The Inspector leaned against the wall outside the cell. He sighed.

He had been allowed access after the first three days, and the first two injured interrogators. "He's not responding to us. Maybe he'll talk to someone more familiar," the unit commander had suggested. But he'd had no luck yet.

Scotland Yard would be completely shut out of this if the Inspector couldn’t get Nikolai to talk. Everything he knew, everything he held in that stubborn, evil head of his would be gone forever.

He'd given up all the British data, all that he'd been sending to the Inspector in his reports. But that wasn't what MI6 wanted. It was sure as hell not what the FSB wanted.

It wasn't a question of punishment. At this point, Nikolai was too valuable to damage permanently. So far. He knew too much. There was a reason the FSB wanted him on Russian soil. This wasn't about the drug trade from Kabul and a handful of brothels. Nikolai had gone deeper and farther than that. It was his nature to go deeper. He was born for this kind of work, and he'd dug up something serious. MI6 wanted it, the FSB wanted it, and it was the Inspector's job to get it, but they could never hope to break Nikolai. It was up to him to make Nikolai see reason.

If Nikolai kept this silence up, they might get tired of him, tired of paying people to watch him, tired of paying people compensation after they'd been injured by him. After that, he might be sent somewhere very nasty indeed, and then Nikolai would feel free to sell his information to the highest bidder. Or, God forbid, he would take up the role of mafia boss for real. There were a lot of things a man like Nikolai could do from inside a Russian prison.
Unless the Russians decided that was too great a danger.

Nikolai would remain on British soil only as long as the information he held was deemed valuable enough to warrant all this expense. The Inspector was under tremendous pressure.

He couldn’t blame MI6 for wanting this dealt with immediately. Keeping Nikolai Luzhin in a cell was like trying to baby-sit a rattlesnake.

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