Lockdown (23 page)

She’d gone down under the force of that punch. One man had sat on her chest and the other on her legs, sending a shard of pain shooting up her left leg, the one that had been broken back in Moscow. She’d heard the shackles clanking against the concrete as they too were taken off.

The men had then retreated from the cell, and she’d run at the door as it closed. Slamming her fists against the steel. She’d heard a door open and slam shut. Then they’d come back, her cell door opened again, and another man was thrown inside.

He was dressed normally. He looked American, or at least how she imagined Americans looked when they weren’t in uniform. His
hair was shorter than the guards’ and he had a fresh scar that ran along the top of his head. He’d looked from the knife to her but made no move towards it, not even when she bent down to pick it up.

His gaze had met hers. There was no fear in his eyes. She’d held the knife in a hammer grip like she’d been taught by her husband. Still he hadn’t moved. They’d stayed that way for what seemed like an eternity. She’d sensed he was conscious of the knife but he never looked at it. Not once.

Then, finally, he’d spoken. ‘I’m not going to fight you. So if you’re going to do it, then let’s get it done.’

She’d looked from the man to the unblinking eye of the camera mounted in the corner, put down the knife, and put out her hand. He’d taken it, and she’d helped him on to his feet.

Back in the control room, Brand had tired of the love-in. ‘OK, go live.’

The operator punched a key. The screen went blank. The operator hit it again.

‘What is it? What’s the problem?’ Brand asked, agitated.

‘We’re not getting any signal from that camera.’

‘Try again.’

‘I just did.’

Brand kicked out at the wall in frustration. Half an hour ago the cell had been occupied by a solitary woman, cuffed and shackled. Now it was her, Lock and a knife. What the hell had gone wrong?

Lock handed the knife back to Mareta – a calculated show of trust he hoped he wouldn’t have cause to regret. If he was going to get out of here he’d need her cooperation.

An alarm that had been shrieking in the background for the past five minutes fell silent. Lock prowled the cell, examining its construction from every angle. Mareta watched him.

‘The only way out is through the door,’ she said.

‘You speak English? Sorry, stupid question.’

‘They don’t know I understand them,’ she said, nodding to the disembowelled camera which lay on the bed.

‘Who are you? Why are you here?’

‘My name is Mareta Yuzik.’

That piece of information alone went most of the way to answering both questions. Lock wouldn’t have recognized her face, because very few people had seen it. And most of those who had were dead. But he sure as hell knew the name. In fact, it sent an involuntary shudder all the way from the base of his spine to the back of his neck.

Mareta was the most infamous of Chechnya’s black widows,
women whose husbands had been killed by the Russians and who operated as suicide bombers in the Chechens’ bloody guerrilla war to win independence from the motherland. Mareta’s husband had been a notorious Chechen warlord. But that wasn’t what had made her exceptional. What made her stand out was the fact that she’d disavowed martyrdom to assume command of her former husband’s group of fighters.

Mareta’s band had spent the last few years on a murderous rampage. Lowlights included the wholesale slaughter of some of Moscow’s prime movers and shakers during a performance by the Bolshoi. Demonstrating a horrifyingly accurate understanding of the theatricality required to get yourself noticed as a terrorist in the modern world, Mareta had kicked off proceedings by personally beheading the lead ballerina live on stage. Of course, where the newly rich Russians were, so were their bodyguards. A firefight had taken place during which the respective close protection teams took out more of each other’s clients in the crossfire than the Chechens managed. The finale had been a huge explosion.

In that particular puff of smoke, Mareta and her comrades had disappeared, leading to speculation that the whole thing was a putup job by the Kremlin, who’d seen one of their main political rivals taken out during the outrage. The apparatchiks had seen it as a happy coincidence.

Mareta’s follow-up was no less demanding of world headlines. Her fighters entered a kindergarten just over the border from Chechnya and held two dozen infants hostage before slaughtering them in cold blood, taping events for posterity. Once again, Mareta slipped into the night before the building was overrun and most of her fighters were killed by Russian special forces.

It was this second escape which had earned her the nickname of the Ghost in the Russian media. There had been numerous sightings of her since then, including in northern Iraq, Pakistan
and Helmand Province. Her popping up here beat them all.

Lock decided to follow Mareta’s lead and play dumb. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

‘To die,’ she said, matter of factly.

‘Are the other people they brought here also from your country?’

‘Some. Some from other places.’ She picked at a hang nail with the tip of the Gerber. ‘Now, let me ask you the same question you asked me. Why are you here?’

‘It’s a long story.’

Mareta glanced around the cell. ‘Maybe we have a long time.’

Lock trusted his new cellmate about as much as Brand, so he gave her an edited version of events, telling her he was an investigative journalist looking into the activities of a drug company.

‘You have investigative journalists, right?’

‘Investigative?’ She rolled the word around in her mouth like it was the funniest thing she’d heard. ‘Yes, we have these people. The government kills them.’

She was clearly a glass-half-empty kind of a gal.

‘So when I was looking around this place,’ Lock continued, ‘they found me, beat me up. I guess they threw me in here hoping you’d finish me off.’

Mareta listened calmly. She paced to the door and back again, making shapes in the air with the blade of the knife. ‘So why do you think I’m here?’

‘You mean, what would a drug company want with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think you’re a guinea pig.’

‘Guinea pig?’

‘Yes. They’re going to use you to see if something they’re developing is safe to use on humans.’

‘What?’

‘That, I don’t know.’

In fact, he had a couple of ideas. Mareta’s presence here had to have been sanctioned at the highest level. Maybe a private deal between governments. Maybe Meditech was developing something which the Russians thought could open her up for interrogation. Both the CIA and KGB had chased down so-called ‘truth’ drugs during the Cold War, everything from sodium pentathol to a more orthodox tongue loosener like whisky, or a picture of the target in a compromising position. In a world where quality intelligence could save thousands of lives, something surefire would be worth more than its weight in gold.

‘So, which paper do you work for?’ Mareta asked.

‘I’m freelance,’ Lock said. It was only half a lie, but Mareta’s expression told him that she didn’t buy it – and neither did he for that matter. It wasn’t such a bad thing to be crap at playing dumb, he supposed.

Mareta stopped pacing the cell and approached Lock. She held the point of the knife about a foot from his right eye – not close enough for him to take it from her. ‘And say I don’t believe you.’

Lock did his best not to blink. He knew that arguing would make him seem even more suspicious. ‘Not much I can do about that.’

She kept the tip of the blade where it was. ‘They tried this once before. In Moscow. They put me in a cell with another woman. I made sure she would never have children. And that time, I had no knife.’

‘You were captured?’

‘Twice. Twice I escaped.’

Lock glanced at the knife, then shifted his gaze back to Mareta. ‘So if you think I’m a spy, why haven’t you killed me already?’

‘Getting information from someone can go two ways. I have learned more from my interrogators over the years than they ever learned from me.’

‘No shit.’

‘Please don’t use such words.’

Lock made a mental note.
Likes: public decapitation. Dislikes: Inappropriate language
.

‘Maybe I make sure you won’t be able to make any children either.’

She moved the knife slowly down from his face, letting it come to rest level with his crotch.

Lock sat on the floor with his back against the cell wall. All he was missing to complete the Steve McQueen look was a baseball.

‘So, what do you think we should call the kids?’

Mareta, who was on the bed, pointed the knife in the direction of his face again. ‘You talk too much.’

‘Just trying to pass the time.’

‘You should be thinking of how we get out of here.’

‘I thought you’d have that covered.’

She looked straight at him. ‘And why would that be?’

Damn
. Nothing Lock had said since he’d entered the cell had in any way suggested that he knew her by reputation, and that was too close. ‘You said you’d escaped twice after being captured, didn’t you?’ he countered, thinking quickly.

She sneered, swung her legs over the edge of the bed frame. Jabbed the point of the knife gently against his arm, like a housewife checking the chicken to see if the juices are running clear. ‘You’re not a journalist,’ she said.

‘And why do you say that?’

‘I’ve met many of them.’

Lock flashed back to another story that Mareta had reputedly featured heavily in. Six pro-Kremlin reporters dispatched from Moscow to show how well the war effort was going in Chechnya. The first head arrived back in their Moscow office in a large brown box a week later. A day later, a second head. Within the week all the heads had been returned. Then the hands started to arrive. That took two weeks. In all, it was a three-month process. A constant drip of gruesome detail. Only their hearts didn’t make it back. Presumably they left them in Chechnya.

‘Most journalists are fat,’ Mareta continued. ‘From sitting on their backsides and sticking their noses in the government trough.’

‘Not here they ain’t, lady,’ Lock said. ‘We have freedom of the press.’

‘So does Russia. They’re free to say or write whatever they like. But somehow what they write is what the people who pay them want to hear. Big coincidence.’ She kept staring at him. ‘So, who are you?’

She didn’t look like she was about to give up this line of questioning any time soon.

‘I told you already.’

‘You mean you lied already.’

‘Listen, if we’re going to get out of here in one piece, we’re going to have to trust each other.’

‘Trust requires honesty.’

Lock conceded that point. He was about to break the primary rule of capture: pick a cover story and stick to it. But this wasn’t a regular situation. For one thing, Brand wouldn’t hesitate to break his cover, especially if he thought it would get him killed.

He examined Mareta. In a straight fight it would be no contest, despite her reputation. But she had the knife. Guys who watched the Ultimate Fighting Championship might talk about knife ‘fighting’, but in reality there was no such thing. There was
only getting stabbed. Quickly followed by bleeding to death.

‘OK, you’re right,’ he said.

She listened calmly as he told her about working for Meditech and filled in the details leading up to his being taken prisoner at the facility. She said nothing, remained resolutely expressionless, only occasionally stopping him to seek clarification of a word or phrase she didn’t understand. The only time she reacted to Lock’s story was when he mentioned the animal rights activists and their cause. The very idea seemed absurd to her. Lock understood her scepticism. For someone who’d witnessed and enacted the slaughter of human beings, it must have seemed a foreign concept. He considered repeating the Gandhi quote that Janice had fired at him from her hospital bed, but thought better of it.

He finished, and waited for Mareta to say something. Silence filled the space between them. Normally he would have been content with that, but what was needed now was rapport. Storytelling was about as good a way to establish that as he knew.

‘So, what about you? Why are you here?’

‘You already know who I am,’ Mareta replied.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘But you don’t seem scared.’

‘Should I be?’

‘Everyone’s afraid of ghosts.’

Lock mulled it over. ‘Maybe I’m different.’

Mareta studied the walls of the cell, equally reflective. ‘That’s true,’ she replied. ‘You’re still alive. And if you want to stay that way you might want to think about how we can get out of here.’

Lock was the first to hear the door being opened at the far end of the corridor. He waved Mareta to her feet. They flattened themselves either side of the cell door as two sets of footsteps made their approach, accompanied by the rattle of a metal trolley. There was more clanking of metal, followed by a man shouting something in a language that Lock didn’t understand.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s asking who else is here.’

Mareta pressed her face to the cell door and shouted something back. Lock picked out that it was her name. In her own language it sounded more guttural, and laden with threat.

‘Proper little reunion you got going on,’ Lock noted.

Mareta shouted something else, this time maybe in Chechen. He could hear the man laugh at whatever it was she’d said.

‘What did you just say?’

‘I told him that we would wash in the blood of our captors.’

‘No wonder we don’t get any Chechen stand-ups playing the clubs here. Why don’t you try asking him how many of you there are?’

She shouted something else, and the man roared a reply.

‘Ten. Maybe more.’

‘What’s happening now?’

Mareta pressed her face to the access panel at the bottom of the door. Lock grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her back. She glared at him.

‘Get too close and they might open that thing and give you a good dose of mace,’ he warned.