Begin with Chapter 1: “The Beginning”
The denseness of the tall trees of the Kurapaty forest ensures that the forest floor remains dark every evening. Neither surrounding light pollution from the growing development that encircles the forest, nor moonlight can illuminate the surface.
Had he been conscious, LJ either would have cursed the darkness for what he couldn’t see, or praised it for preventing him from seeing anything. The physical darkness of the forest was eclipsed by the spiritual darkness resulting from the atrocities committed there. If LJ knew where he was, no amount of light would alleviate terror of being alone in such a place during the middle of the night. However, the goosebumps on his skin, and the waves of nervous electricity that ran the length of his spine would remind him that he wasn’t alone at all.
LJ didn’t realize how lucky he was that he remained unconscious while Mia was gone. His head tilted forward, his chin reached for the ground, free from wild boar tooth marks. A number of bugs crawled on his cheeks and his forehead, but a fresh set of tracks ten feet away implied that he’d encountered wildlife other than bugs.
Mia parked a quarter-mile down the road from where she immured LJ. If anyone saw her car parked on the side of the road, she wanted to make sure they had to walk some distance before finding her. After leaving the Roost she drove to the Monastyrski Hotel, three blocks north. She parked in the circle drive, and went into the lobby. Just inside the sliding glass doors, three carts full of luggage waited for someone to deliver them. She grabbed the largest suitcase on the cart, hustled outside, and put it in the trunk. Driving off without looking back, she turned right, then left, and pulled into an alley. Mia emptied the contents of the suitcase into a garbage bag she took from the Roost, drove back to the hotel, and left the bag in the circle drive.
After checking on LJ, she put the suitcase flat on the ground, opened it, and began digging. He didn’t move as she freed him from his earthen restraint. Other than a layer of dark clay that covered him from the neck down he appeared no worse for the wear. His slight size made it easy to fit him into the suitcase, although with his knees to his chest, and his back curved, he’d be sore when he got out. It wouldn’t matter that he fit in the suitcase if she couldn’t get it to zip though. She pulled the zipper as far as it would go, but ended up sitting on top of the suitcase so LJ’s shoulder folded into his body, which let her pull the zipper all the way around. After filling the hole, Mia dragged the suitcase back to the car, and put it in the backseat so she could hear LJ if he regained consciousness.
She parked near the T-intersection, did her best to take the suitcase out of the backseat without appearing to exert herself too much, and rolled it behind her as she walked toward the apartment building. Just in front of the building, a man who smelled like vodka and had an unkempt beard, and an overcoat with a torn sleeve, smiled at her, and grabbed her hand. She couldn’t make out the Belarusian words that he slurred, but he let go of her hand, and grabbed the handle on top of the suitcase and motioned toward the apartment building. As Mia reached into her pocket and grabbed a 10 ruble note to give him, she told him that she didn’t need any help, and wished him a good night. He smiled again, but this time at the money instead of Mia.
In the back alley, she hid the suitcase on the far side of the five-foot wall, opened the door, and pulled the suitcase into the Roost. For the first time in the history of The Summit, a non-agent entered a Roost.
“LJ! Are you awake in there?” Mia asked. No response. “Don’t worry. You’re not dead. I know it’s dark inside there, and you may be so uncomfortable that you wish you were dead, but you’re not dead. Do you want me to let you out?”
When Mia heard nothing from inside the suitcase, she fell to her knees and put her ear to the suitcase. LJ seemed to still be fast asleep. Or so Mia hoped. If he died in the suitcase, Mia knew she’d feel overwhelmed with disappointment at not discovering LJ’s secrets.
She unzipped the suitcase as fast as she could, in the hope that she’d get it open and see LJ before he understood where he was, if he didn’t already. He’d been so cramped in the suitcase that she didn’t think he’d be in any condition to fight, and he didn’t seem very fearsome to begin with, but she didn’t want to take any chances. With the suitcase all the way open, she could see his eyes were still closed, but his chest moved up and down with slight breaths. She reached toward his shoulder to shake him, but before she could touch him, he shot up from the suitcase, while swinging his left hand toward her face. His silent stillness had deceived Mia, so she’d let her guard down just enough so that the punch—more like a slap, really—landed next to her left eye, and knocked her to the side for just a second before she could get her hands on the ground to break her fall.
She leapt at LJ, whose numb legs left him unable to avoid Mia. Instead he collapsed to the ground, his right foot caught in the strap on the inside of the suitcase.
“That’s not how this is going to go,” Mia said as she grabbed LJ by the shoulders and flipped him on to his stomach. She grabbed his wrists with her hands and pulled them behind him, exerting intense pressure on his shoulders, forcing him to cry out in pain. “Shut your mouth. Gollyfuck you need to be quiet or you’ll leave me no choice but to silence you forever.” She eased the pressure with which she forced his arms back. “I admire your moxie, but now’s not the time. I’m going to pick you up, and you’re going to sit in this chair and not try anything else.”
Mia didn’t wait for an answer, and instead pulled back and up on LJ’s arms so that he had no choice but to get to his feet. He stumbled backward, his legs still asleep, Mia pulling him before he could gain his balance. She guided him to the wooden chair she’d setup in the middle of the kitchen before she left the Roost, and slid his hands into the rope restraints she’d prepared. A quick pull of each rope tightened the knot around his wrists. She slipped the other set of ropes over his feet, and pulled them snug against his ankles. She then looped one rope on of his thighs, and then the other, before connecting one end of the rope to the heavy couch ten feet away in the living room, and the other end to the refrigerator door. Even if LJ got free of the wrist and ankle restraints, the rope connected to his thighs would prevent him from running off.
“You know, LJ, as I was driving here, I hoped that you’d have a moment of clarity and decide to cooperate with me. I mean, I am sparing your life because you told me that you knew some important information. And since I’m sparing your life I thought you might want to tell me everything you know, and you could work with me instead of against me. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. I wish I understood why people like you always have to do things the difficult way rather than just cooperating. I’ve proven that I’m superior to you, so maybe it’s time to just accept that, and make things easy on both of us.”
Mia opened a drawer in the kitchen, grabbed a spoon, walked over to LJ, and stood without saying anything. She smiled at him, and then pressed the tip of the spoon against his eyelid, pushing just hard enough to feel it press between the firm gelatin of his eyeball, and the hard bone of his eye socket.
“One last chance, LJ. If you admit right now that you have nothing to tell me, then I’ll let you go. I’ll drive you to the outskirts of Minsk, and you can get out and be on your way. But if you maintain that you have the information you claim, and you don’t provide it, I’m going to use this spoon to carve your eyes out of your head. It’s not an easy task, but I once watched an organized crime boss in Barcelona do it to one of his underlings who’d been disloyal. You’ve never heard a human cry out in pain until you’ve heard him lose an eye. I’ve got to be careful though. I think there’s a major artery back there. It’d be a shame if I took out your eyes and then let you bleed to death. It’s not like you’d know where to go for help, right?” Mia traced the perimeter of LJ’s eye with the spoon, and then said, “So what’s it going to be?”
“You tell me,” LJ said. “Killing me might make you feel better, but you’d be letting your country down.”
“Why should I believe you?” Mia asked. “You said you wanted to tell me all about the president, but then you tried to attack me. That doesn’t make sense. How do I know that you’re not just trying to save yourself?”
“How do I know that you’re not just going to kill me after you’re done with me? You don’t want me to know where we are. I’m here now, but it seems like there’s a good chance this is the end of the line for me. If I’m going to die either way, then why not make things difficult for you? Why tell you anything that’s true?”
“You’re not helping your case here, LJ. Are you trying to convince me to kill you, because that’s what I feel like doing right now.”
“Of course not, Mia. It’s about trust. If you want to know the truth, you have to trust me. If I want to live another day, I have to trust you. So let’s agree to trust, and see where it gets us.”
“I intended to trust you when I opened that suitcase and you punched me in the head.”
“But you didn’t kill me in that instant,” LJ said. “That tells me that you’re disciplined, restrained, cautious. And you know that I might have something you want.”
Mia walked away from LJ and paced around the living room three times without saying anything. Her mind raced with the possibilities of how her interrogation of LJ and its aftermath might unfold, but despite her best analysis, she knew that the only way to know what might happen is to wait and see.
She walked back over to LJ, stood in front of him, and said, “Convince me you know anything.”
“Your president was elected with help from Russia.”
“That’s common knowledge,” Mia said. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“To say that Russia helped him is a bit general. To be specific, a small group of us interfered with the election because that’s what Putin told us to do. Thirteen of us caused the havoc that has consumed your country for the past few years. We stole e-mails and we funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. But most importantly, we created an alternate reality.” LJ took a deep breath and looked to the ceiling, as if contemplating his next sentence. “No, the reality already existed. People in your country have been creating the reality for twenty-five years. We just expanded it, and directed it toward those people most likely to accept it.”
“What reality?”
“Do you know the biggest lie in America?” Mia shook her head. “The word united. The United States of America. You people aren’t united. Everyone in the world can see that except for you. You’d think that the one thing everyone could agree on is something that has actually happened. But at some point, your country began believing things that didn’t happen, and stopped believing things that did happen. Once we recognized that, it was easy to create a reality that appealed to millions of people in your country, and make that benefit Russia.”
“How does that reality benefit Russia?”
“As you know, for decades America’s president has been confrontational with Russia, and before that, the Soviets. Republican or Democrat, they were all the same. It wouldn’t matter what kind of reality we created if we didn’t find a way to solve the problem of a confrontational president. We waited to capitalize on the reality until we found our guy. This is our guy. It all came together better than we expected.”
“How’d he become your guy?”
“The turning point happened not too long ago, but the project began before that.”
“How long before that?” Mia asked.
“Mia, you’re an attractive woman. You’ve been blessed with the gift of youthfulness. You look young, but I suspect you’re older than you appear. You’re how old? Mid-30s?”
Mia never responded to any personal inquiry during her work with The Summit. She maintained the same policy in response to LJ’s question.
“Yes, I’m right, am I not?” LJ nodded as if to confirm his own observation. “Then Russia has been grooming him your entire life.”
Check back Monday, April 1 for the next chapter of Kompromised.
Brett Baker is the author of The Death Market, and the first two books in the Mia Mathis series, Must Come Down and For the Trees. You can purchase all three here.