Palace of Treason

4

Colonel Alexei Zyuganov had neither the sophistication nor, frankly, the inclination to win Egorova’s loyalty. Personal relationships were not important. No one knew his early history; no one knew anything about his childhood. His father, a prominent apparatchik, had disappeared in the early sixties, at the tail end of the Khrushchev purges. His mother was Ekaterina Zyuganova, a well-known figure in the old KGB. Ekaterina had sat on the KGB Executive Council, then as KGB liaison officer in the Secretariat of the Central Committee, and finally on the Collegium of the KGB. Short, mustached, bosomy, with fantastic upswept hair, Ekaterina had worn the Orden Krasnoy Zvezdy, the Order of the Red Star, awarded for her “great contribution to the defense of the USSR in war and peacetime and for ensuring public safety” until things changed and it no longer was modnyi, fashionable, to continue wearing the red ceramic device.

Nineteen-year-old Alexei was brought into the Service by bonna, maternal patronage, but had failed to make an impression in various low-level assignments. Bad-tempered, at times irrational, and occasionally prone to displays of violent paranoia, Alexei was going nowhere in the bureaucracy: Everyone knew it, but supervisors’ instincts for self-preservation prevented them from recommending he be cashiered. No one dared defy Madame Zyuganova: Ekaterina protected her son with implacable determination. Then Zyuganov had disappeared from the corridors of Headquarters: Momma finally had found sonny boy an assignment for which he was singularly qualified.

Zyuganov was read in as one of four subcommandants of the Lubyanka prison, a formal KGB position title sufficiently anodyne to discourage public scrutiny, with no paperwork or records required. In reality he had joined the small staff of present-day Lubyanka interrogators, experts in chernaya rabota, black work, liquidations, torture, and executions. They were the successors of the Kommandatura, the coal-black department of the NKVD that was the instrument of Stalin’s purges and which had eliminated White Russian émigrés, Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and, in twenty-eight consecutive nights in the spring of 1940, seven thousand Polish prisoners in the Russian forest of Katyn. In four years Zyuganov was promoted as Lubyanka’s second chief executioner and, when the chief executioner — a patron and protector — faltered, he had reveled in the career high of putting a bullet behind his boss’s right ear. Zyuganov had found a home.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought an end to unrestricted wet work. Part of the KGB morphed into the modern SVR; the Lubyanka cellars closed and the building now belonged to the internal service, the FSB. Zyuganov could have made the lateral move to SVR Department V, colloquially still referred to as the Otdel mokrykh del, the department of wet affairs, as one of the “wet boys,” but his mother, Ekaterina, knew better and wanted to forfend his future. She had by that time stepped down from her last position in the Collegium, and a cushy if inconsequential retirement assignment to Paris as zampolit, a political advisor to the rezident, had been arranged. Mother’s last act from Headquarters had been to place Zyuganov as third chief in Line KR, the counterintelligence department. Alexei would be safe there and could work his way up. It was all she could do for her murderous little boy.

The psychopathy of not feeling pity, mixed with innate aggression fueled by sadism, leavened by the utter inability to relate to others’ emotions, had been singularly well-suited to Zyuganov’s ingenue career in the cellars. With the passing of the Lubyanka salad days, when an executioner could be as busy as he could have wished, the post-Soviet era was a definite disappointment. Things had picked up with President Putin, however. Splashy overseas operations — Yushchenko in Ukraine, Litvinenko and Berezovsky in the United Kingdom — had settled the hash of noisy exiles, and domestic troublemaking journalists and activists — Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Markelov, and Baburova — had been obliterated. But for every one of these high-publicity actions there were dozens of lesser bugs that needed quiet squashing: independent provincial administrators, military logistics managers who did not tithe sufficiently to Moscow, uppity oligarchs who needed a reminder of how Russia worked now. All these and more eventually found themselves in the basement medical wings of either Lefortovo or Butyrka prisons.

Defendants would be remanded to Colonel Zyuganov after extended sessions in the procurator’s office, denying scattershot accusations of fraud, or bribery, or tax evasion. This is when trouble would start. Whispered rumors in Yasenevo held that once Colonel Zyuganov inhaled the bloom of the clammy drains in those desperate subbasements he changed — literally and figuratively — insisting on taking over and directing the interrogations personally, but only after having buttoned the vintage Red Army field tunic he favored while working, a brown-speckled coat, stiff and cracking with blood, reeking of pleural or vitreous or cerebrospinal fluids, all grudgingly spilled by enemies of the State.

They were already guilty — Zyuganov’s head swam with impatience to inflict pain, he could taste it — and his instructions were to extract a confession — prisvoenie, embezzlement; vzyatochnichestvo, bribery; khuliganstvo, hooliganism; nizost’, turpitude; whatever — by means of increasingly vigorous levels of physical discomfort, Levels One through Three. There occasionally were accidents — when they would not listen, or refused to comply — and Zyuganov’s vision would clear in time to see guards wheeling broken bodies out of the interrogation theater on gurneys draped with rubber sheets. Zyuganov couldn’t help that: Instruments sometimes slipped, arteries were nicked, and dislodged hematomas would cause the brain to swell.

Occasionally, a prisoner’s real or imagined potential for embarrassing, resisting, threatening, thwarting, or plotting against President Putin made him or her inconvenient. Colonel Zyuganov would receive the vintage “VMN” code-word call on the prison administrator’s Kremlovka line direct from the commissariat of the president. VMN, Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya, Supreme Degree of Punishment, from the old Article 58 of Stalin’s state penal code. It meant that the citizen should disappear, and that Zyuganov could indulge himself during an interrogation. He could splinter the bones of the legs and pelvis of a prisoner with a heavy baton — bendy steel reinforcing bars worked best — then walk around to the head of the table, sit on a low stool, stick his face close, and breathe in the shivering groans, watch the rolling eyes, and listen to the silver thread of spittle hit the slippery tile floor.

A year earlier there had been official trouble — recriminations — during the interrogation of two Chornye Vdovy, two Chechen Black Widow suicide bombers. The women had been arrested as they were boarding a bus in Volgograd; the bombs around their bellies had not detonated. A directive from the Kremlin secretariat — essentially instructions from the president himself — took primacy away from the internal security service, the FSB, and by name designated SVR Colonel Zyuganov, veteran KGB and Lubyanka executioner, responsible for the women’s interrogation. Zyuganov’s swamp-water heart nearly burst with pride: He would not fail the president.

As chief of KR, Zyuganov knew counterintelligence information was urgently needed: the Chechens’ cutouts, bomb-making confederates, and urban safe houses had to be identified. His impatience to extract the info, more to please his leader than to protect and preserve the Motherland, put a ragged edge on his already ragged soul.

At the start of the first session, the stronger of the two girls — Medna was her name, she was dark, thin, vital — spat on Zyuganov’s vintage Red Army tunic. This was a serious infraction, massive impertinence. The scaly rage that lived in Zyuganov’s intestines roared up and out of his mouth and before he could stop himself, he had dogged the knurled handle of the high-backed garrote chair Medna had been strapped to one turn too far, and the mechanism that had been slowly choking her instead collapsed her trachea with an audible pop, obstructing her airway and resulting in a noiseless, blue-faced death in thirty seconds. Shit, thought Zyuganov — one potential source of tactical intelligence was gone. That suka, that bitch, had cheated him.

The second Chechen prisoner clearly was terrified. Her name was Zareta and she was thinking about the day when a middle-aged woman came to her parent’s house in the capital city of Grozny, spoke quietly to her mother, then took Zareta into the bedroom for an hour of mesmerizing, overwhelming, hypnotizing conversation. That recruitment afternoon had been the beginning, she thought, and now this is the end. Through the sour hood over her head she could hear shoes squeaking on floor tiles around her and the click of a snap hook on the wire that bound her wrists behind her back. Her legs shook with fright and she breathed hard into the cloth hood. A ratchet sound began and her arms were hoisted behind her, higher than her waist, forcing her to lean forward, her shoulder tendons screaming. If they had been conversational, Zyuganov could have told Zareta that strappado — suspension by the arms — was used by the Medici family in Florence as early as 1513. But Zyuganov didn’t have time to chat.

Screaming into the hood, Zareta could not immediately identify what was being done to her — it sufficed only to know that her body was engulfed in pain, serious pain that was elemental, sharp, and electric, beneath her skin, deep in her vitals. Her legs shook and she felt her urine on the floor under her bare feet. Then the questions in Russian began; each was repeated by a female voice in accented Chechen. In thirty minutes, Zareta had stuttered the names of the woman who had recruited her, the head and number two of her training cell, the location of two training camps in Chechnya, one in Shatoy, seventy kilometers south of the capital at the end of the P305, and another east of Grozny, in Dzhalka, off the M29.

It was infinitely more terrifying not to be able to see, not to be able to anticipate each assault on her nervous system. She screamed out the name of the young man who assembled the suicide vests in Volgograd, and that of the boy who had strapped the tape-wrapped explosive sausage around her waist, snug under her breasts. He had smiled at her through his beard. If he wasn’t dead already, she had just killed him.

The woman’s voice came to her again, in the strange accented Chechen, asking about Black Widow operations in Moscow. Zareta knew one name and one address, but was determined not to betray these last colleagues. The Chechen voice was replaced by the Russian voice, reedy and harsh — it barely sounded human. Even though bent over double, Zareta could feel the person next to her. Someone slapped her on the back of the head. She felt fingers fiddling with her hood and it was roughly whisked off. The sudden white light of the laboratory made her wince, but it was nothing compared to what was in front of her, a foot away. Zareta screamed for three minutes, seemingly without taking a breath.

Medna’s body was upright in the high-backed chair. She sat regally, hands wired to the armrests, head held upright by a strap around her forehead. Her face was a mass of purple bruises. She stared at Zareta through half-closed lids, her mouth barely open. Dried blood trails on either side of her mouth and nostrils completed the war-paint look. The real horror, the Zyuganov touch, was that Medna sat in the chair with her legs delicately crossed, as if at the theater, with the little toe of the foot closest to Zareta’s face snipped off. Zyuganov clapped his hand over Zareta’s mouth to stifle the paroxysm of screams.

“Look at her,” Zyuganov said. “She’s telling you to live.” He grabbed a handful of Zareta’s black hair and shook her head. “Live, and survive, and return to your parents. You have been deceived and used by these animals. All I require is one name and one address. Then we are done.” As if to demonstrate, he lowered Zareta’s arms until she could stand upright and wobbly, unclipped the hoisting rope, and snipped the wire off her wrists. She bowed her head, unable to look at the ruined envelope of her friend, unwilling to contemplate her own surrender.

She looked up at Zyuganov and hesitated, then whispered the name of the controller in Moscow and the address of an apartment in a high rise building in the southern Moscow suburb of Zyablikovo. Zyuganov nodded and clasped Zareta’s face and squeezed her cheeks, a “that’s a good girl” gesture. He then walked to a stainless steel table against the wall. Zareta, the busty matron who spoke Chechen, and the uniformed prison guard in the corner of the room all watched as he pulled a large gray handgun from under a towel, turned, and walked back to them. Zyuganov raised the pistol — a MP412 REX revolver loaded with devastating .357 magnum cartridges — and shot the already-dead Medna in the left temple from a foot away.

Zareta looked at Zyuganov with horrified disbelief. The guard held his hand over his mouth. The matron had turned away, clasping her stomach, and was vomiting on the floor. The hydrostatic shock of the bullet had tipped Medna and her chair over and the blood left in her body was spreading out in a black lake over the white tiles, migrating slowly toward the large central drain. Normal’no, just right, thought Zyuganov. This was just the kind of ogre’s party he liked.

“Her mother can stuff her head with newspaper, to fill out her kozhukh, her head shroud,” said Zyuganov in a voice that seemed several octaves too low, as if the devil had suddenly started speaking. Hands trembling, Zareta blinked away the blood from her lashes and wiped her sticky face, seeing the horns and yellow goat’s eyes and the cloven hooves, and wondered how she would ever erase the memory of this brilliant, white-tiled room, or this chort, this little black devil with the foul jacket, or how she could return alive to Chechnya, where there would be a reckoning with the council for her betrayal and with her parents’ shame. She could see their faces, but she would be alive, and she told herself that she wanted to live.

Zyuganov motioned for the guard — the soldier’s face was gray — to take Zareta away, and as she turned toward the door and shuffled past him, Zyuganov put the muzzle of the revolver behind her left ear and pulled the trigger. Zareta dropped in a heap and lay on her face, the prison smock up around her hips. No dignity in death, thought Zyuganov, the little provincial slut. The guard howled in fright — he had had been splattered with something out of the girl’s head — and the matron began vomiting again in the corner. Zyuganov surveyed the pink and dripping room for a second, then hurried out to draft his interrogation report for the internal service — but really for Putin. He wanted to report success and the vital CI information promptly.

Days later, prison administrators submitted a written complaint, requesting that Colonel Zyuganov be censured for excessive brutality and criminal acts including torture and homicide, but the complaints evaporated in the blue-eyed blink of an eye. The president had given him a task, and Alexei had delivered. To the grousing officials Putin was reported as saying, Delat’ iz mukhi slona, don’t make an elephant out of a fly.

Young Alexei had surprised himself by doing well in the distrustful peat bog of SVR counterintelligence, and in time was promoted to the chief’s position. His paranoid grain was well suited to the work. Zyuganov had learned much during the formative Lubyanka years — cunning overlaid his crusty homicidal urges — though his instincts were still firmly in a Soviet Jurassic zone. He understood the politics a little better. He missed the excesses of the Soviet years, and the president was Russia’s best hope to reclaim the majesty and power of the Soviet Union, to restore the red-toothed fury and jaw-breaking brutality that had made former enemies cower.

Very few of the officers working in Line KR could in clinical terms define the worm farm that was Chief KR Alexei Zyuganov’s brain. A trained psychologist in SVR’s Office of Medical Services perhaps would classify Zyuganov’s monstrous urges as patent malignant narcissism, but that would be like calling Dracula a melancholy Romanian prince. Zyuganov was much more than that, but all his subordinates needed to know was that the whiplash sting of the bantam centipede could come without warning, rages triggered by a perceived slight, an omission in work, an urgent tasking from the fourth floor, or, especially, opprobrium from the Kremlin — disapproval from the other diminutive narcissist who ruled behind those red walls. People in KR paid for any mistake that might even remotely make their chief appear lacking to the president. Zyuganov worshipped Putin like an Aztec worships the sun.

Zyuganov’s deputy, Yevgeny, had been working largely unnoticed in KR for three years by the time the toxic dwarf arrived. Zyuganov had kept his eye on him, looking not for talent or initiative, but for unmitigated and abject loyalty. Overly ambitious deputies were a danger: Executioners tend not to trust people standing behind them. Zyuganov tested his hirsute deputy-designate early on by sending a number of ringers into him, some with offers of employment elsewhere in SVR, others to dangle bribes or commissions. The most important tests were the malen’kiye golubi, the little pigeons who whispered slander against Zyuganov himself, or who proposed plots against him. Yevgeny reported them all to Zyuganov, promptly and without omission. After an interim year of tests and snares and traps, Zyuganov was satisfied and promoted Yevgeny to be his deputy in KR. Yevgeny worked hard, kept his mouth shut, and did not care about his boss’s sweet tooth for the cellars, straps, and syringes.

Now, Zyuganov sat slumped in his seat in the Line KR conference room, peevishly watching as Dominika — just returned from Paris — made her report on Jamshidi. She willed herself not to wince when she moved, for her ribs were on fire. She briefed four SVR managers — the chiefs of Lines X (technical intelligence), T (technical operations), R (operational planning), and KR (counterintelligence.) Line X would prepare intelligence requirements on Iran’s centrifuges for the upcoming meeting with Jamshidi in Vienna.

Dominika had gently rejected the Line X suggestion that she include a nuclear energy analyst during the upcoming debriefing. Jamshidi was untested and would be too skittish to accept a new face this soon, she argued. She assured the gathered chiefs that she could manage the initial technical details until the case was utverdivshiysia, more completely institutionalized, with Jamshidi completely under the yoke. They grumpily agreed to wait, for the sake of the operation.

Zyuganov looked past the chiefs at her, appraising, weighing, calculating. Of course she wanted to handle Jamshidi alone. She was monopolizing the case — she would in turn trot over to the Kremlin with the intelligence, soliciting — ensuring — Putin’s favor. He contemplated the delicate situation. Egorova was essentially untouchable. He would have to be careful — ordering the unsuccessful Paris attack to disable his statuesque officer had been a calculated but risky action. She didn’t seem to be badly damaged — despite a doubtful report from Paris to the contrary — and in fact had demonstrated that she had her own claws. He had already given follow-up orders to cauterize that operation: Fabio would be floating buns-up in the Canal Saint-Martin by now, his long hair fanned out in the sewage.

Dominika saw the hooked-talon bat wings of black unlimber behind Zyuganov’s head. She sensed his agitation; she knew he was watching, assessing, calculating. Assuring him of her loyalty was folly: He did not expect it, and he would not believe it, from her or from anybody. She would not antagonize him, even though she was certain he had ordered the mugging in Paris — about which she had said nothing on her return to Moscow. It showed what Zyuganov was capable of, how far he would go. How little the Service had changed since the purges of the 1930s and 1950s.

In KR, there was no specific group dedicated to offensive operations — the Jamshidi Iranian case was an example — so Egorova had conveniently been tucked away and assigned responsibility by default. Zyuganov wanted her occupied, kept in the dark; she would not be included in the other work of the department, he and Yevgeny would see to that. Not so easy keeping her penned up. Not easy at all. Shilo v meske ne utaish, you cannot hide an awl in a sack.

With the dim intuition of a sociopathic paranoid, Zyuganov acknowledged that he repulsed her, but that did not bother him. He did however want to establish alpha-wolf primacy. So after the briefing, Zyuganov had insisted she accompany him to Lefortovo to observe an interrogation. “You need to learn this work” — he had smirked — “for when you conduct your own investigations.”

“Of course,” said Dominika, determined not to show the panic she felt at returning to Lefortovo. She had been imprisoned there herself and “interrogated,” but she never confessed, never gave in, and was released after six weeks of agony. She had endured refrigerated cells, electric shock, and nerve manipulation, but in the end she had looked into the eyes of her interrogators, read their colors, and knew she had won.

She followed Zyuganov’s black fog as he scuttled along the same Lefortovo basement corridor she herself had been frog-marched down, the splintered wooden cabinets at each corner still there, into which prisoners would be shoved and locked to prevent them from seeing another passing prisoner, to starve the soul and deny human contact. Dominika kept her face impassive — Zyuganov was sneaking looks at her — and forced herself to keep walking on nerveless legs. The dwarf hurried forward with his nose up like a bird dog in a wet field. They passed the familiar steel doors with the spalling paint, the ones that hid the drains, hooks, and horrors, and rounded a corner. Zyuganov motioned for a guard to open a separate steel door, then continued down the corridor with solid doors on either side. There were none of the familiar prisoner screeches and bellows from behind these doors, no animal eyes peering out from the narrow food hatches. It was utterly silent here.

They stopped at the last of the doors in the corridor and Zyuganov hammered on it with his fist. A steel slat banged open, eyes briefly appeared, then a steel bolt shot and the door opened. Zyuganov bustled in, nodding at a plump prison matron in a too-tight uniform coat. Dominika followed Zyuganov inside, hearing the door slam closed behind her. It was an interrogation room unlike she had ever seen before, more like a surgical theater. The room was brilliantly lit in a gassy white haze from overhead tubes that cast no shadows. Three-inch square white tiles covered the floor and continued up the walls to the ceiling. The air was thick with fumes that stung her nose and throat — the wall tiles had been mopped down with ammonia. Zyuganov turned to her to gauge her reaction, breathing in the air like he was in a rose garden.

Along the wall, stainless steel tables had tools and instruments laid out. A larger table was in the center of the room, beneath a canted surgical light head. A drainpipe ran from one corner of the table into the floor. Zyuganov took off his suit coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He took a brown coat off a hook on the wall and put it on, buttoning the bottom buttons but leaving the tunic top unfastened. Jaunty, with a barnyard smell. He looked at his watch and turned to the matron.

“Ring for the tray before we begin,” he said.

She walked to the wall, pressed a button, and in a minute there was a knock on the door and a second matron entered carrying a tray covered by a cloth napkin. She set it on the stainless table over the drainpipe for bodily fluids and whipped the cloth away.

“Selyodka, Captain,” said Zyuganov, “we haven’t had lunch yet.” Dominika, standing just inside the door to the room, could smell the pickled herring and onions over the tang of the disinfectant ammonia. She shook her head and sat in a chair away from the table. Zyuganov was enjoying himself.

“Fetch our guest,” he said to the guard, his mouth full of herring.

They waited two minutes in silence, apart from the wet noises Zyuganov made while he ate. Looking at the back of the dwarf’s little head, Dominika focused on the depression below the back of his skull and just above the start of the cervical vertebrae, the spot she would choose to plunge one of the stainless steel surgical chisels set out on the side table.

The door opened and the matron pulled a woman into the room. Her hands were handcuffed behind her and she wore only a dirty prison smock and felt slippers.

“Gospozha Mamulova,” Mrs. Mamulov, said Zyuganov, wiping his mouth with a napkin. The matron pushed the woman into a steel chair, which Dominika noticed was bolted to the tile floor, and stood behind Mamulova, her hands casually on her shoulders. Zyuganov dismissed both guards with a wave and turned to Dominika.

“Captain, come here and hold her shoulders.” Dominika frantically thought of some excuse to refuse, but was determined not to falter in front of Zyuganov. She could feel the slight woman trembling under her hands, and wondered what she had done. Zyuganov pulled up a chair to sit facing the woman, their knees almost touching, and he leaned forward till he was inches from her face. There was a faint crackling sound when the dried gore on his jacket flaked off. Dominika breathed through her mouth to avoid the smell while trying to recall how she knew the name Mamulov. Who was this woman?

Irina Mamulova was in fact the wife of Russian media tycoon Boris Mamulov, whose communications empire included print and broadcast holdings. Mamulov had massively defied the Kremlin: His reporters had assiduously covered current Russian politics, running successive interviews with dissidents and rival political figures, including the telegenic members of the punk rock protest group Pussy Riot after their release from prison. Mamulov’s public opposition to the reelection of Vladimir Putin naturally triggered an investigation into his taxes and overseas bank accounts, which in turn led to the inevitable charges from the Moscow Procurator’s Office of corruption, tax evasion, and theft. The blue-eyed scorpion’s tail was rigid, curled forward, waiting to lance into flesh.

Mamulov knew what happened to people who defied Putin — prison terms, traffic accidents, cardiac episodes, fatal muggings — and chose not to return to Moscow after a business trip to Paris. He sent urgent word to his wife, Irina, to gather her sable coat and jewelry and meet him at their antiques-filled apartment on the Avenue Foch. Irina was detained at Vnukovo International Airport thirty minutes before departure to Orly and driven to Lefortovo in a closed van. As she was processed into the political prisoners’ block, no property inventory was completed. Her fur and jewelry disappeared as completely as President Putin’s previous enemies.

Putin had called Zyuganov on the Kremlovka — the direct line from the Kremlin — and, with a straight face, had directed him to request Mamulova to kindly detail her husband’s overseas holdings, including the numbers of the accounts, to be able to clear him of the charges of corruption. Zyuganov was also directed to ask that Irina please convince Boris to return to Moscow from Paris as soon as conveniently possible. Putin told Zyuganov he had full confidence that he would satisfy the investigative requirements with discretion.

The Kremlovka needn’t have been encrypted, for Putin’s sly requests were clear. Irina was a hostage, bait to draw Boris back to the Rodina, and if black eyes, or loose teeth, or tissue hematomas — Level One injuries — inflicted on his young wife did not hasten his return, well, there were Levels Two and Three to consider.

Irina Mamulova was in her early thirties, with black hair to her shoulders. She was of medium height and slim, with Slav cheekbones and large brown eyes. She had met Mamulov when she was twenty-five, while working in one of his radio stations and, despite her new life of private jets and yachts and penthouses, the pretty young Mrs. Mamulov was sensible and perceptive. She had been in Lefortovo for a week already and knew what was happening. She had resolved not to cooperate. Her husband, Boris, must stay out of Russia.

Dominika stood inside the green bloom around Irina’s head — she was terrified, anticipating discomfort. Zyuganov’s black wings overlaid her color as he leaned close, breathing pickled herring in her face.

“I was anxious to come today to see how you are,” said Zyuganov. “We have heard that your husband is quite concerned for you, is contemplating returning to Moscow to settle these legal troubles.” Irina’s head came up and she searched Zyuganov’s face. Her eyes dimmed when she realized he was lying.

“When Monsieur Mamulov returns, this unpleasant interlude can end,” said Zyuganov. Monsieur? Interlude? marveled Dominika, trying to imagine the oxidized circuits in this little man’s brain. Zyuganov moved so their knees touched, and Irina cringed. Zyuganov looked up at Dominika without expression, as if checking whether she was still in the room.

“I heard a story yesterday,” said Zyuganov conversationally. “A woman came to the police. ‘Please, help, my husband is missing. Here is his photo and personal information. When you find him, tell him that my mother decided not to visit!’”

Zyuganov looked up again at Dominika, as if to confirm she had liked the joke. Irina stared motionless at him. Russians had long been programmed to get the message. Irina’s mother’s neck was in the noose next.

“We should tell Boris that your mother decided not to visit,” whispered Zyuganov. “Maybe that would reassure him.” He got up, went over to a side table, and came back with a short leather sap in his hand — flat black stitched leather, weighted at either end. Irina closed her eyes. Her hair fell on either side of her face, the tips of her locks trembling.

“Open your eyes,” he said, and when she did, limpid eyes opened wide, Zyuganov struck her right shin with a downward snapping motion. The woman’s head went back and she hissed with the pain, but did not cry out. She chooses to fight them, thought Dominika, holding on to her heaving shoulders. “And there is the little matter of the bank accounts, the numbers,” Zyuganov said.

Zyuganov hit her right shin again, then reached across and instantly struck her left shin. Irina cried out, then bit her lip to stop herself. Her head came down and her shoulders shook under Dominika’s hands. Zyuganov said nothing more; there was plenty of time. He reached down and tugged the felt slippers off Irina’s cringing feet.

The dwarf looked at Dominika with a lifted eyebrow, and raised the truncheon delicately in both hands. “Shins and the soles of the feet are well-known areas to exploit,” he said conversationally, “but I have identified alternate areas, such as the heel and behind the knee, that are most effective. I recently have obtained excellent results — quite unexpectedly I might add — with strikes to the tips of the toes.” He leaned down and swung the truncheon parallel with the floor to jam the tips of Irina’s toes — the tops of her bare feet were already black and blue. She screamed and hunched her shoulders involuntarily. Her legs jerked spasmodically. Zyuganov inhaled her groans as if from a bottle of perfume.

Dominika fought down her nausea. She considered walking around the chair, twisting the sticky leather dubinka from his hand, and beating his frying-pan face into a paste. Irina raised her bowed head. Her cheeks were wet, and she looked vacantly at Zyuganov. It is time to signal Nathaniel, it is time to start working again with CIA, Dominika thought.

“Captain,” said Zyuganov, holding the dubinka out to her. He expected her to stand shoulder to shoulder with him and beat the woman. This was a test; he was pushing her. Dominika knew she could not refuse — it would jeopardize her by showing him weakness, revulsion. She came around the chair and took the leather thing from his hand.

“Colonel,” said Dominika confidentially, crowding him. “I cannot hope to duplicate your expert application. But something occurs to me, an idea that may bring results, especially after your preliminary efforts have shown the prisoner the realities of her situation.”

Zyuganov looked at her sourly. “What idea?” he said.

“I wonder if you would indulge me this little experiment,” said Dominika. She was keeping the anger inside her gut, and she tried to control her voice. “Can you leave me alone with her for five minutes?”

“Regulations are for two people to be in the room at all times,” said Zyuganov.

“Certainly you determine the rules in this place,” said Dominika. “And if we can achieve quick success, wouldn’t it be worth the experiment?”

Zyuganov looked at Dominika, then at a weeping Irina, whose head was down.

“Colonel, give me five minutes.” She reached over to Irina and squeezed her face, shaking it lightly, mostly to hide her own trembling hands. “We’ll get on very nicely together.”

Zyuganov’s eyes narrowed. He was both suspicious and provisionally interested. He wondered what sugary, girl-on-girl pain Egorova had in mind. He would have liked to stay, but he was intrigued and knew he could watch the action on the monitor in the guards’ room. He nodded and left the room. The door clicked shut, and Dominika turned and walked toward Mamulova.

There were two of them watching from the corner of the room, her two friends, blond milkmaid Marte, and Junoesque, hazel-eyed Marta, veteran Sparrow and her confidant in Helsinki, who had defied the Service and disappeared one winter night without a trace. Her friends watched her cross the room, telling her with a look to hurry and to be careful.

Dominika put her face close to Mamulova’s, pulled her head back by her hair, and whispered into her ear. She was risking it all in the next instant. “Sestra, sister, you have about three minutes to listen to me,” Dominika said. “Will you pay attention?” Mamulova stared at her, not understanding. Dominika hit the leg of the chair with the sap, hoping that on the video monitor it would appear she was hitting the woman. Irina stared at her in amazement. Dominika looked at her significantly, and swung again at the chair leg, the sound of the leather hitting steel like a pistol shot. Dominika leaned over her again and grasped her face in one hand.

“Listen carefully,” she hissed to the woman. “They’ll permanently cripple you, then throw you in an asylum. Your mother will be put in a refrigerated cell.” She pushed Irina’s face back farther, putting her lips close to the woman’s ear. “Tell them the account numbers, it’s only money. They will let you loose for a time, free to contact your husband, so they can listen to the call. While they wait, you’ll be able to get out. You and your mother.”

Irina looked at her through a swirling green fog, and shook her head slightly. She didn’t believe her. Dominika swung the sap sideways, as if to strike her shoulder, but instead hit the back of the chair. Irina flinched and gasped — a good enough reaction. Dominika’s own bruised ribs were alight with pain from swinging the thing, but she stood over the woman, brought her face close again, and whispered, “Do you ever want to have children? Do you want to see Boris again? Give them what they want. All of it.”

Dominika bent closer to her, visualizing what it must look like on the video monitor.

“Hand over your husband’s ledgers, the ones with the foreign account numbers. Give them the keys to the overseas bank boxes. Show them where the safe is in your house. Promise to get more from your husband. Then get out, with your mother. Can you arrange it?” Irina hesitated, nodded once. Not surprising — she probably had access to Mamulov’s well-paid lawyers, second-country passports, business jets. Getting out of modern Russia would be relatively easy for her, if she planned ahead this time.

“You are one of them,” Irina said, wondering. “Why?”

The sound of the latch of the cell door stood Dominika up, and as Zyuganov poked his head in the door, Dominika slapped Irina hard across the cheek, turning her face and cutting her lip. Nothing a little bacitracin in Paris wouldn’t smooth out.

And I’m not one of them, Dominika thought. Perhaps one day they would meet for tea in Paris at Le Procope, alligator bags and suede gloves on the table between them, and Dominika could explain it all. Sure. Kogda rak na gore svistnet, when the crayfish whistle on the mountain, when pigs fly.

“Tell him,” said Dominika to Irina, tilting her head toward Zyuganov. “Tell him.” She looked at Irina, the green halo of fear and indecision swirling around her. Would the little twit decide to save herself? Zyuganov looked at Dominika, then back at Irina.

“I… I will give you the account numbers,” Irina said, eyes downcast.

Zyuganov, impressed, looked back at Dominika, who held up the sap and delicately ran a slim finger around the edge like an antique dealer examining an objet d’art.

“You’ll concede perhaps that a woman knows best what another woman fears the most,” Dominika said. “Mamulova did not want to test your patience further. Congratulations, Colonel.”

This was all nonsense. But was it? Zyuganov contemplated the most interesting epiphany that perhaps a woman could torture a woman better than a man, something about getting into each other’s heads, knowing their own bodies. Egorova certainly hadn’t been sickened by the tableau. Bah, Zyuganov didn’t know what to think, but he knew Egorova had given him a gift, a victory for the president over Mamulov, whose accounts would be siphoned dry in an hour of cyber theft. This would put Zyuganov at the top of Putin’s New Year’s Favorites List. But there had to be a trap: A gift from Egorova was poison, for she would use it against him, she would find a way to take advantage, to show him up. And President Putin would notice.

As Mamulova was led out of the room, Dominika shoved the white tile walls, the surgical lights, and the sticky truncheon out of her mind, and huffed to clear her nose and mouth of the smell of pickled herring and ammonia disinfectant. With a hard swallow, she then realized she was due back in Vienna in a few days for the follow-up meet with the Iranian. And she would see Nate again.

Line a deep dish with trimmed pieces of boned and skinned herring cover with vinegar, olive oil, sugar, and chopped dill. Chill for several hours. Serve on squares of brown bread, topped with translucent thin slices of onion.