A little while later a different orderly came in and took the tray away. Then Kalin came in, carrying two chairs. He set them down facing each other and gestured for Chapel to sit in one of them.
“You look well,” Kalin told him, with a smile that showed some actual warmth. “I’m glad. You know I don’t want to cause you pain, don’t you? I hope you understand that. That I don’t take any pleasure in what we’ve done to you.”
Chapel considered sneering, but he didn’t want to give Kalin the satisfaction.
“You don’t want to give me your name, we’ve established that,” Kalin told him. He made a dismissive gesture, as if he were shooing away a pesky insect. “Okay. Konyechno, as we say in Russia.”
Chapel forced himself not to flinch, hearing Nadia’s favorite word out of this man’s mouth.
“You know the term? It means more than just ‘okay’ or ‘of course.’ There’s no exact translation into English. Perhaps you have heard of our famous Slavic fatalism. The way we simply accept that the world is not made for our pleasure, to our desires. We say ‘konyechno’ to mean this. Perhaps the best English equivalent would be, ‘What are you going to do?’”
“So you’ve given up? You’re going to release me with an official apology?”
Kalin smiled again. “American optimism. Perhaps that’s what won the Cold War. Okay. All right. Konyechno. I give up… at least, I will stop asking for your name. There are other questions that I’d like answers to. I’d like to know how you met the terrorist Asimova.” He took his pen and his notebook out. “I’d like to know what you were doing at Aralsk-30. I’d like to know what her plan was. She was in charge, yes? She was giving the orders? We’ve established that much, but I’d like confirmation.”
“For your report.”
“Yes. Exactly. For my report. Where should we start?”
“Sorry,” Chapel said. “I don’t have the answers you want.”
“You mean you won’t give them to me,” Kalin suggested.
“Believe what you want,” Chapel said. He draped his arm over the back of his chair. It was immensely comforting to have furniture at his disposal again. “So where I’m from—”
“Which is?” Kalin asked, his pen coming up.
“—the police have this tactic they use during interrogations,” Chapel went on, “called Good Cop Bad Cop. Two police officers enter the interrogation room and the first one threatens the suspect with jail. He shouts and demands answers and slams the wall and gets right up in the suspect’s face. The suspect, naturally, refuses to answer anything. He’s afraid of the bad cop, you see.”
“Understandably.”
Chapel nodded. “Eventually, the bad cop gets so frustrated he says he has to leave the room. That he’s going to hurt the suspect if he has to look at him for one more second. The other cop, the good cop, closes the door behind him and tells the suspect how sorry he is, that the bad cop is a hothead and dangerous and he wishes he didn’t have to work with him. He tells the suspect that things aren’t actually so bad, that he understands why the suspect did what he did. He promises him all kinds of favors. He gets the suspect coffee or food. He makes friends with the suspect. Of course, it’s all an act. Both cops know it. But it’s surprisingly effective. Given the chance to talk to a friendly face, many suspects will just give themselves away.”
“Interesting,” Kalin said. “But I don’t see the point. There’s only one of me.”
“Exactly,” Chapel said. “That’s why this isn’t going to work. I’ll never think of you as a friend, Kalin. And I’ll never answer your questions.”
The senior lieutenant nodded in understanding and tapped his pen on the edge of his notebook. “You have been trained to resist interrogation, haven’t you? Very impressive. Very good. But you’re wrong about one thing — I’m not trying to fool you here. I harbor no illusions that you’re going to start to like me. I am not trying to instill Stockholm syndrome in you, no, nothing like that.”
“Okay,” Chapel said.
“No, no. You see, I wasn’t trained by American policemen. I was trained by the KGB. You understand, of course, that the old men I learned from were experts at this sort of thing. Masters of getting at secrets. They had their own technique. One of them, one of the most simple, one of the most effective was based on the idea of operant conditioning. Do you know the term? No? Let me tell you how it works. I begin with something bad, something unpleasant. Say, I keep a man awake for days until he begins to break down psychologically. Then — out of nowhere — I stop. I let him sleep. I give him food. I let him feel good again, safe again. I let him remember what it was like to be warm and comfortable. I let him remember how much he has lost. Because — and this is the effective part — it makes what comes next so very, very much worse.”
Chapel froze in his chair. He forced himself not to give anything away.
Kalin rose from his chair. “Come,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I want you to see the next step.”
Kalin led him out into a wide hallway that curved gently as it followed the round shape of the hospital. They passed by a number of doors, some of which were ajar, though Chapel could see nothing in the rooms beyond. He wondered for the first time if he were the only inmate here.
One door opened, and a pair of big orderlies stepped out. They nodded respectfully to Kalin and then fell in behind him and Chapel. They said nothing, and they didn’t meet Chapel’s eye.
“Torture,” Kalin told Chapel as they walked, “has a rather long history. As soon as there were kings and priests, I imagine, there was a need for torturers. As long as there were heretics and dissidents. Think of all the ways it used to be done — the rack, the iron maiden, the thumbscrews. An enormous amount of human ingenuity has gone into finding ways to make people talk. But in ancient times it was always looked on as a craft. Perhaps an art form. It took the KGB to bring torture into the modern era. To bring science to the problem of persuasion. To make a technology out of it.”
They reached a junction in the corridor, and Kalin gestured for them to walk deeper into the building, away from the windows.
“For seventy years they worked at it, testing out new techniques, new drugs, new methods of causing pain. They studied how their subjects responded to each tactic. They made charts and graphs of how long human beings could withstand, say, having hot irons placed against the soles of their feet, or how long they could go without food before they would begin raving. They tested all the famous truth serums — scopolamine, sodium pentathol, amobarbital — measuring each dosage so carefully, compiling lists of control questions and polygraph results. For decades they honed and refined their methods, always looking for the new way, the best way to reach the truth.”
They came to a bank of elevators. Kalin summoned one with the press of a button and they all stepped inside, the orderlies flanking Chapel on either side. Maybe they thought he was going to attack Kalin. Try to kill him.
He’d thought about it. But he knew that no matter how much satisfaction he might get from strangling his interrogator, it would make no difference. Moscow would just send another one straightaway.
As the elevator descended, Kalin continued his lecture. “After seventy years of this, most of what they had learned was what didn’t work. How useless most torture really was. Cause enough pain and a man will tell you anything — but you can never know if what he tells you is true or simply what he thinks you want to hear. Testimony given under the influence of drugs is as likely to be fabricated — pure fantasy — as it is to reflect reality. But they did learn one basic principle about torture. One thing they could be sure of: every subject is different.”