As if reading his mind, Shukov said, “I suggest the ice plant. Kulakovsky Street. You know it?”
“I can find it,” Grushin said, determined not to ask Shukov for the address.
“A pound or so should be sufficient,” Shukov said. “I have a pair of gloves. And tongs.”
Of course he would.
“I’ll send Mikhail,” Grushin said, wishing he could go himself and get away from Shukov for a while. Ivan the Terrible depressed him, set his teeth on edge and made him feel the need to shower under scalding water.
Too late, Grushin thought. He was already soiled beyond redemption, not that he placed any faith in superstition or the church. Forgiveness, if it mattered, always called for a confession and repentance, whereas Grushin had been raised to keep his mouth shut in the presence of authority.
And truth be told, he wasn’t sorry for the things that he had done. Well, maybe one or two of them, but just a little.
Dry ice coming up, he thought, and bustled off to find Mikhail.
* * *
BOLAN COULDN’T READ the sign, in Cyrillic, outside the warehouse, but he didn’t need to. The address was painted in Arabic numerals, and the numbers didn’t lie.
Unless his contact had.
No way to second-guess it now as he approached in darkness. Seven hours had passed since the package had been lifted, and he understood the kind of damage that could be inflicted in that span of time.
A gunshot to the head took, what, a fraction of a second? But the men he had to deal with would be after information, likely skilled in methods of extracting it. How long that took depended on their subject’s pain threshold and powers of endurance.
No one was immune to torture. Everybody broke, sooner or later, if they didn’t die from shock or blood loss. But would a subject give up what his or her tormentors required, or misdirect them? Would the innocent confess to heinous crimes, while the guilty targeted a fictional accomplice?
Bolan reckoned he had seen the worst of it on more than one occasion. If he’d come too late this time, at least he could avenge the victim and make sure that her interrogators felt a measure of the pain they had dispensed. Or maybe they’d be lucky, and he’d simply kill them where they stood.
But first, he had to get inside.
The large doors on the warehouse loading dock were padlocked, and their rumbling would have been too noisy even if they weren’t secured. He sought another way inside and found it at the southeast corner of the big, old building. An employees’ entrance, he supposed, although its faded sign was gibberish.
He tried the knob and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. No sign of an alarm from where he stood, fishing inside a pocket for a set of picks. Bolan spent sixty seconds on the lock—no dead bolt on the door to make it complicated—and he pocketed the picks again before he crossed the threshold.
The soldier was cautious now, letting the stubby muzzle of his submachine gun lead him through a corridor with concrete underfoot and metal walls on either side. The hallway ran for twenty feet and then turned left at a dead-end partition, granting Bolan access to the warehouse proper.
The building was dark, except at the far end, where two banks of overhead lights blazed his trail. Between Bolan and what he took to be his destination, ranks of agricultural machinery stood silent in the murk. He picked out tractors, cultivators, backhoes, combine harvesters. Moving between them, the soldier homed in on sounds of moaning and a male voice asking questions that he couldn’t translate.
They were still at work, then, but he still might be too late. Beyond a certain point there was no rescue, and the only mercy came with death’s release from hopeless agony. If it came down to that, Bolan was equal to the task.
When he was halfway to the lights, a voice addressed him from a pool of shadows to his left, between a thresher and a skid loader. The lookout spoke in Russian. “Who the hell are you?”
Bolan let his AK answer back, one Russian to another. Three rounds at a range of six or seven feet, two punching through a plastic cooler that the stranger carried, loosing plumes of smoke. His muzzle-flashes lit a startled face before it toppled over backward, out of frame.
So much for stealth.
He dodged between a swather and a mower, reached a different aisle and pounded toward the bright oasis where the action was. Bolan could hear people scrambling, as a voice called out, “Mikhail? Mikhail!”
Presumably the dead guy.
Bolan let the others wonder as he moved in for the kill.
* * *
TATYANA ANUCHIN hoped she was dying. She’d heard the pale interrogator asking for dry ice and tried not to imagine how or where he’d use it. After the electric shocks, it hardly seemed to matter, but she understood that pain was both his passion and profession. Since she had resisted his best efforts to the moment, he could only plan on doing something worse.
She hoped to die before she cracked and told her captors everything. Exactly what she knew and how she had acquired that knowledge, naming sources both unwitting and deliberate. Sergey had been the lucky one, compelling them to kill him outright at the airport terminal. In retrospect, Anuchin wished that she possessed the same presence of mind.
Next time, she thought, and almost found it humorous.
That would confuse them, if she burst out laughing. If nothing else, it would insult the ghoul they’d summoned to abuse her. Anuchin wondered if he was a colleague from the Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii, the FSB, someone whom she might have seen at headquarters and overlooked in passing.
Someone from the Lubyanka’s basement? Or an operator from the private sector, peddling his skills and predilection to the highest bidder in a cutthroat marketplace?
It hardly mattered now, when she was duct-taped naked to a wooden chair, her flesh a crazy quilt of superficial burns and bite marks from the alligator clips. The jolting pain still resonated in her muscles, in her teeth and jaws. A migraine headache pulsed behind her eyes.
Was it a sin to pray for death? If so, she didn’t care.
Could hell be any worse than this?
Against her will, Anuchin began to imagine the next phase of her live dissection. Dry ice, she knew, was the solid form of carbon dioxide. Its normal temperature hovered around -109 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to cause frostbite on contact. Above -70 degrees, it sublimated into frosty-looking gas, the “fog” so often used on movie sets for old-time horror films.
And as a tool of torture, she recognized that it could prove effective. As to whether it was worse than electricity…well, she’d simply have to wait and see.
If she withstood the ghoul’s next round of questions, how would he proceed? With scalpels or a blowtorch? Acid? Could she hope for shock to spare her from the worst of it, or was he skilled enough to revive her with drugs?
Holding her breath accomplished nothing, as she’d quickly learned. Innate survival
