“Fuck you.”
Miroshnikov was momentarily startled, his eyes wide. But then a huge smile crossed his face, and he threw back his head and laughed so hard that tears began to stream down his cheeks. “Oh, my,” he gasped.” Oh, dear, that is rich, Mr. McAllister. I love it, I honestly love it and you.”
“Let me speak with my embassy.”
“It’s time now,” Miroshnikov said rising. He came around the table and took McAllister’s hand, helping him up. “It’s not far in distance, Mac, but it will be light years in conception. Believe me, we are going to have a splendid time together, you and I. Simply splendid.”
The torture chamber was a very small room, laid out much like a hospital’s operating theater. A steel table with stirrups for his feet and leather straps for his arms and legs, was situated beneath a large, focused light fixture in the center of the spotlessly clean room. Electronic instruments were clustered around the head of the table. A stainless-steel roll-about cart held several trays, each covered with crisp white towels. Video cameras were set on each wall so that not one single aspect of a prisoner’s interrogation could possible be missed on tape. Two stern-faced nurses in starched white uniforms removed McAllister’s coveralls and slippers and helped him up on the table, where he was strapped in place, his legs bent at the knees, open as if he were a woman about to give birth. There was no value, at this point, for active resistance, he had been taught at the Farm. Now is when you will need all of your strength. The course of training was called Pain Management. Cancer specialists were on the staff, instructing them how to “go with the flow.” Allow the pain to wash through your body. Don’t resist it. Don’t fight it. Scream your bloody head off, in fact, because when you consider the alternative to pain death you’ll learn to endure.
The nurses placed an electroencephalogram headband around his forehead, EKG pickups on his chest, a pulse counter on his left wrist, and a blood pressure cuff on his biceps. They also attached metal clips to his nipples, and soft, almost sensuous suction cups on his testicles. When they were finished they left the room, the door closing quietly after them.
Miroshnikov sat on a tall stool behind and to McAllister’s right. He leaned forward and adjusted a knob on one of the electronic instruments, and immediately McAllister could hear the sounds of his own heartbeat and respiration over a loudspeaker. He willed himself to relax, to accept whatever would come.
They will break your will sooner or later, of course, his instructors had told him. So one might rightly ask: What is the value of resistance of any sort? Simply that the enemy knows we will treat his captured spies exactly the same as they do ours. Treat ours with respect and we will do the same. Treat ours with punishment, and we will respond in kind. The more you take, the more they know will be inflicted on their people.
So where was the twin of this room back home? Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two.
“What?” Miroshnikov asked, his face overhead. McAllister smiled.” Fuck you,” he said good-naturedly.” Thomas Murdock, let us begin with him. It is all that I want this evening.”
McAllister closed his eyes, the faint traces of a smile at the corners of his mouth. It was very possible, he told himself, that he would not come out of this alive. It was ironic that they wanted him to tell them about Murdock, of whom he knew nothing. Voronin, on the other hand, had been the gold seam. Had been, that is, until their last evening together. When? Had it been days, or weeks… — or had it been only hours ago.
A blindingly massive pain reached up from his groin, raced through his body, and rebounded in his armpits. From a long ways off he heard someone screaming, the sound animal, not human. As the pain receded he could hear his own heartbeat coming from the speaker, fast but still strong.
A second pain came, this one across his chest, and although the hurt of it was much less than the first, it was more frightening in that while it was happening he could clearly hear that his heart had stopped. When it began again he nearly cried in relief.
“Do you know Thomas Murdock, Mr. McAllister?” Miroshnikov’s voice was close in his ear.
No he did not. In the old days of Scorpius, of course, he had worked with Tom, but not afterward. Not in ten years.
The pain at his groin came again, this time more intensely, as if hot pokers had been rammed into his armpits, penetrating all the way inside his skull. Once when he was a young boy he had hit his finger with a hammer, and he couldn’t understand why the pain had been the most intense and most lasting in his elbow.Again the pain shot up from his groin, followed almost immediately by the more exquisite torture across his chest, his heart stopping, then beginning raggedly, and frighteningly weaker than before.
Tom had been a womanizer, a boozer, the network’s resident high roller. McAllister decided that he wouldn’t put it past the man to be involved down in Panama as a mule-a delivery and drop man. The cocaine connection, the pipeline back to the States, supposedly measured in the billions of dollars. Tom would be drawn to it, yes. But was there an Agency connection? We needed the hard currency, beyond the prying eyes of Congress. But how far?.
Again the pain came, this time unbelievably bad and his heartbeat stopped again. He listened. He was reminded for some insane reason about the guillotinings during the French Revolution. The man whose head had just been cut off had a few seconds to look up from the basket at his own mutilated torso flopping in the stock before the dark veil of death descended over him. McAllister found the same thing happening to him; the lights in the room began to fade, faster and faster.
“Mr. McAllister, Mr. McAllister,” someone was calling to him from an impossibly long distance.” Mac.” He opened his eyes to find that he had been unhooked from the electronic instruments, and had been unstrapped from the table. He was sitting up. There was little or no pain remaining, only a detached feeling, as if he were floating a few inches off the table. Miroshnikov stood at his side holding his arm, a big grin on his face.
“Splendid, really quite splendid, you know,” he was saying. Everything was coming back into focus for McAllister, and in some strange, almost indefinable way he felt even better for his experience. As if he had been cleansed. It was the same feeling, he supposed, that a marathon runner must feel after completing his race. Terribly tired and strung out, but with a feeling of inner strength coming from a Herculean accomplishment. They’d not told him about this at the Farm.
He also felt an exceedingly odd bonding with Miroshnikov. As if they had been, until just this moment, Siamese twins. The connecting tissues had been severed with the removal of the electronic probes and the electrodes from his chest and testicles, but he still felt as one with his interrogator.
“You should have felt the pain,” McAllister heard himself say, and he was no less astonished by his statement than Miroshnikov was.” But we’ve made progress, my dear fellow. So much wonderful progress that there cannot possibly be any animosity,” Miroshnikov said.” Here, let me help you down.”
McAllister allowed himself to be helped down from the table at the same moment the two nurses from before entered the room. He stood for a second or two, wavering slightly on his feet, then he leaned left away from Miroshnikov, as if he were about to fall.
The Russian stepped forward, his legs spread at that moment, his right hand outstretched, when McAllister turned back, bringing up his right knee with every ounce of his strength into Miroshnikov’s groin. A look of pain and disbelief spread across the interrogator’s face, and he started to rear back, his mouth opening in a bellow of pain.
The two nurses started forward, giving McAllister just enough time to roll left, then right again, the side of his right hand driving into Miroshnikov’s throat, then they were on him, shoving him roughly back against the tall torture table.
“Bastard,” one of them hissed.
“Fuck your mother, ” McAllister replied in Russian.