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“please, just don’t hurt me.”
    Kerikov’s gaze didn’t soften. How many people had begged for their lives before him, he wondered. A hundred, certainly. Two hundred, quite possibly. It never got easier for him, nor did it ever get harder. In the life he’d led, torture and interrogation were simply parts of his job, as necessary and familiar as a lawyer preparing a brief.
    Several long seconds passed. Howard’s eyes locked on the Russian as he levered himself out of the chair.
    “I don’t wish to make this any more unpleasant than it must be, Professor Small.” There was no sympathy in Kerikov’s voice. “But you must realize the seriousness of my intent.”
    On cue, the younger Arab, whose nom de guerre, Abu Alam, meant literally “Father of Pain,” left the room for a moment, returning with a large cloth bag that writhed with anguished movement. Howard clearly heard his cat, Sneaker, screaming from inside the sack. The two bodyguards lifted Howard off the floor, carrying him to the kitchen where Abu Alam stood poised over the sink with the bag. His hand flicked out and switched on the garbage disposal.
    “Oh God, no, please. I’ll do anything you say. Please don’t do it,” Howard cried.
    Alam ignored him, plunging his hand into the bag and removing a multihued calico male with four white paws. Tape bound each pair of legs so tightly that the cat could not defend itself, only squirm.
    Still in the living room, Ivan Kerikov listened dispassionately as the disposal’s mechanical teeth stripped the flesh from the cat’s forepaws and then ground the bones to splinters. Long after the pet had died from shock, Abu Alam continued to feed the carcass into the unit, its motor loading down as it chewed through heavier concentrations of bone and gristle, until the whole animal had been reduced to a pulpy mush. Howard Small struggled against his two captors and would have screamed forever had they not tied a gag over his mouth.
    Listening to the grisly sounds emanating from the kitchen, Kerikov reflected that he was too old to still be doing these sorts of interrogations. He should be retired right now, living in a beautiful birch forest dacha on the Moscow River with a study full of citations and a chestful of medals. At this moment he should be half drunk on Scotch, fucking some eager blonde the State had given him in gratitude for a lifetime of service in the KGB. Had Russia not sold out, and allowed herself to be swept aside in a sea of greed, corruption, and the slick packaging of the Western lifestyle, Kerikov wouldn’t be sitting in a shabby house in Los Angeles, trying to extract information from a man who was not even important enough to waste spit upon.
    Kerikov had spent thirty years in the KGB, ruthlessly working his way through the hierarchy. When the Soviet Union disintegrated around him, as he had known all along it would, he headed one of its most shadowy organizations and was in possession of a great deal of information that would make him wealthy in the New World Order to follow. Unlike many others in the higher echelons of the KGB, Kerikov wasn’t going to allow himself to be caught in the rubble of the collapsing Russian empire.
    When the Soviet Union inevitably fractured, Kerikov was the head of Department 7, Scientific Operations, the arm of State Security involved in planning and executing Russia’s most audacious operations. At the height of the Cold War, Dept.
    7 had a budget that rivaled the space program’s and boasted a much higher caliber of scientists. Its operations, launched during the 1960s and 70s, were not designed to come to fruition until decades later. Yet when Kerikov took it over in the late 1980s, much of Dept. 7 had been dismantled due to financial constraints. Russia could no longer plan operations decades in advance when the government didn’t know if it would exist the following month.
    Knowing that the end was coming, Kerikov managed to keep active a few