by Matthew Dunn
Lana nodded. “Harry as well.” She widened her eyes. “I have always loved Megiddo, and he has always loved me. I had to be here to complete his masterpiece because you killed all his other soldiers.” She smiled. “I came here to trigger the bombs if someone like you tried to stop our attack from happening.”
Will’s mind raced with questions and confusion. There was so much he didn’t understand about what was happening, but he also knew he had no time to find answers to these questions. “How can you detonate the bombs?”
Lana patted a breast pocket. “I have a number programmed into my cell phone. If I call that number, the bombs receive my signal and detonate ahead of their preprogrammed time of nine P.M.”
Will checked his watch. It was 8:45 P.M.
He desperately tried to think. “You will have another number in your phone. A number that if called will stop the bombs from going off at nine P.M. A number that was to be called only in the event that the concert was postponed to another day or called off.”
Lana narrowed her eyes. “That number will never be called, because I have everything I need in the concert hall-the premiers’ wives and the thousands of children.”
Will shook his head. “Surely you don’t want this atrocity to happen? Surely you don’t want their deaths?”
Lana smiled. “They will die, you will die, and I will be with Megiddo again. I will be happy when the bombs destroy everything around us.”
Will felt sick. The woman before him was a woman he did not know. Lana meant what she said. If she had any heart, it was a heart that cared for nothing other than Megiddo. He decided that his only hope now depended upon her believing a lie. He shook his head. “Lana, it is you who’s been the fool. Megiddo never loved you.”
She glared at him. “You know nothing about the love we had for each other.”
Will shook his head again. “I came here expecting to find you tied up and a bomber holding a gun to your head.”
Lana sniggered. “That is what Megiddo wanted you to expect.”
Will nodded. “He did. Even when he was on his knees and I had a gun pointed at his head, even when he knew he was about to die, he knew that there was nothing I could do to stop his attack.” Will frowned. “So why would he describe the bomber in the opera house as a naive and gullible pawn whose death would be as trivial as the deaths of the children? Why would he say that when he had no need to say such a thing to me?”
Lana frowned. “You’re lying.”
Will shook his head. “I’m not, but the comment he made was unnecessary. If Megiddo loved you, he would just have kept his mouth shut about his views of the bomber. Or maybe he would have used a more positive description. But he had absolutely no need to be disparaging about the bomber unless”-he nodded sadly-“unless he wanted me to truly know the magnitude of his strategy. He wanted me to know how he had manipulated every single person around him. Every person, including the man or woman who was going to detonate his bombs.”
Lana shook her head, but doubt clearly showed on her face. “He. . he loved me. He always loved me.”
Will checked his watch. It was 8:52 P.M. His heart was hammering, but he kept his voice calm. “Think about it, Lana. He lived his life solely to outwit others.”
“You know nothing about him!” Lana spat. “He loved his work, but he also loved me.”
Will spoke forcefully. “He has always used you, and he is using you now. That is why he described you as a naive and gullible pawn. And I agree with his description, because that’s precisely what you are!”
The generators near them seemed to hum louder. Pipes rattled and hissed. Vents groaned. The music from the concert above them sounded distant but was still audible.
A tear ran down one of Lana’s cheeks. “I love him.”
“But he never loved you.”
Her gun moved slightly.
Will watched her. “Lana, I loved you. But he had no love for anything other than his work.”
Lana looked away for a moment. When she looked back at Will, she had tears rolling down both cheeks. She spoke with a weak and trembling voice. “Then I have indeed been the fool.”
Will smiled with a look of sympathy, even though he felt anything but sympathy for the woman in front of him. “We have both been fools. And victims.”
She took a step back and leaned against a vent. She was breathing rapidly, and Will wondered if she was starting to hyperventilate. She shook her head, cursing. She lowered her gun and held it by her side. She looked around the basement and up at the ceiling. She shook her head some more and banged the butt of her handgun against the vent. She looked at Will. “What. . what should I do?”
Will took a step toward her. “You must do something to show Megiddo that you are no longer a fool. You must do something to show him that you are no longer his pawn. You must do the one thing that will hurt him the most. You must call the number to disarm the bombs.”
Lana shook her head, and tears now streamed down her face.
“Lana, if you die here, you will never be with him. You will have died for nothing. Everyone here will have died for nothing.”
Lana again banged her gun on the vent and muttered, “Oh, dear God.” She looked at Will. “He told me he loved me. He showed me he loved me.”
“He did that so you would be here.”
Lana looked up at the ceiling and screamed, “A fucking pawn?”
She lowered her head and began breathing slower. She closed her eyes. She rubbed the back of her gun-carrying hand against her face. She looked at Will.
“Call the number.” Will looked at the time. It was 8:57 P.M.
She reached into her breast pocket and pulled out her cell phone. She looked at it. For a long time. She frowned. Then she looked at Will before looking back at the cell phone.
It was now 8:59 P.M.
“We have no time, Lana!” Will’s heart was racing.
She breathed in slowly. She pressed numbers into the phone. She held it to her ear. She waited a moment, then nodded. She dropped her arm to her side, still clutching the phone. She began weeping and shaking.
“Are the bombs disarmed?”
Lana wrapped her arms around her body and shook violently with emotion.
Will shouted, “Lana, are they disarmed?”
Lana inhaled slowly, and her body steadied. “They are. They’re safe.”
Will checked his watch. It was 9:00 P.M. He looked around, waited, counted seconds, could barely hear the concert, but life was clearly continuing in the building. He sighed and looked at Lana.
Her gun was pointing at him. She rubbed tears away from her face and breathed loudly. She shrugged. “So it’s over now.”
“Put the gun down, Lana.”
She shook her head.
“Put the gun down, Lana.”
Lana huffed. “You’ll put me in a prison cell for the rest of my life.”
“Lana, put the gun down! You’ve disarmed the bombs. That will go in your favor.”
Lana shook her head again.
“Put the gun down.” The voice was not Will’s.
He spun around and faced a man who was pointing his gun at Lana and Will. One of the men whom Will had seen on the floor above. A Secret Service agent. He was alone.
The man looked at Will. “We’ve been looking for you.”
Will nodded. Now that the bombs were disarmed, he decided that his work was done. He decided that he had to tell the Secret Service what was happening here.
The man looked at Lana and fixed his gun on her.
Will said, “I am a British intelligence officer.”
The Secret Service man glanced at Will.
A shot rang out, and a bullet struck the Secret Service man in the center of his head. Will closed his eyes. He turned slowly to look at Lana. Her gun was pointing at the now prone and dead agent. She moved the gun so that it was pointing at Will’s head.
Lana smiled. “My next bullet’s for you.”
Will
shook his head. “Why did you kill him? Why are you still holding a gun?”
“Because I have fucking nothing now. Because it seems I’ve always had nothing.”
Will sighed and briefly felt pity for her. “You could have had so much more. I hoped that you and I could have been together.”
“I know you did.” She laughed humorlessly. “I might have been a pawn in Megiddo’s game, but you were certainly a pawn in mine. I wanted you to love me. I needed your emotions for me to cloud any possibility that you might suspect my true role in Megiddo’s plan. I had to try to get you to expose your soul to me so that I could watch you suffer when you realized that your emotions had been totally duped.”
Will shook his head. He felt a coldness descend over his mind. He felt momentarily numb. “I see.”
Lana watched him without emotion. “We often see the truth only at the very end of things. We both now know our truths, but only one of us is going to walk out of this place.”
“I know.” In a movement that was too quick to be seen and stopped, Will stepped forward, grabbed the barrel of Lana’s gun, used his other hand to twist her hand, and took possession of the gun, now pointing it at her head.
Will held the gun close to her. He no longer felt numb, and instead his heart filled with anger, regret, and sorrow. “I lied to you. Megiddo never described you as a pawn in his game. I think he really did love you.”
Lana’s mouth dropped open in a look of total surprise. Which swiftly turned to anger. “You tricked me!”
“I stopped you from making a dreadful mistake.”
Lana’s eyes darted left and right, and she seemed to be making some kind of calculation. She looked at Will. “I have to be with Megiddo again.”
“No, Lana.”
She raised her hand and brought her cell phone close to her chest.
“Lana, do not do that.”
She smiled and moved her other hand toward the phone’s number pad.
“Lana, stop now.”
She moved a single finger close to the cell phone. Her smile faded. “In a different life, it would have been wonderful to get to know you.”
Will’s heart pumped fast. “Don’t touch that phone! Don’t trigger the bombs!”
Her finger moved until it was an inch from the phone. She smiled again. “Good-bye, Will Cochrane.”
Her finger descended to the number pad.
In that tiniest moment, Will knew that it was too late to say anything else, that action was all that mattered now, but as he watched her finger move and squeezed his own finger back rapidly on the handgun’s trigger, he felt nothing but overwhelming sorrow. He heard the sound of his gun, felt the weapon recoil, saw his bullet strike Lana in the side of the head and rip open her beautiful face. He watched her move away from him, her knees buckle, her body start to fall, and her hand release the cell phone. He saw the death of Lana Beseisu.
He dashed forward and caught the phone before it fell to the floor alongside her. He looked at the display screen and sighed with relief as he saw that his trigger finger had been quicker than hers. No number had been depressed.
He looked at Lana’s dead body and felt giddy and sick. He had thought this woman would change everything for him. But now he stared at her, knowing that she’d been prepared to help Megiddo slaughter millions of people for no other reason than her love for the monster.
He looked around and imagined the floors above him in the opera house, the boxes where the premiers’ wives were sitting during the performance, the other boxes and the ground-level seats containing the audience of children and the orchestra area holding excited child performers. He pictured bombs and fire raining down from the ceiling and tearing through all of that, causing the total war that would have resulted from the abhorrent act were he not standing over the dead body of Lana Beseisu. He shook his head in disbelief.
He looked at Lana one last time. There was so much he wanted to know about her, so much that did not make sense. But he knew that things could have been different. He knelt beside her and smoothed a hand against her bloody face. He ran his fingers through her hair and whispered, “If I’d been there at the beginning, you would not be here now.”
He closed his eyes and saw the young Lana walking desperately through frozen Bosnian woods, her clothes torn and offering no protection against the bitter winter, her legs staggering, her eyes wide with fear, her body weak and in shock after being raped, her mind focused only on reaching the besieged city of Sarajevo and being with the man called Megiddo. He imagined her falling to the ground, crawling through thick snow, pulling herself to her feet again, staggering forward, falling again, crawling again, but continuing to use all her remaining strength to find the man she believed was her savior. He watched every movement she made and every exertion take her inch by inch closer to a man who would corrupt her life so that it would end with a bullet in her brain.
He wished he’d been there as she dragged her mind and her desecrated body through the terrible war-torn forests. He would have gone to her, taken her hand, and walked her away from Sarajevo and the deadly man it contained. He would have spoken soft but commanding words to her. Come with me. I am taking you to a better life.`
Fifty-Three
Will looked at the clear blue sky above him, at the snow-covered Swiss Alps around him, at the empty mountain valley far below his feet. His cell phone rang, and he saw that the caller was Alistair. He answered, listened to what the Controller had to say, shut his phone, and turned to look at the ski chalet beside him. He pulled out his handgun, strode quickly through the snow, opened the door to the building, and walked through one room before entering another.
Harry was there, seated behind a desk, smoking a cigarette. Two British Special Forces men flanked him. They had brought Harry to this place after tracking him to the city of Lausanne.
Will moved up to the desk, kicked a spare chair to one side, pointed his gun at Harry’s head, and said, “Talk.”
Harry lifted his face so that he was looking at Will. He looked exhausted but not terrified. Instead he had the look of a man who had moved beyond fear to a state of resigned calm, a calm driven by the knowledge that his execution was now inevitable. He scratched the stubble on his chin, extinguished his cigarette, and lit another one. He took a sip of water, cleared his throat, frowned.
Will slammed his boot against the desk, causing it to bang against Harry’s chest and sending a glass of water to the other side of the room. “I know you’ve been working with Megiddo all along. Talk.”
Harry winced in pain, placed his cigarette in an ashtray, put both of his hands flat down on the desk, and spoke in a strained but measured tone.
“When Megiddo realized that the NSA had discovered he was planning a massive strike against the West, he decided to adopt a dual strategy to hide the details of his attack. First, he manipulated the NSA breach to send misinformation about the location of the attack and to stretch Western intelligence resources. Second, he decided to lure out a Western intelligence officer with the endgame of getting that officer to believe that he had discovered the location of the attack. He deployed me and Lana for that second complex task.” He looked away briefly before fixing his eyes on Will. “Your Head of Sarajevo Station introduced me to you, I decided that your gravitas made you perfect for the role, and I killed Ewan so that I had a direct link to you.”
Harry looked at one of the Special Forces men. “May I have another glass of water?”
“No, you may not!” Will shouted the words. “Keep talking.”
Harry breathed in deeply. “We had to make everything look credible-the letters via the Iranian embassy in Croatia, the Iranian surveillance team following Lana-making Megiddo appear cautious. And all the time Megiddo manipulated the NSA communications breach, including trying to get you to think the real target was Berlin. But you uncovered that ruse, so he decided to focus solely on the second strand of his strategy. He used one of his men-the man you knew as his deputy, Gulis
tan Nozari-to act as if he were Megiddo. He got me to alert you to the HBF offices, he had the man Dzevat Kljujic killed to add weight to the notion that Megiddo was operating out of those offices, and he ensured that the deputy’s name was listed in those offices for discovery by you when you inevitably searched the place.” Harry frowned. “He was sure that you would be convinced that his deputy was Megiddo, so he was therefore very surprised when you did not follow or seize Gulistan Nozari. He realized that you had not automatically assumed that Nozari was Megiddo. He realized that Lana could therefore not pretend that the man was Megiddo or you would have become suspicious of her. She had to tell you that the man she met in Sarajevo was not the man you sought.”
Will nodded. “If I was so important to Megiddo, why did he allow his men to attack me in Zagreb and Vienna?”
Harry shrugged. “You forced him to do so by deliberately revealing your identity in your letters and by ensuring that you were seen with Lana in the Diana Bar of the Westin Hotel. His men had to go after you aggressively, but Megiddo hoped that your men would rescue you immediately after your capture. As it happened, you killed most of Megiddo’s men and were not captured yourself, so you solved that problem for him.”
Will moved closer to Harry. “After you disappeared, were you aware of what subsequently happened?”
Harry shook his head, picked up his cigarette, and inhaled smoke. “How could I?”
Will nodded. “It’s clear to me now that Megiddo changed his strategy after realizing that his ploy of using his deputy could not work. Instead he ordered his men to seize Lana in Boston, knowing that I would go after her and rescue her and hoping that I would believe her when she told me she’d spent time with Megiddo and learned the location of the attack.” He narrowed his eyes. “Megiddo nearly succeeded.”
Harry sighed. “Our objective was always to get you to think that Camp David was the target, when in fact the Metropolitan Opera House was always the real target.”
Will moved his gun closer to Harry. “How did Megiddo get employment passes for the opera house? How did his men plant their bombs without fear that they would later be detected?”
