with penetrating foreign secret intelligence operations.
On the way in from his dacha on the Istra River outside of town, the general had run through the morning reports his driver had brought out. And now he was angry that he had not been included in last night’s operation.
“Good morning, Comrade General,” his secretary said as Borodin charged through his outer office and into his own private domain with its view of Dzerzhinsky Square. “Get me General Suslev on the telephone,” Borodin bellowed, throwing off his great coat and lighting a cigarette.
How could one hope to run an overseas operation without knowing what was happening in one’s own back yard? All the years of work could easily be escaping like a puff of smoke. Once it was away and dissipated no science in the world could reconstruct it. Like acid rain it could even spread destroying everything in its path. Coordination, was all he asked. Not so much. Even the CIA had its oversight committee to make certain their people didn’t step on each other’s toes. It made sense, damnit. He had argued until he was blue in the face, first with Andropov and then with that fool of a successor.
He sat down, inhaling smoke deeply into his lungs, then closed his eyes. “With care, Aleksandr,” he told himself. “It is time to move with care.”
His intercom buzzed. “It is General Suslev, sir,” his secretary said. Suslev was head of the First Chief Directorate, charged with watching Americans in Russia.
Borodin picked up the telephone. “Nikolai, now what exactly was it you did last night?”
“My job, Aleksandr Ilyich,” 5uslev said. “Arresting spies.”
“Who is he?”
“Come down and see for yourself, if you’re so anxious.”
General Borodin rode the elevator down to the basement and strode through the broad stone-walled corridor to the interrogation center where he was immediately passed through to Chief Interrogator Miroshnikov’s office. General Suslev was already there. They were watching the American in the interrogation chamber through a one- way glass. He’d obviously been here since they’d arrested him shortly after ten last evening. His coat was off, his tie loose and at that moment he was seated in a straight-backed chair, smoking a cigarette as he faced his two preliminary interrogators.
“Who is he?” General Borodin asked.
“David McAllister,” General Suslev said, looking up. The general, who had changed his name from the Georgian Suslevili, was a small, intense man whom Borodin hated with a passion. Suslev, however, would probably become the KGB’s director one day. “He is a special assistant to the Ambassador.”
“CIA?”
“You’re particularly astute this morning, Aleksandr. Actually he’s deputy chief of station.”
Borodin ignored the sarcasm. He stepped a little closer to the window so that he could get a better look. McAllister seemed weary, his complexion pale in the harsh white light reflecting sharply off the stark white tiles. He looked nervous, perhaps even concerned, but he did not seem like the sort of man who would give in easily. It was something about the American’s eyes that Borodin found fascinating. He could see in them, even from this distance, a hint of power, of raw strength. It was a look he saw in his own eyes each morning in the mirror. A look he admired. This one would be tough to break.
“You have an interest in this case, Comrade General?” Chief Interrogator Miroshnikov asked. He was a big, oily man, nearly as large as Borodin. But his eyes were small and narrow and close set. They reminded his subordinates of pig eyes. No one liked him. Even his wife, it was said, waited for the day her husband would be struck down by a bus. But he was very good at his job, which was finding out things.“Is there a possibility of turning him?” Borodin asked, masking the real reason for his interest.
“I do not believe so,” Miroshnikov said wistfully. “Perhaps, given the time.
“You are on the wrong side of the ocean with this one, Aleksandr,” Suslev said. “Your job is penetrating the CIA in Washington, not Moscow.”
“He will not remain in the Rodina forever, Nikolai,” Borodin said, gesturing toward McAllister. “Not unless you mean to kill him.” He looked at the American again. His eyes narrowed, as if he had thought of something else. “Where was he when you picked him up?”
“Just off Lyalina Square,” Suslev answered. “What was he doing there at that hour of the night? Meeting someone? Passing secrets?”
“We don’t know, yet. But he was armed,” Suslev said. “Perhaps we’ll find that out this morning, Comrade General,” Miroshnikov said.
I Borodin looked at him, and then in at McAllister. He nodded.
With Miroshnikov across the table from you, anything was possible. He shuddered inwardly. With Miroshnikov the coming days would not be very pleasant for McAllister.
Colonel Petr Valentin Miroshnikov switched off the tape recorder and laid the headphones on his desk. He sat back and stretched, temporarily relieving the pressure on his lower spine. The day had not been entirely satisfactory. The American had refused to give them anything, anything at all, and General Suslev had called every hour wanting to know what progress had been made. Yet the interrogation was going as it should. As he expected it would. There was a certain symmetry to these things. First came the shock of arrest which led to a timidity between the prisoner and his interviewers. It was up to the good interrogator to make the prisoner understand, as soon as possible, that his very existence was no longer in his own hands. Someone else controlled his destiny. From that moment on, the prisoner would become the interrogator’s friend. They would become allies. Confidants in the end.
Miroshnikov looked at the tape recorder, then glanced into the empty interrogation chamber: its stainless steel tables, its sturdy chairs, the instruments, the white tiled floor and walls gleaming like an operating theater beneath strong overhead lights, excited him. With McAllister the symmetry was there, but Miroshnikov knew that the process would be long and drawn out and painful. From the first moment he’d laid eyes on the American he’d instinctively sensed a strength in the man, well beyond the men who had passed this way before. And for that Miroshnikov was grateful. Breaking a man’s will, his spirit, was the real joy. If it was too easily accomplished, if it came too quickly, there was little or no satisfaction. “The world is my will and my idea.” It was bad 5chopenhauer philosophy, but one which Miroshnikov had embraced early as a young exile growing up in Irkutsk in Siberia. He was an outsider. The foreigner in a land of displaced persons, and he had to fight his way through school. His father had never learned to fight or even cope and he had died out there, as had Miroshnikov’s mother. But Petr had learned that the key to the domination of any man was in first understanding his will and then making it yours.
The pitiful little Jews they sent to him who wanted to emigrate so badly to the West, or the poor farmer boy turned soldier who was guilty of nothing more than perhaps a moment’s indescretion were of no consequence. Boring actually. Just hauling them into the Lubyanka was often all the impetus they needed to spill their guts. For a few others, a few slihbas, Soviet political officers, who had become just a little too enamored of life in the West, the challenge was somewhat greater, though intelligence was not necessarily the mark of a man who could withstand an interrogation.
With this one, however, Miroshnikov sensed the biggest challenge of all. McAllister was as intelligent as he was strong. Miroshnikov sensed in the American an extremely well-developed instinct for survival. Challenging. Challenging indeed.
The interrogator got up and went into the tiny bathroom just off his office where he closed and locked the door. He looked at his face in the mirror over the sink and liked what he saw, because he could see beyond mere physical appearance. The eyes are windows into the soul. Looking into his own eyes he could see no soul. Nothing. Only a deep, smoldering hate for Great Russians. Hate for what the Soviet Union had done to him, for what he had been made to endure as a boy, for what he had become. He took a bottle of cognac and a glass from his medicine cabinet, poured himself a stiff measure and drank it down, the liquor warming his insides, straightening out the knots in his stomach. He splashed some water on his face, then tipped his head back, stretching the muscles at the base of his neck, releasing some of the tension that had been building. He took a deep breath, held it for the count of five, and then let it out slowly, forcing all the air out of his lungs, before he turned and went back out to his office.
They’d started with McAllister last night the moment he had been brought in, and had not let up until three this afternoon. Four interrogators, rotating on two teams, had begun the softening up process, the opening acts. McAllister had been allowed a few hours rest, and now it was time to begin in earnest.
