Michael Bunker - WICK

“Time to go to the meeting, Clay, are you ready?” Mikail asked, smiling.

“What do you want me to say, Mikail?”

“You don’t need to say anything. Just put your hands behind your back. We’re going to take a walk.” Mikail pulled out a set of handcuffs and before Clay could even think of some plan to fight or escape or shout, the handcuffs were clamped on to his wrists behind his back, and he was gently pushed toward the door. Mikail and Sergei walked before him, Vladimir walked next to and somewhat behind him, holding him lightly by the handcuffs.

The first thing Clay noticed was that the door to the hallway down to the cell clusters, the hallway down which he had first seen the prisoners, was completely intact. There was no damage to it at all. In fact, as he walked toward the office and followed Sergei into it, he saw no damage anywhere. No wood particles, no pieces of glass, no blood. There wasn’t a single clue that there had ever been a riot. Of course, he thought, he’d only heard it. He hadn’t seen any of it.

Rounding the corner into the security office, as soon as Sergei and Mikail had moved to the right and cleared from his vision he saw, sitting at his desk, completely unmarred, unbeaten, and fully alive… Officer Todd Karagin. The man smiled like the cat that ate the canary, the smile of the magician who was savoring his lifelong best reveal.

“Good morning, Clay,” Todd said with a wink in his voice, if not exactly in his eye. “Good to see you. Welcome to the Charm School.”

Never, in the long history of humankind, at least since Plato wrote of The Cave, had a man appeared so surprised and confused as Clayton Richter did in that moment. He stood in the prison office, handcuffed, before the man that had, he had thought until this very moment, died in an effort to save him. And now it turns out to be a con? But… why the charade? Clay wondered.

For his part, Officer Todd was, for the moment, enjoying the surprise. He was acting like he’d just won a prize fight. He stood up and cracked his knuckles, and sucked his wind in and did one of those shadow-boxing dances, before raising his arms in mock triumph. “What’s the matter, Clay? Cat got your tongue?”

If Clay had been a bit more clever and if this new shock hadn’t stolen his breath, he might have replied, “Yes, Schrodinger’s cat,” and while these Russians tried to figure out what he meant by that, he might have rushed headlong into the officer or straight through the office, down the hall, trying to find a door, anything , any way that might lead to out . But none of that happened, because he was surrounded by captors, deep inside a locked prison and sometimes cowardice and fear are the things that keep endangered men from engaging in heroic stupidity.

As it was, he stood there like someone about to be administered a test he knew he’d flunk. No. It was worse… It was that he felt so overcome by a sense of helplessness and disgust that his knees buckled slightly and he turned pale. Too many weird things. Too much to handle. Best to just observe my right to remain silent. He caught his balance with a shuffle of his feet and then straightened, but he didn’t answer.

Todd reveled in the obvious reaction. Clay wasn’t sure whether the man couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wipe the smile from his face, but he knew instinctively that there was a difference. The officer reached down and snapped the black holster on a service pistol, patting the gun with his right hand and winking at Clay as he saw Clay trying to remember whether he’d been armed when he first met him.

“My real name is Fedya Leonivitch Karaganov,” the officer said. “My friends call me Teodor, or just Todd. You are in Warwick, but I guess you know that already. It is the place of our birth. It will be the place of your death. We call it Novgorod among ourselves. Perhaps you’ll get to see some more of our little town before your short visit with us comes to a close.” He smiled at this, pleased with himself, and Clay wondered why. Then he leaned over Clay and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. It was the kind of gesture that you make when you make an obvious bow, like that one the servant makes before the throne. Todd made that kind of gesture, then he stood up and said in his best mock British, “And might you have any bags, Guv’nuh.”

Clay looked at him and all of the throbbing pain and discomfort from the recent beating intensified and he could feel his broken ribs expand and strain with his breath, and as a man he just wanted to punch Todd in the face. But, he didn’t. He was still processing the fact that Todd was not dead and here the man was before him, and in the seriousness of the moment and with all that had happened, Todd was playing the clown as if life and love and hate and tragedy and comedy were all the same thing and that there was no proper place for each.

“And might you have any bags in yuh guest quarters, sir, or will you just be traveling with what’s on your person? Have we advised you of our check out policy?” Somewhere in that last sentence he had lost the accent, probably about the word “sir.”

Clay just stared. He didn’t know what to think. Was this just Todd’s weirdly aggressive finale in acting out a too-scripted end to the little production they’d just so obviously put on for his benefit? Or was it an actual, honest-to-goodness threat.

Clay looked at the other men in the room and noticed that none of them carried weapons or made stupid jokes. He wondered now if he had been wrong in his assessment that Mikail was in charge, and Mikail seemed to notice his doubt. He’d been standing to the side, watching, like the others, for Clay’s reaction, but now he stepped forward into the center of the men. “Enough, Todd,” Mikail said sharply. He barked out what sounded more like an order than a question. “Has Volkhov been captured?”

“He’s being brought to the gymnasium as we speak. They found him hiding like a coward in his basement. Everyone else is being assembled according to your instructions. We can go whenever you’re ready.” Mikail looked around the room, then looked at Todd, then at Clay, and motioned with his hand toward the hallway.

Todd took Vladimir’s place escorting the hostage, and the whole entourage walked through the office, past an unlocked door, then moved into a long hallway that was dark and only faintly lit by the emergency lighting recessed in the ceiling. As they passed under evenly spaced orbs of light they went into and out of the light and the darkness in regular succession, occasionally stopping or slowing to open doors or turn down hallways as they wound through the maze of the prison. Clay found himself, for no apparent reason, beginning to shuffle his feet, as though he had leg irons. Dead man walking , he thought. It was an eerie and frightening feeling and he could not help thinking that he was a condemned man, walking to his execution.

The others, the youths, were practically stoic in their quiet, as though they were going over something in their minds, mulling some decision. Only Todd seemed unable to stand the silence. He nervously fidgeted with his hand on Clay’s arm before he began speaking a little too boisterously. “You’re probably a little freaked out right now, aren’t you? That’s OK. I would be, too. Imagine how I felt, for example, when you showed up at our door in that storm. We’d already been planning our little takeover for a long time when you showed up, you see. And here you came, just in the nick of time.”

Clay heard the implication but hadn’t yet figured out whether they had come to believe him. He turned his head to look at Todd for some clue, but he couldn’t make out the guard’s features in the dark with only one good eye.