The Enemy

“I was very good at what I did.”

“And what did you do?”

He didn’t answer.

“You have a nice car,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “A car like that was always a dream to me.”

“Where did you take it on the night of the fourth?”

He didn’t answer.

“There are no Special Forces in Bulgaria,” I said.

“No,” he said. “There are not.”

“So what did you do there?”

“I was in the regular army.”

“Doing what?”

“Three-way liaison between the Bulgarian Army, the Bulgarian Secret Police, and our friends in the Soviet Vysotniki.”

“Qualifications?”

“I had five years’ training with the GRU.”

“Which is what?”

He smiled. “I think you know what it is.”

I nodded. The Soviet GRU was a kind of a cross between a military police corps and Delta Force. They were plenty tough, and they were just as ready to turn their fury inward as outward.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“In America?” he said. “I’m waiting.”

“For what?”

“For the end of the communist occupation of my country. It will happen soon, I think. Then I’m going back. I’m proud of my country. It’s a beautiful place full of beautiful people. I’m a nationalist.”

“What are you teaching Delta?”

“Things that are out-of-date now. How to fight against the things I was trained to do. But that battle is already over, I think. You won.”

“You need to tell us where you were on the night of the fourth.”

He said nothing.

“Why did you defect?”

“Because I was a patriot,” he said.

“Recent conversion?”

“I was always a patriot. But I came close to being discovered.”

“How did you get out?”

“Through Turkey. I went to the American base there.”

“Tell me about the night of the fourth.”

He said nothing.

“We’ve got your gun,” I said. “You signed it out. You left the post at eleven minutes past ten and got back at five in the morning.”

He said nothing.

“You fired two rounds.”

He said nothing.

“Why did you wash your car?”

“Because it’s a beautiful car. I wash it twice a week. Always. A car like that was a dream to me.”

“You ever been to Kansas?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s where you’re headed. You’re not going home to Sofia. You’re going to Fort Leavenworth instead.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” I said.

Trifonov didn’t move. He sat absolutely still. He was hunched way forward, with his wrists fastened to the chair down near his knees. I sat still too. I wasn’t sure what to do. Our own Delta guys were trained to resist interrogation. I knew that. They were trained to counter drugs and beatings and sensory deprivation and anything else anyone could think of. Their instructors were encouraged to employ hands-on training methods. So I couldn’t even imagine what Trifonov had been through, in five years with the GRU. There was nothing much I could do to him. I wasn’t above smacking people around. But I figured this guy wouldn’t say a word even if I disassembled him limb by limb.

So I moved on to traditional policing techniques. Lies, and bribery.

“Some people figure Carbone was an embarrassment,” I said. “You know, to the army. So we wouldn’t necessarily want to pursue it too far. You spill the beans now, we could send you back to Turkey. You could wait there until it was time to go home and be a patriot.”

“It was you who killed Carbone,” he said. “People are talking about it.”

“People are wrong,” I said. “I wasn’t here. And I didn’t kill Brubaker. Because I wasn’t there either.”

“Neither was I,” he said. “Either.”

He was very still. Then something dawned on him. His eyes started moving. He looked left, and then right. He looked up at Summer’s map. Looked at the pins. Looked at her. Looked at me. His lips moved. I saw him say Carbone to himself. Then Brubaker. He made no sound, but I could lip-read his awkward accent.

“Wait,” he said.

“For what?”

“No,” he said.

“No what?”

“No, sir,” he said.

“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.

“You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?”

“You think you didn’t?”

He went quiet again. Looked down.

“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.

He looked up.

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

I just sat there. Watched his face. I had been handling investigations of various kinds for six long years, and Trifonov was at least the thousandth guy to look me in the eye and say It wasn’t me. Problem was, a percentage of those thousand guys had been telling the truth. And I was starting to think maybe Trifonov was too. There was something about him. I was starting to get a very bad feeling.

“You’re going to have to prove it,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“You’re going to have to. Or they’ll throw away the key. They might let Carbone slide, but they sure as hell aren’t going to let Brubaker slide.”

He said nothing.

“Start over,” I said. “The night of January fourth, where were you?”

He just shook his head.

“You were somewhere,” I said. “That’s for damn sure. Because you weren’t here. You logged in and out. You and your gun.”

He said nothing. Just looked at me. I stared back at him and didn’t speak. He went into the kind of desperate conflicted silence I had seen many times before. He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn’t. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place.