“Yup.”
“Would you shatter Pete’s left knee, please?”
“Love to.”
Jonathan more sensed than felt the Big Guy’s approach from behind.
Pyotr’s eyes grew huge. “No, no, no,” he said. “I tell you.”
Jonathan dared a look over his shoulder and saw the Big Guy with the sledge raised over his shoulder, poised for a home run swing. He’d never know if he was bluffing because he’d never ask.
“One chance, Pete,” Jonathan said. “I abhor torture, but I’ll watch you scream for mercy for hours before I let another tourist die on an airliner. Do you get where I’m coming from?”
Pyotr nodded like a bobble head. “Yes, yes. I understand. Please don’t hurt knee.”
Boxers’ shadow retreated.
“I won’t hurt knee if you tell truth,” Jonathan said. His Russian accent sucked.
“We have sleeping cells in your country,” Pyotr said. “They wait for orders to do violence.”
“What kind of violence?”
“Big violence. Big as East-West Airlines and even bigger.”
“Was that you?” Jonathan asked. “Did your sleeper cell shoot down the airliner?”
Pyotr smiled as he nodded. “Was perfect operation, no? You still do not know who was person who shot down.”
Jonathan shrugged. “We will,” he said. “We Americans aren’t good at everything, but we’re really good at ferreting out our enemies.” He didn’t add that Pyotr would be the very man to give them the intel they’d need to close that loop. “What does any of this have to do with Mrs. Darmond? Why did you attack her?”
Pyotr smiled. “Did you know she used to be one of us?”
Jonathan said nothing. In an interrogation, it was of utmost importance that information flow in only one direction. He asked the questions and the prisoner provided the answers. “Is it revenge?” he asked.
Pyotr scowled as if he didn’t fully understand the question. “Revenge is same as payback, yes?”
“I suppose.”
“Payback for how she betray her friends?”
“You tell me, Peter.”
“No. We are not interested in revenge. She knows secrets.”
“Of the targets you’re planning to hit,” Jonathan presumed.
“I don’t know what the secrets are,” Pyotr said. “I only know that she needed to be silenced.”
A piece of the puzzle fell into place. “So, the hit on the Wild Times Bar was an assassination attempt?”
Pyotr looked away.
“I need an answer, Pete.”
He nodded.
“And what about the police officer on the Mall?” Jonathan asked. “DeShawn Lincoln.”
“He saw too much and talked too much,” Pyotr said.
“What did he see and say?”
Pyotr shook his head. “I do not know. It doesn’t matter that I know. I do not design the machine. I am merely a mechanic.”
Across from Pyotr, Vasily managed one more giant breath, and then he died. The death rattle seemed to give Pyotr a moment of peace. Jonathan wondered whether it was because his friend was finally out of pain, or if it was because his boss could never rat him out for telling.
“By mechanic you mean killer,” Boxers clarified.
Pyotr did his best to pivot his head to see the Big Guy. “By mechanic I mean I fix things and make them right. I am a soldier.”
“Don’t honor yourself, asshole,” Boxers said. “You’re no soldier.”
Jonathan knew that the current path couldn’t lead to anywhere good, so he changed the subject. “And what about David Kirk and Becky Beckeman? What did they do that you had to fix?”
“The girl meant nothing to us,” Pyotr said. “She was — what is your word? Collateral damage. She was with Kirk.”
“And what had Kirk done?”
“Is that not obvious?”
“I need to hear it from you.”
“He also knew too much. He was Officer Lincoln’s last phone call.”
And so it was with cover-ups. Jonathan had seen the pattern a hundred times. Once a secret is blown, the only way to get the genie back into the bottle is to engage in a scorched-earth strategy of cleanups.
“The group that is doing this,” Jonathan said. The group you’re a part of. Does it have a name? Is it organized?”
“We don’t need a name,” Pyotr said. “We have memories and we have a mission.”
“Who’s the leader?”
Pyotr shook his head. “I do not know.”
“Then who is your boss? Who do you take orders from?”
He said a phrase in Russian that Jonathan didn’t understand. When pressed, he said, “I do not know the English. Perhaps drop dead?”
Boxers bristled. “Easy there, pal.”
“I think he meant dead drop,” Jonathan said, a term of art in the espionage trade that meant a pre-established location to leave and retrieve messages. It remained one of the most reliable means by which clandestine people communicated with each other. “Explain to me how it worked.”
Pyotr hesitated, but Jonathan sensed that it was mainly for show. The thing about breaking somebody was once the information started to trickle, a flow was generally close behind. As much as Scorpion hated to admit it, watching Vasily be tortured to death had loosened Pyotr’s tongue. People in pain may or may not give reliable information; but people in fear of pain would give up anyone and anything.
“My phone would ring at a precise hour. If it rang, then I would go to the drop dead. Dead drop. The instructions would be there.”
“Who called you?”
“I do not know.”
“Well, who was on the other end of the line when you answered?”
“I did not answer it,” Pyotr said. “The phone would ring at only one of two times per day if it was going to ring at all. At four fifty-seven exactly. Same time, morning or afternoon. Not a minute sooner or later. If it rang, I would go.”
“He’s lying,” Arc Flash said. He hadn’t yet dared to stand from where Boxers had planted him.
“Shut up,” Big Guy said.
Jonathan said, “You mean to tell me that you were never curious?”
“Of course I was curious. But I have orders, and the orders were not to answer when phone rang at four fifty-seven.”
Soldiers the world over suppressed all manner of emotions and foibles when their orders told them to. The story made sense to Jonathan.
“What sorts of things would you be instructed to do?”
“Mostly, I would be deliveryman. Pick up a package at one place and drop it at another. And before you ask, I never saw the people on either end of the delivery. I would pick up at a place and drop off at a place.”
“Always the same pick-up location?” Jonathan asked.
“No. Always same dead drop. It would then give location for pick-up. At pick-up, I get instruction for drop-off.”
It was a good way to control the flow of information, Jonathan thought. You never wanted human assets to know more than they needed to. Even now, under the heat of a coerced confession of sorts, Pyotr’s betrayal of his superiors could only go so far.
“Where is the dead drop?”
“In a restroom in Fairfax, Virginia. In hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
“Hilton Garden Inn on Route Fifty. Instructions would be taped behind toilet in men’s room off of the lobby. No one could see it if they were not looking for it.”
“And these packages. What would be in them?”
“Always orders not to look.”
“How often did you and Vasily work together?”
“Never before now. Never before this mission.”
“This mission to kill,” Jonathan clarified.
“Da. This mission to kill. But I do not know why. The dead drop told me to go to the park outside of the Foggy Bottom Metro Station wearing New England Patriots knit cap with blue Levis and white tennis shoes. I would meet a man wearing brown shoes, tan pants, and a blue ski parka. I would say to him, ‘sure is cold,’ and he would say, ‘I am ready for vacation in Saint Kitts.’ That person was Vasily.”