Early on the morning of Dec. 7, 2022, Viktor Bout heard the sounds of multiple footsteps bouncing off concrete walls, a sharp break from the clockwork prison routines. He knew something was happening.
Normally, the day inside the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, started an hour later, when a single guard came for the 5 a.m. count. But now three guards stood outside his cell with empty cardboard boxes. They knocked against the door grate.
“Pack up,” one told him. “You know where you’re going.”
“I hope so,” he said.
The guards told him they would be back in 20 minutes. It wouldn’t take that long to box up the few family photos, four or five books, and the drawings he had made.
While he packed, some 5,200 miles away, American basketball player Brittney Griner already had been moved out of a Russian women’s prison.
For months, the two had known their best chance at freedom would be an exchange for the other, if their countries could navigate the hostile geopolitical thicket to make such a deal.
But Bout knew he…
