“Oh, it’s mine.”

“But it was someone else’s first, no?”

“You believe what you want,” Laurel said.

Timokhin nodded. “I believe you let Roth give you the face of another woman. You let him give you painful, invasive surgery, just so he could use you to seduce one of his assets who was going off the rails. Isn’t that true?”

Laurel knew she had to be careful. She was getting emotional. She could make a mistake.

“Going off the rails?” she said.

“Didn’t you hear? He was a complete liability. Completely losing it. No one wanted him. Not the CIA. Not the president. Roth thought giving him back the love of his life would soothe his savage soul.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And the sad part, the part that must really get under your skin, my dear, is that it didn’t even work. You went to Spector, looking like you do, exactly like his lost lover, and it didn’t even work. He rejected you.”

“Fuck you,” Laurel said.

“He rejected you, and now he’s dead. All that surgery, all that pain, for what?”

Laurel raised her knee suddenly, trying to hit Timokhin’s face, but it only made him laugh.

“And now, after they disgrace you like that, after they humiliate you, erase your face, make you into nothing, into no one, you’re going to hang here and die to protect them.”

She said nothing.

Timokhin nodded. “Anyway,” he said, shifting approach, “I think we can all agree the dead do not mourn the dead.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, if I kill you, my dear, it would be a tragedy, would it not?”

Laurel knew no one would be crying at her funeral but said nothing.

“But if I killed a million, it would cease to be a tragedy. It would simply be a chapter of a history book. If that.”

“So you want to kill a million people?”

“Good heavens no,” Timokhin said, feigning shock. “Do you take me for a monster? Of course I don’t. Only a madman, only a psychopath, would think of doing such a thing.”

He was staring intently at her face.

“No scars,” he said.

She tried to turn away from him.

“I’d have thought, with all those procedures, they’d leave some mark.”

She looked up at the ceiling, the machine holding the ropes, the ventilation shaft.

“Remarkable work,” he said. “You know, I’ve seen your before and after pictures. Between you and me, I much prefer the original.”

Laurel wasn’t sure how much more of this blabbering she could take.

“The Great Patriotic War, as we call it,” he said, changing tack again, “killed 26.6 million Soviet citizens. That’s the best number we’ve got. That doesn’t include two million service personnel who are still officially classed as missing.”

Timokhin let out a snort. He found that amusing.