Serov nodded at him to pick up the extension. He did so and could hardly feel the plastic in his grip.
"Ah—Ponomarov? Good. What's the condition of the patient now—no, the spy. Yes, that's right, I want a report."
Priabin listened fearfully.
'"Twenty-four hours before he comes around, at least that long. We consider he will be able to be questioned again by Friday, but gently, Colonel, without the use of more drugs. Really, some of your people . . . mind might have been irreparably ..."
Eventually, Serov snapped: "Thank you, Ponomarov. I don't have time for morality. Just keep him safe. Is he under guard?"
"Your people are here, yes."
"Good. Thank you, Ponomarov." He slapped the receiver onto its cradle and grinned, spreading his hands as if in innocence. "There, that's your witness for you. To have him brought here would be peculiar enough to arouse suspicion, to collect him from the infirmary, suicide. That's your one witness taken care of. See how it shakes you, Priabin? See how much of a blow that is? You're felling apart."
"Send for the American. Do it!"
Serov rubbed his chin, then his nose, then plucked his lower hp, elongating the silence until it drummed against Priabin's ears. He ran his hands over his cropped hair, even pulled at his earlobes. A whole language of relaxation, confidence, contempt. Priabin raised the pistol and carefully aimed it at Serov's broad, creased forehead, above the gleaming eyes. Serov's smile remained.
"Send for Gant," Priabin said quietly, aware of the inadequacy of his voice, its lack of command. "Do it now—because, as you might now begin to guess, you have turned over the stone and found the scorpion under it."
"Poetry?"
"Even the son of a peasant should be able to get my meaning." Priabin attempted to sound relaxed. Using contempt steadied his hand, his bluff. "You know what I mean. You've made my situation hopeless—where does that leave you?" He smiled shakily, but its effect on Serov was minutely visible. The mans eyes narrowed in calculation. "I'm not going to let you live so that you can kick seven kinds of shit out of me for making a fool of you here, am I? Without you supervising what happens to me, I might even qualify for a neat, military execution at Rodin's orders—mightn't I?"
"Don't be stupid," Serov began. Priabin's hand waved him to silence, and he stopped in midsentence. Another signal of uncertainty.
'Think about it. I shoot you in—oh, in a struggle for the gun, then I phone Rodin and get him to come over. Surrender myself to military discipline. I could ensure your death and something slightly more civilized for myself than if I give you back your gun. Mm? What about it?"
"Rodin's already beginning to think you harassed his son to suicide."
'Then I'll tell him the truth—I saw you kill him. Your people. Do you think he'll expect proof? I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't have an awful suspicion already that something like that—" He broke off. "It doesn't matter. You now know that you won't come out of it smelling of roses."
Serov's face was vivid with hate and bafflement. His hands moved more quickly over his face and head now; without pretense. There was no fear, because he knew how to keep himself alive and unharmed. But he could be defeated.
"You—little shit," he snarled.
Priabin's fears and possibilities bubbled inside him again, now that the iciness he had required had been exhausted. Katya, Gant—
—having to use Gant. Gant! He would kill Gant when he'd used him. He had to kill him. He looked quickly as his watch. Two-forty. It would be dark in a couple of hours—Wednesday.
Twenty
-four hours before—
"Pick up the telephone," he ordered. "Have Gant sent up here for—interrogation by you. Do it, Serov. You know now I
could
easily use this gun on you. Pick up the telephone."
Vividly, he heard the strange, chirruping voices of Charley in the darkness. The water up to his chest was icy, his body already
numb
and maggot-white from immersion. Occasionally, a
narrow-eyed,
child-size face would peer down at him; occasionally, a
flashlight
beam glanced over him. Chuckles. Charley laughing, talking in the distance; the noises of women and the cleaning of weapons.
They did not feed him, nor did he receive any water. Eventually, he cupped in his hands some of the filthy, stagnant liquid in which he stood, his stomach heaving at the idea and the reality; he had urinated, evacuated his bowels in that same water. After the first night, the Vietcong villagers paid him not the least attention. For them, he had ceased to exist; had begun to cease to exist even for himself, as if the soupy, filthy water were dissolving him. The occasional distant noise of aircraft tormented him.
Gant sat in his cell in GRU headquarters, arms folded tighdy into his chest, body hunched in a sickly posture. He was breathing shallowly and quickly, as if staving off nausea or memory. Vietnam had strengthened its hold on his imagination. He had escaped then—been rescued, rather—but here it was different. No one would come; he was trapped just as certainly and for as long—if they didn't kill him—as Ciarkville and Iowa had held him.
Church, flag, the flat, uninterrupted land, school; his father. They all seemed to him now like pieces of a complex plot to bring him to this last place—to his disappearance. Gant understood the creeping, strengthening hopelessness welling up in him, but he was too weary to fend it off; he could only disguise it by memories of other imprisonments, earlier escapes. He had escaped Iowa, even Vietnam; but not Baikonur, because he had never escaped flying. Not from that first aircraft, billowing the road's dust around, heading for the gas station. A crop duster who'd flown in the war. Church, flag, flying; all a trap.
At some moments, he looked quite rationally at his watch— they'd left him that—and smeiled the dried urine on the gray blanket he had flung into the corner; he could even smell the spiced gruel that had stained his overalls and hands. The afternoon was halfway to darkness, almost three o'clock, local time. The last time zone.
It had been like a fever, that first flight. Each loop and spin and dive and climb—the engine popping only a little more loudly than his mother's sewing machine—was a rise in temperature, the fever taking firm hold of him. Ciarkville as he looked down on it was Nothing; dotted buildings, a few narrow streets, scattered farms, the corn everywhere, the gently rolling landscape that from the air seemed endlessly flat » . . his father shrank to insignificance. He knew, with a fierce delight, that he had broken out, escaped; loop, turn, dive, climb, spin, upside down, roll; free movements. The fever had never left him.
Almost three o'clock. His mind returned to Vietnam, toward the third dawn and the terrible numbness throughout his body, the collapse of will and the awful loneliness amid the bustle of the village; his past was better than his future. In memory, he was close to being rescued—
—door, startling as it was meant to do by being flung open. He looked up, frightened. Now, it began.
"Get up!" an officer barked at him, posed with his hands on his hips in the doorway. One armed guard behind him was as much as Gant could see. "Get up!" the officer almost screamed. Yes, now it would begin, the drugs or the beating.
He rose slowly, shakily, to his feet, unable to ignore the weakness that seemed to have drained everything from his frame, even the blood.
Loop, roll, turn, dive, climb.
"Quickly—this way!" the officer bellowed. Everything he said was shouted, had exactly the same volume and tone. The guard outside, carrying his rifle across his chest, stepped back to allow Gant into the corridor, keeping a precise distance between them. "Upstairs, you! To the elevator—quickly, the elevator!" It was the voice of a machine. The officer had drawn his pistol. Gant moved at a shamble that he could not improve or disguise; like the numbness that had made him stumble and fall when they had hoisted him out of the pit. Marines, the rattle of gunfire, the noise of helicopter rotors . . . loop, turn, dive, roll, climb, spin.
The officer's gun was thrust into his back. The guard's rifle had its stock folded. An AKMS, something in him identified. The guard was jammed into the corner of the elevator behind him, next to the officer. Gant faced the elevator's closed doors. He took no notice of the numbers illuminating and flicking off as they ascended. Then the doors opened on to,a carpeted corridor. He was pushed along it. The guard was allowed to swing the barrel of the rifle against him in encouragement, but he hardly felt the blows; numbness was something he required now. He encouraged it.
"Halt!" the officer cried like a parody of authority. He knocked at the door at the end of the corridor, listened, opened it. "In here—* wait!"
There was no one, no secretary, in the outer office. The
officer
seemed surprised, but knocked at the inner door. Gant heard a
voice
he might have recognized had he not been sinking into himself, then the officer opened the door.
'The prisoner, Colonel, as you ordered!" he snapped out
robotically.
Then he turned to wave Gant forward. The guard buffeted him almost casually in the back with the AKMS. Gant stum
bled
toward the voice that announced:
"Thank you, Lieutenant. That will be all. Return to your duties."
"Should your outer office be manned—?" the officer began.
"Its not your concern, Lieutenant. That will be all."
Gant had passed the officer, shuffling into the office where he saw Serov outlined against the light from the window. He was still squinting after the darkness of the cell. The light hurt his eyes as much as the blue sky had done over the Vietcong village. There was a second officer in the room, he noticed as the door was closed behind him.
Closed. Change of atmosphere, of tension; excitement here, even rage. But not directed at him, he sensed, like an animal exploring some outbuilding at night. Alert, led on by hopeful scents, aware of danger, confused by contradictory sensations. What was it about this room, these two? Who was—?
"Gant."
Priabin, he realized—and the KGB colonel had a pistol drawn. Priabin, who wanted to kill him. He stared at the man, unable to move or speak, as if exactly repeating their previous encounter.
"Thank God," he heard then. Serov? No, Priabin.
Serov slumped noisily into his chair, hands raised. His voice betrayed nervousness, suppressed or burned-out rage.
"So you've got your pilot. What now? It's three already. I've been shut up alone with you for a long time. We've refused two urgent calls, and other, more routine ones must be piling up at the switchboard." He sighed theatrically, lowering his hands slowly onto the desk, fingers spread. Gant was baffled; kept turning his gaze to Priabin, to Serov, to Priabin. Serov added, with greater mockery, "I even sent my secretary on a pointless errand, but he will be back soon. Anyone could walk in here, at any moment. What are you going to do?" He was all but gloating, even though he appeared to he Priabin's prisoner, Gant realized with slow, painful thought.
Where's your girlfriend,
mm? It
's not happening quickly enough, Priabin."
"Serov, be quiet—you're boring me," Priabin replied, moving toward Gant. His nose wrinkled at the food stains, at the dirt on
Gant's hands; his eyes were concerned at the features he studied, at the defeat and weariness Gant knew his own eyes proclaimed. He shook his head, not knowing what he intended by the gesture. "Are you OK?" Priabin asked in heavily accented English.
"Maybe," Gant replied in Russian. Priabin nodded at the word, as if remembering Gant more clearly. "What gives here?" he added, gesturing at Serov, who watched them both.
"You are now my prisoner once more," Priabin replied.
An exchange of prisons? The room's atmosphere was wrong, there was something else here—as if Serov were the prisoner, though he couldn't be.
He watched the emotions of Priabin's face; hate, yes, but purpose, too—fear, desperation, the wild excitement of overcoming something. What had happened in this room?
"You said pilot," Gant observed, turning to Serov. "Why are you handing me over to this guy? He wants to kill me."
"We all want to kill you, my dear fellow, in our own good time and our own way, but Colonel Priabin"—he lit and drew on a cigarette; blue smoke rolled above his head—"Colonel Priabin has a use for you before he kills you. And make no mistake, he still wants to do that. You are able to see that quite clearly for yourself, I imagine?"
Gant had turned back to Priabin. Yes, he still wanted it. Gant felt his body coming back to life, prickling with cramps and heightened nerves. There was a prison here, but he was no longer sure on which side of the bars he stood. He slowly, innocuously flexed his hands, shifted his feet.
"So?" he asked Priabin.
"Not if you help me, Gant—not then."
"No, I don't believe you," Gant replied. He might even want to mean it, but the woman's death would make him do it in the end.
"I'm your only way out, Gant," Priabin snapped, with an
anger
that seemed to have been suppressed for a long time. "You'll do as I say."