The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Agnes didn’t budge, didn’t blink; she was every inch the top pro. “I’ll get clear and get you out if there’s any trouble,” she said. She looked at him with blazing eyes.

Nate snarled at her out of the side of his mouth while stepping away from her. “You’ll do no such thing. We rehearsed this. You lie low and work with the restoration team for two weeks, then fly home. Stay away from DIVA and her dacha, and stay off the beach. She knows enough to send MAGNIT’s name out in the boat. Understand?”

Agnes nodded. “I’ll follow your orders, but there’s one more thing,” she said. “I love you.” Nate looked at her for a long beat, trying to say it with his eyes. That white forelock, Jesus. He turned away.

The subaltern stood up, the signal. It was time. As the surprised students looked on sullenly, two militiamen stepped behind Nate and grabbed him tightly above the elbows, spun him around, and walked him through a door at the end of the dormitory lobby. He didn’t resist, husbanding his strength. Agnes didn’t look at him, and the last thing he saw as he was pushed through the door was that no one had seized her. Thank Christ. Nate was led down a manicured gravel path through a dense stand of pines, their fresh scent competing with the salt air. Nate thought he could see glimpses of water through gaps in the trees, but the militiamen yanked him straight whenever he looked to the side. At the end of the path, quite alone, deep in the forest, stood an ornate Russian log cottage with decorative fringe tracing the steep gables, a pair of casement windows with rustic diagonal muntins and a polished wooden door with wrought-iron hinge straps and a grated speakeasy. Fucking Hansel and Gretel. The guards opened the door and pushed him into a deep armchair upholstered in dark-green fabric. Nate looked around the spartan living room with a single couch and two end tables. A framed picture of Lenin hung on the wall in front of Nate, the unsmiling portrait of him while in exile, around age fifty, with the piercing stare, the goatee, the straight mouth without a trace of mirth or mercy.

The bare logs on the walls and along the pitched ceiling were light-colored and polished, their gleam lighting up the room in the afternoon light. This was a secluded guesthouse, or perhaps the personal quarters of some caretaker. The two militiamen stood on either side of the armchair and pushed him back down into the chair when he tried to get up, apologetically saying toileta. He wanted to look around the cabin for escape points, and to test the degree of free movement allowed him, but for now, no dice. Nate knew this was going to be hard or easy, a sophisticated interrogation or a basic police-level interview. He expected the latter, for starters. A lot was going to depend on his attitude, the mood and skill of the interrogators, what exactly they wanted to know, and the urgency of their inquiries. He planned on sassing them, pissing them off, and holding out for as long as possible.

Early in training, Nate had attended classes in interrogation—resisting it, not inflicting it. The instructor, an Argentine operator—with a perpetually flicking eyelid and improbably named Ramón Lustbader (named by his mother after silent-screen star Ramón Novarro) with an attitude worse than Gable’s—had told the class that the bottom line was that everyone eventually gave it up; it was just a matter of how long you put up with the pain or drugs. Classically, the goal was to hold out forty-eight hours, an artificial period ostensibly long enough for a blown asset or a compromised network of assets to exfiltrate, but that was largely outdated film noir, Cold War theatrics.

In actuality, Ramón said, it was the pain of physical punishment—and the ancillary techniques of sleep deprivation, starvation, and extremes of hot or cold—that broke prisoners. The mysterious and feared psychotropic drugs such as ethanol, sodium thiopental, amobarbital, and scopolamine that reportedly could compel prisoners to talk, and that could, after prolonged use, plunge the human brain to the cognitive level of one of the lesser apes, in reality did not compel subjects to begin blurting the truth. Rather, these drugs unlocked memories, reduced inhibitions, and heightened suggestive responses that could, in the hands of a skilled interrogator, prompt the blurting of desired information. Common sleeping gas at the dentist, nitrous oxide, had the same effect.