Designated Targets

Blokhin spoke to a couple of NKVD guards, his flat, Slavic features hardly moving as he did so. The pair stomped over to where Khrushchev lay on the cold concrete floor and pinned him beneath their boots. The agony of their hobnails grinding into his already tortured flesh and broken bones summoned up screams the former Politburo magnate had not thought he would be able to voice. His throat was already raw from what seemed like a lifetime of screaming.

He was dimly aware of Blokhin’s heavyset form as it advanced on him, and for one irrational moment he wondered if he might have lived had Stalin agreed to liquidate the executioner, as Beria—the head of the NKVD—had once desired.

But that was madness. The Soviet Union had no shortage of executioners.

After all, Yezhov—that poison dwarf—had tortured and killed unknowable numbers of enemies, only to be killed in turn by Beria. He had died begging and screaming and thrashing against his fate, and all Khrushchev had left was a determination that he would not go out like that. He knew there was no return from this very special section of Lubianka. Best then to consign his shattered carcass to the release of death with what little dignity he could muster.

Naked, covered in his own filth, nearly toothless, his face a bruised ruin, one eye gouged out, nubs of broken bone poking through torn flesh at half a dozen places on his body—the very concept of dignity was ludicrous. But he would not beg for his life. He would—

A small sting in his neck. He wouldn’t have noticed it amid the blizzard of pain, were it not for the fact that Blokhin had grabbed one of his torn ears just before he jabbed the needle in. This was unexpected. Death by injection. It was not standard. It was . . .

A trickle of soft, indescribably sweet pleasure. No, it wasn’t that, either. It was . . . an absence of pain. It spread from the site of the small sting, flowing down his spine and out along his thin, scabrous arms and legs. It was like slipping into a warm bath. Even his mind, which had been as badly abused as his body, found itself floating on a summer breeze, drifting away from the horrors of his torture. The beatings remained in his memory, but now he felt so disconnected from them that they were as easily endured as the thousands of beatings and murders he himself had ordered over the years. Other people’s misery, he’d learned, was a much lighter burden than one’s own.

Even when the guard flipped him over roughly, so that his skull hit the floor with a crack and the glare of the cell’s naked lightbulb shone into his dying eye, he did not care.

“So, Nikita Sergeyevich, you have lost weight. The regimen here agrees with you, da?” That was a new voice. A familiar one.

Khrushchev blinked the tears from his eye. He tried to wipe them away, forgetting his broken fingers, but the guards still pinned him to the cold floor. Each crushed a wrist beneath one boot, and they held long rubber truncheons in their hands. He didn’t care. They could do as they pleased. It’s a free country. The thought made him chuckle in spite of himself.

“Is there something funny, my friend. Why do you laugh so?”

Khrushchev coughed up clots of dark blood and a few broken pieces of his teeth as he regarded his latest visitor across a gulf he could not fathom. Beria stood there like a snake in human form. He had stepped from behind Blokhin, appearing without warning.

His former friend, now chief tormentor, wore a general’s uniform and carried a small cosh. Khrushchev recognized it from previous beatings. Early on, in this new phase of their relationship, he had repeatedly wet himself when it had appeared in Beria’s thin, white hands. Now it was just a curious artifact. He didn’t even flinch when the NKVD boss took three long strides toward him and bent down to smash him across the jaw with it. An awareness of blinding pain flashed through his thoughts, but at no stage did it connect with his concerns. Then the pain faded, and he did not care that it had been visited upon him.

Nikita Khrushchev, despite the fact that he was teetering on the edge of mortal existence, found himself fascinated. What on earth were they doing to him?

Beria just smiled. “I can see that you are intrigued, comrade. But before I can satisfy your curiosity, I wonder, would you mind signing this confession for me? I know it has been a matter of some difficulty between us. But I thought I might seek your indulgence one last time. The Vozhd is pressing me for a resolution. You understand, my friend.”