Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  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?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe, Konstantin.”

  “And yet here you are,” he said again, “telling me about a dead body in a river that could go some way to validating the truth of my story.”

  “Or, you could have had one of your people kill the guard for that selfsame purpose.”

  Konstantin nodded slowly. He couldn’t help it, he rather liked this woman. She thought about things. She didn’t leap to conclusions based upon what she could or could not see. He needed to find a way to get her to call the old man. He could give her all the truths she needed.

  “You want me to give you names?”

  She shrugged. “Rather depends whose names they are, doesn’t it? You could start by telling me who you were working with in Berlin, and who helped you in Koblenz.”

  Konstantin slapped his forehead. He had thought for just a minute that she believed him, for what good it would have done him. She was just as blind as her partner.

  “I work for Sir Charles Wyndham,” he said. That was all she needed really. One name. If she was good at her job, she would ignore official channels and go to the old man directly. Of course, he didn’t expect her to do that. Why would she? As she kept telling him, they had screeds of evidence against him. They could place him in Berlin at the time of the subway attack and on the stage with the silver dagger in his hand as the Pope died. They didn’t need anything else. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You can ask,” she said.

  “How long have I been in here?”

  “Four days,” she said.

  “They’ve taken the Pope back to Rome?”

  She nodded. “It was on the news this morning. They are preparing Saint Paul’s for over six million people to make the pilgrimage to see Pope Peter lying in state.”

  “Have there been any other attacks since the Pope? It’s been three days. Forty days and forty nights of fear. That’s what they promised.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Which rather supports the idea that with you stuck in here there’s no one out there to coordinate the attacks, doesn’t it?”

  “Or it means that Orla got Mabus.”

  She looked at him. She had obviously heard what he said but didn’t know either of the two names, and because she didn’t know them, that turned the simple sentence into something that made no sense to her.

  He tried to think through the chain of events. They would have returned the Pope’s body to the Vatican. The Cardinal Camerlengo would hav
e officially declared him dead, calling out his real name three times. It was all ceremony, but that was part of believing, holding to the old rituals even as the world turned. Then the Camerlengo would have shattered the Papal seal of Peter II and split the Ring of the Fisherman, so that no one else might use it in the dead man’s place to forge papal decrees. Then the Church would enter Sede Vacante, the Empty Seat. There were nine days of mourning between the death of the Pope and the conclave that would elect his successor. There were precedents for moving the conclave of the Cardinals forward in times when the Church and the faithful were at the greatest risk, but they would resist that at all costs. Moving the conclave forward would show the world they were frightened by Mabus and his terrors.

  That meant there were five more days until the conclave would convene.

  Five more days. And he was stuck in this interrogation room, helpless to do anything, while Mabus and Caspi and Devere moved into their endgame.

  It disturbed him that there had been no more attacks since he had been taken. Terrorists needed to make good on their threats, otherwise the fear they instilled would be diluted. Cities would rally. Berlin and Rome would be stronger for their suffering, just like New York and London. There should have been something else, something more.

  Five more days for the Disciples of Judas to strike the most decisive blow of all.

  They had promised to shatter the world’s faith.

  Killing one man would not do that.

  He had no idea what would.

  And then he realized what this was: the calm before the storm.

  Everyone in the world would think this was it, that it couldn’t get any worse. They’d seen cities ruined from within and without, and then the Father of the Catholic Church struck down.

  He looked at the woman across the table from him. “Do you think this is over?”

  She didn’t answer him for a long moment. She genuinely seemed to be thinking about her answer rather than glibly saying yes. “We have no reason to suspect more attacks,” she said finally, like she was parroting the official press release.

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “You have very good reason to expect more attacks, because they told you they were coming. Forty days and forty nights of terror in every city in the West. Wasn’t that what they said? Something like that. Not just Berlin and Rome.”

  “But the threats in Rome and Berlin were different.”

  She was right. Lethe had pointed that out. They were. “So that’s what you’ve decided? The threats were all about assassinating Peter II?”

  “We have no reason to suspect otherwise.”

  “Until they give you a reason.”

  “They won’t,” she said, with surprising certainty.

  “What about the promise to destroy the faith of the world? Are you just discounting that?”

  “How do you destroy someone’s faith?” she asked in all seriousness. “There are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, 2.1 billion Christians. How could you possibly shatter the beliefs of a third of the world’s population?”

  “Not by killing one man,” Konstantin said, trying to force home the point.

  “No, and every scientist who stands up to decry there is no god and has evidence to support his claim doesn’t change the fact that these people believe. Evolutionary biologists can call them stupid for believing, they don’t care. They still believe. So how do you do it?”

  “You prove it wrong.”

  “But that’s what the scientists are doing, isn’t it?”

  “Then how do you do it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I am not worried about it. That’s why I am much more interested in much more mundane questions like who you work for and who you are working with.”

  “I’ve told you, I work for Sir Charles Wyndham. The project is codenamed Ogmios. Ask him,” he said again, willing her to just go and track down the old man herself.

  The next time she came into the interrogation room she brought something for him. It wasn’t a cup of coffee. She put the silver dagger on the table between them and said, “What’s this?”

  He looked at it. It was the first time he had seen it properly. It was obviously old. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said.

  “Try me.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a dagger.”

  “I can see that, so that hardly counts as unbelievable. So tell me, what’s so special about it?”

  “It’s two thousand years old for a start,” Konstantin said. He didn’t want to say more, saying more meant he knew more. Knowing more only implicated him further. He breathed deeply. What did it matter? He wasn’t walking away from this. He might as well tell her what he knew, if for no other reason tha talking to her kept her partner away. The man’s constant badgering and boorishness as boring.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s silver.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Silver’s not usually the stuff of weapons. Too soft. It’d break, maybe not the first time it’s used, maybe not the second, but it would break. And no fighter wants to go to war knowing his weapon could fail him at any time.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Because it is sense. Common sense.

  “So it’s ceremonial?”

  “You’d think, but no. I think it is more accurate to say it is commemorative.”

  “That’s an odd choice of words, don’t you think? Are you saying the dagger used to murder the Pope was a commemorative dagger? So what, it was made for a King’s Jubilee? Something like that?”

  He did like this woman. She was sharp. “Something exactly like that. A king two thousand years ago.” If he said two thousand years often enough she’d make the intuitive leap. He knew she would. “That’s one thing that makes this dagger special-it’s silver, it’s two thousand years old. What kings do you remember from two thousand years ago?”

  She spread her arms wide.

  “Think,” Konstantin said. “King of the Jews, two thousand years ago?”

  “Jesus? You’re telling me this dagger was made to commemorate the life of Jesus?” She didn’t laugh, but he could see she wanted to.

  “How does silver fit into the story?” he guided her. “Think.”

  “Silver?”

  “Come on. You know this. Every one learns the story when they’re kids. Thirty pieces of silver.”

  She shook her head. “No bloody way. Not possible. I don’t believe you.”

  “You asked me. I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “You didn’t say I wouldn’t believe, because it was ludicrous though, did you? So, tell me, how did you get your hands on a dagger forged from Judas’ silver? Hell, I can’t even believe I am asking a question like that. Jesus, Judas, we just wandered off into criminally insane territory. Is that what this is? Are you fashioning your defense? Going to plead the Devil made you do it? That you heard the voice of Judas telling you to strike back? To punish the unfaithful for treating him so badly?”

  “No,” Konstantin said.

  “Then what? Talk me through it, Konstantin. Help me understand, because right now I’ve got a murder weapon, a murderer, and a truckload of evidence, but something doesn’t fit when I think about it. It’s a niggle. The old cop instinct, if you like. I want to say I don’t think you did it, but I’ve watched the footage a thousand times; you’re as guilty as sin. So I don’t know why I keep coming back to the fact that I want to believe you.”

  So Konstantin told her everything-Masada, Mabus, the two Akim Caspis, the prophecies and the threats, and his involvement in it. He told her about the gun in the apartment and the timer and the birdseed in the trees meant to cause a distraction. He told her about trying to fight his way through the crowd to save the Holy Father and being too late. He told her about the Swiss Guard and begged her to put his face out across the wire, to warn people. Because he was still out there, and the body in the Moselle proved someone else had witnessed the murder and he’d silenced them
before they could talk. He told her about Humanity Capital trading on tragedy, about Miles Devere, about the hostages in England. He told her everything.

  It felt good to confess it, to put the burden onto someone else, because it wasn’t over yet. He knew that as surely as he knew the sun was going to rise on the ninth day and the College of the Cardinals would enter conclave to elect the next Pope. It wasn’t over.

  “What are you going to do with the dagger?” he asked her.

  She looked at him. He couldn’t read her face. He didn’t know whether she believed a word he had said. What she couldn’t argue with was how it all hung together. He couldn’t have made up a story like that while they had him trapped in the interrogation room. “It’s a murder weapon. It’s evidence.”

  “When it’s over?”

  “Why?”

  “Like you said, it’s evidence, but not just of murder. In a weird kind of way it’s proof, isn’t it? Proof that Jesus and Judas existed, proof in the stuff they want us to believe. It’s the kind of treasure the Vatican will want, no matter how tainted it might be.”

  He lost track of the time between visits. He was beyond tired. But they wouldn’t let him sleep. Not properly. Only snatches here and there. That told him they had cameras on him and someone watching him at all times. Whenever he started to doze they returned, like clockwork.

  They kept coming back, working away at him. Softly from the woman, great hammer blows from the guy. He kept trying to tell them they were wasting their time, that the real assassin was out there, still safe in his position inside the inner ring of the papal guard, but they refused to believe him.

  He still didn’t know their names. They were just the woman and the man. It kept it impersonal, stopped him from thinking of them as friends. If he had been running the interrogation, the first thing he would have done was make it personal. Sometimes he did not understand the logic of these people. If they wanted him to trust them, surely they should be using every trick at their disposal to convince him there were bonds between them. They couldn’t bring in the torturer, so what else could they do?