They’d started with McAllister last night the moment he had been brought in, and had not let up until three this afternoon. Four interrogators, rotating on two teams, had begun the softening up process, the opening acts. McAllister had been allowed a few hours rest, and now it was time to begin in earnest.
Miroshnikov took McAllister’s files, left his office and next door let himself into the interrogation chamber. The tape recorders and video cameras would run automatically. He allowed no one to watch his work. It was his way. And his staff respected his wishes.
He smiled. He’d been waiting for this for a long time. A challenge that he intended savoring slowly, and with delicacy. He pressed the intercom button.
“Bring him in now,” he said, his voice as soft as wind through a graveyard.
McAllister was dressed in a pair of thin coveralls and paper slippers. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, but he seemed alert. He sat erect in the thick, unpadded steel chair.
“Your name please,” Miroshnikov said, studying the open file on the steel table in front of him.
“David McAllister.”
“Your occupation, Mr. McAllister?”
“I am employed by the United States Department of State. At present I am a Second Secretary under Ambassador Leland Smith.”
“You are not a spy?”
“No.“Miroshnikov looked up. He smiled gently. “Do you speak Russian?”
he asked in Russian. McAllister did not reply.
“I asked if you spoke Russian,” Miroshnikov said in English. “No.”
“I think you are lying to me. I think you will be doing a lot of lying at first. But there is time. All the time in the world.”
“I’d like to speak with a representative of my embassy,” McAllister said. His voice was clear, but held just a hint of an East Coast accent.
Miroshnikov sat forward and glanced at McAllister’s file. “An odd job, wouldn’t you say, a Second Secretary? Odd, that is, for a man who graduated first in his class at West Point. Quite an achievement, I might add.”
“It happens.”
“What I don’t understand, however, is why you resigned your commission after only two years. I am under the impression that upon graduation from West Point you are required to serve six years. Your father, the general, must have been terribly disappointed in you.”
McAllister held his silence.
“Or was he, I wonder,” Miroshnikov said.
McAllister had lost all sense of time, though he suspected that it might be after midnight. He was tired, hungry, cold, and stiff from sitting so many hours in the steel chair.
“I wonder if you are aware of Soviet law in regards to suspected foreign agents,” Miroshnikov said.
“Only vaguely,” McAllister replied. He was thinking about his wife. By now she would be safely at the embassy. She would light a fire under Ambassador Smith himself, if need be.
“Unfortunately for the individual there is no right of habeas corpus here. I can keep you like this for as long as I want. For as long as it takes to find out what it is my superiors are so anxious to learn.”
“I am not a spy.” He had been through this training at the Farm.
It was called Progressive Resistance Under Interrogation. Give nothing at first, they’d been taught. Only later should you admit to bits and pieces, nothing important at first. In the end, of course, they all knew that a man’s will could be broken. Torture or drugs. Sooner or later it would come, and with it the possibility of mental or physical damage. But with this one, he thought, damage would not matter. It was in the interrogator’s eyes. The man was not human.
“Oh, but you are, Mr. McAllister. We knew that from the very moment you set foot on Soviet soil twenty-three months and eleven days ago. We have been watching you. Waiting for the proper time to arrest you. And it has come. We are now in what can be considered the pretrial phase. Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” McAllister said. By now Langley would have been notified that he was missing. The first stage of the search was called Pre-Comms, in which his haunts in Moscow would be quietly visited. Perhaps he was having an affair, and he was at the home of his mistress. Perhaps he was involved with one of his sources and could not break free. Perhaps he was with friends. Later, the Ex-Comms stage would be initiated. Hospitals would be contacted, as would the Moscow Militia equivalent to American civil police. Perhaps McAllister had been injured in an auto accident. Perhaps he had been arrested for drunken driving, or running a stoplight. In Moscow it took very little to land in jail, especially for a foreigner. But all that took time.
“Very good,” Miroshnikov was saying. “Because believe me, your life depends upon your complete understanding.”
“I demand to speak to a representative of my embassy.”
“Let’s talk, for a moment, about your grandfather… “Let’s not.”
“Stewart Alvin McAllister. A Scot. Very important man in Great Britain in his day. Did you know, by the way, that your grandfather came here to Moscow in 1920? He was sent to study the Cheka the forerunner of our KGB. He was looking for ideas for his own Secret Intelligence Service. And he was quite effective, from what I gather.”
“I never knew him.”
“More’s the pity,” Miroshnikov said. “It’s an odd thing about us Russians, but don’t you know that in one respect we are very much like the German peoples. We have a propensity for keeping records. We write things down in triplicate, and then file the bits and pieces in little cubbyholes. Someday you will have to see the great pile of records we’ve amassed since 1917, awesome.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Your father, for instance, is in our files. He immigrated to the United States in 1923, joined the army and became a general. Another amazing achievement. In fact it was your father, along with Alan Dulles, Bill Donovan, and a few others, who created your secret intelligence service. So I imagine he was actually quite proud indeed when you resigned your army commission to work for the Company.”
“I work for the State Department.”
“It is too bad your father isn’t alive now to see this. He was a good man. A brave man. A straightforward man. A soldier. He knew who his enemies were, and he met them head on. He didn’t have to sneak around back alleys talking to dissidents.”
McAllister held himself in check. Had it been because of Voronin after all? If they got to that old man he would fold and they would have all the evidence they would need for a conviction. He began to have his first doubts that this would turn out so good after all. He sat a little forward. “May I have something to eat?”
“No.”
“Something to drink, at least?”
“I think not. There is more ground to cover here. For instance, why didn’t you make a career of the military service? You were raised in an officer’s household, you attended military boarding school the Thomas Academy in Connecticut-and you graduated West Point. Class of ‘71.