Free Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews Page B

wobbly, unclipped the hoisting rope, and snipped the wire off her wrists. She bowed her head, unable to look at the ruined envelope of her friend, unwilling to contemplate her own surrender.
    She looked up at Zyuganov and hesitated, then whispered the name of the controller in Moscow and the address of an apartment in a high-rise building in the southern Moscow suburb of Zyablikovo. Zyuganov nodded and clasped Zareta’s face and squeezed her cheeks, a “that’s a good girl” gesture. He then walked to a stainless-steel table against the wall. Zareta, the busty matron who spoke Chechen, and the uniformed prison guard in the corner of the room all watched as he pulled a large gray handgun from under a towel, turned, and walked back to them. Zyuganov raised the pistol—an MP412 REX revolver loaded with devastating .357 magnum cartridges—and shot the already-dead Medna in the left temple from a foot away.
    Zareta looked at Zyuganov with horrified disbelief. The guard held his hand over his mouth. The matron had turned away, clasping her stomach, and was vomiting on the floor. The hydrostatic shock of the bullet had tipped Medna and her chair over and the blood left in her body was spreading out in a black lake over the white tiles, migrating slowly toward the large central drain.
Normal’no,
just right, thought Zyuganov. This was just the kind of ogre’s party he liked.
    “Her mother can stuff her head with newspaper, to fill out her
kozhukh,
her head shroud,” said Zyuganov in a voice that seemed several octaves too low, as if the devil had suddenly started speaking. Hands trembling, Zareta blinked away the blood from her lashes and wiped her sticky face, seeing the horns and yellow goat’s eyes and the cloven hooves, and wondered how she would ever erase the memory of this brilliant, white-tiled room, or this
chort,
this little black devil with the foul jacket, or how she could return alive to Chechnya, where there would be a reckoning with the council for her betrayal and with her parents’ shame. She could see their faces, but she would be alive, and she told herself that she wanted to live.
    Zyuganov motioned for the guard—the soldier’s face was gray—to takeZareta away, and as she turned toward the door and shuffled past him, Zyuganov put the muzzle of the revolver behind her left ear and pulled the trigger. Zareta dropped in a heap and lay on her face, the prison smock up around her hips.
No dignity in death,
thought Zyuganov,
the little provincial slut.
The guard howled in fright—he had been splattered with something out of the girl’s head—and the matron began vomiting again in the corner. Zyuganov surveyed the pink and dripping room for a second, then hurried out to draft his interrogation report for the internal service—but really for Putin. He wanted to report success and the vital CI information promptly.
    Days later, prison administrators submitted a written complaint, requesting that Colonel Zyuganov be censured for excessive brutality and criminal acts including torture and homicide, but the complaints evaporated in the blue-eyed blink of an eye. The president had given him a task, and Alexei delivered. To the grousing officials Putin was reported as saying,
Delat’ iz mukhi slona,
don’t make an elephant out of a fly.

    Young Alexei had surprised himself by doing well in the distrustful peat bog of SVR counterintelligence, and in time was promoted to the chief’s position. His paranoid grain was well suited to the work. Zyuganov had learned much during the formative Lubyanka years—cunning overlaid his crusty homicidal urges—though his instincts were still firmly in a Soviet Jurassic zone. He understood the politics a little better. He missed the excesses of the Soviet years, and the president was Russia’s best hope to reclaim the majesty and power of the Soviet Union, to restore the red-toothed fury and jaw-breaking brutality that had made former enemies cower.
    Very few of the