Matthew Palmer - Enemy of the Good

With the young Scythians providing cover, they hurried down the hall, running away from the gunfire and in the opposite direction of the stairwell. They moved as quickly as they could with the barely conscious Murzaev in tow. At the far end of the corridor, there was another stairwell, but this led up only one level. One of the Scythians took the point while his partner brought up the rear. Ruslan helped Nogoev lift Murzaev bodily up the stairs.

The next floor up was another maze of cells. They ran down the widest corridor, ignoring the poorly lit branches that seemed to lead off into darkness and nightmares. An oversize red button set at eye level was labeled LOCK DOWN. Kate was afraid that button might seal the doors, but there was no time to stop and examine it.

The Special Police were not far behind. Kate could hear the heavy thud of their boots on the stairs. At the end of the corridor was a metal door. The words EMERGENCY EXIT were stenciled on the door in both Russian and Kyrgyz.

The Special Police fired wildly down the corridor. Bullets from their machine pistols ricocheted off the walls. Right behind her, Kate heard a grunt and turned in time to see one of the Scythians fall, clutching his leg where he had been shot. Automatically, she took a few steps back in the direction of their pursuers to help the wounded Scythian. She had a clear view down the corridor, but without a weapon she could only watch as one of the Special Police hit the red LOCK DOWN button on the wall.

The button’s function was instantly and horrifyingly clear. A metal grate dropped from the ceiling and closed off the corridor, with Kate and the injured Scythian on one side and her friends on the other. Ruslan shouted in anger and frustration and threw himself at the grate, struggling to lift it so that Kate might escape. It was locked in place. A burst of bullets forced him to let go.

“She has immunity,” Kate heard Nogoev say. “But you do not. And there’s no time. We have to leave.”

Kate ran to the grate and for a moment her fingers touched Ruslan’s.

“Go,” she said.

“I love you.”

“Then go. Now.”

Sparks flew from the steel grate as another wild round of bullets slammed into it.

The uninjured Scythian grabbed Ruslan by the shoulders and dragged him toward the exit.

Kate raised her hands in surrender.

It was pitch dark in the Pit and Kate had lost all sense of time. It might have been hours since the guards had stripped off her stolen Special Police uniform and closed the door to her cell. It might have been days. Probably not days, Kate told herself. She had no food and no water and while she was both hungry and thirsty, she was not desperately so.

She was, however, cold. Underneath her uniform, Kate had been wearing only a thin cotton T-shirt and underwear. The cell was damp and the stone walls and floor seemed to suck the heat out of her body. She had felt around in the dark looking for a mattress or a blanket, but there was nothing. As near as she could tell, the room was entirely empty.

At one point, something insect-like had skittered across her bare leg and Kate jumped up in alarm, cracking the back of her head against the stone wall. There was a lump there now the size of a robin’s egg. It ached dully. When she had to pee, she picked a corner and urinated on the floor, adding a vaguely ammonia smell to the odors of mildew and wet stone.

“At least I can’t get sick,” Kate said out loud to the dark. “I have immunity.” She laughed at her own weak joke.

There was no one to rescue her, she knew. The Scythians had shot their one bolt freeing Ruslan, and the embassy would have no way of knowing she was in the dungeon cells of Prison Number One unless the regime decided to tell them. That seemed unlikely.

Her diplomatic status was only worth something if her government knew what was happening. Without that, she was just another prisoner who had fallen into the black hole. Would they torture her? For what? What would they want from her?

Maybe they would do it for sport, out of sheer bloody-mindedness. A further act of revenge and retribution against her family.

Her best hope, she reasoned, was that she was trade bait. The Eraliev government might give her to the Americans in exchange for some concessions in the base negotiations. How valuable was she? Was she worth the contract for cafeteria services? Maybe Ball and Crandle would prefer that she never see the light of day again. What would her uncle think? What side would he be on? That she was even asking the question was painful.

To pass the time, she played piano in her head, moving her stiff fingers across an imaginary keyboard as best she could. She could hear the music clearly in the silence of her cell. This must have been what it was like for Beethoven, she thought. He had composed his masterpiece, the Ninth Symphony, after going completely deaf and he had never heard a single note of it with his own ears. The mental game both helped her pass the time and keep track of it.

Two concertos, three études, a fugue, and a rumba later, the bolt to her cell door slid open with a crack that sounded like a rifle shot. Kate was sitting on the floor with her back up against the wall, and she unconsciously brought her knees up to her chest in anticipation of some form of assault.

A guard stood silhouetted in the doorway. Without entering the cell, he threw something across the room that landed at Kate’s feet.

“Get dressed,” he said in Uzbek-accented Kyrgyz.

Kate reached for the bundle. It was a blue prison uniform, with separate shirt and pants rather than a jumpsuit. There was also a pair of rubber slippers about two sizes too big for Kate’s feet. She dressed under the watchful eye of the Uzbek guard.

Her T-shirt and underwear were uncomfortably sticky and damp, but it was still a sensuous pleasure to be clothed. The guard was tall and broad, with a boxer’s broken nose and tattooed flames on the back of his neck that licked at the collar of his uniform. He led Kate down the hall and up what she believed were the same stairs she and Nogoev had used in their descent to the sub-basement. They went up one flight to the floor on which she had been captured.

The room he brought her to would not have been out of place in a metropolitan police station in the United States. It was entirely functional, with a metal table bracketed to the concrete floor and two metal folding chairs. A steel ring welded to the top of the table was presumably for shackles. The walls were tiled and there was a mirror that did not even try to disguise its identity as an observation window.

The guard said nothing. But he pushed Kate into the room and closed the door behind her. It clicked shut and Kate did not have to try it to know that it was locked. In any event, there was nothing to try. There was no handle on the inside.

Kate went to the mirror, imagining strangers in the room behind it watching her straighten her hair and rub the dirt off her cheeks with her shirtsleeve. Screw them.

She sat at the table and tried not to think about how much she would like a drink. A glass of water first. And then something much stronger.

Keeping her here alone was no doubt part of the elaborate mind games the torturers had learned to play. Kate’s defense was the discipline of a classical musician. She waited with her hands in her lap, looking straight at the door.

After half an hour, the door opened and Torquemada himself entered the room. He was wearing a dark suit that looked expensive, with Italian loafers and a black Omega watch. His hair was cut bristly short and was the same steel gray color as his eyes. The body under the suit looked strong and healthy. Torture must agree with him.