Silence.
COME SMALL corner of his mind remained rational, knew he could not take much of the treatment this time without cracking. Only a few hours, it could not have been more than that, for they hadn’t brought his bowl of slops. And yet he felt his mind slipping, slipping….
The lights flashed on brightly. The door opened, swung in. Two guards came, lifted him to his feet. Sobbing, he pushed their hands away, stood up straight, marched out of the vault between them. An elevator, going up. A polished corridor, a flight of stairs. A familiar room, a suave, handsome face which Skinner had grown to hate—Laurenti Beria.
“Something came up which made me forget all about the schedule mapped out for you, Mironov. I think you will agree that you’re lucky.”
“Yes, I’m lucky.”
“We’re efficient here, Mironov. Quite efficient. I think our efficiency would surprise even you, and from what I’ve recently been led to believe, you’ve had intensive training. No, don’t answer. You’ll see what I mean in a moment. Colonel Rashevsky?”
Rashevsky poked his big head in from another room. “Yes, My Commissar?”
“You will bring in the woman now.”
Rashevsky entered the room briskly for all his great bulk, dragging behind him a creature which once had been a young woman. She hardly looked it now. Instead, Skinner saw a gaunt, trembling bag of bones with dirty, loose-hanging yellow skin, flaming cheeks, dull, sullen eyes, disheveled hair, an unsteady, faltering gait. She waited, halting in Rashevsky’s wake, her dull eyes riveted to the floor.
Beria smiled. “You know this woman, Nikolay Mironov?”
Skinner shook his head. “I never saw her before in my life.”
“Boris, you will elevate the woman’s face, please.”
Rashevsky prodded her chin, raised her head, got her glance off the floor.
“Miss Palowski,” said Beria, “do you know this man?”
The sullen eyes flickered, stared at Skinner. The woman grunted as her eyelids blinked shut.
“You know him?”
“I know him.”
“Who is he?”
“He calls himself Nikolay Mironov. He kissed me once, did you know that he kissed me? Oh yes, he did.”
“I don’t get it,” Skinner persisted.
“You will. Her name is Palowski—Natasha Palowski.”
NATASHA! This—Natasha? A broken, haggard, skinny wreck of a woman, the buxom Polish lass who, a couple of months ago, had led Skinner through the Pripet Marshes to the Russian frontier?
“I assure you,” said Beria, “this is Natasha Palowski. Subjected to the treatment with which you now are familiar, she did not prove quite so strong. Two weeks, and she crumpled. Utterly. You see, Mironov, we’ve patched together the entire story. A valiant youth of the Red Army, who now is convalescing in a Polish hospital, survived this woman’s murderous attack. A trader going from Lunniec to Pinsk found him, brought him in. The soldier described your girlfriend here, and it wasn’t too difficult to trace her.
“But you, Mironov—you are what intrigues me now. A parachute in the Pripet marshes, a man who speaks Great Russian like a native but who has never before set foot inside our frontier…”
“He is American,” Natasha said, sotto voce. “Did you know that I was kissed by an American?”
“Yes,” Beria repeated quietly.
“American. The parachute was of American manufacture, Mironov. Surely you’ll talk now? More conditioning would be so pointless—”
“What will you do with the girl?”
“Do with her? What can we do with her? Her mind is hopelessly shattered. She’d be a waste to the State. We’ll kill her, of course. Painlessly. Colonel Rashevsky, will you be good enough to take her out and have her shipped to the proper disposal unit? There’s no place here on, Lubianka Street for that….”
During his first long period of confinement, Skinner’s mind had filled with hatred, such stark, cold hatred as he never had known before. But he’d had no place to release it, and the emotion worked like a backlash, got all muddled up and produced hysteria. Now it could be different, now even as he ranted Skinner almost could feel a safety valve letting off necessary steam.
“You filthy, Godless bastard!” he cried. “You contemptible, stinking slime! You—”
RASHEVSKY ran back into the room after” giving Natasha over to some guards. He charged at Skinner, struck his face with stinging open-palm blows. Right, left, right—
Skinner took it for a while. Then he bellowed, ducking in under the wild swings and planting his right fist in Rashevsky’s ponderous belly. The man let out a loud groan as his face turned purple. He began to fall.
Skinner felt better all the time. Sometimes it could work like that. Maybe a few weeks in the hospital, a few months convalescing at some quiet, peaceful place might have returned him to normal. But there was another way, this way. His body needed no healing; the second phase of Beria’s treatment already had supplied that. His mind, then—and his complete loathing for Beria and what he stood for, his opportunity to turn that loathing into action, these were medicine no hospital staff could duplicate.
Skinner did not permit Rashevsky’s body to sag to the floor. He caught the huge man under his armpits, spun him around, held him up against the edge of a desk. With his free hand he tore Rashevsky’s pistol from its holster. “Sit right where you are, Beria,” he said, “or I’ll kill this man.”
Smiling, Beria shrugged. “I assure you, he is replaceable. Go ahead, kill him if it will make you happy. You still won’t get out of here. But I am surprised at Colonel Rashevsky, really surprised.”
From the doorway, a guard peered into the room. Skinner snapped off a shot, but the bullet plowed harmlessly into the wall and the guard ducked out of sight.
“He’ll be back,” Beria promised softly.
From somewhere, an alarm bell clanged loudly. In a moment. Skinner heard the grating of machinery. A thick slab of steel slid down from the ceiling, clanked against the floor, cutting off the doorway.
“You see,” said Beria, “you’re trapped.”
“So are you.”
SKINNER let Rashevsky fall. When the man began to squirm around on the floor, Skinner bent over him, applying the butt of the pistol quite unemotionally to his skull. Rashevsky groaned again and was still.
A buzzer sounded on Beria’s desk.
“My phone,” he said.
“Go ahead, answer it.”
“Hello? Yes, yes. Of course. Hold on—”
“What is it?” -
“This building is sectioned off into steel compartments. We’re in one now, Mironov. Do you mind if I call you Mironov, not knowing your real name?”
Damn the man—he was all iron nerves and composure!
“As I was saying, we’re blocked off. They want to know if they should fill the chamber with tear-gas.”
“It’ll get you too.”
“My dear Mironov, don’t you think I know that? Tear gas never killed anyone. But it will, render you quite harmless, and—”
“Tell them that at the first trace of tear gas I’ll put a bullet through you.”
Beria paled slightly, spoke into the phone.
Skinner grunted, said, “Now tell them this! I’m going to take Rashevsky’s belt and tie your hands behind your back. I’m going to walk out of this room with you in front of me. Oh, they can get me from behind, I know that. But they won’t kill me so quickly that I won’t have time to take you with me. Is that clear? Tell them to give me thirty seconds, then to remove that steel door. Tell them we’re coming outside. Tell them that if anyone out there makes a hostile move, I’ll also kill you. Go ahead, talk!”