Rasputin's Shadow

23

Daphne Sokolov flinched as she felt the man’s presence close in on her. She was on a hard, cold floor, her hands tied behind her back and attached to some kind of pipe, a replay of what she’d been through at the hotel. Only this time, she was the prisoner of someone else.

She felt the man bend down, heard his clothes crease as he leaned into her. She sensed his hands reaching out to her, then he was pulling off the balaclava he’d covered her head with. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the light, and the man’s face came into focus.

He looked the same, only this time, up close, she could tell that the beard was fake and the glasses too clear to be anything more than a prop.

He stayed uncomfortably close, studying her.

Her eyes darted around to get a look at where he was keeping her. She was in a bare, windowless room, like an office in a light industrial warehouse that hadn’t been used for a while. The floor wasn’t carpeted, just a cold, bare screed. Then she noticed something on the floor next to her captor: a small toiletries pouch, the kind used for travel.

She didn’t quite know why, but the sight alarmed her.

He stayed unnervingly silent. After a moment, she summoned up the courage to speak.

“Why am I here?” she asked. “What do you want from me?”

He just stared at her quietly, then his eyes dropped to his pouch and he unzipped it. He reached in and pulled out a couple of small plastic ampoules. They were like the ones used for eye drops, with the snap-off tips. And these did have eye drops in them, but they were not intended for soothing dry or sore eyes.

“I’m going to need to ask you some questions,” he told her as he snapped the top off one of the little tubes. He held it up to her. “These will help you answer them. I ask you not to resist. They won’t harm you, they’ll only make you more… compliant. Make it easy on yourself and don’t fight me. One way or another, I always get the answers I need.”

She was too shocked to answer.

He didn’t wait for her reply. He just reached out and put one hand on her chin, tilting her head back against the wall and holding it in place.

“Don’t fight it,” he told her, softly. “Just let me put them in and we’ll get through this as quickly as possible.”

She started trembling wildly, uncontrollably. But she didn’t fight him. It was pointless. She just tried to take in deep breaths and control her fear as he reached in and, as deftly as someone who’d done this many times before, tilted her head so it was at a slight angle. Then his thumb and his index finger crept up and across her left eye and held it wide open, forcing her eyelid to stay up.

His gaze locked on hers as he brought up the small tube of clear liquid and held it in front of her for a torturous moment. Then he turned it and squeezed it, allowing its contents to drip into his captive’s eye.

Daphne needed to blink, but she couldn’t, not until the man was done.

He pulled back, studying her curiously, like she was a lab rat. He was clearly enjoying the dread and the confusion that had to be playing across her face.

“There,” he comforted her. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He did the same to the other eye, emptying the other ampoule into it. Then he put the empty ampoules back in his pouch and got up.

“Let’s give it a few minutes to take effect,” he said. “Then we’ll chat.”

He walked out, leaving Daphne shivering more out of fear than from the chill of the cold floor.

THE QUESTIONING DIDN’T LAST LONG.

Code named SP-117-the SP stood for “spetsial’noi podgotovki,” or special preparation-the drops were a cocktail of barbiturates, alkaloids, and other psychoactive substances, and they worked. The world-and Department Twelve of the KGB’s S Directorate, in particular-had come a long way since the days when alcohol, given as intravenous ethanol, was used to loosen tongues. But while so-called truth serums encouraged the talkativeness of their subjects, their weakness was that it was hard to tell what part of the subjects’ blabbering was fact from what was fiction. The reliability of what was said while under the drug’s influence was key. And that was what made SP-117 special. It subdued the imagination and made its victims focus on nothing but what they believed was fact.

In this case, though, the facts Daphne Sokolov had given him were worthless.

Sokolov hadn’t told her anything. She knew nothing of his past, or of his work.

Which wasn’t unexpected. Koschey anticipated as much. Still, having her here was important. Sokolov was a capable man, and they were clearly very much in love. Koschey knew the scientist would do everything he could to get her back. It was only a matter of time before he popped his head over the parapet again.

Koschey reclined his car seat as far as it could go and leaned back, running through possible scenarios of how things might play out from here. It was a discipline that had served him well. He hadn’t failed yet. His whole career had been a string of successes, right from the beginning. Only things had changed. He’d grown bitter and disillusioned. And sitting there in the darkness of the empty warehouse, he wondered if this assignment was going to lead to a new beginning.

A rebirth for the deathless.

He’d grown up in a patriotic communist family in Minsk and had been recruited by the KGB while working in a factory alongside his father, making parts for military helicopters. He graduated from the KGB’s Academy there after excelling in marksmanship and bare-handed combat, and was on his first mission in Riga, breaking into and bugging the British embassy there, when the Wall fell. His work wasn’t affected. He was busy running audacious disinformation campaigns against the CIA, identifying and taking out Chechen rebel leaders, and seeding insurgency headaches for the West in places like Afghanistan and Sudan. He reached the rank of major six years after graduating, lieutenant colonel five years after that.

And then it had all changed.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, everything he’d been trained to fight for was suddenly gone. His role changed. It wasn’t about helping to spread Communism and beating America at the game of global dominance. It wasn’t about sneaking missiles into Cuba or arming Arab states or supporting South American insurgencies. Ideology was no longer relevant.

Instead, it was now all about money.

A tsunami of greed and corruption had swept up everyone around him. And while Koschey was out in the field, defending the values he’d had instilled in him by his father and his mentors at the Academy, fighting a dirty war against capitalism and the decadence of the West, those same mentors were jumping ship. His superiors at the KGB, even hard-liners like the general, jettisoned any allegiance to the founding concepts of the Soviet Union and threw themselves into the pursuit of wealth with embarrassing abandon. To a man, they scrambled to line their pockets and grab as much money as they could, shamelessly and ruthlessly-and there was a lot of it waiting to be grabbed.

Koschey, ever the perfect soldier, had stubbornly and naïvely clung to his values, only to find himself out to sea in a world that no longer existed. And with each passing year, he grew more disillusioned and more cynical. He took pride in knowing that he excelled at what he did-which was why they needed him, why they spoiled and cossetted him. Only, things were different. He knew he was being used. He was no more than a glorified enforcer, a foot soldier in a global battle that was about more than greed, sent out to safeguard his superiors’ cushy lives and their bank accounts. His missions were now all about controlling oilfields and gas pipelines and making sure turmoil in the Middle East kept the price of oil up-a major source of revenue for Russia, a lot of it ending up in the hands of those above him who’d raped the country. It was also about silencing any dissident voices or potential headaches for the regime, whether in Moscow, Georgia, or in London, to make sure his superiors stayed in power and continued to enjoy their newly acquired wealth.

Koschey’s disillusionment had taken time to set in. He’d been too focused on staying alive while carrying out his missions all over the world to notice what was happening back home. But the disillusionment was now well and truly entrenched, and he’d grown more bitter with each passing day. More than bitter.

His work made him feel dirty.

It made him feel used.

He needed to change. To adapt. To accept the new reality on the ground and redefine his life.

And the more he thought about it all, the more he sensed that Sokolov would be the key to his rebirth.

He just had to find him first.