The Kill Zone

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Dr. Anatoli Nikolayev was an old man, and the summer heat was oppressive to him as he hauled his thin body up the dark narrow stairs.

He wasn’t sure that he wanted the answers that he had come here to find. Yet with everything that he’d learned so far he couldn’t simply turn his back like an old lover who’d found out he’d been betrayed.

His research was almost finished. He had ground his way through a million pages of old records, starting in 1917 with the Soviet Union’s first secret intelligence service, the Cheka, until the breakup under Gorbachev and the dismantling of the KGB in 1991; the kidnappings and terrorism and sabotage; poisons, electric guns, honey traps, brain washings intimidation of countless thousands of officials and diplomats from nearly every country in the world. And assassination. The ultimate act of the state other than war. Bodies stretching back almost ninety years; piled to the rafters; more bodies than even Hitler had been credited with, making him wonder why the Soviet Union hadn’t been as reviled as the Nazis were. His honey, blue-veined left hand trailed along the cracked plaster wall, and he could smell the terror in the stifling air like last night’s cabbage dinner; urine and shit from the overflowing communal toilets; the accumulated filth of ninety years of neglect. When the KGB came it was almost always easier to commit suicide the moment the knock came on the door than to endure what would come next. But all of that was finally coming to an end.

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