The Apollo Deception by Mitch Silver

Author:Mitch Silver [Silver, Mitch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780727889751
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2019-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-FOUR

Federal Detention Center, D Street SE, Washington, DC

There are worse places to be jailed, Anya thinks to herself, not for the first time. The food is all right, and it comes three times a day. She looks down at the remains of the supper finished hours ago but not yet taken away. The printed sheet called it ‘gumbo.’ She uses her spoon to push through what’s left of the rice. Those tiny pieces, the only ones that taste like anything, must be shrimp. Or crab. Or … what else do the Americans add to gumbo? Sausage? The only drawback is that whatever it is gets caught between your teeth.

She laughs to herself. Nothing in the prison food back in Chelyabinsk could ever get caught in your teeth. What wasn’t water looked and tasted like water. At best, it was potato water.

Of course, there are always drawbacks in any situation. Isolation from the other prisoners here means the only exercise you get is when you walk from the mattress to the toilet to the door with the bars in it and back to the mattress. Seventeen steps if you make them little ones.

The other, more important, thing about solitary is you can’t be sure that what you got by hacking into the briefing was enough for your contacts to act on. Or that it went where it’s supposed to go.

They could use the screen shots she managed to send off of the people in the room, run it through some facial recognition software, maybe, and deduce all the players that way. Still, that’s always the field agent’s lot, the not knowing. Even if the ‘field’ is just a desk and a chair.

She feels a quick pang of something. Regret? Yes, regret, calling for help the way she did. Now, to the four walls she yells, ‘Pomogite!’

Nothing. Nobody running to the rescue. There’s no ‘help’ to be had in solitary. Not in English-speaking America.

Was that a bird that just flew by the window? Something did, but now the view out of it, set so high in the wall you can’t see down, is just black, unending American sky. How long has it been since she’s seen anything other than clouds? There was the Anacostia River she glimpsed through the steel mesh of the van’s window, the van that brought her here six days ago. And the cemetery for Washington big shots the driver pointed out a couple of blocks to the south.

He said someone named J. Edgar Hoover is buried there, the Director of the FBI. But, wasn’t Hoover President during their Depression? And isn’t there a different cemetery for Presidents? Anya’s remaining memories from that one year of Soviet-style American History are now so much mental porridge.

Porridge. Which brings her back to food. And the particles of it lodged between her teeth for the last couple of hours. She walks over to the sink hanging from the wall (six small steps) and picks up the little – what did he call it? – ‘personal hygiene kit’ with the toothbrush and toothpaste and floss inside.

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