“Yes.” Thornton suspected that, if he were entirely cooperative, they would in fact allow him to leave here — but only in a shark’s belly.
Bow Tie flicked a droplet of moisture from the corner of his mouth, then launched into a wide range of questions, beginning with Thornton’s childhood. What elementary school did you attend? What did your father do for a living? Establishing a baseline, Thornton suspected.
He answered truthfully. Had to, he figured, because interrogators studied extensively for this initial questioning, memorizing everything they could about their subjects. In part this gave the impression that they were omniscient and that any lie would be easily uncovered. On a more pragmatic level, once they reached the important questions, they could ill afford to pause and ask subjects to repeat names and places. If a subject realizes he’s revealing information, he stops.
Mindful of this, Thornton waited for the interrogator to start fishing. And waited, his throat increasingly raw as he contended with two hours’ worth of the likes of What was your grade point average at Concord Academy? What were your SAT scores? What was the name of your freshman football coach at UMass?
Finally, Bow Tie asked, “Who tipped you off about the ballistics in the Sokolov investigation?”
If this were about Sokolov, Thornton thought, then the eavesdroppers’ game could be obtaining electronic weaponry, meaning he was hardly the only one whose survival was at issue. “No one tipped me off,” he said. “It was just old-fashioned information wheedling.”
The interrogator looked down his nose. “Come on, Russell, we know about your agency connection.”
To Thornton, it was as if dark clouds had suddenly parted, allowing sunlight to illuminate not only the objective of the rendition, but a means by which he might survive. O’Clair’s counterintelligence play in Torrington had caused Bow Tie’s people to fear that Thornton was working in cooperation with some agency, thereby jeopardizing their operation. Thornton could delay the release of the guillotine blade by maintaining the fiction that he really did have an agency connection.
“Ballistics had nothing to do with anything,” he said. “If I had had a shred of substantiation, the story would have been about an administration of midazolam gone wrong.”
“How could you have known that about the midazolam?”
Speculation, Thornton thought. Unconfirmed until now, thank you. On account of a morsel of Stalin trivia, he realized, he’d been on the money two months ago: The seven-gram lead bullet was a red herring. He must have struck a nerve at the time with his hypothesis that whoever killed Sokolov had known more Soviet history than your average hit man. Whoever had been attempting to stick a listening device in Sokolov’s head went on to stick one in Thornton’s as damage control. The bug’s feed would have alleviated their concern: His investigation was headed toward the same dead end as the FBI’s. But then came his “meeting with someone from the agency” in Torrington, Connecticut.
“How did you learn about the midazolam?” the interrogator asked again.
Like a successful seduction, Thornton reminded himself, a good lie is built upon truth. “O’Clair figured that your operator used ketamine, because hardly anyone has an allergic reaction to it. From there it was mostly deduction.” True and true.
The interrogator plucked a chin whisker that must have escaped his razor. “We know that Kevin O’Clair was not your agency contact. He was a low-level analyst at NSA.”
Thornton said nothing. Pointedly, he hoped.
“We also know that after you discovered your Littlebird device, you told O’Clair that you’d been contacted by ‘someone at the agency’ whom you planned to meet in Torrington, Connecticut, at Bill’s Diner. Please don’t tell me the diner’s proximity to a forty-thousand-kilowatt radio tower was coincidental.”
“No, of course not. The purpose was to jam the Littlebird.” Thornton made a point of saying Littlebird as if he’d been tossing around the term for ages.
The interrogator glanced at the mirror. Thornton wondered who Bow Tie’s superior was.
“Who met you in Bill’s Diner, Russell?”
Easy to tell the truth here. “No one.”
“No one showed up at Bill’s Diner?”
“No one showed up to meet me.”
“We know about the encrypted Hushmail you received beforehand, Russell. Surely you know who sent it.”
“I hoped someone from the NSA was going to help me.” True enough. And of the intelligence agencies who were candidates to conduct an operation on the scale of Littlebird, Thornton could rule out only the NSA with any confidence, albeit not much.
“Who, Russell?”
“I don’t have a real name.”
“Do you have a pseudonym?”
“That’s often how it is. For instance, when calling me on a disposable cell phone, Catherine Peretti went by Jane Johnson. If you’re trying to stay below the radar, you’re not going to go by Jane Jingleheimerschmidt, right?”
Bow Tie cleared his throat. “What was the pseudonym?”
“Meade.” Untrue, and if the interrogator read it as dissembling, great.
“Is Meade a man or a woman, Russell?”
“I couldn’t tell you.” Thornton pretended to rub his chin involuntarily. “No one showed up at the diner, remember?”
“But you did meet someone at the Exxon station.”
“No, I just went there to get gas.”
“You went inside.”
“Oh, yeah. I bought a Gatorade. The cashier was cute, but she wasn’t Meade — as far as I know.”
“So to your knowledge, you never met Meade?”
“Never.”
“And you never received an explanation for that?”
“None. Maybe whoever it was saw the AT&T van parked a few stores down. I mean, if I can pick up a watcher, surely the pros can.”
The interrogator shot another look at the mirror. Snapping his eyes back to Thornton, he asked, “Did you have any further contact with Meade?”
Thornton hesitated, as a subject might do if inventing. “No, no further contact.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. If they tracked the AT&T van, maybe they got what they needed?”
The interrogator uncrossed his legs and sat up. “Russell, you remember what I said about leaving here, about the necessity of you telling the full truth?”
“I remember.”
“Who is Meade?”
Thornton shifted in his seat, causing it to squeak. “I would assume Meade is a reference to Fort Meade, Maryland, home to NSA headquarters. Then again the NSA often poses as the CIA and vice versa, so …”
“Do you expect anyone to believe that a skilled journalist with curiosity to a fault failed to dig deeper than that?”
“I understand why you wouldn’t believe that. But, I swear to God, it’s true. I’m usually working on five or six stories at a given time, plus I have another twenty or thirty on the back burner. By the time I saw the full scope of this story, I was being chased by hit men dressed as New York City cops.”
Bow Tie clamped his thumb and forefinger over his mouth. Bridling emotion, Thornton suspected. An interrogator can’t show frustration. It encourages the subject to hold out. And the interrogator can’t foster the hope that he might give up.
“We’ll take a break here,” Bow Tie said, rising. He pivoted toward the door, which someone opened on his approach. Thornton couldn’t see who.
The interrogator hurried into the corridor, fading into the darkness well before his footfalls subsided. Thornton bit back a smile. He would bet his apartment that he’d succeeded in planting concern in his captors that their operation faced an unknown and potent threat. Which was a hell of a lot better than their having ascertained the truth: that they had nothing whatsoever to worry about. Now, however, they would seek to extract from him the true nature of the threat. He didn’t expect the process to be pleasant.