The Secor agent sighed. He peeled a few tabs of tape from the box’s edges and lifted off the top.
The box had indeed been opened, and its contents had told the FMA technicians precisely nothing. Inside was a mess of burnt wiring and components, the partially melted remains dusted with white powder and globs of metal.
Katya smiled, though her lip was split and the smile made it bleed again. “Oh, dear.”
“Oh, dear,” agreed the agent. “Yagizban design, of course. They’re very ingenious like this. It did its job, and then a thermite charge melted the processor and memory core. However, not to worry.” His eyes narrowed. “We still have you.”
Katya looked at him coldly. Then she giggled. “Do you always talk like that? ‘I’m with Secor. We’re so threatening’?” She couldn’t help but laugh. She shook her head, grinning at him. “You idiot. Thanks for that, by the way.” She nodded at the box. “Until you showed me that, I didn’t know if I’d succeeded or not. Now I do.”
The agent wasn’t smiling. “You don’t seem to appreciate exactly what is going to happen to you.”
“No,” she said. “No, you don’t seem to appreciate exactly what is going to happen to you. You joined Secor because it looked like a nice, safe berth, didn’t you? You get respect, decent money I would think, and you get to feel important. You’re probably a bit of a failure as a human being, aren’t you? Oh, and you get to work out those sadistic impulses you feel now and then, torturing prisoners.”
Now he smiled, but it was just a pattern of tightened muscles and stretched skin across his face. His eyes said something different. “This isn’t about me, Kuriakova…”
“It is exactly about you.” She couldn’t tell if she was being brave or just reckless. Either way she was as good as sunk, so she decided to just let herself go with the delightful flow of hatred that was running through her now. “The FMA is finished. Everything you have hung your little flag on is finished. It might take a while, but this war is as good as over. And when it is, and Secor is closed down, what’s going to keep you safe then, Mr Above-The-Law?”
The Secor agent’s eye twitched. Abruptly, he leapt to his feet, snatching up his pistol. He clamped the muzzle against Katya’s forehead, released the safety catch, and she would not, could not stop laughing.
“Go on!” she snarled at him through bloodied teeth. “Fire! Something else for the judges when they try you for war crimes! Fire, you bloody coward!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Traitor’s Gate
The next Secor interrogator Katya had was interesting in that he barely asked any questions.
He came in and chatted at her. Not with her, because Katya had decided to maintain a stony silence when asked about anything to do with her immediate situation. If he asked her what she would like for lunch, she would tell him. If he asked her what had been the function of the Yagizban device, she would just look at him with her arms crossed.
It was nice to be able to cross her arms. The new interrogator didn’t seem to believe in restraints and had neither had her strapped to her chair or had her wrists taped. He just sat there and talked about what was going on beyond the walls of the interrogation room.
He kept this up for two days. Finally, she interrupted a story he was telling her about an uncomfortable trip he’d once had aboard a shuttle when he was eight, by asking, “When do you start torturing me?”
“Soon,” he said, and then went back to describing the funny smell he remembered from the shuttle.
He had been very solicitous about her injuries and had called in a medic almost the minute he first saw her. The swelling to her eye had almost gone and the bruising was fading, the cut to her scalp where she’d fallen against the table was cleaned and sealed, and she’d been declared free of internal injuries from her beating.
With all his talking, reminiscing, gossiping, and reading out news stories from his memo pad, Katya found it easy to ignore him, and to think about her situation. She didn’t need her stereotypical Russalkin fatalistic streak to know that this was only a small diversion on the road to Hell. When he said she would be tortured soon, it was no idle threat. The only thing that she couldn’t guess was why they hadn’t started yet.
Other things she had managed to guess, though. The mystery of how Federal security had started looking for her so quickly, for one. It was an ugly conclusion at which she did not wish to arrive, and she tried a dozen others of increasing ridiculousness to try to avoid it. The most obvious conclusion is almost invariably the correct one, however, and that it saddened her so deeply did not alter the grim logic.
Sergei had betrayed her. It was the only thing that made any sense at all. He’d sat at Dunwich racked between his patriotism and his loyalty to her, and to the memory of Lukyan, his friend, her uncle. Finally, something had given way inside him, and he’d decided he needed to warn the Feds.
She could guess all the self-justifications — that she’d been led astray by Kane and Tasya, lied to, conned into doing some job for them. She could also guess that he would have begged the Feds he told his story to at Dunwich to go easy on Katya, that she was just a kid; that she didn’t know what she was doing. In her mind’s eye, she could see them giving him assurances that they never intended to keep, and poor, gullible Sergei walking away, believing them.
He wouldn’t have been able to tell them much, but it would have been enough. The search for her must have begun when she was already in the old corridors. She imagined Secor agents turning up at the coffee salon, asking questions. If she hadn’t stopped for coffee, she might have got away, or at least further. She might just have made it back into the water.
Then, of course, the base defences would have sunk her in seconds. No, she didn’t regret stopping for the coffee.
It must have been a shock when an internal reader reported her card being used; not one at an entrance to the Beta halls. So they’d called around everywhere in the vicinity but for the communications hub chamber where the card was in use, ordered everyone off the corridors, and been on their way to arrest her when she almost walked into them.
Poor Sergei. Lukyan would never have forgiven him for such a betrayal, and that meant he would never forgive himself.
On the morning of the third day, everything changed. She was taken from her cell and escorted to a sick bay, where she was given a cursory examination that seemed primarily concerned with her head injuries. They took some pictures, and a dour woman who stood silently in the corner throughout said, “Good enough” at the end of it.
The man with the camera went out into the corridor, and two tall and strikingly handsome Federal officers entered.
Katya looked at them suspiciously. “What’s this? What’s going on?”
“You’re leaving Atlantis soon,” said the Secor agent. “This is all part of the preliminaries. Don’t let them trouble you.”
“Preliminaries? What do you mean, ‘preliminaries’? What kind of preliminaries?”
“Don’t let them trouble you,” he repeated, and smiled blandly.
The officers took her out into the corridor, where the cameraman was already waiting, the small unit held at chest level. Katya didn’t care to be the subject of any more pictures and kept her head down as she was walked past him. She was surprised when she heard him say, “Perfect!”
She turned back to find the dour woman and the Secor agent looking at the camera as the cameraman replayed the scene of a moment before. The woman nodded. “It will do.”