“Roger on that mayday. Over. This is the Dogfish. I hear you. What’s the situation?”

“This is the Lonely Fisherman,” said Faqir. “We have a priority problem. We are in need of urgent assistance. Over.”

“What’s the problem, Captain?”

“We have fuel, but the pump is not transferring. We need a pump.”

“Where are you?”

“East of Newfoundland,” said Faqir. “Near the Flemish Cap.”

He gave the captain of the Dogfish his coordinates.

“Let me see what I can do,” said the captain. “We’re at the beginning of our trip and we’ll be heading a little south of you. Let me see if we can we spare a pump. Switch to forty-one.”

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later, the captain of the Dogfish came on channel 41.

“Fisherman, you there? This is the Dogfish. Over.”

“We’re here, Captain.”

“We have a pump we can spare. I expect to be compensated for it.”

72

ELEKTROSTAL

Cloud watched the news reports on his computer, volume turned down. The plane had crashed near the airport, in a town called Tolstopaltsevo. The scene was pandemonium.

A low beeping noise sounded from Sascha’s computer. Cloud looked up. Sascha was waving him over.

“There’s something happening,” he said.

“Move over.”

Cloud took over the keyboard, sitting down in the seat, quickly scanning the screen. It showed signals intelligence activity over the past day originating at the CIA. The activity had virtually ceased the evening before, then started back up.

The analysis was displayed as a long list. These were precise nodes of activity, fed back to them via the virus infecting Langley. Next to each entry, electronic activity was represented by percentages, over time.

It was clear that Langley had shut down everything following the failed attempt to extract him. That was expected. What he hadn’t expected was the resumption of activity. It could mean only one thing: they were hunting for him. Langley would attempt to find him in the same way he’d found them, via the Internet.

Cloud’s entire network was protected by several levels of state-of-the-art encryption. The only way to find him was for someone to find the encryption key, then break it. Breaking the key itself would require months. More important, someone would first have to find an instance of the algorithm itself just to have a chance to break it. As of now, Langley was clueless.

Yet, theoretically, it was possible for them to use the trapdoor to find the encryption layer. It didn’t mean they could get through it, but even giving Langley that glimpse of his line of defense made Cloud nervous.

He sat back, crossed his arms, and shut his eyes. After a few moments, he opened them. He leaned forward and started typing.

“Go to access four,” Cloud said without looking up.

“And do what?” asked Sascha.

“Destroy it.”

“If I do that, the trapdoor will be gone,” protested Sascha.

“If they find access four, they will be able to find us. Shut it down immediately.”

73

BANCHOR COTTAGE

SCOTLAND

Chalmers stepped through the back door of Banchor Cottage, then down a flight of stairs that led to a locked door. He inserted a key and pushed into the windowless basement.

Few who’d been to Banchor had seen this part of the rustic fishing camp.

Behind the door, an intimate, low-ceilinged room looked like an old-fashioned hospital room. On one side, communications equipment was stacked on shelves, all of it tied to MI6 headquarters in London. At the back of the room was medical equipment, including heart and life monitors. A beat-up leather sofa was pushed against the wall to the left. Two hospital beds occupied the right side of the room.

A closet next to the sofa, out of view, held a mysterious-looking device that could be used by an interrogator to elicit information through the moderated application of electricity. For all of the publicity surrounding waterboarding, it was electricity that worked best at getting terrorists to talk, and Banchor, despite England’s stated dislike of torture, had heard its share of screams over the years.

Smythson was seated on the leather sofa, reading a magazine. Robbins, the MI6 physician, was standing against the back wall, back turned, inspecting the contents of a drawer filled with pharmaceuticals.

Robbins turned when he heard Chalmers enter.

“Hello, Derek,” he said.

Chalmers nodded but said nothing. His eye went to one of the beds. Katya was strapped to it, a variety of sensors attached to her neck, arms, head, chest, and legs. If necessary, her heart, blood, and breathing patterns could be run through MI6 computers in order to assess her level of honesty.

“Give us a few minutes, will you?” Chalmers said.

“Yes, of course. I’ll be upstairs.”

Chalmers looked at Smythson, who was still seated. She met his look.

“Me too?” she asked.

Chalmers nodded.

Katya had not moved since being strapped to the bed. She lay beneath a flannel blanket, her clothing having been removed except for panties and a bra. Her head was facing the wall, eyes shut.

What played through Chalmers’s mind, as he prepared to interrogate Katya, were the choices before him.

In Chalmers’s storied intelligence career, he’d been subjected to a multitude of enhanced interrogation techniques. As a KGB prisoner in 1979, Chalmers wasn’t allowed to sleep for extended periods of time. In 1982, the IRA locked him in a Belfast warehouse for almost a month. There, he was waterboarded and electrocuted, though the memory he hated most was of the time they made him kneel in front of a concrete wall for five days with a lightbulb dangling down in front of him. He remembered crying when they finally turned the lightbulb off, as if it had become his only friend, or a god. To this day, Chalmers never changed a lightbulb, an idiosyncratic remnant of his time in that basement.

Chalmers thus had a view of enhanced interrogation techniques that was less theoretical than that of most others in the intelligence community. He’d been there. He knew what worked and what didn’t. The challenge was that there was no way to know until the sessions began. Chalmers believed all torture could be effective if there was something there in the first place. If there weren’t secrets to be found, however, a prisoner could lead an entire operation down a rat hole simply to stop the pain.

Chalmers could understand Katya having a relationship with someone who had a secret. The question was, did she have real knowledge? It seemed a practical impossibility. How could someone who had to travel all the time, to practice every day for hours on end, be shielding someone with such dark intentions?

The problem for Chalmers was, if he spent the next day trying to get her to confess, he might end up in the exact same place he was now. If she knew nothing, he would get lies in order to stop the interrogation, lies that might misdirect the CIA at a time it needed to be sharpening its focus. He would also destroy any chance he had of eliciting passive but still vital information. If he broke trust with Katya by inflicting pain, she would shut down. He’d been there, and that is exactly what happened. The KGB wanted information he simply did not have. By beating him, his tormentors lost the opportunity to drag other key information out of him.

Chalmers went to a cabinet above the sofa and took out two glasses and poured each half full with scotch. He walked to the bed and lifted the blanket. Gently, he removed the sensors from her body, then unstrapped the bands from around her arms and legs. She remained with her eyes closed, her head facing the wall, motionless.

“Katya,” Chalmers said.

He waited for her to turn her head and look up. After more than a minute, she turned and opened her eyes. The aniline blue of her eyes, against the backdrop of dark skin and jet-black hair, was slightly jarring. She stared up at him.