Paul Vidich - The Mercenary

“Fuckhead,” the man said.

Garin was made to undress and sit on a metal stool. His arms were raised above his head and chained to the ceiling. Then a bucket of cold water was thrown at him. Naked and shivering, he watched the guard circle him, slapping the baton on his hand. He felt the man’s cold gaze, like a viper waiting to strike its prey.

The guard unleashed a torrent of abuse. “Who do you think you are? Scum, bastard, degenerate, shithead, swine.”

He went on for a while, exhausting his list of Russian insults. He paced back and forth and spewed obscenities as he waved his arms, screaming and making violent gestures, demanding that Garin confess. But abruptly, he would pause to light a cigarette and contemplate Garin, drawing on the black tobacco as he evaluated his victim, offering a puff but withdrawing the cigarette and laughing when Garin leaned forward to accept. After his smoke break, he presented a jar of urine, calling it his piss. He threw it in Garin’s face, and the monstrous screaming began again.

Garin demanded to speak to the American embassy, but the guard shrugged. Not once did he ask Garin a question. Garin’s arms went numb.

This went on for an hour, and then the guard stopped. He sat on a chair opposite Garin.

“Are you done performing?” Garin demanded. “What do you want from me?”

The guard cocked his head sideways. “Beating people is my job. I don’t want anything. I am paid to do this.”

He stood and slapped Garin on the face, splitting his lip.

“If they ask how I did, tell them you shit your pants,” the man said.

Garin tasted the salty blood. “Fuckhead.”

The guard smiled. “I was told Americans don’t have a sense of humor. Maybe you’re the exception.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Whatever you want to believe, go ahead. I’m not here to change your mind.”

“How big is this prison?”

“Why do you care?”

“Why not?”

The guard laughed. “You are the only one who has asked that question. Knowing that fact does nothing for them. No one leaves here. There are three types of prisoners here: ordinary, know-nothing criminals who die of disease, starvation, cold, or too much physical persuasion; dissidents who come in stupid and disappear stupid; and people like you, who know something, don’t talk, and then don’t exist.” He looked at Garin. “The graveyard is bigger with more occupants. Scream for me.”

Garin screamed his lungs out.

“There you go. That’s what I need to hear.” The guard pounded his baton on the concrete floor. “See how easy it is?”

The guard whacked Garin’s jaw hard with his baton, drawing blood. “Fuckhead,” he said again. “What do you do for Posner?”

GARIN LAY ON the metal cot in the cell when he was awakened from a fitful sleep. He was in his clothing, which smelled of blood and sweat, and his sockless feet were blue from cold. He shivered terribly. His lip was swollen, and his shoulder ached. He had fallen asleep, thinking there would be another round of insults and abuse. The darkness outside the high casement window told him that it was still night. He glanced at his watch.

Loud, raucous activity in the hall beyond the locked door pulled him from sleep. Then he understood what was happening. An angry voice berated the guard in the hallway for sleeping on his watch.

Garin’s eyes adjusted to the light’s painful brightness, jolting his numbed brain like an electric prod. He went to turn off the wall switch above his head, but he found it disabled, and his primitive memory recalled the frustration of an earlier effort. He moved his legs off the bed to the floor and cradled his head in his hands. Again his watch. Twenty hours.

The yelling outside in the hall stopped, and now there was only a plaintive groan. Down the hall, he heard another voice yell in English that the noise was keeping him awake. Then a sound of metal scraping on concrete, the door opening and closing, and, beyond his cell, an orchestra of uncouth sounds.

Garin sat, head in hand, groggy, unable to focus, for a minute or two. His neck ached and his welted thigh, black and blue from knee to hip, throbbed. His clothes stuck to his body, and he had a terrible thirst.

He became aware of two polished black boots, which had entered the room and now stood before him. He looked up to the fresh face of an unsmiling Lieutenant Colonel Talinov and felt the hot sting of a slap.

“Idiot,” Talinov said. “You have given us nothing.”

Garin rubbed his cheek and met Talinov’s eyes. “I know what you want.”

GEORGE MUELLER SAT AT A conference table in a mahogany-paneled conference room in the Russell Senate Office Building. Gauzy light came through the drawn curtains and illuminated the five men who sat across from Mueller—prominent men with grim, skeptical faces.

Coffee cups and bone china dishes sat in front of each man, but only one had bothered to drink, and none had tasted the Danish pastry set out for the early-morning briefing by the new acting head of the CIA’s SE Division. Their attention was riveted on Mueller, who had a file open in front of him, which he occasionally consulted in the course of his classified briefing on events in Moscow.

Mueller knew the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a balding older man with bushy eyebrows, and also a smug lawyer who had never lost his litigator’s propensity to appear hostile even when he sought to be accommodating; and he also knew the Director of Central Intelligence, his soon-to-retire boss. He was acquainted with the president’s National Security Advisor, a political appointee and toady who saw the world through the lens of public relations; and the Secretary of Defense, a former CEO of a defense contractor who listened with intermittent interest to Mueller’s assessment of the value of the intelligence the CIA was collecting from GAMBIT.

“I am big fan of yours, George, always have been,” the senator said. “You’re quite convincing, but how can you possibly put a billion-dollar price tag on the value of the intelligence you’ve gotten? I understand you want to make this sound big—and a billion dollars is a large number, and I’ll be sure to remember it when you come back to defend your Agency’s budget—but where does the number come from? Did someone pull it out of his ass?”

Mueller didn’t smile, and he waited for the National Security Advisor to stop whispering in the DCI’s ear.

“Mr. Chairman, it is a big number,” Mueller said. “I didn’t make up the assessment, and I didn’t come up with the number. The Pentagon did. It is based on what we’ve seen and what we expect to see from our asset.”

Mueller pushed the file to one side, folded his hands on the table, and looked at the senator. He had little tolerance for the gobbledygook that passed for sophisticated thinking on Capitol Hill. He was tired of being a lonely voice.

“We are in an arms race. It isn’t a nuclear arms race, but a race to acquire the military technology that is needed for the regional conflicts that are defining our influence in the world. The race requires new weapons systems: look-down radar, drone technology, and compound materials that can make our stealth bombers ghosts on Soviet radar screens. The Soviets, for all their social and economic failures, have dedicated resources to creating weapons technologies that have frustrated the Pentagon’s engineers. The billion dollars is an estimate of the R-and-D costs we will save by building only those weapons we need to defend against their arsenal, and it includes what we will save by leapfrogging our failed efforts. How valuable is that? Mr. Chairman, does that answer your question?”