When this manner of passing time faltered, he closed his eyes and tried to mentally reconstruct the late Beethoven sonatas, the Hammerklavier in particular, with its echoes of Bach in the fourth movement fugue—which of course only reminded him of Felicia.

And this was his third manner of passing the time: He wondered where she was, if she was all right. If she was alive. His guilt quickened into rage that melted into fatherly concern that dissolved into hopeless sorrow. In time the despair would slither on to Charley, then Leonora—named for Leonore, heroine of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio—which would return him to his mental reconstruction of the sonatas, until at last the ceiling beckoned once more.

He tried not to think of Ruslan. The bearish Russian had known the risks, they all did. Even so . . .

The room’s lone door opened. Mealtime, he supposed. Breakfast? Lunch? Supper? He’d lost all sense of time. But instead of the hunched and ferret-faced crone—a real one this time—who’d delivered his tray of borscht and black bread earlier, served with a raw quartered onion and a glass of vodka, a tall and well-dressed man appeared: vigorous, vaguely military, with that chiseled Slavic bone structure, the uniquely soulful eyes. He wore a simple black suit beneath a heavy wool overcoat; his bluchers were muddy. Entering alone, he closed the door behind him, to the clatter of deadbolts from the hallway outside.

“Mr. Middleton,” the man said, his English suggestive of British tutelage, not American. “I trust you’ve not been too terribly inconvenienced?”

His smile seemed sincere, his tone matter-of-fact. Middleton thought of the screams he’d heard through the walls just hours before—inconvenienced? “Not in the least.” He wrapped his coat tighter and glanced up at the ceiling. “I’ve been admiring the view.”

The stranger obligingly followed his eyes. “My apologies for the delay. We wanted to be sure we had the facts before troubling you.”

The facts. Of course. That’s what torture provides, the troubling facts.

“I suppose it would be impertinent of me to ask who, exactly, you mean by ‘we,’” Middleton said. He assumed the old KGB men who’d saved him had fobbed him off on some shadowy element within the security apparatus. Gangsters, maybe. Perhaps both.

The stranger smiled, pulled up one of the other two skeletal chairs, brushed its dusty surface, sat. “I’m at liberty to tell you this: There are several groups very interested in—how to put it?—acquiring you, let’s say. Considerable sums have been offered. Tempting sums. But we—and no, I will not tell you any more about who ‘we’ are—do not concern ourselves so much with financial reward as the singular satisfaction provided by one thing and one thing only: information. We like knowing what’s going on. It’s our reason for being.”