Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  “Call Neri,” Noah shouted, taking off after the man. He knew it was a trap, but he really didn’t have a choice in the matter. He wasn’t about to leave it to the jesters of the Swiss Guard in the motley to chase the man through Rome, and he wasn’t about to let him disappear into the crowd. So even if it meant chasing him all the way into whatever trap he had waiting, that was exactly what Noah was going to do. “Tell him I’m about to get myself killed!”

  22

  The Birth of the Truth

  The ICE train from Berlin to Koblenz took six hours.

  Konstantin Khavin chose the first airline-style window seat in the silent carriage. The seat backed onto the restroom, meaning no one could sit behind him and he could see anyone walking toward him. It was an ingrained habit. He didn’t want noise. He didn’t want people pretending they were important and talking into their mobile phones for the entire journey. He didn’t want kids with their annoying little computer games chirping and bleeping at him. And most of all he didn’t want someone sitting next to him and talking at him for six hours. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts, either looking out of the window at the world rolling by or with his eyes closed, pretending sleep.

  The carriage was five degrees cooler than it was outside, and maintained at a constant sixty-eight by precision German engineering. The air was lifeless, pumped into the car as though it were an airplane.

  Konstantin breathed deeply, letting the manufactured air leak slowly out of his nose.

  Lethe had briefed him an hour ago. He had filled him in on everything the rest of the team had discovered. It was a lot to digest.

  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 upo
n 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.

  The ICE train was pulling into a town that looked like it had been lifted straight from the fairy tale world of Grimms’ fables.

  The driver announced the next station. It wasn’t Koblenz. He closed his eyes again. This time he did not allow himself to sleep. He was hungry, he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. He walked along to the restaurant car and ordered a too-hot cup of black coffee and a microwaved pizza slice in a silver-lined box along with a cinnamon bun dripping white icing, and a candy bar. It was all sugar food. Fast energy junk. But he didn’t feel like a sit-down silver-service dinner, which was the only alternative, so it would have to do.

  He worked his way back through the train, rolling with the motion of the car as it leaned into the long curves in the track, until he was back in his seat. He sipped at the coffee. He ate the pizza in six bites, barely taking the time to chew before he swallowed, he was so hungry. He licked the stringy cheese from his fingers.

  If he thought like a Russian, it made sense that the Disciples of Judas would want the Church’s “papa” dead. It was a bold move. It was a strike right at the heart of their false messiah. It obeyed the Moscow Ru come hard, come fast and leave them frightened. It was just like breaking down the door at four a.m. and dragging a man out of bed, naked, kicking, screaming and, most important of all, helpless. But more than that, with the eyes of the world watching, it turned the murder of one man into a spectacle.

  The driver announced Koblenz Hauptbahnhof.

  Konstantin wrapped the bun in the napkin it came with and crammed it and the candy bar into his pocket and moved toward the door.

  He stepped off the train straight onto the set of a macabre morality tale straight from the Grimms’ repertoire. It was fitting, given the gingerbread quality of the houses and the quaint narrowness of the cobbled streets. There were police waiting at the end of the platform. Instinctively Konstantin reached for his pocket for his papers. The fear was ingrained in him. It took him a moment to remember this wasn’t Moscow and these men weren’t looking for traitors to the Soviet cause. They didn’t care if he was a defector, but it was hard for him to forget that he was exactly that. He walked toward the station house. Not too quickly, not too slowly. The policeman nodded slightly as he past. Konstantin inclined his head a fraction.

  The station house had that unique railway station smell, a combination of flowers, fast-food grease, diesel engines and the desperation of a place where people were forever saying goodbye.

  There were ten uniformed officers that he could see spread out across the platforms and the main entrance. In the few minutes it took him to walk across to the coffee stand beside the ticket office, buy a piping hot Americano that came served in a paper cup thin enough to burn the fingers, sit down on a bench and drink it, they didn’t challenge a single traveler. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but they obviously didn’t see it in the faces of the bald businessmen, the skinhead in the torn Clash tee-shirt that said London was calling, or the woman in the high heels and A-line skirt whose powerful calf muscles turned all the heads as she walked by. They didn’t see it in the bearded man in his college professor jacket with worn-out elbows, or the lanky student with his sunglasses and dyed-black hair that hung down past his shoulders.

  He took the crushed bun from his pocket and unwrapped the napkin. The icing stuck to the tissue, the tissue stuck to the bun and then both stuck to his fingers as he tried to tease them apart. Konstantin took his time, savoring the bun. A tramp came and sat down on the bench beside him. He smelled as though he hadn’t bathed in a month; it was that sour stench that reached down his throat and made him want to gag. Konstantin took the candy bar from him pocket and offered it to the man, who took it, peeled it out of its wrapper and ate it hungrily. Pigeons gathered around their feet. One hopped up onto the bench beside the tramp. A woman came and sat on the other end of the bench and started to read a newspaper. The tramp spread his arms out, trying to shoo the birds away, but that only brought more. Together they looked like a curious reworking of the Last Supper: Jesus, Mary, Judas and the birds.

  Konstantin finished his coffee and threw the sticky napkin in the bin.

  The police guarding the station watched him walk toward them. The timetables and maps were on the wall beside them.

  They didn’t stop him.

  He took his phone from his pocket. At less than two inches squared the route map was almost useless, but it was enough for him to check up against the street map beside the timetables and ICE, Inter City and regional rail schematic maps. He studied the two for a few minutes, committing them to memory. “Do you need any help?” the nearest of the uniformed officers asked, seeing him staring at the street map.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Konstantin told him without looking away from the map. The parade route followed the line of the Rhine for two of its three miles before turning in toward the Old Town. There were several landmarks, including, of course, the massive Ehrenbrietstein citadel on the opposite bank of the river. Then there was the aluminum factory and the automotive brakes manufacturing plant. Both had a lot to offer in terms of isolation, but without seeing them he had no way of knowing whether they presented a genuine shot. Office buildings, hotels, boarding houses-those were the kind of places he was most interested in. Places offering a view, which meant they had to be a few stories above ground level. That almost certainly discounted a lot of the older buildings of the Old Town, meaning the shooter would probably favor the new town with its wider street
s and higher buildings. But again, he wouldn’t know for sure without walking the parade route.

  Beyond the main portico of the station a curious glass roof rippled out into the center of the main square. The road curved around a paved area. To the right of the entrance a bright yellow DHL van was collecting the day’s deliveries. To the left was the short-term parking lot. It was filled with almost identical “people carriers” and family cars. Bicycles were chained up against every post that supported the glass roof. Even through the glass, the sky above was like some crystal blue mountain stream. Across the street was one of those chain-store cafes that had turned the simple pleasure of drinking a coffee into visiting an emporium. On the far side of the square he saw a building almost entirely constructed of glass. It might have been a design school or a fancy office block, he couldn’t tell. It was at odds with almost every other building around it.

  There were signs pointing every which way. He followed the pedestrian route down to the Rhine. The path divided into two, half for cyclists, half for walkers. There was no one for three hundred yards ahead of him. Konstantin took his time walking, looking left and right like a tourist drinking in the medieval architecture. A small cafe spilled out into the street. The eight wooden tables were empty, but two of them had dirty espresso cups on them and the corner of a napkin that fluttered in the wind. Next door, buckets of tulips, sunflowers, velvet-headed roses and other colorful bunches of flowers had been arranged around the doorway. There was a white handwritten sign in the door saying “Closed,” but a striking middle-aged woman stood in the window, fixing the display. Seeing him, she smiled. Konstantin smiled back. The windows of the first floor were dark, as there were no skylights. He turned to follow the angle of trajectory from the first floor as best he could, but it was far from ideal. In the shooter’s place he wouldn’t have used it. That was enough for him to dismiss it.