The Warsaw Protocol: A Novel(24)
Sonia Draga.
She’d intentionally revealed herself back at the restaurant. Surely seeing him with Bunch and Stephanie had raised suspicions. Why wouldn’t it? But there’d been no opportunity for him to explain. Maybe now was the chance. He kept watching as she dissolved into the crowd. Then something else caught his attention. Two familiar faces. Two-thirds of the Three Amigos. Following Sonia.
Leave it alone.
Walk away.
Yeah, right.
He headed in her direction.
At the junction of the side street and the market square he caught sight of Sonia fifty yards ahead, the Two Amigos in pursuit. Buildings lined both sides, and there were enough people moving back and forth for no one to be noticed. But Sonia had to know she had company, as these guys weren’t making any secret about their presence.
She turned and disappeared into one of the buildings.
The Two Amigos followed.
Nothing about this seemed right, but he kept going until he came to a pedimented arch that led through one of the gabled houses, forming an alley about fifty feet long. No one was in sight. He walked through the covered passage into a courtyard flanked by more old houses. Wrought-iron lanterns suspended from the stone fa?ades cast a dim glow. Another covered passage led out on the opposite side. Three doors dotted the exterior walls to his left and right, all closed. Where’d everybody go? He heard a click and turned to see the Two Amigos standing behind him, one of them armed with a gun.
“That way,” the guy said, motioning with the weapon at one of the closed doors.
No choice.
He turned.
The door opened and Sonia emerged.
She walked by him and gently stroked his cheek with her hand.
“Sorry, Cotton. It had to be done.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Czajkowski realized that he could not sit back and allow things to happen. His whole life was at stake. Perhaps even the entire country’s future. Someone named Jonty Olivier was out to destroy him. He’d long expected threats from the various political parties, hostile ministers in Parliament, opposition leaders, even the media—which was not always kind—but never had he thought a foreigner would become so dangerous.
It had been a long time since he’d thought of that day at Mokotów Prison. Many times he’d wondered what had happened to the math professor tied to the stool. The last he saw the man had been forced to crawl on hands and knees from the interrogation room back to his cell. How degrading. He’d been so young then. So afraid. Major Dilecki of the SB had brought him there to make a point.
Do as he was told or face the same consequences.
Countless people had been arrested and tortured. In addition to beatings and burnings, the most popular methods of “interrogation” had been to rip off fingernails, apply temple screws, clamp on tight handcuffs that caused the skin to burst and blood to flow, force prisoners to run up and down stairs, deprive them of sleep, make them stand at attention for hours, reduce their rations, pour buckets of cold water into cells, leave them in solitary confinement, anything and everything imaginable to break a person down. All of it had been applied in a harsh, premeditated manner, without remorse or discrimination. Those who fainted were revived with an adrenaline shot. Before some of the sessions, which could last for hours, many received booster injections to keep them alert. Torturers strictly followed the wishes of interrogating officers like Dilecki.
A damn disgrace.
And for what?
That brave man on the floor that day had been right. What the foreign force has taken from us, we shall with sabre retrieve. And that was precisely what had happened. The communists were finally driven away and Poland returned to its people.
But at what cost?
During martial law many had stayed in prison for years, until a general amnesty finally forgave everyone. Till today, he never knew what happened to Dilecki, but apparently the major had kept up with him, secreting documents that should have long ago been destroyed.
One day you might be a big somebody.
What a bastard.
Mokotów Prison still existed, now used by the government as a short-term holding facility. No one, though, had been abused there in a long time. A huge plaque now adorned one of the outer walls commemorating the victims. What happened inside those concrete cells, in unimaginable conditions, had been the subject of books and memoirs. Nobody really knew how many died there, and few paid for those atrocities. Unfortunately, justice back then seemed more like a leaf in the spring air, at the mercy of the twists from an unpredictable wind. Now here he was, decades later, still dealing with it.
How had things come to this?
He was fifty-six years old, a respected citizen of Poland, one who’d managed to attain the highest elected office in the land. His mother had wanted him to become a priest, because back then the clearest path to an education came from the church. All children were taught in school to be subservient to the state and obedient workers to the collective. No mention of individuality ever came. People were helpless in directing their own lives. But he managed to obtain a university degree, eventually heading up, during the time of martial law, a branch of the Independent Students’ Union, the junior arm of Solidarity. That position had been what caught Dilecki’s attention, along with his operation of an underground publishing house. He’d been quite the radical. But everyone was back then. The country was changing. The world was changing. And he’d wanted to be part of that change.