Sean Black - Lockdown

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.