Back in Oscar’s interview room, Oscar watched as the blood turned to ice throughout his whole body.
“You’re saying Oscar Magnuson was responsible for the bombing? Can you tell me how it happened?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll tell you. Oscar made the bomb. He made all of them. He used a pressure cooker, and he tricked Billy into picking it up. That’s how he got his fingerprints on it. Shit.” On the screen James covered his eyes for a moment with his hand. When he lowered it again he glanced at the camera again, but then seemed scared by the sight of it. He looked away. “Look, I need to have my lawyer here. My parents have an attorney. I need to use the phone.”
West leaned forward and paused the video, leaving James’ white panicked face frozen on the screen. And deep inside Oscar’s head, all thoughts of staying calm had gone, as if blasted away by the explosion of a bomb.
“What the fuck did you show him?”
West didn’t reply, which only added to Oscar’s fury. His complete loss of composure.
“What the fuck was that? What did you show him to make him say that? What the hell is this?”
West sat back. Waited a few moments.
“I showed him two photographs we recovered from his Apple iCloud account. The first was of you working on what looks very much like a home-made pressure cooker explosive device. The second was of you on the ferry to Lornea Island, with a newspaper in the foreground showing the same date as the bombing took place. It seems he took them both without your knowledge. Perhaps he wanted a little insurance against you, in case things went wrong. He just wasn’t very good at hiding it.
The fuck… the fucking idiot. Oscar felt the floor dropping away from him. It really felt like he was free-falling down to a place he didn’t know. He opened his mouth to reply, but his mouth was completely dry.
“Look, we know he’s lying. We know it was the pair of you, and maybe that he even led it – after all, he was the one with the grudge – Wheatley was dating his girl. But unless you start talking, and right now, before his attorney gets here, then we’re going to go with whatever version he feeds us. This is an aggravated murder case. That’s life without parole. You got one chance to cut a deal. You start talking. Give us your side of what happened. Right now. Or this is over.”
Oscar looked at the floor, gray carpet. Cut into squares. Cheap and thin. He hadn’t noticed it when he walked in, hadn’t seen it the whole time he’d been waiting, so confident he was on top of this. That he and James had outsmarted Billy, the cops, the FBI, and it had been easy. Easy as manipulating the markets, and making more money than he’d ever known. Suddenly the enormity of what James had done was crashing in on him, stopping him thinking.
“It didn’t go down the way James said it did.” Oscar’s voice was croaky.
“Excuse me? Could you speak up a little? For the sake of the camera?”
“It didn’t happen like James said it did.”
“But you did carry out the bombing? And frame Mr Wheatley for the crime?”
Oscar took one more look at the carpet, at the walls, at the heavy wooden door, firmly shut, and then at the two agents staring back at him, looking much more interested now.
“Yes.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
The two hotel rooms were joined by an interior door, and though neither Amber nor Billy, nor his father Sam Wheatley, who had been picked up a couple of days previously, had been arrested, the door was locked. The rooms were comfortable enough, but by that stage the three of them had been confined there for seventy two hours, with food and water brought to them three times a day by a young agent with very red hair. Every time she arrived Amber or Sam pounced on her, demanding information on what was happening, but she either didn’t know or wasn’t saying.
“It hasn’t worked. It was never going to work.” Amber said. She wasn’t sure if she meant it, really she just wanted to break the silence that had descended over them, long after there had been anything helpful to say.
“Have faith. They wouldn’t have kept us this long if they had nothing,” Sam replied.
Billy ignored the pair of them. For the last twenty four hours he’d done nothing but lie on his side on the bed, staring at the wall.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door, then the scratch of a key being fitted into the lock. It swung open. The same agent as before, the red-haired woman was there again.
“Don’t tell me,” Amber said. “No news is good news right?”
“Uh huh.” The woman said this time. “I’m going to need you to follow me.”
Billy looked up.
“They’re done?” Amber asked. “What’s happened?”
“Agent West asked me to fetch you.”
They followed the red-haired woman along a corridor and to an elevator, where they descended to the ground floor, emerging into the lobby of the hotel they’d passed through days before. They kept walking, outside, and across the street, into the FBI building where Billy had assisted with the creation of the final deep fake video. They passed through a security barrier, like one in an airport, and then went to another elevator, down a corridor and finally came to what looked, through the small glass panel in the door, like a conference room. The red-haired woman knocked, and opened the door at the same time, and ushered Billy and Amber inside. Two people were sitting down, in front of a tray of breakfast pastries. One of them was Agent West, the other was a man Amber didn’t know. Agent Black was standing
