There was a long moment, then everyone started talking. The director said something to Iryna. She turned to Scorpion, her eyes glistening.
“He said up till now, he thought like everyone else that we were guilty. He said this changes everything.” One of the men said something to the director and he repeated it to Iryna.
“What did he say?” Scorpion asked.
“He said it’s not good television, it’s great television!” She smiled.
There was an excited buzz on the set. People were whispering to each other. One of the men showed them where he and Iryna would sit and which camera would be on them. Scorpion was surprised to hear that, and as soon as he could, he pulled Iryna aside behind the cameras.
“What the hell’s going on? They don’t expect me to be on camera, do they?”
“Yes,” she said. “They think it’s an important part of the story. Tetyana wants to ask you some questions. Is it a problem?”
“I don’t go on TV. I don’t have my picture taken. Ever. It would destroy what I do,” he told her.
“Of course,” she said, looking into his eyes. At that moment, the hair rose on the back of his neck. He had the feeling she was falling in love with him. “I’ll tell them.”
She went over and talked with the director and Tetyana. They spoke for some time before Iryna came back.
“You have to be on. You’re the one on the video talking to Shelayev. They’ve suggested a mask. Is that all right?”
“Not if it shows half my face,” Scorpion said.
Iryna had another conference and came back. “You’ll wear dark glasses and have the rest of your face covered, plus it will be digitally obscured. Your voice will be electronically disguised. Ilko-”
“Who?”
“The director,” she said, indicating the man talking to Tetyana, “he thinks the disguise will make it even better. More believable. Okay?”
Scorpion nodded. He checked his watch. They would be taping in half an hour. Still plenty of time for him and Iryna to catch the Krakow train, although he wasn’t sure she would come. Watching her now, the center of attention, the TV cameras getting ready, he wondered if she was ready to give this up for him. Why would she? he asked himself. Why would anyone?
An assistant led Scorpion to a small room offstage, where he tried on the dark glasses, a workman’s cap, and a wraparound mask and voice device. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a terrorist. If he were a viewer, he thought, he wouldn’t believe a word out of his mouth. Then Iryna joined him and studied him critically, tilting her head.
“Ilko’s right. It’ll make it better,” she said.
A female assistant came in and brought them tea, then began to do Iryna’s makeup. Scorpion checked his watch again. He was getting antsy. It’s almost over, he told himself, but his instincts were telling him something was wrong. He heard sounds outside.
“Chto eto?” he asked. What’s that?
“They are just getting ready on the set,” the assistant said. She checked her watch. “Only five minutes.”
Scorpion heard something, people outside the door. He started to reach for the Glock when the door burst open.
Half a dozen SBU team members in full battle gear swarmed into the room, their weapons pointed at Scorpion and Iryna. Even if he reacted, Scorpion realized, there was a good chance that Iryna, if not both of them, would be killed. Two men grabbed him and forced him to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye he could see they had done the same to Iryna and the assistant. His body was patted down and someone kicked him in the ribs. Someone else ripped his Glock out of its holster as his hands were shackled behind him with tight plastic cuffs. Iryna was lying nearby, two SBU men on top of her, one of them with his hand between her legs.
An SBU team officer holding a pistol walked into the room. Even from the floor, with a knee pressing hard on his neck, Scorpion could see who it was-the man’s cheek and broken nose still swollen and bruised from where he had kicked him.
Kulyakov.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Lukyanivska Prison
Kyiv, Ukraine
The screams echoed off the walls of the cell. Scorpion couldn’t tell where they were coming from or even whether they were from a man or a woman. They sounded barely human. They seemed to go on for hours, though he knew it might have only been minutes. It was part of the process, he thought. Time deprivation, sensory deprivation, loss of control of your own body, humiliation, pain. “Reports from subjects have repeatedly confirmed that the anticipation of torture is worse than the torture itself,” he remembered Sergeant Falco quoting from the KUBARK book, the CIA’s classified manual on torture. Buzz-hair-cutted, fat-faced, massive-shouldered, no-necked Sergeant Falco tapping the desk with a rubber hose. Scorpion had encountered him during his Level C SERE training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, back when he was in JSOC’s First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta Force. The rules for Level C SERE were that interrogators were allowed to break no more than one major and two minor bones. For five straight days and nights he’d had Sergeant Falco’s undivided attention.
Not an easy man to forget, Sergeant Falco.
The screams subsided. For a moment there was nothing. Suddenly, he heard a terrible piercing scream, louder, higher pitched, worse than anything he had heard before. A woman, he thought. Definitely a woman. Then he understood. They wanted him to think it was Iryna.
Maybe it was.
Scorpion was penned naked in a small cage, his hands plastic-cuffed behind him, in a squatting stress position. There was no room to straighten any part of him, and the pain in his knees and back, shoulders and neck, was becoming unbearable. In a little while he would fall against the side of the cage and it would be even more uncomfortable.
The cell the cage was in was concrete and pitch-black and unbelievably cold. When they first brought him into the prison with his hands zip-tied behind him, Kulyakov had watched, smiling, as three SBU mussory took turns beating him with rubber truncheons. One of them got too close and Scorpion nearly took his head off with a Brazilian capoeira — style heel-kick that laid him out. He head-butted another and started to take the third man out, but Kulyakov had called for help and another three or four beefy guards piled in, swinging truncheons. One of them slammed his truncheon into Scorpion’s groin as he was kicking, bringing him down.
His body ached all over from the beating they had given him, angry that he had hurt two of their comrades. But it was worth it, he thought, even as they were hitting him. It was worth it to let them know that they weren’t completely in control. The pain was bad though. It was hard to know which was worse, the bruises from the beating, the pain in his joints from the stress position, or the cold.
The cold, he decided. He was shivering violently, approaching hypothermia, which he remembered starts when body temperature drops below 35 Celsius, 95 Fahrenheit. His breathing was becoming shallow. He needed to do his thinking now, he realized, while he still could, before the cold robbed him of his mind too.
“Sooner or later you’ll break. Everyone does,” he remembered Sergeant Falco saying. It was a contest between interrogator and captive. Between Kulyakov and him. Kulyakov wanted confessions. If he didn’t get it from him, he would try to get one from Iryna.
Scorpion tried to calculate if she could resist. How bad would they go on her? Would they sexually abuse her? Probably, he thought. How did he feel about that? He didn’t want to think about it, he realized. Well, you better, because they’re going to do it. If they survived-and realistically, for him at least that was almost an impossibility- would he take her back? Even if he would, would she let him? You’re in a dream world, he told himself. It’s the cold. It’s the cold and the pain and the screams doing the thinking. Not me, he decided. He would take her back no matter what they did. And even if Iryna didn’t break-she would try not to, he knew that about her-Kulyakov also had
