Black Gambit Page 3

  Zorin was led through two sets of gates, and into a bare room. He was ordered to strip and to put on a striped pyjama-type uniform, taken to what was obviously the prison hospital and given an examination. He might, but for the circumstances, have been going through an annual medical check-up at work.

  There were two doctors. After each test — for blood pressure, reflexes, teeth — they made notes. Zorin tried asking questions. Only one answered. All he said was ‘Yes, fine, fine, fine, yes.’ The reply was the same whatever the question — ‘What is this about?’ ‘Where is my wife?’ ‘What authority do you have for this?’

  Once Zorin walked to the door. They made no effort to stop him. Outside there were guards.

  When the tests were completed, one of the doctors pushed a button on a desk. Almost immediately Zorin was led downstairs, below ground. There was a smell of damp and rotting plaster; apart from the footsteps of himself and his escort there was no sound. Finally Zorin was pushed into a box-like cell.

  Three of the walls were bare concrete. The fourth consisted of two sets of bars, spaced about six inches apart, rather like those on the cage of a particularly dangerous animal in a zoo. The only light came from a faint bulb above, protected by a wire cage. There was nothing to sit on but the floor. In the thin, baggy prison uniform Zorin felt both cold and exposed.

  For a while he crouched on the concrete floor. When it became too uncomfortable he walked to the bars and shouted. There was no reply.

  He kept thinking of Tanya. Where was she? What were they doing to her? She had not been well lately, perhaps the result of semi-confinement. He was not religious, but he began to mutter prayers for her safety.

  Zorin walked up and down shivering from the combination of cold and hunger. Finally, he curled in a corner. He had been told once — he could not remember where or by whom — that taking and holding a deep breath warmed the body. He tried it a few times. It was a distraction, but all he felt was a slight giddiness.

  Time passed. He dozed and walked and recited poems aloud and remembered previous confrontations with the KGB which he had endured. Gradually a kind of numbness took over. Pangs of hunger came and went. He was almost annoyed when he heard voices and then the guards arrived and he was marched away from his cell.

  Apart from the fact that there were no windows, the room could have been an office anywhere. Admittedly, the furniture was spartan, but then so it was in many offices.

  The walls were plain. There was a green filing cabinet and a row of open shelves on which stood boxes, not books.

  The steel desk stood in the centre, facing the door. The top was clear except for a pad and an ashtray. Behind it sat a man in a swivel chair. The chair, bucket shaped and made of imitation leather, was almost certainly imported.

  The occupant of the swivel chair was impeccably dressed in a steel-grey suit, a silver and red striped tie.

  The man stared at Zorin for several seconds, then he smiled.

  ‘It would be nice to start by introducing myself,’ he said, ‘since I know you are Alexandrai Leonidovich. But’ — and he paused to spread his hands in a gesture — ‘it is perhaps better that you think of me simply as a friend. A nameless friend.’

  He was still smiling.

  He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. ‘It may surprise you but I am an admirer of yours.’ He paused to let Zorin absorb his words. ‘Yes,’ he added, ‘I thought you right and brave when you called attention to the effect radiation was having on people in our northern territories. That’s what we want — people who are right and brave.’

  His tone became conspiratorial. ‘Of course we know there were those who did not like it. What man of any fire has no enemies?’

  Zorin’s chair was cutting into his back; he wanted to lean forward, but the desk was too far away.

  The man opened a drawer of the desk, took out a thick folder, and began reading. Occasionally he glanced up, a quizzical look on his face.

  Zorin decided to try to establish some sort of initiative.

  ‘Where is my wife? I insist on knowing. Our Constitutional rights have been —’

  The interrogator’s fist hit the desk. ‘Can’t you understand that you have no rights? That all that stands between you and …’ He paused, surely to rephrase what he had been about to say.

  He stood and walked around the desk and sat on the edge, looking down at Zorin.

  ‘Can you not see that this time you are in real trouble?’ He raised his hand to stop any reply. ‘Let me continue. Then I will let you talk. You have done such foolish things.’ His voice was full of simulated hurt. ‘Oh yes, you are a fool. Even great scientists are human. Can’t you accept that — that you can make mistakes just as others can?’

  He returned to the desk and opened the file, flicking pages and reading isolated paragraphs aloud.

  ‘Moscow University, a good student and Party member; political organizer …’

  ‘Brilliant researcher, but signs of delusions of infallibility …’

  ‘Arrested 28 July 1973. Charge — hooliganism, Sentence — fifteen days, extended by ten days after striking another prisoner.’

  The interrogator looked up: ‘Provoked, were you? It happens. I told you you have enemies. All the more reason you need friends, eh?’

  Zorin tried to work out a background for his interrogator. If he could make him a person, he would be easier to resist. Age, perhaps thirty, thirty-one. Rank, well, he was young but very assured. Lieutenant-colonel? Or was that too high? He concentrated on the accent. Certainly not Moscow. That soft ‘th’ pointed to the south. Perhaps near the Ukraine? The Rostov area?

  The interrogator swivelled in his chair. ‘Alexandrai Leonidovich, it is a time for being honest, yes? First, I will be honest. Then you.’

  He walked to the door and barked an order for tea which arrived almost immediately. Zorin rose to reach for his but was waved back. ‘No, you must sit. There are rules.’

  Zorin took the tea, stirred in the spoonful of fruit jelly and sipped. It tasted good. He wondered if he should ask for food. He had already decided he would not take cigarettes even if they were offered. Their withdrawal when it came would give the KGB yet another weapon.

  The interrogator began walking up and down.

  ‘To be honest, then.

  ‘One’ — he checked the number with his fingers — ‘you have done many stupid things for which you could and should be punished.’

  He waited for a reaction which did not come.

  ‘Two, you have enemies.

  ‘Three, the cause you pursue is doomed anyway.

  ‘Four, the penalties you face are severe.’

  His voice rose. ‘What are those stupid things? You have fermented unrest, you have consorted with the Zionists who oppose peace, you have passed information to our enemies …’

  ‘I have passed nothing. I …’

  ‘Who are your enemies? You might think we all are. But no, there are some who think you are a good man who has been foolish.’ He clasped his hands in front of his face. ‘Believe me, Alexandrai Leonidovich, we want to help you.

  ‘I said your cause — cause, what a grand word! — is doomed. Can you deny it yourself? What is your own toast, eh?’

  He waited for Zorin to prompt him on the bitter wording of the toast the dissidents used among themselves. When there was no reaction he spoke it himself: ‘To the success of our hopeless enterprise.

  ‘And the penalties …’ his voice dropped. ‘Well, let us leave that. It is up to you, Alexandrai Leonidovich, to make that unnecessary.’

  He took a single sheet of paper from the file and handed it to Zorin.

  ‘Where is my wife?’

  ‘Please, first read the paper.’

  It was a confession, an apology and a renunciation. It began with a listing of his confessed crimes against the Soviet people, some real, some false: passing information to Western correspondents, smuggling manuscripts abroad, publishing clandestine literature … Zorin t
ried not to show by his expression which specific charges were true and which were not.

  He now realized, read the paper, that he had been wrong, and he asked for forgiveness and understanding. It mentioned his father and the pain he must have caused him. He had been a loyal citizen, a good Party worker, until he met his wife. She had encouraged him into activities and beliefs that he now knew were wrong. He realized that she had been used as a tool by the Zionist reactionaries she met while visiting abroad as a pianist.

  At the bottom was a space for Zorin’s signature.

  He looked up and for the first time since the session began started to smile.

  ‘You really expect me to sign this?’

  The door opened behind him and he heard a second man enter.

  His interrogator took back the paper, placed it on the desk facing Zorin, and gathered up his file.

  His voice was very low; his tone resigned. ‘I did not want to hand you over to the specialists. I tried.’

  He began to walk past Zorin.

  ‘Oh yes, Alexandrai Leonidovich,’ he murmured half to himself, ‘you will sign. If not now, later. If not today, tomorrow. If not this week, next. But you will sign. Yes, you will sign.’

  *

  The next interrogator ordered Zorin to stand. When he remained seated he called in two guards who pulled Zorin to his feet. Then the interrogator hit him across the face with the back of his hand, just hard enough to establish his commanding role.

  ‘When I say stand, you will stand.’

  Something in Zorin snapped. The moment the guards released his arms he threw himself forward, his hands outstretched grasping for the interrogator’s neck.

  He did not reach that far. The blow hit him in the middle of the back and sent him forward into the desk. The guards pulled him to the floor and one kicked him viciously in the ribs.

  ‘Good,’ he heard the interrogator say, ‘now we know one another. The foolishness of treating you as an honoured guest is over.’

  The questioning seemed to continue for hours. The guards remained in the room. Whenever Zorin began to sleep on his feet one or other of them hit him in the back or across the shoulder with a club.

  He could see the confession still lying on the desk, but the new interrogator made no attempt to get him to sign it.

  Now he was asking how the dissidents communicated to arrange a meeting. What were the arrangements about using the telephone?

  ‘I know nothing of what you are talking about.’

  The interrogator came forward, his hand lifted, his voice rising in anger.

  Zorin heard the door open again. He was sure it would be the first interrogator again — the timeless ploy of alternating the friendly questioner and the cruel one.

  It was a third interrogator, in his way as chilling as the one who now left.

  ‘I want you to know that I do not care if you say anything or nothing,’ he announced. ‘You are doomed. You will never leave here.’

  He sat reading papers, as Zorin continued to stand in front of him, fearing the blows even more than he desperately wanted sleep.

  After perhaps an hour the interrogator reached over and touched the confession with his finger tips. ‘You will sign now?’

  Zorin did not reply.

  ‘Very well.’ And again he sat mute.

  Altogether there were four interrogators including the ‘kind’ one. They came and went in different permutations, staying for varying lengths of time.

  Sometimes they talked — cool, angry, gently, con-spiratorially. Sometimes there was silence.

  Zorin knew the cruel/kind technique of interrogation. It was a cliché. But nonetheless he found himself succumbing to it. Each time the door opened to herald a change of interrogator he found himself hoping it was the first one.

  The man was sympathetic. ‘Surely you can see why your visa application had to be refused? You are a special man, a great geneticist …’

  Coaxing. ‘Renounce. That’s all. Everything will be forgiven. Just sign.’

  Scornful. ‘Why waste yourself like this? Within days of signing you can be back doing real work — the kind you like. You owe it to yourself and your talent.’

  He could be pragmatic. ‘You educated liberals — you are an entirely unrepresentative minority. Oh yes, the West has protected you till now — they like to think real Soviets are like you, that you are the great silent majority suddenly speaking out. Fools, you don’t believe that.’ Zorin said nothing, but had to admit to himself that the interrogator was right. ‘And now,’ he added, ‘even there you are now an embarrassment. They too want détente. The Americans found Solzhenitsyn as troublesome as we did.’

  And occasionally he could appear saddened. ‘There are those who think you should be charged with treason.’ The maximum penalty for which, of course, was death.

  Through it all Zorin thought of Tanya: was she suffering the same threats, the same treatment?

  He was terrified that she was. After his early questioning, he ceased asking because he did not want them to realize how great was his fear and concern. Then as the days passed he had to ask. None of the KGB men replied. He realized not knowing was part of his torture. The KGB let his mind paint its own nightmare picture of what it thought might be happening.

  On one occasion Zorin had to force himself not to volunteer his co-operation if they would produce Tanya unharmed. He reminded himself it would achieve nothing: if she had been harmed there was no way that it could be undone. If she had not, he would simply be giving his captors an idea. He did know that if they produced Tanya and gave him an ultimatum, sign or she will be tortured, he would give way. Beside her, nothing mattered.

  Time became meaningless. Zorin was taken back to his cell on two occasions and allowed to sleep, but he did not know for how long. There was neither day nor night. There were no sounds other than those of the doors opening or closing to let interrogators in or out.

  In the interrogation room the physical violence was never acute: a sharp push, a blow in the back when he started to slump. The pain, though, lay in the standing and in the degradation. His legs had begun to swell and to lose all power of feeling. And he soon learned that the kindness of hot tea was, in time, a cruelty.

  He bore the need to urinate until, at last, he was forced to ask to be taken to a lavatory. The fact that his request had been made did not even register on the interrogator’s face. He happened to be the silent one, but Zorin found later that none of the interrogators, not even the ‘kind’ one, would let him out of the room.

  Finally he had to urinate where he stood. For a few seconds the warmth of the wet urine was actually a pleasure: the pain had reached a point where he had been sure his bladder would burst. Then came the smell and the cold and the feeling of shame — the small boy who had wet his pants.

  *

  One of the interrogators spent one session doing nothing but read out names: Vladimir Bukovsky … Petr Grigorevich … Viktor Fainberg …

  The names went on.

  Zorin made no comment on them. There was none he could have made. They were all men who had gone: imprisoned or locked in psychiatric hospitals or sent into exile.

  To hear their names brought a sadness; it made him realize just how isolated those who remained were becoming. So many good men had been lost.

  Then came the moment when Zorin realized a crucial point had been reached. The ‘kind’ interrogator entered the room, but the other one did not leave. They whispered together and then one pressed the buzzer for more guards.

  The ‘kind’ one shrugged at Zorin. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I have done all I could.’

  The guards moved forward to grasp Zorin’s arms and turned him abruptly towards the door. The interrogator signalled to the guards to wait, walked over to Zorin and stood facing him.

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ he said, ‘but I really have had your welfare at heart.’

  The guards led Zorin nearer the door. Again the interrogator made them
stop.

  ‘You know the trouble,’ he said. ‘You intellectuals — you love to suffer. You always have. You always will.’

  Chapter Three

  ALLAN SCOTT eased the belt of his trousers another notch and sighed with relief.

  Then he put his feet back on the leather topped writing table and continued listening to the tape.

  Scott had made a conscious point of following the Kissinger Middle East tour through newspaper reports and Washington cocktail talk instead of the official information that poured back to the White House and the State Department.

  He read — and he listened. He noted the universal approval when the Secretary took the Israeli prime minister a list of Israeli prisoners being held in Syria. The following day he listened even more closely when the expected announcements came, reporting that American-Egyptian diplomatic relations were being resumed and that President Nixon was being invited to Cairo.

  He avoided diplomatic and intelligence reports and assessments simply because as a political animal, he wanted to view the Secretary’s visit the way the voters would, not as some privileged insider.

  What he needed, though, was the feel of the situation in Israel. He could have gone himself, but he rarely travelled now. The Secretary tried to persuade him to do so — the last time had been Dr. Kissinger’s secret visit to Peking which Scott had not been able to resist. He now pleaded that he could not afford to be away from Washington. In reality, he had developed a fear of flying — or, more precisely, of flying over water. Surely he was more useful back in Washington where he could gauge reactions to the latest news and developments and try to encourage or thwart them.

  And, of course, this time he had Sunnenden alongside the Secretary.

  Throughout his working life, Scott had made a point of looking out for bright young men. Once he helped them, they became his men, even when they moved way out of his field of direct influence. He now had a network of such men. A perceptive colleague had once dubbed him ‘the Godfather of Washington’, although that was not strictly accurate — his tentacles reached out beyond that city. But his strength came not from this alone, but from the fact that he never used his influence for personal gain or prestige.