Agent 6

Moscow Butyrka Prison Pre-Trial Detention Centre 45 Novoslobodskaya Street

One Week Later

Arms and legs cuffed together, secured so tightly that he was forcedto stoop even when standing, Leo had been waiting for several hours in an ancient interrogation room within a prison notorious almost from its inception one hundred years ago. He’d supervised this arrangement countless times: the humiliating restraints, the atmosphere of intimidation and psychological pressures of surveillance, watched by guards in all corners of the room. No threats of violence had been made. Instead, a torture far more astute than physical pain had been applied.

This was Leo’s seventh day in Moscow and he’d not yet seen his daughters. He hadn’t spoken to them by telephone – he’d received no word of their welfare. Every morning upon being woken he’d been informed they would visit him that day. He’d been brought into this interrogation cell and told that they would arrive shortly. He’d waited, eager, feet tapping. Minutes had passed but they’d felt like hours. There was no clock on the wall and no answer ever came from the guards. Part of the torture was the difficulty of judging time. There were no windows, no sense of the outside world. In response, he had devised a way of maintaining his sanity. There was an exposed pipe running across the ceiling. At one of the rusted joints water was leaking, collecting at the line, forming a drop. Once the drop had enough weight it fell and the process began again. Leo counted the seconds of an entire cycle. He then counted them again, and again. There were roughly six hundred and twenty seconds to each drop and he used this number to gauge how long he’d been waiting. So far today he’d been waiting for forty-eight drops, eight hours.

Yesterday he’d sat for twelve hours, counting drops, in a state of great anticipation only to receive word that his daughters were not coming. This excruciating routine was repeated every day, forcing Leo to lurch from hope to despair. He hadn’t been given any information on what the problem was, whether his daughters had been spitefully refused permission or whether they did not want to see him. His tormentors were, of course, aware that Leo would obsess upon the possibility that his daughters were choosing not to visit him and they did nothing to alleviate this corrosive thought which, like a pearl of concentrated acid, bored through his thoughts.

There was a chance his daughters wanted nothing to do with him. Leo could not be sure how they had reacted to the news of his defection, or his return. The girls would be angry with him for causing them so many problems – they’d been arrested, questioned, their families collectively punished for his defection. In the six months that he’d spent in America he could not be sure how their careers had suffered, or how their reputations had been damaged. Perhaps they were afraid of visiting him, concerned with how their lives would change. As he ran these thoughts over and over in his mind he could feel every muscle in his back tightening, his hands clenching.

The door opened. Leo stood up as far his restraints allowed, his throat dry, desperate to see his daughters. He squinted at the shadows.

– Elena? Zoya?

From the gloom of the corridor a KGB officer entered.

– Not today.