will beg you not to hurt him anymore; he will tell you everything you want to know and more; he will offer secrets you didn’t know he had, just to lessen the pain for a little while.”
“Are you telling us to torture you?”
“Would you if you thought it would give you the truth?”
“We have the truth,” the man cut across their little dance. “It’s on bloody film for the entire world to see.”
That is not the truth,” Konstantin said.
“You’re insane. Do you know that? You’re a freakin’ sociopath! So what, you want us to waterboard you?” The man shook his head in disgust.
“There is no way I can convince you. Even if you open my stomach and reach in with your bare hands to pull at my guts, my truth will not change. I did not kill him.”
“Easy to say,” the man said. “We can all be brave when it’s only words.”
“Then cut me,” Konstantin said. “My people will not save me. I am alone here. I have nothing to gain by lying and nothing to lose by telling the truth.”
“I don’t believe you, Konstantin,” the man said. “You’re a liar. One way or the other. Either you lied to your people when you fled to the West, or you lied to us when we welcomed you? Which one is it?”
“Silence is not a lie.”
“Why did you do it, Konstantin?” the woman asked, taking over the interrogation. Her voice was calm, honeyed. She smiled at him. It was a “we’re all friends here” smile. It was the biggest lie of the day so far.
“I didn’t do it.”
“We know you did, Konstantin. What we don’t know is why. We’ve got a lot of other questions as well, things we don’t understand, like, how does killing the Pope link in with the Berlin subway attack? And how are you tied to Rome and the people who burned themselves alive in London and all of those other cities? We’re only seeing part of the picture, Konstantin. Help us see all of it. Talk to us. If you help us, we can help you.”
She wasn’t particularly good. She wasn’t one of the A team, Konstantin thought, listening to her. Neither was her partner. They were the breakers, the waves sent to crash against the shore just to wear him down. They were never meant to get the truth out of him. It was all about weakening his resolve. They were the sodium pentothal, figuratively speaking.
But they could ask all the questions they wanted, they could badger and push and probe; they were never going to catch him in lies, because he wasn’t lying.
Or he could give them something.
“You want another truth?” he asked.
The woman nodded eagerly, like Pavlov’s detective.
Konstantin’s memory was good. It had to be. He remembered the zero plate from the car in Berlin.
He gave it to them. It was up to them what they did with it.
“Who does the car belong to? Your boss? Your contact?”
Konstantin shrugged. “How would I know? But the car is connected. It all is. Everything is connected.”
“Very zen of you, Konstantin,” the man said.
“Find the owner of the car, find the Berlin cell. Everything is connected.”
The woman glanced toward the glass. Konstantin knew that behind the mirror people were frantically trying to connect the dots, work out who the car belonged to and if Konstantin was telling the truth. They had no reason to assume he wasn’t, and every reason to believe he was selling one of his collaborators out. That was the way they broke terror cells, one small confession at a time. If Konstantin gave them the man behind Berlin, it would hardly prove his innocence, though. If anything, it would only serve to compound his guilt as far as they were concerned.
“Find Berlin and you will find Rome, or London or Madrid or Paris. Everything is connected. Information travels down channels; it isn’t just plucked out of the air. Everything is connected. It has to be, because of the precision. The suicides had to know when to burn themselves. The poisoner in Rome had to know when to poison the water. He didn’t want people dying early. He didn’t want the deaths blending in with the deaths in Berlin. He didn’t want the majority dying the same day the Pope was killed. Everything had to be separate. Forty days and forty nights of fear, see?”
Still, the clock was ticking on another day. Mabus had promised forty days and forty nights of terror, and nothing told Konstantin that had changed just because the Pope was dead. Now was the perfect time to increase the intensity of the attacks. So it didn’t matter if they thought he was guilty or not. If he had something that could help save innocent lives, even something as simple as a registration number, he was always going to share it, even if it meant damnmself. That was his sacrifice.
The woman came back alone the next time. She brought him a warm cup of black coffee. It was a trade, he knew. She gave him warmth and sustenance-he gave her another truth, quid pro quo. It was straight out of the good cop/bad cop handbook.
He didn’t complain. He warmed his hands on the cup, then sipped at it slowly.
“They found a body in the Moselle this morning.”
Konstantin looked up at her. “And you think I killed him as well?”
She smiled that smile again. “Difficult. The coroner puts time of death almost a full day after we took you into custody, so I think you’re safe on this one.”
“Then why tell me about it? I assume you have a reason?”
“I do. His name was Emery Seifert. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Konstantin shook his head. “Should it?”
“He was a member of the Swiss Guard. More pertinently, he was one of the guards on the stage when you killed the Pope.”
“I didn’t kill the Pope,” Konstantin said, reflexively.
She smiled at that. Again.
“Can you think why anyone would want to kill Seifert, Konstantin?”
Only one reason, Konstantin thought. He looked at the woman, trying to decide if she was deliberately trying to lead him into this line of reasoning. If she was, he couldn’t see what she stood to gain from it. “Because he saw what really happened on the stage,” Konstantin said, “or because he suspected.”
“Either way we have all of this video evidence, so it’s just one voice against the maddening crowd.”
“And yet here you are telling me all about it.”
“Maybe I want to believe you, Konstantin?”
“Maybe you do, maybe not. Either way won’t change the truth.”
“You’re a strange man. You don’t want legal representation. You don’t want to confess. You aren’t spouting any religious propaganda. You aren’t trying to convince us that you had to strike for Lucifer to rise again. In fact you seem disturbingly rational. Yet you know things you clearly shouldn’t know, such as the license plate of a diplomatic car that is registered in Berlin to the Israeli Ambassador’s personal staff.”
“Who? Who’s it registered to?”
She looked at him, surprised by the sudden intensity of his question. For a fraction of a moment the implacable calm of Konstantin Khavin came down and she saw the real man beneath. It was like seeing the wizard behind the curtain.
“Lieutenant General Akim Caspi of the Israel Defense Force.”
Konstantin closed his eyes. He had been that close.
“Caspi’s dead,” Konstantin told her.
“Did you kill him?”
He let out a slow breath, shaking his head. “No, the man in the car pretending to be him almost certainly did. Caspi died in June 2004.”
“That doesn’t mean you didn’t kill him,” she said reasonably. “One fact does not contradict the other.”
“Check my service record with Ogmios.”
“And again, you know we can’t. As far as we can ascertain this Ogmios is a figment of your imagination.”an›
“Do you believe that?”
