Complex 90 Read online

  Not many cells, perhaps half a dozen. This was a holding area. For prisoners who hadn’t been processed yet, or maybe who weren’t going to be processed at all.

  Another red-star-capped guard in green was supervising this area—no burp gun this time, just a side arm in a snap-flap black-leather holster. At the far end of the hall was a wire-mesh wall-and-door onto an area with a barred window letting in the periodic light of a rotating prison spotlight, and the mouths of opposing stairways.

  The Cossack stopped about halfway down this short hall and nodded toward an unmarked cell whose paint-peeling green was darker than the pale institutional shade around it.

  The guard opened the door from his own key ring and I went in.

  My new hotel room was six feet wide, four feet deep, its cot a plank of wood attached to one of the rough stone walls. That steel door clanged shut, then the oblong face with its razor smile filled the food slot, like the worst goddamned framed picture you ever saw

  “Do not get comfortable, Mr. Hammer. You will be questioned shortly.”

  I sat on the wooden plank. I had to act quickly and soon. My arrest was strictly sub rosa. There would be no intervention from Senator Jasper, because all he’d know was that I had disappeared. Same with the American embassy. I was a non-person now, like so many others in Russia. I was still breathing, but as far as my captors were concerned, I already didn’t exist.

  Busting out of this holding cell area remained possible. Once they had moved me to a cell block, escape became a much longer shot—not out of the question, but why risk it? Anyway, the signs were that they would attempt to get what they wanted from me, probably via torture, and then dispose of my American ass.

  No, I would be checking out of this hotel as soon as possible, thanks very much.

  Luckily their security was lax to say the least. For unknown political reasons, they had sneaked me in this back way, meaning I knew the way out. And but for that Cossack’s frisk, which included discarding my necktie, I had not been closely checked. In an American prison, I’d have had my shoes or at least shoelaces taken away, and my belt. Not that there was anything in here I could hang myself off of.

  But these had been crucial omissions. In my shoe was my five hundred bucks, actually in the sock of my left foot. In or out of prison in this damn country, dollars would buy me plenty.

  And in my belt, in back, was the safety razor blade that I always carried, tucked in a slit in case some asshole tied my hands behind my back again. Boy Scout stuff, be prepared, but it had saved my life more than once. Not that Mr. Gillette could help me carve my way out of this stone cell....

  But the Cossack was true to his word—I did not have long to wait. The two cockroaches I was watching were just in the foreplay stage when the tall character, still in his damn high fur hat and matching coat, returned with his two thuggish companions. The boxer-faced bully boys had their Makarovs out of sight now, but not out of mind: each had a right hand in a topcoat pocket. And there was also another burp-gun wielding young Russian along to accompany us through the wire-mesh door and up a flight of stairs to a door.

  We were moving through a cell block, two facing walls of misery rising several stories joined by walkways prowled by rifle-bearing guards. Back home the guards were armed with billies, and I wondered how many times a guard in this clink got a gun taken away from him and jammed up his ass for a hot lead enema. Food for thought.

  This was no American prison in a lot of ways. Walk through a cell block in the USA, whoever you were—Billy Graham or the Queen of England—and you’d get catcalls and the classic cup-on-prison-bars rhythm-section routine. Here the faces, dark-eyed and smudged with the kind of beard once-a-week shaves get you (Look sharp! Feel sharp! as Gillette ads put it), stared out in glum silence, faces of the resigned, faces of the damned.

  We were on the slightly sunken main-floor walkway of this cell block, one floor up from ground, where I’d come in. Keeping the geography straight was easy, so far. But I had a big problem. Entering this cell block had meant going through a door opened by a guard in a bullet-proof cage. My best hope now was that between rounds of interrogation, I would be returned to my holding cell.

  So whatever they threw at me I would have to take.

  Then I caught a break, a real break. As we were about to exit the cell block, through another steel door overseen by a guard behind bullet-proof glass, that door opened and a small bald man with steel-frame glasses, wearing a black suit and black tie, came through and spoke to the Cossack in a commanding manner that belied his size, pointing back the way we came.

  Their conversation was in Russian, but for whatever reason, we were to go back. That was fine with me, because it put me past that first steel door and into the less secure section of the prison. The commanding little man, who with a beard would have resembled Lenin, led us down the stairs and into that open area beyond the row of holding cells, where the beam of a prison spotlight made its swing.

  The little man led us up the facing stairway and down a hallway lined with offices, the pebbled-glass panels of doors dark this time of night. But midway down, one door had no glass and was strictly sturdy-looking wood. Posted there was a surprisingly large brace of guards—three men in their green uniforms and starred military caps and flap-snap holstered side arms, and one with yet another burp gun.

  When the door was opened for me, and I got nudged inside, this proved not to be an office exactly. It was too large for that, yet was smaller than a conference room. In the middle of the room a scarred square wooden table and four matching chairs might have been awaiting the prison bridge club. The walls and ceiling were lined with soundproof tiles, and even the back of the now-shut door had the porous stuff. The floor’s thick carpet was the same green as a guard’s uniform. No windows.

  It was an interrogation room, but an oversized one, so it could accommodate the kind of watchers who in the States might have lurked behind two-way glass. But over here they either didn’t have the two-way stuff or just didn’t give a damn who the subject—I was a subject, remember—saw watching him being questioned. Two lumpy-looking characters in lumpy-looking suits with facial moles, caterpillar eyebrows, and hair sticking out of their noses and ears were standing there like they were posing for a sculptor making gargoyle statues.

  The Lenin-looking guy bowed his head respectfully to them, said a few words in Russian, then gestured to the table, where they took two of the seats, leaving the other adjacent two free. Then the little man in charge gave the Cossack a look, and this somehow told the guy he was to escort me to one of those chairs. He did, and I sat. Why not? It was their show

  Then the big little man took the other seat. The high-hatted Cossack stood behind me, looming. His two plug-ugly minions stood on either side of the closed soundproofed door.

  “Welcome to Butyrka Prison, Mr. Hammer,” the little man said in a quiet, almost gentle voice, sharing with me possibly the least sincere smile in human history. “I am Warden Zharkov.”

  “What do you hear from Flash Gordon?”

  He frowned.

  “Guy in the funnies,” I said with a shrug. “Maybe it doesn’t run over here.”

  His smile returned, and it was at odds with his reply: “There is nothing ‘funny’ about this situation, Mr. Hammer. You are an enemy espionage agent, and you are in our custody.”

  “This isn’t a K.G.B. facility, though, is it? It’s local Moscow M.V.D. So why hold me here?”

  “We ask the questions, Mr. Hammer. But I will say that in our government, distinctions between the local and the national are less...”

  He was looking for the word, so I gave him one: “Distinct?”

  Zharkov gave me the smile again. “Butyrka is a remand facility. You may be moved elsewhere... unless, of course, we can resolve this matter here and now.”

  “What matter is that?”

  “Espionage charges. Crimes against the state.”

  “I haven’t been arrested, Warden.”


  “In due time, Mr. Hammer. If you make it necessary.”

  I sighed. Then I gave him a nice friendly smile. “I don’t know much about the laws of your country, Warden. I admit that. But I’m pretty sure I’m being held here illegally.”

  The caterpillar-eyebrowed Tweedledum and Tweedledee, sharing our small table, were just sitting there, watching me, showing no signs of comprehension. But nobody was bothering to translate, so maybe they understood English.

  The warden said, “You are right, Mr. Hammer...”

  “I thought so.”

  “...you do not know much about our laws.”

  “Then it’s legal to abduct a tourist at gun point and toss him in a prison cell? Here’s how our laws work—kidnapping is a capital crime.”

  “It is a capital crime in this country, as well.”

  “Comforting to hear, Warden. Keep in mind, in my country, if you kidnap somebody, you can get yourself executed.”

  “I know what a capital crime is, Mr. Hammer.”

  “Good. Because I am giving you fellas a chance to release me right now. You show me out of here, unharmed, hell—I’ll even find my own way back to my hotel—and there’ll be no hard feelings. No international incidents. Just a simple misunderstanding.”

  The warden was thinking about that when Tweedledum asked him something in Russian—apparently he and Tweedledee didn’t understand English at that. The warden spoke to them for a while and they nodded as he apparently filled them in on our conversation so far.

  Then, without referring to notes, Zharkov said, “In 1952, in an incident in an abandoned paint factory near New York City, you killed eighty-two of our agents and associates, and later murdered a prominent American senator who held Soviet sympathies.”

  The chair creaked as I shifted in it. “Well, those eighty-two agents? They had kidnapped a friend of mine. Remember what I said about kidnapping being a capital crime? And they were an ungodly mix of foreign enemy agents and fellow travelers, all on U.S. soil. I don’t see that as a crime against the Soviet state. Just self-defense against it.”

  Even as I said this, I had a hunch a self-defense plea wouldn’t go over as well in this country as mine.

  “As for the politician I removed,” I said, “his Soviet sympathies were secret. He was passing himself off as a patriot when he was in fact in the employ of a foreign power.”

  He seemed to have barely heard that. “Just three years ago, you dismantled our top execution team—codenamed the Dragon by your C.I.A. Tooth and Nail, a male and a female. The woman, highly placed in Washington society, you murdered.”

  “No. She took her own life.”

  “Not intentionally, Mr. Hammer. It was a death you most cruelly engineered. A trap you set. And you captured and disfigured and turned over to your people the male half of that same team.”

  “Again, Warden. All of this was on American soil.”

  “That makes you no less of an enemy of the state, Mr. Hammer. As you are on our soil, now.”

  He had a point.

  The warden shifted and his smile turned sideways. “Regimes may change, but the soldiers who fight wars and the agents who serve in the shadows remain constant. You can perhaps appreciate, with your well-known...” He again searched for a word, and when he spoke it, he gave it a French pronunciation: “...penchant for vengeance, just how many of those in Soviet espionage circles would love to spend time with you, Mr. Hammer. To show you how they still feel, so many years later, about their fallen comrades.”

  What the hell was he getting at?

  “So it is in your benefit to cooperate with us,” the Warden said, as if summing things up, though I had no goddamn idea what he wanted from me.

  “Here’s what I can tell you about Senator Jasper’s trip,” I said. “It’s a straight-up fact-finding mission with some diplomacy stirred in. You’ve got a new guy in the top chair, our side wants to know whether things are going to get better or worse. Okay? Are we done?”

  Warden Kharkov shook his head. “We do not seek information about Senator Jasper’s visit.”

  “What then?”

  “You are an agent of. what is your people’s ridiculous, melodramatic term? Top secret, yes. Of a top-secret intelligence agency. An agency that operates in sensitive, critical areas where neither your F.B.I. nor C.I.A. can legally, officially go.”

  That was true as far as it went.

  He continued: “We would like you to tell us everything you know about this agency. The names of chiefs, of agents, any active investigations, anything pertinent that might help maintain the balance of power.”

  If I’d known any of that, I wouldn’t have given it to them. I wouldn’t give these bastards any chiefs or Indians. But if they started pulling out my toenails with pliers or sticking hot glass rods where I’d rather not have them stuck, I still couldn’t tell them a damn thing. Just the name Arthur Rickerby, who had given me this intelligence agency status for one reason only: to help him dismantle that aforementioned execution team, the Dragon.

  And since the conclusion of that episode, my rarefied status as a field agent for this nebulous agency had served primarily to pressure the New York D.A. not to pull my gun permit or P.I. ticket.

  The warden was still talking: “If you give us any reasonable amount of information, Mr. Hammer, we will put you through processing here at Butyrka—tonight you will be booked and printed, and have a full medical examination in our prison hospital.”

  “What’s the point? If I spill, why not just spring me?”

  “Because of your propaganda value, Mr. Hammer. We will keep you for several days. We will let it be known that you were associating with, plotting with, a known dissident who has been under our surveillance. But after a short period, as a show of good will toward the United States, we will release you back into the custody of Senator Jasper.”

  “It’s a crock of shit. I never ‘associated’ with a known dissident. You won’t make that fly.”

  “Oh, but you did, and we will, Mr. Hammer. And perhaps this will convince you that we are serious about our proposal.”

  The warden turned toward Tweedledum and Tweedledee, spoke a few Russian words, and Tweedledum nodded and reached into his pocket. He produced a handkerchief with something in it and handed it to the warden. The warden placed the folded-over hanky on the table in front of me, flipped it open to reveal the contents.

  A sad silver smile.

  Metal shining bridgework, spattered with blood.

  I sat staring at it for a long time. Whether that was ten seconds or ten minutes, I couldn’t tell you.

  Then I asked, “Did you just torture her? Or is she dead?”

  “She is quite dead, Mr. Hammer,” the warden said, and I swung my hand around with the palmed razor blade in it and cut his throat, a thin red smile of its own forming, glistening into a grin.

  The Cossack was moving forward as I jammed the chair back into him, shoving him against the wall, and his two cronies at the door were fumbling in their topcoat pockets for their Makarovs. I slashed the Cossack’s face twice, one on either sunken cheek, distracting him, then let the razor blade drop as I yanked his nine mil from that cross-draw rig and shot both of his boys in the head before either had their own weapons out. Then I swung the gun up under the Cossack’s chin and fired and watched his eyes go blank.

  The warden was still just sitting there, grabbing his throat, blood seeping between his fingers. That cut might not have been deep enough to kill him, but the bullet I put in his brain did the trick. Much of what had been inside his head splattered onto Tweedledum and Tweedledee, whose eyes were wide and stupid under the caterpillar eyebrows, and who put their hands up in surrender. I shot them anyway.

  The gunfire had been loud in the little room and the cordite stench here was as prominent as in Red Square today. Had the soundproofing been enough to conceal the six shots? Were the guards told to ignore little unpleasantries like gun shots during an interrogation? I had my doubts.


  I up-ended the heavy little table, the corpses sliding to the floor with thuds befitting dead meat, and I waited for that door to open.

  Would it open?

  Finally it did.

  One guard swung it wide and the burp-gun guard leapt in and I shot him in the head. The one holding open the door raised his Makarov and took a head shot for his trouble.

  Then I was scrambling around the table and got the burp gun in my hands before the other two guards could rush the room and when they did, half a second later, a short burst stitched across their chest and knocked them back against the hallway wall and they slid down and sat under the smears of red they’d made on the institutional yellow, heads bowed as if praying. But they weren’t.

  Working quickly but keeping focused, I removed the key ring from the dead Cossack’s belt. The big man sat there as if slumbering, the tall furry hat sitting at an undignified Tower of Pisa angle. I got my passport out of his topcoat pocket, and my wallet. Might come in handy.

  When I left the interrogation chamber, I had the burp gun in my hands and two Makarovs shoved in my belt. I ran out of there, and halfway down the steps, I looked across at green uniforms and guns pouring down after me. A burst from the burp gun sent them falling over each other and slipping in their own and each other’s blood, landing in a clumsy pile.

  Up in the cell block, Russians were screaming things, whether prisoners or guards or both, I had no idea.

  When I made the bottom of the steps, another gaggle of guards started down, got stalled by the dead bodies of the green uniforms gone before and they posed like a picture for another burp-gun blast, a pose they couldn’t hold as they tumbled on top of their comrades.

  Behind the wire-mesh wall of the cell block, the guard was running toward me with his Makarov raised to fire. I let go the rest of the burp gun’s magazine and took him off his feet and the wire-mesh door off its hinges. I pushed through, stepped over the dead guard, tossing the burp gun and filling my left hand with one of the Makarovs. I remembered which key to use from the Cossack’s commandeered key ring and got through the iron door that separated the holding cell area from the hallway of offices and locker rooms.