“Becca. A pleasure. Welcome to Lithuania. You must be Justin?” She looked up at them still standing outside.
“Yes. Glad to see you.”
“Get in, Carrie. I’ll pop the trunk for your luggage, Justin.”
He dragged their suitcases through the slushy snow and stowed them in the spacious trunk. He noticed a duffel bag and a Samsonite suitcase, which he assumed belonged to Becca or the car owner.
Justin sat in the back seat behind Carrie and offered Becca her coffee.
“Oh, thanks,” she said and took a sip. “Airport coffee usually sucks, but this one is good.”
“Glad you like it,” Justin said.
He found the seatbelt and fastened it. The interior of the car was very tidy, with comfortable leather seats of a color that resembled purple. Justin ran his left hand over the smooth texture and the perfect seams. His right hand was still holding the two pizza boxes.
“Purple seats?” he asked.
“They’re amaranth, actually,” Becca said. “But very similar.”
“You don’t mind our pizzas in the car, do you?” Justin asked.
“As long as you clean up after your mess, you’re fine,” Becca said with a smile. “Don’t worry about it, the car’s not mine. It’s the agency’s.”
“Thanks.” He handed Carrie her box, then opened his.
“Are we good to go?” Becca asked.
“Yeah, we’re good,” Justin replied.
Becca nodded, adjusted the rearview mirror, and stepped on the gas pedal. She rounded the corner and turned left, the Volkswagen gliding smoothly over the cleared road. They left the airport behind and Becca flicked on the left turn signal as they came to a large sign. Its blue letters read Vilniaus oro uostas. The English translation was under it: Vilnius Airport.
“I was thinking we should head straight to our facility and conduct our interrogation,” Becca said. “But if you would rather we went to Vilnius and stopped at your hotel, we can do that.”
Her tone of voice clearly showed her preference for the first option. And she was already heading south, toward the prison. Vilnius and their Radisson Hotel were up north.
“Let’s get our job done first,” Justin said in a firm tone. “Where is your prison? Its location was not mentioned in the files we received from Moore.”
Becca gave him a small frown. “Our facility is about twenty-five miles southwest, a little further than the Rudininkai airbase.”
The traffic light switched to green. Becca took the turn a bit faster than necessary, the front wheels sliding on the icy asphalt. She straightened the car, then said, “The airbase used to be a bomb testing range during the Soviet times. It’s abandoned because it’s contaminated by unexploded ordinance, which have turned it into a virtual landmine.”
“And that’s why you — the CIA — chose that area?” Carrie asked.
“Yes. It’s isolated, in the middle of a large, thick forest, but close enough to the border with Belarus for a quick exit if things go wrong.”
“How much does the SSD know about your operation?” asked Justin, referring to the State Security Department, Lithuania’s secret intelligence service.
Becca hesitated for a second. She gazed at the road ahead, then she cocked her head, staring at a cargo train stopped to her left on the tracks parallel to the road. “A few years back, when we were running a facility in the north, in Antaviliai, the SSD knew about the location and when our planes with detainees flew in and out of the country. They escorted our aircraft landing in Vilnius and elsewhere and facilitated the access to their airspace. We never told them the identity of the detainees, why we were holding them, or the information we obtained through our interrogations.”
Justin asked, “And now?”
Becca grinned. “Now they pretend they don’t know. The prosecutor general launched a criminal investigation of the previous operations, which as expected resulted in no charges filed against any Lithuanian national. So now we have no official contacts with the SSD. And we no longer use their airspace for renditions. We bring our detainees from across the border with Belarus.”
“Keeping a low profile,” said Carrie.
“Quite so.”
Justin opened his pizza box and took a couple of bites of his pepperoni. It had gone cold, but he was hungry, so he ravished a slice within a few moments. Then he began to work on the second slice.
The Volkswagen slowed down and they turned right. They were now driving through an industrial business park. Blue and gray warehouse-type buildings appeared on the right side, surrounded by tall, gray walls with a protective grill on top. The area gave Justin an eerie feeling. The sky had begun to turn a pale shade of blue and fog had started to appear in the distance. Becca switched on the windshield wipers as the first drops of freezing rain hit the glass.
“Who is this man we’re interrogating today?” Carrie asked.
Becca took a sip from her coffee and flicked her hair to the side with a head gesture before answering, “One of our teams nabbed him two days ago in the outskirts of Minsk. The FSB is making life impossible for Chechen terrorists, so they’re scattering everywhere. They drove him here last night.”
Justin said, “Has he been cooperative?”
“No, not really.” Becca shook her head. “He thinks he’s a mean badass. I’ll show him otherwise.”
Justin held Becca’s eyes. They reflected a cold, icy glare, like the rain sprinkling the car. He wanted to ask if she was going to make him talk and how, but he already knew those answers. Everyone broke under pressure, and torture loosened even the tightest lips. The right question to ask was whether he was going to tell them anything useful they could take to the FSB the next day.
Carrie was chewing on a small piece of her vegetarian pizza.
“How much do you believe he knows?” Justin asked.
“If you’re asking whether he’ll lie to me, the answer is no. No one lies to me.”
Becca’s teeth were clenched hard. She reminded Justin of one of his neighbor’s Rottweilers, the one who had always been so aggressive when he used to deliver fliers as a boy, barking and snapping his teeth at him through the chain-link gate. He was sure Becca was ready and willing to use her desire to dominate, intimidate, and force the detainee to do her bidding, just like a Rottweiler herding sheep.
“I meant, are we going to learn valuable intelligence today?”
Becca shrugged and released her tight grip around the steering wheel. “He’s a known member of the Islamic Movement, not a high-ranking member, but not a foot soldier either. I’m sure he’ll have some information about the assassination of the Russian Minister of Defense or other terrorist plans, something concrete we can use as a bargaining chip with the FSB tomorrow.”
“That would be excellent,” Carrie said. She wiped her lips with a napkin and added, “So our trip will be worth something.”
“If nothing else, you got to see the beauty of Vilnius in winter.” Becca gestured to her left, pointing to more gray, drab buildings and chain-link fences that stretched along on both sides of the road.
Chapter Twelve
By the time they reached Highway 202, the freezing rain had turned into a thick curtain of heavy snow pelting the car and everything around them. The wind howled like a wounded animal and the haze hung low, just over the tips of the pines and cedars along the highway, reducing their visibility to barely a few feet. Justin felt like they were driving through a grayish-white tunnel with no end in sight. He hoped no deer or any other animal would jump in front of the Volkswagen, as Becca would hardly have any time to avoid a possibly fatal collision. She was gripping the steering wheel and had slowed down to thirty miles per hour. Her eyes were glued to the road straight ahead and she had stopped talking to them.