“Might I have a sip of water please?” She asked hoarsely. If she had been in a KGB cell the request would have earned her a savage beating.
One Redcap handed his Sten gun to his partner and stepped close, holding out his own canteen. She took it clumsily; her hands were numb from the weight of the cuffs. The water was warm, brackish but it slipped down her throat like a vintage wine. She almost emptied the vessel.
“Sorry, I was thirsty,” she smiled apologetically.
“That’s okay,” the man grunted, taking back the canteen. He stepped away, retook possession of his gun from his partner and resumed his watching brief.
Rachel had made no move to engage her guards in conversation. If they had to shoot her she did not want them to feel any worse about it than inevitably, they would. It was better if they thought about her as the mad woman who had strolled about Mdina with an AK-47 sowing a trail of death, and somehow ended up in the room in which Julian Christopher had died in the moments before the last Soviet invaders had thrown down their arms in surrender.
She was resigned to her fate.
The worst had happened; never again would she have to pretend she was somebody that she was not. The girl who had been a sewer rat in the ghetto at Lodz, who had killed her first fascist at the age of thirteen — with a knife, twisted in his guts — and lived a lie ever since was not afraid of dying. She just wanted to sleep and to not dream her dreams. The October War had driven her a little mad, as it had most people, she supposed. The trouble was that she had inhabited her shadow world for so long that she had become estranged from what was, and was not, normal. How else could she have become so fascinated, besotted, so easily taken in by a monster like Arkady Pavlovich Rykov? She had known who and what he was all along; she had been hunting him for a year before she finally caught up with him in that US Air Force hospital at Incirlik just after the night of the war! But for the war her mission would have been to quietly slit his throat from ear to ear that first day; and but for the cataclysm she would have done exactly that without a qualm. But then he had started babbling about Krasnaya Zarya in his sleep and she had known that if she executed him she would never learn any of the secrets that were capable of tormenting the mind of a man as deranged and inhuman as that of the KGB’s legendary — some said mythical — Head of Station in Istanbul. The man’s legend was such that many people simply did not believe he existed, that he was an intellectual construct of some drunken MI6 or CIA bigwig desperately attempting to explain away his organisation’s latest disasters.
But she had always known he existed and unlike the idiots in London and Langley; she had actually seen him twice. Once in Hungary in 1956 she had stood three metres from him as he executed students — men and women, none of them yet in their twenties — outside a burning secret police building in Budapest at the end of the uprising. Five years later she had almost walked straight into him on street in Beirut; she had been following another target, not broken stride. It had come as no surprise when later she had been asked to find him again and end his career once and for all.
Back in 1956 Arkady Rykov had been Major Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov, a Political Officer attached to the Political Directorate of Lieutenant General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s 8th Mechanized Army. Fyodorov was the name he took with him to Istanbul in 1960; she had never found out what he was doing in Beirut in 1961. In Budapest she had been a dirty-faced nobody in a badly fitting Red Army mechanic’s overalls given a rifle and told to ‘kill rebels’. In Beirut she had been dressed like a movie star, her hair raven black with Rayburn shades hiding her eyes as she paraded down the Corniche dressed like a film star, a model, or a very high class prostitute. The monster had once asked her where he had seen her before but her legend — over the years she had been the kept woman of a dozen rich and powerful men and had travelled widely in Europe, the Mediterranean and the near east — had kept her safe. That they might conceivably have crossed paths before was unlikely but by no means implausible. Her legend had always had a ring of truth, of impenetrable authenticity because in a way, it was true. Anybody who had watched her life — not even necessarily from afar — during the 1950s right up until just before the October War would have taken her for exactly what she seemed to be; an international courtesan living off the largesse of her wealthy and powerful and very appreciative admirers.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was no more the monster’s real name than Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov; although, oddly near the end she was sure that he — whoever he was — had known that time was running out and that this had somehow, in some perverse way, partially reconnected him with the person he might have been had he not become Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria’s pet assassin…
The cell was lit by a single feeble electric bulb hanging from a cracked ceiling rose near the entrance. A thin brown electric cable snaked through a hole drilled in the ancient wooden door frame, up the wall and across the roof to the fitting. She squinted at the light bulb and in her hunger and exhaustion her vision blurred, and her thoughts wandered.
“Miss Pullman!”
She blinked into the face of an ashen, unshaven man in a torn and dirty army battledress who was squatting on his haunches directly in front of her. He stank of sweat and freshly disturbed earth and he still had streaks of camouflage paint on his cheeks.
“My name is not Clara Pullman,” she said, forcing a grimace.
“Oh well, never mind,” the man replied.
He wore a Captain’s stars on his collar tabs beneath his battledress and spoke with an accent straight out of Eton College.
“My company has taken over the security of this area of the Citadel. The thing is nobody is exactly sure why you are being held here?” He did not wait for her to try to explain. “In any event, several of your friends from the hospital where you work have made strenuous and most persistent representations to me to be allowed to visit you.”
She stared at him in confusion.
The man turned to the two Sten gun toting Redcaps.
“Why is this woman handcuffed?” He demanded in disgust.
“She had them on when we took charge of her, sir. Nobody told us to take them off…”
“You can bloody well take them off now!” The officer lurched to his feet, shaking his head. “I don’t know what the bloody world is coming to these days!” He muttered almost but not quite under his breath. “And somebody empty that bloody latrine bucket! It stinks like a pig sty in here!”
This said he stalked out of the cell leaving the Redcaps and their prisoner staring, open-mouthed at his retreating back.
Neither of her guards had keys to the handcuffs.
Both men were grumpily apologetic about that.
Apologetic but sensibly still somewhat cautious while they remained in her immediate proximity. She backed into the farthest corner of the room so that one of the Redcaps could safely retrieve the foul smelling latrine bucket.