The Russians’ attention was fixated on Aleksa now. They pulled her out of the wreck, and one of them punched her in the gut when she stabbed a pen through his friend’s neck.
Avery tried once more to stand up, and was kicked from behind. He fell forward, catching himself on all fours, and another kick to his side knocked him over. Three Russians converged on him, laughing and exchanging vulgarities. They battered him, used his head as a soccer ball until he finally blacked out.
TWENTY-TWO
“Nick?”
It took a few seconds for Aleksa’s voice to register with Avery as he returned slowly and painfully to consciousness. When he opened his right eye — the left was swollen shut — he saw the expanse of an aircraft hangar, and he felt the smooth, glossy surface of the epoxy floor against his face. It stung badly where his right cheek was split open. When he moved to rub his eye, sensitive to the intensity of the bright lighting overhead, he found his hands restrained behind his back. The steel cuffs were fastened tight, cutting off blood flow to his hands and scraping bone. There was the iron taste of blood in his mouth.
From the dizziness, blurred vision, and the ringing in his ears, he figured he’d suffered a concussion. In addition to which, breathing too deeply sent a sharp, stabbing pain through his side. That worried him. He’d suffered fractured ribs before, and those were always to be taken seriously.
Aleksa’s voice came from somewhere behind him. He tried to respond, to let her know that he was alive, somewhat, but the words became caught in his parched throat and he was seized by a coughing fit instead. There were approaching footsteps and soft-spoken conversation. There was something familiar about one of the voices.
He started to roll over onto his other side, in the direction of the oncoming footsteps. He didn’t move far before the stabbing pain in his side hit him again, a hundred times worse now, agonizing, stopping him in his place and eliciting an involuntary gasp from his lips and confirming his self-diagnosis. Hopefully the rib was just cracked, not broken. At least blood hadn’t come up when he coughed.
Aleksa was likewise slumped on the floor, twenty feet away, and Avery hoped she wasn’t in the same condition he was. He didn’t want to contemplate the things they could have done to her.
“Nick?” she called out again. “Are you okay?”
“I’m alright.” He wanted her to be quiet, so he could focus on the new arrivals, and he didn’t want to appear vulnerable and weak, affected by her, in front of them, whoever they were.
“They drugged us, gave us injections,” Aleksa said. “Ketamine, I think.”
That explained the foggy haze clouding his thoughts and his dulled senses, Avery thought. He didn’t mind if they beat the shit out of him, but toxic impurities coursing through his blood, further hindering his body’s functional capacity and recovery, was particularly odious to him.
He started to say something, but the sudden roar of very near jet engines drowned out all sound. The noise receded as the aircraft lifted off, and when it was gone, he sensed a presence hovering over him.
“Avery, you stupid fuck, is that you?”
When he opened his eye again, he stared up at a pair of hiking boots and khaki pants belonging to Robert Cramer. Standing a few feet behind Cramer, Avery recognized the second man by his shaved head and spider tattoo. The man stared straight at Avery with dark, penetrating eyes, trying to look menacing and instill fear, and doing a good job of it. Avery stared right back at him for several seconds before passing his gaze onto Cramer. The man looked like he’d aged fifteen years since the last time Avery had spoken to him, four years ago in Afghanistan.
“Shit, Avery, if I knew that was you I would have told them to take it easy on you. When I heard they picked someone up at Sosny, I assumed you were just another one of this cunt’s reporter friends. God, I hate reporters. Still, you got off lucky. Better than that fat fuck Romanchuk.”
He paused, as if waiting for Avery to speak, but Avery gave him nothing.
Avery considered his options, none of them good. He could play dumb and act surprised to find Cramer alive and well and in the middle of a nuclear smuggling pipeline. He could try to spare Aleksa and insist that she knew nothing, was unwittingly dragged into this, and say he was only using her to gain access to Yuri Dzubenko.
But there was no point in doubting Cramer’s intelligence. Plus, Avery didn’t know what, if anything, Aleksa had already told them, and he didn’t feel like getting the shit beaten out of him again if he was caught in a lie. The best thing he could do was to keep quiet and volunteer nothing. However it played out, he knew this wasn’t going to end well. He just hoped they made it quick for Aleksa.
“Last I heard from my sources in Tajikistan the mission was over and you were heading home,” Cramer said.
Sources, Avery thought. “So how did you manage to pin Dagar on me?”
“That was just a happy coincidence, really. Bad luck for you, though. He’s always been my agent, my eyes and ears over there. I had no idea the Agency would send you. But it’s a small world, and lucky for me, a mutual friend set you up with him. The Agency’s long believed that Dagar was their asset, and I figured they’d turn to him, but he was mine the whole time.” Cramer shook his head, genuinely pitying Avery for his current circumstances. “You really should have gone home.”
“And what the hell are you doing here, Bob?” Avery glanced back at the man standing behind Cramer. “And what are you doing with that piece of shit?”
Cramer swung his foot back and kicked Avery hard in the side. Avery wasn’t expecting it, making it that much worse. He coughed and gagged as he gasped for air, the pain in his chest amplified. Cramer patiently waited for him to settle down before he resumed.
“Listen to me closely. I’m not going to repeat myself. You know how this works, so I’m not going to waste time making threats, trying to instill the fear of God into you. I need to know everything you’ve told Culler. It is Matt who sent you, isn’t it? There’s nobody else at Langley that would be stupid enough to go to you, and he’s still heading up GRS last time I checked.” He meant CIA’s Global Response Staff.
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Cramer said, reading Avery’s eyes. “You’re dead anyway, and in the meantime you can take another beating. Sure, but how about before these guys finally end you, I turn them loose on that bitch over there and let you watch? You’re right, Avery, however this goes, you are a dead man, but you can still spare her an extremely vicious, violently pornographic ordeal.”
Avery felt Aleksa’s eyes on him, becoming more terrified by the minute, but he couldn’t bear to look at her. He didn’t want her to make him weak. He shut his eyes and tried to clear his head.
“Don’t even think about lying to me. We recovered the USB from her. That gives me a pretty good idea of what you two already know and what you can piece together. Unfortunately for you, Avery, I also know you were at Ayni a couple nights ago. I’m even pretty certain you had something to do with the missing arms convoy, but I don’t really give a shit about that right now. So, again, what have you told Langley?”
“I haven’t spoken to Culler since Tajikistan, before Ayni.”
Simple lies were always the easiest to make convincing, and the fact that Avery wasn’t trying to deny working for Culler wouldn’t be lost on Cramer.
Cramer nodded thoughtfully and asked, “And the convoy?”
Avery knew what Cramer was thinking. If Langley had taken out Mullah Arzad’s trucks, then that indicated Avery had been in contact with Culler after the Ayni op, which meant Avery could have reported seeing Cramer at the airfield. Cramer knew from the data on the USB drive that the Taliban’s processing facility wasn’t compromised. He was mostly worried about whether he was about to become the subject of an international manhunt.