is under investigation,” he noted, eventually. “Exhibits signs of mental disorganization. Does not appear to follow logical questions.”

“That sounds like a psychological profile,” Chapel said. “I guess I am in an asylum, so it makes sense. What was that last night, a therapy session?”

“A method of persuasion,” Kalin said. “We have several at our disposal.”

“Sure. The KGB were always the experts in torture and interrogation,” Chapel said.

“I’m not KGB. The KGB doesn’t exist anymore.”

“You’re FSB, then,” Chapel pointed out. An organization that had been created, instituted, and staffed almost exclusively by former KGB agents.

“There
is
a difference, you know. The FSB is committed to human rights. We don’t hook up anyone to car batteries or pull out their fingernails with pliers. We won’t stick you in a cage full of rats.” Kalin laughed as if such things were quaint, old-fashioned practices, like writing with quill pens or traveling in horse-drawn buggies. “We won’t take you out in the courtyard and just shoot you.”

“Too messy,” Chapel said. “So how will you do it?”

“Do what?”

Chapel forced himself to grin. “Maybe you’ll inject me with polonium. That’s one of your techniques, right? Or maybe you’ll just let me starve.”

Kalin started writing in his notebook again. “Subject indulges paranoid fantasies. Believes he is to be killed. Believes he is important enough to be executed in violation of the rule of law.”

Chapel wanted to rip the notebook out of the bastard’s hand. “We both know how this ends,” he shouted.

“Do we? If I were to kill you, that would make it impossible for me to get the information I need. It would mean I couldn’t finish my report. No, no. I’m going to keep you healthy for as long as it takes.”

A little voice started screaming inside Chapel’s head, then. A voice of panic. It threatened to overwhelm him.

He fought it back.

“Let’s try to get back on course, all right?” Kalin asked. “Tell me your name.”

“You haven’t figured that out, yet? In your investigation?”

Kalin favored him with a cold smile. “I know that a man named Jack Carlson is wanted in Romania for destruction of property and discharging a firearm in public. I know that a man named Jeff Chambers is wanted for questioning in Uzbekistan. Since both of those men fit your description, and both were seen in the company of the terrorist Asimova, I think we can safely assume neither of those men really exist. I would like your real name. The one you use in America.”

Chapel turned away from Kalin. He started pacing back and forth, trying to get his blood moving so he could think more clearly. He hadn’t told Kalin he was an American. It wasn’t exactly hard to figure that one out, but if Kalin knew that much, then he must have already figured out that Chapel was a spy, that—

“Tell me your name. That’s all. Then I’ll let you sleep.”

“My name,” Chapel said. Oh, God. If Kalin knew so much already, what would it hurt? And to sleep—even if it was just a nap, just a catnap, a little sleep—

“Yes,” Kalin said. He held his pen over his notebook.

“My name is Napoleon Bonaparte. Put that in your psych profile.”

That night they took him out to the courtyard and made him walk in circles. Every time he flagged, every time he tried to stop in place and close his eyes, even for a second, an orderly would hit him with a baton. Not hard. Just enough to get him moving again. They had a knack for finding the bruises he already had and prodding those. They seemed to think it was funny when he jumped away from them. They started brandishing their batons at him even when he was moving, just to see him flinch.

In Ranger school, his trainer Bigelow had told him that a soldier needed to be able to sleep anywhere, anytime, under any conditions. “Sometimes you’ll be in the field for days on end. Behind enemy lines, or just in the middle of a battle that goes on and on. Your inclination will be to keep going, to just not sleep. Don’t do it. Even one night without sleep has the same effect as drinking three shots of tequila. It’s like being too drunk to drive. Your reaction time slows way down. You stop thinking about what you’re doing and you go on autopilot. You know what happens to a soldier who stops thinking on the battlefield?”

“He gets killed, sir,” Chapel had replied.

Bigelow had nodded. “That’s right. So you’re going to learn to sleep in a foxhole with artillery going off right next to you. You’re going to learn to sleep in a puddle of mud—to sleep standing up, if need be. You’ll learn to sleep for twenty minutes and feel as fresh as a daisy. You’ll—”

His reverie was interrupted by a quick blow to the bullet wound on his leg. Chapel shouted in pain and hopped forward on his other foot, while an orderly in a white coat laughed in his face. The man’s breath stank of meat.