When Lethe finally stopped talking Konstantin said simply, “And I am to kill them, yes? That is what the old man wants?”
That was the Russian way. Already his mind was running through possible scenarios. He could walk into Devere’s office and take him out of the picture. One bullet was all it would take. Not even that, men like Devere were seldom fighters. Konstantin could simply walk up behind him and snap his neck as brutally and efficiently as that. Or he could wait for him in the street, drag him down a dirty alley and leave him in a stack of garbage sacks for the rats to gnaw on. He could rent a car, run Devere off the road, then stand over his flashy sports car while it burned. There were as many different ways to die as there were hours in a year. The end result was the same. That was all that mattered.
There was a certain elegance to the Russian solution sometimes.
It would be different with Orla. Extraction not execution. It would need more thoughtful planning. He didn’t have time to thoroughly case the area, so he would have to rely upon shock. Hit them before they had a chance to react. Come at night. Make lots of noise. Full of fury. In the dark of night fear was as good a companion as a second shooter. But he would need more than just his Glock 19.
Lethe killed the fantasy before he could lock the slide on the imaginary gun. “No. You’re not to kill anyone, Koni. At least I hope you’re not. The old man’s got other plans for you. Devere’s in Koblenz. He’s the money-he isn’t likely to do the thing himself, but he’s going to want to watch what he’s paid so much for. He won’t be able to resist. It’ll be like the Kennedy Assassination. Everyone will say ‘where were you when the Pope got shot?’ and Miles Devere wants to be able to say ‘I was there. I saw the whole thing with my own two eyes.’ Koblenz fits the prophecy-it’s a city split by two major rivers, the Rhine and the Moselle-and the Pope is scheduled to be in the city for the next forty-eight hours before moving on to an engagement in Krakow. Your job is simple,” Lethe said without a hint of irony. “You stop it from happening at all costs. Whatever it takes, Koni. Keep him alive. It’s as simple as that.
“I’ll be raising flags on the Bundeskriminalamt INPOL database. I’ll give them every face from that photograph in Masada, every name from the dig. I’ll build them as complete a profile to work off as I possibly can in the time, and meanwhile the old man will be calling in the cavalry. You won’t be alone, Koni, but here’s the kicker: you won’t be able to trust anyone. As far as we can tell Orla spoke to no one outside of the IDF in Israel, and Mabus took her. If they can infiltrate the Israeli Defense Force, they can sure as hell infiltrate the BKA, or at least know how to pose as some down-at-the-heel German detective. Trust no one, my fine Russian friend.”
“It will be just like old times,” Konstantin said.
“I thought you’d like that,” Lethe said.
Konstantin thought about it.
It made sense.
Orla was in trouble. But Orla was a big girl, big enough to look after herself. She had done it before, and she would do it again. She was a soldier. She was trained for this. She was resourceful. Capable. The old man had chosen her for a reason. He trusted the old man’s judgment. For that reason he shunted her out of his thoughts. He needed to focus on the things he could influence.
“I appreciate the irony of the situation,” Konstantin said, “but I do not like it. I would be much happier going to Tel Aviv and killing the men who have taken our girl.”
“Me too, my friend. You doing the killing, obviously, not me. I could barely crush a wasp. Look after yourself, Koni. I’m going to send a data packet to your cell phone in a minute; it’s got the Pope’s itinerary on it for the next forty-eight hours-who he’s meeting, where, and how he’s getting there. I’ll also send you the parade route. His Holiness is scheduled to lead prayers tonight in the Florinsmarkt. The dais is being constructed on the exact same spot where the gallows used to stand. Part of the prayer service will also be to sanctify the unholy ground. I’m thinking, if anything is going to happen, this is the most likely place. It’s a crowded square overlooked on all sides. Plenty of angles of opportunity.”
“Precisely why it is least likely, then,” Konstantin said. “It is where security will be tightest. What about the parade route?”
“The cavalcade will run along the riverside and through the Old Town. The route’s a little over three miles with plenty of meet-and-greet spots. It’s going to be pretty exposed from what I can see on the computer screen. Hardly any of the streets have the same sort of blanket surveillance camera coverage we’re used to, so I’m not going to be a lot of use when the shit starts hitting the fan.”
“You do what you do, I will do what I do,” Konstantin said, and hung up.
The rhythm of the wheels on the tracks was soothing. He found himself dropping into a thought pattern that coincided with the duh-duh-da-duh duh-duh-da-duh vibration that shivered te floor beneath his feet.
Provided the train ran according to the schedule, he would arrive around two and a half hours before the Pope was scheduled to deliver evening prayers. That gave him a little time to walk the parade route, looking for possible vantage points a sniper might use and that kind of thing, but crowds would be gathering at the same time, making his job more difficult.
There was corruption here. The entire thing reeked of it.
Humanity Capital was big business. Devere Holdings was bigger business. That Miles Devere had been in Israel at the time of the quake and worked with the real Akim Caspi put him right at the middle of this particularly tangled knot Konstantin was trying to unravel.
He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe was right; Devere would want to see the endgame played out, but he wasn’t an ideologue like Mabus. Devere was a money man. Devere had money. Money bought people. It was a fairly simplistic worldview, but he’d yet to have it disproved. He had corporate muscle. He developed corporate strategies that exploited the system, and he loved the system quite simply because it allowed him to exploit it.
Mabus was a different beast entirely. He didn’t hire mercenaries to prolong a conflict or bribe men to hit a civilian ward so that he could be hired to rebuild it. He wasn’t a profiteer. He didn’t need to be. He was a zealot, just like the Sicarii had been two millennia ago. And like any zealot he relied upon fanaticism as his stock in trade. Mabus had a single core belief: the Church was founded upon a lie. The man history loathed as the great betrayer was in truth the real Messiah, a religio-martial liberator who made his sacrifice out of love, sealing it with a kiss.
That belief had caused Mabus to bring together thirteen others and forge them as self-styled Disciples of Judas. Those thirteen had cast their nets out, recruiting others to their faith. Together they formed the Shrieks. Their purpose? The only one that made any sort of sense to the Russian was an attack on the very foundations the Catholic Church was built upon. After all Judas was their Messiah, not Jesus. Why should the world pray to the cross and drink the blood of Christ if his entire life was a lie? What salvation was there in that? It was a seductive way of reasoning.
He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He checked it. Lethe’s data packet had arrived. He opened it, checking the locations, dates and times, and realized there were far too many for comfort. Protecting the man was going to be a nightmare. Even without walking the parade route he knew there would be far too many places an assassin could hide. Modern sniper rifles made it possible for a skilled shooter to be so far removed from the scene that chasing them was next to impossible if so many of the variables of the murder weren’t already fixed. So, of course, the last ting Konstantin was going to do was waste his time trying to protect the Pope. Besides, he had his personal guard, willing to take a bullet for him and earn their place in heaven. And of course, the entire BKA would be on high alert from the moment he stepped out into public. No, Konstantin would put his particular skills set to a slightly different use. As the old football adage went, attack was the best form of defense.
He would find the man and kill him before he could pull the trigger.
That gave him anything from three hours to two full days to find the assassin, depending upon when he had decided to take the shot.
The train rolled on. Konstantin found himself drowsing. He let himself slide into a shallow sleep. He had no idea when he might sleep again.
While he slept he dreamed in Russian. In his dream Mabus was the snake in the darkness, whispering with its forked tongue. He held his Glock but couldn’t see what he was aiming at. And then he saw it, the snake coming out of the darkness. He pulled the trigger again and again and again, making the snake writhe. He shot ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred bullets into its cold skin. He was a snake charmer, making it rise. Then the creature arced forward and bit him. He fired and fired and fired again.
He woke with a start, lurching forward in his seat.
