Threat Vector

coats, and both were older than Kovalenko. He put them in their fifties. Valentin had never seen them before but assumed them to be doctors.

Both men looked nervous.

Neither doctor regarded Kovalenko on his gurney by the door as they passed by. They then removed the curtain partition, rolling it out of the way up against the wall, giving Kovalenko a view of the rest of the space. In the faint light he saw another man on a gurney; the second prisoner’s body below the shoulders was covered by a sheet, but he was clearly bound by his hands and feet much the same as was Kovalenko.

The other prisoner looked at the doctors now. “What is this? Who are you?”

Valentin wondered what was wrong with the man. Who are you? Was it not clear where he was and who they were? The better question would have been “What the hell is going on?”

“What the hell is going on?” Kovalenko shouted at the two older men, but they ignored him and walked now to the foot of the other prisoner’s bed.

One of the doctors had a black canvas bag on his shoulder, and he reached into the bag and took out a syringe. With a quiver in his hands and a tightness in his jaw that Valentin could register even in the dim, the man popped the cap off the syringe, and then he lifted the sheet off the bare feet of the other prisoner.

“What the fuck are you doing? Don’t touch me with—”

The doctor took hold of the man’s big toe while Kovalenko watched in horror and utter confusion. Valentin quickly looked up at the prisoner and saw similar bewilderment on the man’s face.

It took the doctor with the syringe a moment to separate the skin from the nail at the tip of the man’s toe, but as soon as he accomplished this he jabbed the needle deep under the nail and pressed the plunger.

The man screamed in terror and pain as Kovalenko looked on.

“What is that?” Valentin demanded. “What are you doing to this man?”

The needle came out of the toe, and the doctor tossed the syringe into the bag. He wiped the site with an alcohol prep pad, and then he and his colleague just stood at the foot of both gurneys, their eyes fixed on the man to Valentin’s right.

Kovalenko realized the other man had fallen silent. He looked over at his face again and saw confusion, but before Valentin’s eyes the face contorted in sudden and sharp pain.

Through clenched teeth the prisoner growled, “What did you do to me?”

The two doctors just stood there, watching, tension in their own faces.

After a moment more the man on the gurney began thrashing against his bindings; his hips rose high in the air and his head jerked from side to side.

Valentin Kovalenko shouted for help at the top of his lungs.

Foam and spit came out of the agonized man’s mouth, followed by a guttural moan. He kept convulsing at the limit of his straps, as if he was trying in vain to expel whatever toxin had been injected into him.

It took the prisoner a slow, torturous minute to die. When he stilled, when his body came to rest contorted but restrained by the straps, the man’s wide eyes seemed to stare right at Kovalenko.

The ex — SVR assistant rezident looked toward the doctors. His voice was hoarse from his shouting. “What did you do?”

The man with the bag on his shoulder stepped over to the foot of Kovalenko’s gurney and reached inside his bag.

As he did this, the other man pulled the bedsheet off Kovalenko’s legs and feet.

Valentin screamed again, his voice cracking and faltering. “Listen to me! Just listen! Don’t touch me! I have associates who will pay you… pay you or kill you if you—”

Valentin Kovalenko shut up when he saw the pistol.

From out of the bag the doctor had retrieved not a syringe, but instead a small stainless-steel automatic, and he leveled it at Kovalenko. The other man stepped up to the gurney and began unfastening the bindings around the younger Russian’s arms and legs. Kovalenko lay there quietly, sweat alternately stinging his eyes and chilling him where it had dampened the sheets.

He blinked out the sweat and kept his eyes fixed on the pistol.

When the unarmed doctor finished releasing Valentin from the leather straps, he stepped back to his colleague. Valentin sat up slowly on the gurney, keeping his hands slightly raised and his eyes locked onto the pistol in the quivering hand of the man who had just murdered the other patient.

“What do you want?” Valentin asked.

Neither of the two men spoke, but the one with the pistol — Kovalenko identified it now as a Walther PPK/S — used the barrel of his tiny weapon as a pointer. He twitched it toward a canvas duffel on the floor.

The Russian prisoner slid off the gurney and knelt down to the bag. He had a hard time taking his eyes off the gun, but when he finally did he found a full change of clothes and a pair of tennis shoes. He looked up to the two older men, and they just nodded at him.

Valentin changed out of his prison garb and into worn blue jeans and a brown pullover that smelled like body odor. The two men just watched him. “What’s happening?” he asked while he dressed, but they did not speak. “Okay. Never mind,” he said. He’d given up getting answers, and it certainly did not look as though they were about to kill him, so he allowed them their silence.

Were these murderers actually helping him escape?

They left the infirmary with Kovalenko in the lead and the doctors walking three meters behind him with the Walther leveled at his back. One of the men said, “To the right,” and his nervous voice echoed in the long and dark hallway. Valentin did as he was instructed. They led him up another quiet corridor, down a staircase, through two iron gates that were unlocked and propped open with waste bins, and then to a large iron door.

Kovalenko had not seen another soul during the entire walk through this part of the detention center.

“Knock,” instructed one of the men.

Valentin rapped on the iron door lightly with his knuckles.

He stood there for a moment, silence around him except for the thumping in his chest and a wheezing in his lungs from where the bronchitis affected his breathing. He felt dizzy and his body was weak; he hoped like hell this jailbreak, or whatever was going on right now, would not require him to run, jump, or climb any distance.

After waiting several more seconds, he turned back around to the men behind him.

The hallway was empty.

Bolts in the iron door were disengaged, the door creaked open on old hinges, and the Russian prisoner faced the outside.

Valentin Kovalenko had experienced a few hours of semi-fresh air in the past eight months; he’d been taken to the exercise court on the roof once a week and it was open to the sky save for a rusted wire grille, but the warm predawn breeze that brushed his face now as he stood at the edge of freedom was the freshest, most beautiful feeling he’d ever experienced.

There were no wires or moats or towers or dogs. Just a small parking lot in front of him, a few two-door civilian cars parked along a wall on the other side. And off to his right lay a dusty street stretching as far as he could see under weak streetlamps.

A street sign read Ulitsa Matrosskaya Tishina.

He was no longer alone. A young guard had opened the door from the outside. Valentin could barely see him as the lightbulb in the fixture above the door had been removed from its socket. The guard stepped past Valentin, inside the prison, and he pushed Valentin outside, and then he pulled the door.

It clanged as it shut, and then a pair of bolt locks were engaged.

And just like that, Valentin Kovalenko was free.

For about five seconds.

Then he saw the black BMW 7 Series sedan idling across the street. Its lights were off, but the heat from the exhaust rose to diffuse the glow of the streetlamp above it. This was the only sign of life he could see, so Kovalenko walked slowly in that direction.

The back door of the vehicle opened, as if beckoning him forward.

Valentin cocked his head. Someone had a sense for melodrama. Hardly necessary after what he’d been through.

The ex-spy picked up the pace and crossed the street to the BMW, and then he tucked himself inside.