“It moves. It grips… a bit. Maybe after some PT it will improve a little more.”
Patsy said, “But?”
Clark shook his head. “Not the outcome we’d hoped for.”
Sandy moved to him, sat in his lap, and hugged him tightly.
“It’s okay,” he said, comforting her. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse.” Clark thought for a moment. His torturers had been about a second away from driving a scalpel through his eye. He had not told Sandy or Patsy about this, of course, but it did pop into his head every now and then when he was dealing with his battered hand. He had a damn lot to be thankful for, and he knew it.
He continued. “I’m going to concentrate on PT for a while. The docs have done their part to fix me up; time for me to do mine.”
Sandy released the hug, sat up, and looked John in the eye.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s time for me to pack it in. I’ll talk to Ding first, but I’m going to go in and see Gerry on Monday.” He hesitated a long time before saying, “I’m done.”
“Done?”
“I’m going to retire. Really retire.”
Though she clearly tried to hide it, John saw a relief in Sandy’s face that he had not seen in years. In decades. It was virtually the same as joy.
She had never complained about his work. She’d spent decades enduring his late-night dashes out of the house with no information as to where he was headed, his spending weeks away at a time, sometimes coming home bloodied and bruised and, more distressing to her, silent for days before he lightened up, his mind left the mission that he’d just returned from, and he could once again smile and relax and sleep through the night.
Their years in the UK with NATO’s counterterror unit Rainbow had been some of the best times of her life. His hours were almost normal and their time together had been well spent. But still, even during their time in the UK, she knew that the fate of dozens of young men rested on his shoulders, and she knew this weighed heavily on him.
With their return to the States and his employment at Hendley Associates, once again Sandy saw the stress and strain on his body and mind. He was an operator in the field again — she knew this without a doubt, though he rarely went into details about his activities away from home.
The previous year her husband had been dubbed an international outlaw by the American press, he’d gone on the run, and she’d worried day and night while he was away. The matter had been put to bed in the press quickly and cleanly with a public apology by the outgoing U.S. President and John’s life had been given back to him, but when he’d come back from wherever he’d been off to, it was not to come home. It was, instead, to go into the hospital. He’d been beaten badly, to within an inch of his life, one of his surgeons had told Sandy quietly in a waiting room while John was under anesthesia, and though he’d come out of his ordeal with a damaged right hand, she thanked God every day that he’d come out of it at all.
John talked it over with the two women in his life for a few minutes more, but any doubts he had about his decision were put to rest the instant he saw the relief in Sandy’s eyes.
Sandy deserved this. Patsy deserved this, too. And his grandchild deserved a grandfather who would be around for a while. Long enough to cheer him on at baseball games, long enough to stand proudly at his graduation, long enough, just maybe, to watch him walk down the aisle.
John knew that, considering the line of work he’d been in since Vietnam, he’d lived most of his life on borrowed time.
That was over now. He was out.
Clark was surprised to find himself at peace with his decision to retire, though he imagined he would harbor one regret — that he never got a chance to wrap his hand around the throat of Valentin Kovalenko.
Oh, well, he thought as he gave a gentle hug to his daughter and headed into the kitchen to help with dinner. Wherever Kovalenko was right now, John was near certain he wasn’t exactly enjoying himself.
SIX
Matrosskaya Tishina is a street in northern Moscow, but it also serves as shorthand for a facility with a much longer name. Federal Budget Institution IZ-77/1 of the Office of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in the City of Moscow does not roll so trippingly off the tongue, so those referring to the massive detention facility on Matrosskaya Tishina normally just refer to the street itself.
It is one of Russia’s largest and oldest pretrial lockups, built in the eighteenth century, and it shows its age. Though the seven-story façade that faces the street is well maintained and almost regal in appearance, the cells inside are small and decrepit, the beds and bedding are infested with lice, and the plumbing is unable to keep up with the building’s current population, which is more than three times the capacity for which it was built.
Just before four in the morning, a narrow gurney with squeaky wheels rolled down a green-and-white painted hallway inside the old main building of Matrosskaya Tishina. Four guards pushed and pulled it along while the prisoner on the bed fought against his bindings.
His shouts echoed off the poured concrete floors and the cinder-block walls, a sound just louder and no less shrill than the squeaky wheels.
“Answer me, damn you! What’s going on? I am not ill! Who ordered me transported?”
The guards did not answer; obeying the profane commands of prisoners in their charge was precisely the opposite of their job description. They just kept rolling the gurney down the hall. They stopped at a partition of iron grating and waited for the gate in the center to be unlocked. With a loud click the gate opened, and they pushed their prisoner through and rolled him on.
The man on the gurney had not told the truth. He was ill. Everyone who had spent any time behind bars in this hellhole was ill, and this man suffered from bronchitis as well as ringworm.
Though his physical condition would be appalling to a citizen on the outside, the prisoner was no worse than most of his cellmates, and he was correct in his fear that he had not been hauled from his cell in the middle of the night in order to receive treatment for maladies shared by virtually every other prisoner in the building.
He yelled again at the four men, and again they took no notice of him.
After more than eight months here at Matrosskaya Tishina, thirty-six-year-old Valentin Kovalenko still had not gotten used to being ignored. As a former assistant rezident of Russia’s foreign intelligence arm, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, he had grown accustomed to having his questions answered and his orders obeyed. He’d been a rising star in the SVR from his early twenties until his mid-thirties, achieving the plum assignment of number-two man in their London Station. Then, some months ago, a personal and professional gamble had failed, and he’d gone from meteoric rise to freefall drop.
Since his arrest by internal security officers in a warehouse in Moscow’s Mitino district in January he’d been held at the pretrial facility under an executive order of the office of the president, and he’d been told by those few prison officials that he’d met that his case would be delayed and delayed again, and he should mentally prepare himself to spend years in his cell. Then, if he was lucky, all would be forgotten and he’d be sent home. On the other hand, they warned, he could be shipped east and ordered to serve time in Russia’s gulag system.
This, Kovalenko knew, would be a virtual death sentence.
For now he spent his days fighting for a corner of a cell shared by one hundred prisoners and his nights sleeping in shifts on a bug-ridden cot. Disease and disputes and despair encompassed every hour of every day.