Steve Abbott - Devil's Gambit

“Sergei! Sergei you bastard! Let me out, damn you man. I paid already.” Sergei stood in the hall just outside the door and listened to Pieter’s shouts get more and more frantic. The other two guests were clamoring for attention as well, but they were one floor down at opposite ends of the building. Isolation was a great tool. Sergei had paid off his employees and girls for the evening. Except for the three Russians, the normally crowded building was empty. For three million, it was the least he could do. He waited till Pieter started to scream before opening the small grate. Showing who was in control from the beginning was an important issue in matters like this. With a cold eye, he watched the relief spread across the Major’s sweating face.

“Stop your sniveling Boskovitch.”

Pieter was near tears. “Thank God, Sergei. The door must have gotten locked.” Pieter’s stomach dropped when he saw the look on Sergei’s face. He knew in an instant that the door had been locked on purpose.

Sergei saw the uncertainty on Pieter’s face and smiled like a wolf. He moved forward until his face filled the entire space of the grille. “I would not thank him just yet, Checkisti.” Pieter jumped when the hatch slammed shut. He was too stunned to react. Sergei was well down the hall before the blows on the door and yells of the now-terrified Major resumed. Sergei laughed out loud. For this kind of entertainment he would have carried out Verkatt’s wishes for free. Further recreation was waiting. Full of dark purpose, he moved down the stairs.

Pieter felt the waves of nausea build and overtake him once more. He rolled to the side of the cot and vomited on the floor again. The shakes hit right after, hard. It felt like his was body was tearing itself apart. He was dying; Pieter knew it in his heart. Sergei must have put poison in the drugs. That was it. He cursed at his stupidity, his weakness. He rolled in agony on the cot as the next wave of pain shot through him. How long had he been here? Days, months, an eternity?

From his peephole, Sergio watched the Major go through his first stages of withdrawal. It always amazed him how short the time it took, never more than a day. A few more minutes and he would give Pieter some release with a small dose. Just enough to take the edge off. When the Georgian was finished with the Major, he would do exactly as told. Sergei had to admit, this one was far tougher than the other two. They were proving much more pliable.

The shakes hit Pieter in waves now, each bout slamming deeper and deeper into his core. He did not see Sergei until Sergei was standing over him with a hypodermic in one hand.

Sergei’s smile was bitter cold. “Comrade Boskovitch, I hate to see you so ill. I have brought you some more medicine to ease your pain.”

Pieter could guess what was in the needle, but he was too weak to protest. Right now, he would kill for release from his agony, poison or not. He thrust out his right arm and struggled to hold it still.

Hamilton Smythe read through the transmission time sheet of the Korean cover company operating out of the Cape Town warehouse. There had been two major bursts of incoming and outgoing coded messages, which preceded and followed Verkatt’s meeting. The man was up to something for the North Koreans. Whatever it was, it could not be any good. He looked up across his desk at Edward Travis, the head of the Communications Department.

“Any luck at all with the codes, Edward?”

Travis was through and through a product of the British public school system. A thin, cadaverous man, he maintained an air of superiority over anyone he deemed lower on the social ladder than himself. But it hid nothing from anyone. All the members on station knew that underneath his shell of class, he was a toadying coward. Travis struck what he liked to think of as his headmaster’s pose. The staff called it his Mr. Chips delivery.

“Barnes feels that there might be an ‘En Clair’ ghost behind the initial outbound transmission,” Travis said.

If it were true, if there was a shadow of the un-encoded transmission under the intercepted signal, it could give them a real key into decoding everything coming out of the Korean operation. Smythe would be able to throw a very big wrench into North Korean intelligence’s gears. “But you, of course, have your doubts.”

Travis hesitated to answer. It annoyed Smythe that his Communications head would not or could not support the findings of his department. “Well… er… yes.”

Smythe decided to give him a bit of rope to hang himself with. Rumors had it that Travis bullied his staff and they, in turn, despised him. Smythe had suffered under the hands of a bully when he attended public school and he rarely missed a chance at retribution. He leveled his gaze at Travis over his reading glasses, which were now perched on the end of his nose.

“I would like to know on what grounds you reject the findings of Mister Barnes,” he said.

Travis had no answer.

Smythe decided to let him off the hook this time. “Then, tell Barnes to keep on it. If he is successful in any way, I want to know about it immediately. Have him come and see me later. Let Gwen know to expect him on your way out.”

“Of course, sir.” Travis slid out of his chair and left the room.

Hamilton Smythe waited until the door to his office had swung shut behind Travis’ back before he swore under his breath, “Prat.” The man really was odorous.

The monitoring of the signals from various machines, including the fax messages out of the North Korean legal and illegal operations, was an extension of the old “Stockade” program. The problem was, as always, decoding so you could read what was intercepted. Smythe pushed his reading glasses back up on the bridge of his nose and continued on with the Korean report.

The guard at the gate eyed the three disheveled individuals as they sat in the UAZ 469 jeep. It looked to the guard like the men had had a very successful three-day leave. It took great dedication to get to such a state. He handed the Major back their papers and waved to his partner to lift the barrier.

Pieter looked at his two companions, Dimitri Golotsin and Sasha Filidovich. They were through, beaten. In the last stages of Sergei Smirnoff’s narcotic indoctrination, all three had come to know just how far their addictions would take them. Sergei had given them each two small vials of the now-precious amber liquid. Strong enough to take the edge off, but too weak to get high. Sergei had promised them a way out of the country and new identities if they could get what he wanted by tonight. The new addicts would have tried tonight anyway. Without more of the heroin, the shakes, the pain and the vomiting would return with a vengeance. Pieter had vomited blood during his last bout; he thought his lungs would burst. He didn’t doubt death would come before release the next time.

“The Storage Depot at 20:00, do not be late for duty,” Pieter said.

Blank faces turned to look at him. The treatments had been much harder on Dimitri and Sasha, but both men nodded.

“Better get cleaned up. We all look like hell. The last thing we want is to go on report.”

The two men got out of the jeep and shambled towards their barracks. Pieter had to return the jeep to the motor pool before he could do the same. Sergei had planned well. It was no coincidence they were all on the same duty roster.

Pieter washed himself under the gang shower in the Bachelor Officer’s Barracks. How long had the cursed Georgian been waiting for such a chance? Pieter almost resolved to tell the base commander Sturmovic the whole story just to see that bastard Sergei before a firing squad. But the memory of what withdrawal could do to him reared its abyssal depths in his mind’s eye. He rubbed at the red marks over the veins of his left arm. The shower was aggravating the situation more than it helped; Communist plumbing was haphazard at best. Water pressure and heat varied in great degrees. Pieter’s nerves, ravaged by recent events, exaggerated all information to his brain. He was forced to turn the shower off, another defeat of the spirit. Even the lights seemed too bright, his uniform too rough.