The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

The guards pushed Nate into a wooden straight-backed chair and stood behind him, their hands resting lightly on each of his shoulders. Nash saw the prison guards carried OTs-27 Berdysh 9mm automatic pistols in holsters on their belts. He leaned forward to peek around the guards at the rest of the room, but was yanked back to sit up straight. There were glass-fronted medicine cabinets filled with vials, and surgical instruments neatly laid out on sterile cloths. There was also a stainless-steel table in the center of the room with drainage pipes at either end leading down to drains in the floor, clearly a mortician’s table for performing autopsies. Nate did not like the look of the undulating tile floor gently sloping toward half a dozen drains around the room. He also didn’t like the look of a truck battery on a dolly with a jumble of cables wrapped around the handles, barely visible, leaning against the side of the cabinet. The equipment was incongruous in the gleaming surgical theater; it belonged in a grimy motor-pool garage meant for jumping stalled trucks, not in this room. Nate’s spirit fluttered a little as he imagined what the battery was for. Ignore the damn thing.

Despite his arm and his finger, Nate was in relatively good shape. He had figured out that Benford had probably run a canary trap and had told the three DCIA candidates variants of the same story. With luck, Dominika had passed the word to Langley, hopefully in time to prevent a catastrophe. Nate accepted that this was Benford’s radical, all-out tactic to expose the mole, and he understood he was being used as a “lizard’s tail,” an expendable operative who is jettisoned and sacrificed to protect larger equities. He had not seen Dominika since the interrogation in the little cottage on Putin’s compound, and he was worried that the mole had somehow compromised her. He was also worried about Agnes, and hoped she was safely out of Russia. No. If everyone was blown, he reasoned, it wasn’t likely they’d be putting him through the wringer. He still had agents to protect. If he listened closely, Nate expected he could passively glean an idea from the interrogators’ questions about the status of the mole hunt and of Dominika’s security situation.

Avoiding looking at the battery, Nate tried to prepare himself mentally and physically for the coming cycle of interrogation. They probably would try drugs again, but with luck and discipline, Nate thought he could resist. If Dominika had any influence in managing the interrogation, he knew she would contrive to keep the physical punishment at a minimum, and to limit the sessions for as long as possible as Langley worked on arranging a swap. She must not go too far on his behalf and throw suspicion on herself, however. That was critical.

Whatever the Russians had in mind, he had no doubt he would survive. He was a prisoner in Putin’s Moscow, but this was the modern age and intelligence officers from opposition services were not harmed, according to a strict protocol. Putin may have eliminated hundreds of dissident Russians, but not ops officers of rival services.

Nate knew he had a long stretch ahead before the State Department would get off their pinstriped fannies to commence talks to arrange for his release. He could be in the slammer for a year, five years, ten years, but CIA would never give up trying to get him back. On his return to Langley, there would be medals, a promotion, choice of assignments, but in reality his career would be over. He would be considered too burned coverwise and too burned out psychologically. By then, he daydreamed, Dominika might be finished at SVR and would be ready to retire and disappear into idyllic resettlement with Nate. It was a hell of a long way around to finally start a new life together, but it would be worth the wait. For the present, Nate intended to give his interrogators as much guff as he could muster. He knew by now the Russians probably had identified him as Nathaniel Nash, the last handler of General Korchnoi, one of the best assets the CIA had run in Moscow for fourteen years. They would also know that Nash was a fluent Russian speaker, which would further infuriate them.

All thoughts about civilized outcomes in the basement of Butyrka Prison evaporated when Sergeant Iosip Blokhin walked into interview room three. He was dressed in a camouflage utility uniform and wore polished combat boots. A green nylon web belt was cinched tightly around his waist with a metal snap buckle with the Spetsnaz seal of parachute and dagger. His uniform was starched and crisp, but nowhere was there any badge of rank. His thin hair was slicked back over his bullet head, his scarred forehead dully shone in the bright lights of the room, and his ham-hock hands hung at his sides.