Like a sprawling desert fortress, the prison was surrounded by yellow-brick outer walls, three times the height of a man, running unevenly across the terrain, linking squat guard towers with pyramidal roofs. Rake-thin guards in ill-fitting uniforms slouched in the shadows, antique rifles slung over their shoulders. The scene would not have looked out of place in an American Western, the frontier outpost, housing gunpowder, whiskey and stables. Leo regarded the institution through the smudged lens of his aviator sunglasses, his eyes drawn less to the building itself and more to the vast space around the prison. It was in the middle of nowhere, rising from an arid plain; there was no clue for its existence: a fortress with nothing to protect, no river, or valley, no crops or people, as if it had been built thousands of years ago, surviving s away, the reason for its construction was eroded by the sand. There was no doubting the symbolism of this far-flung place: geographically and morally beyond the reach of civilization, a world of its own. Leo had heard talk of fifteen thousand people being executed here but he was numb to these statistics, numb to notoriety. Over the course of his life he’d heard so many numbers about so many different prisons, seen so many lists, heard so many whispered atrocities. Whatever the true number might be, it was certain that not one of those men or women had received proper burials, their bodies tossed into shallow graves outside the walls. Perhaps that’s why they’d designed the prison to look like a fortress, to guard over the angry souls trapped in the sand. It was a fanciful idea and one Leo might have taken more seriously if he had ever believed in life after death.

He entered the prison-fortress, akin to being allowed into a medieval castle through the great gates. And like a medieval castle, this was a facility concerned solely with the preservation of power. These walls had nothing to do with justice. The Soviet occupation force had immediately recognized the prison’s importance and sent a detachment of soldiers, as many as to the power stations and government ministries. This was where the dirty work of protecting a regime took place, processing the risky elements of the population. Soviet objections to the previous President’s techniques weren’t underpinned by morals, there was nothing wrong with a bloody purge, but murder had to be smart, and for the benefit of the party, rather than a personal grievance. Indiscriminate murder was a tactical mistake, undermining the Communist regime; murder needed to pacify, not aggravate, to make the job of the occupation easier, not more complicated.