Free Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews Page A

seconds.
Shit,
thought Zyuganov—one potential source of tactical intelligence was gone. That
suka,
that bitch, had cheated him.
    The second Chechen prisoner clearly was terrified. Her name was Zareta, and she was thinking about the day a middle-aged woman came to her parents’ house in the capital city of Grozny, spoke quietly to her mother, then took Zareta into the bedroom for an hour of mesmerizing, overwhelming, hypnotizing conversation.
That recruitment afternoon had been the beginning,
she thought,
and now this is the end.
Through the sour hood over her head she could hear shoes squeaking on floor tiles around her and the click of a snap hook on the wire that bound her wrists behind her back. Her legs shook with fright and she breathed hard into the cloth hood. A ratchet sound began and her arms were hoisted behind her, higher than her waist, forcing her to lean forward, her shoulder tendons screaming. If they had been conversational, Zyuganov could have told Zareta that
strappado
—suspension by the arms—was used by the Medici family in Florence as early as 1513. But Zyuganov didn’t have time to chat.
    Screaming into the hood, Zareta could not immediately identify what was being done to her—it sufficed to know only that her body was engulfed in pain, serious pain that was elemental, sharp, and electric, beneath her skin, deep in her vitals. Her legs shook and she felt her urine on the floor under her bare feet. Then the questions in Russian began; each was repeated by a female voice in accented Chechen. In thirty minutes, Zareta had stuttered the names of the woman who recruited her and the head and number two of her training cell, as well as the location of two training camps in Chechnya, one in Shatoy, seventy kilometers south of the capital at the end of the P305, and another east of Grozny, in Dzhalka, off the M29.
    It was infinitely more terrifying not to be able to see, not to be able to anticipate each assault on her nervous system. She screamed out the name of the young man who assembled the suicide vests in Volgograd, and that of the boy who had strapped the tape-wrapped explosive sausage around her waist, snug under her breasts. He had smiled at her through his beard. If he wasn’t dead already, she had just killed him.
    The woman’s voice came to her again, in the strange accented Chechen, asking about Black Widow operations in Moscow. Zareta knew one name and one address, but was determined not to betray these last colleagues. The Chechen voice was replaced by the Russian voice, reedy and harsh—it barely sounded human. Even though bent over double, Zareta could feel the person next to her. Someone slapped her on the back of the head. She felt fingers fiddling with her hood and it was roughly whisked off. The sudden white light of the laboratory made her wince, but it was nothing compared to what was in front of her, a foot away. Zareta screamed for three minutes, seemingly without taking a breath.
    Medna’s body was upright in the high-backed chair. She sat regally, hands wired to the armrests, head held upright by a strap around her forehead. Her face was a mass of purple bruises. She stared at Zareta through half-closed lids, her mouth barely open. Dried blood trails on either side of her mouth and nostrils completed the war-paint look. The real horror, the Zyuganov touch, was that Medna sat in the chair with her legs delicately crossed, as if at the theater, with the little toe of the foot closest to Zareta’s face snipped off. Zyuganov clapped his hand over Zareta’s mouth to stifle the paroxysm of screams.
    “Look at her,” Zyuganov said. “She’s telling you to live.” He grabbed ahandful of Zareta’s black hair and shook her head. “Live, and survive, and return to your parents. You have been deceived and used by these animals. All I require is one name and one address. Then we are done.” As if to demonstrate, he lowered Zareta’s arms until she could stand upright and