breath. Noah wondered if she had been about to say bombers; it was such a natural extension of her old life the two words would almost certainly have fused together in her mind-“… and terror threats,” she continued, her eyes drifting unconsciously toward the screens, “are way beyond the capabilities of five people. We can’t be the last bastions of democracy.”
“Nor should you be,” the old man agreed. He leaned forward in his chair. It was a subtle shift in his body language that implied complicity. “We will, of course, be feeding any information we discover up the line, and it will be for Control to decide how it is distributed. But there is a convergence of events here that we will investigate, and that’s my final word on the matter.”
Orla shook her head. The gesture was barely perceptible. “Why do I get the feeling you know more than you are letting on here?”
The old man smiled indulgently and spread his arms wide as if to show just how helpless he was. Noah knew it was all an act. Sir Charles had been paralyzed by an IRA bomb in the London Docklands over twenty years ago, and even in the hospital bed in the days immediately after the attack, he hadn’t been helpless.
The story was, he’d whispered into the right ear, and in turn the right ear had placed a call to a not-so- upstanding friend of an even less upright gent. And while that chain reaction played out, Sir Charles settled back into the starched pillows, content that his whisper had lit a very short fuse. The chemist suspected of being behind the bomb was involved in a not-so-tragic accident less than forty-eight hours later.
That was the kind of man he was.
He didn’t get angry.
He didn’t rail against the world.
He got even in his own very quiet, almost understated, way.
And right then the old man’s smile was a match for any the Russian had ever conjured. “Because, my dear, I am dreadfully predictable and you know me far too well. It’s the curse of spending too much time together. I will admit this much, I have my suspicions. I can only assure you that some very good reasons underpin those suspicions-but I am not ready to voice them just yet. As soon as I am sure, you will be the first to know. Until then, he who speaks first and thinks later has an idiot for a mouth. And contrary to what you may believe, I am not an idiot.” This time his smile was both self-deprecating and honest. It was a gentle deflection.
Noah half-expected her to challenge the old man again. She could be like a dog with a bone sometimes. She didn’t. Noah understood why. Thirteen burning faces told them all it was an argument for another day.
“Okay,” she said instead, “let’s think about this rationally. The one question that’s begging to be asked is: who else was involved in that dig? For all the conspiracy theory nonsense, the dig is the one thing we know for sure that the suicides have in common. Logically, anyone else who had been there is either in danger themselves, or more likely, is wrapped up in the whole thing somehow. Either way, we need to find them.”
Lethe had a partial answer. It wasn’t what any of them wanted to hear. “More than fifty locals were used as casual labor. The dig was overseen by one Akim Caspi, who is not, I hasten to add, an archeologist. Caspi is a lieutenant general in Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Force. I sincerely doubt he has a list of names, unfortunately. Archeologists are great for keeping itemized records on fossilized donkey crap, but they don’t seem all that concerned about people if they haven’t been dead for a millennium or more.”
He put up a picture of Caspi in full military regalia on the screens. The man looked like someone a soldier would be willing to die for.
“Okay, so given that we aren’t going to be blessed with a convenient list of prime suspects, we need to hit the ground running. What ground though?” the Irishman asked.
“We’ve got thirteen potentially blind alleys to run down.”
“Rome or Berlin,” Konstantin said, breaking his silence. “There is a reason those calls deviated from the pattern.”
“I am inclined to agree,” the old man said, “and because of that, Konstantin, I want you to go to Berlin and walk a mile in the dead man’s shoes.”
The Russian raised an eyebrow. “Walk in his shoes?” He made his index and forefingers skip across the tabletop to demonstrate his understanding, or lack of it.
“Relive the last seventy-two hours of his life,” Sir Charles explained. “Go through it with a fine-toothed comb. Every place he visited, every person he saw. No man is an island, especially in this modern age of emails and phone calls. Lethe will support your investigations from back here, following the electronic paper trail. Somewhere in the middle of everything is his killer-and make no mistake about this, he was killed. They all were. Their murderers might not have pulled the trigger, but that is neither here nor there. Death comes upon his pale horse wielding fire, guns and other instruments of death. Nothing says death needs to be intimate anymore. So take his life apart, climb inside his skin. Become him. Let the dead man tell his last tale.”
The Russian nodded.
Sir Charles turned to Noah. “I want you to go to Rome. Whether we consider the threat credible or not, the scant evidence we have points toward the Holy See. To ignore it would be negligent in the extreme,” the old man said. “And given the veneration half the world feels for His Holiness, I can’t say I am particularly eager to have his blood on my hands. So let’s see if we can avoid that, shall we?”
Noah nodded.
“Good. Get out there. Get a feel for the lie of the land. There’s a reason these two messages were different. I don’t know what it is, but my gut instinct is screaming that it is important. Do what you are best at, Noah, make yourself a pain in the arse. Get in there and ruffle some feathers. Shake the holy tree. Just do whatever it takes to unearth that reason. And, for God’s sake, don’t let the Pope die, there’s a good man.”
“Dig up secrets, don’t get His Holiness killed, understood.”
“Let’s not forget the one thing in our favor right now is the sheer scale of this. Everything about today’s events cries spectacle. It’s terrorism in the truest sense of the word. It is theater. If ten times the amount of people had died in a plane wreck, the world would barely have blinked an eye. Planes crash. Nine-eleven changed the nature of fear. It made it global. As a society we have become so desensitized to death that anything less is almost mundane. Terrorists bring down planes and bomb embassies. That is what they do. It’s tragic, yes, but any way you look at it, it’s old news.
The old fears aren’t enough in this brave new world. Everything has to be bigger,”-he let that sink in for a moment-“which is a salutary lesson for us. What it means in this case is, they don’t martyr themselves in broad daylight without having achieved some obvious goal. So what was that goal? Thirteen people burning themselves alive is not frightening, not on a global scale. It is off the front of the newspapers in a few days, forgotten in a few weeks, which is a crime in and of itself, but not one we can afford to worry about.
“If you want my opinion, it is the threat they deliver right before they burn that is frightening. That’s what sends shivers through the strata of society. That’s what makes the good people of the world look over their shoulders.
“Forty days of terror is very precise and obviously picked for its religious connotations. It’s a common biblical time of transition: And I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. Later Moses convenes with God on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, and Mark tells us that Jesus emerged from his forty days in the wilderness reborn, having resisted the temptations of Satan. To my way of thinking this all adds credence to Mr. Lethe’s theory about Masada holding the key.
“Ask yourself this: Can our modern society resist forty days of listening to Satan’s overtures? Will it emerge from the terror, from the purge, as every living substance is wiped from the face of the earth? And if it does, if society comes out of the flames, triumphant, what will we have become?”
Before anyone could answer, the old man turned to Orla. “My dear, I am going to take advantage of you shamelessly,”-there was nothing remotely sexual about the overture, despite the glaring double entendre-“I want you to find out everything there is to know about the day-to-day lives of the other victims. Work your contacts. Even though the world has been reduced to ones and zeroes, machines will only tell us so much, no matter how brilliant Mister Lethe is. Paper trails are all well and good, but what paper trail ever had loose lips or guilty body language?
“Frost, in Masada. Track down Caspi, he’s the one name we have out there.”
“One thing I did find out about Caspi,” Lethe said. “In 2004 he received an insurance payout in excess of two million dollars, which he dutifully paid an ungodly amount of tax on.”
