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his left. The two men were dressed
identically—black overcoats, black slacks, black shoes, even black Homburgs covering
their heads. They escorted him directly past the entrance to his hotel, walking
him roughly half a kilometer along the main road, still busy with pedestrians
at this relatively early hour. None of them paid any attention to him or to the
men dressed in black. Aleksander’s heart was racing but he tried not to panic.
One call to Secretary Gorbachev’s office and this misunderstanding would be
cleared up.
    The strange
threesome continued, moving so far down the sidewalk that they left the
flickering, pre-World War Two-era streetlights behind. They turned a corner
into a secluded alleyway, walking Aleksander to an East German-made Trabant
automobile parked in the shadows. The car was ancient, tiny. They shoved him
wordlessly into the back seat. One of the men leaned over and lifted a
foul-smelling cloth from a well-sealed plastic bag in his pocket and pressed it
to Aleksander’s face. Aleksander willed himself not to panic and tried not to
breathe.
    Eventually he did
both, in that order, and everything went black.
     
     
    8
    May 30, 1987
    Time Unknown
    Location unknown
    Aleksander regained consciousness
slowly. He was sitting on a hard chair, probably in a basement or storage room
of some sort. It was cold and dark and damp and smelled of rotting vegetables
and something vaguely sinister. Copper? Aleksander wasn’t sure.
    He could hear
voices muttering somewhere nearby. Two people, it seemed. He was afraid to open
his eyes to check. His hands and arms ached. He tried moving them but they were
secured tight to the chair, arms pulled behind his back, wrists shackled
together.
    Tried his feet
next. Same result. Each ankle had been affixed to a chair leg with something
heavy and solid, probably a length of chain.
    Aleksander felt
queasy and weak. He knew he had been drugged into unconsciousness inside the
tiny East German automobile and wondered how long he had been out. Was he even
still in the German Democratic Republic? Was he back in Russia? Somewhere else?
He concentrated on the voices, trying to pick up enough of the conversation to
determine what language they were speaking and how many people were inside the
room with him.
    No luck. The
voices were too quiet.
    He risked opening
his eyes, just a sliver, and moved his head very slowly to look around. In the
dirty yellow light of a single bulb he could see a pair of shadowy figures
huddled together in a corner of the room. The image blurred and doubled, then
cleared. The lingering effects of whatever drugs he had been given, Aleksander
guessed.
    The men were
sitting around a rickety table drinking something hot out of mugs—Aleksander
could see the steam rising into the air even from here—and his stomach clenched
and rumbled.
    He wondered how
long it had been since he had eaten. He wondered whether he would ever eat
again. The terror of his predicament struck him like a wrecking ball and
Aleksander puked all over the floor, the vomit burning his gullet on the way
out. Cheap German vodka. Aleksander sobbed, then quickly stopped
himself. His eyes widened in mounting panic as the men pushed their chairs back
and began walking across the room.
    The men stopped
directly in front of him. One was tall and thin, skeletal. The other was
completely bald. Aleksander looked up in fear, feeling like he might be sick
again. He hoped when the vomit erupted from him it wouldn’t splatter all over
his captors.
    “Welcome back to
the land of the living, Comrade,” the bald man said in Russian, which meant
nothing, since his East German contact had spoken Russian, too. “Time is of the
essence, so let us skip the preliminaries and get right down to business, shall
we?”
    Aleksander’s
terror was nearly overwhelming. His stomach rolled and yawed. He was afraid to
speak for fear of vomiting again.
    But as terrifying
as this situation was, he knew he possessed the