“Sit, please, make yourself comfortable.”
Konstantin sat in one of the two armchairs in the room while Devere sat behind his desk. It was another subtle power play, the desk between them, the slight height difference between the armchairs and the desk chair all combined to give Devere dominance over the situation. Konstantin didn’t care. He sat back in the armchair, crossed his right leg over his left and breathed deeply, stretching the muscles of his back.
“Perhaps you could answer a question for me?” Devere asked, quite reasonably. “Why, if you are so sure I intend to kill the Pope, would you come here and start annoying me? I am not quite sure I follow the logic of it.”
“Because that is the way it is done in my country, face to face. Death is man’s business, not a coward’s.”
“So you’re saying you are going to kill me now? You really are quite unbelievable. What was your name again? I think I should learn the name of the man who is going to kill me, don’t you?” Devere shook his head slowly, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard.
“Konstantin Khavin.”
“Konstantin Khavin,” Devere repeated, saying it slowly.
“Yes. First I will stop your man, then I will come back for you. That is a promise. When you hear that first gunshot you should start running, Mister Devere, because the second one won’t be all that far behind; and as the villain says in all the bad movies, it will have your name on it. I doubt that someone who still likes to play with toy robots will be all that hard to kill, no matter how much money he has. What do you think?”
“I think you should leave now,” Miles Devere said. The smile had left his lips.
The meeting had been rash, and unwise, and so many other words that meant “really bad idea” but Konstantin couldn’t help smiling as he walked out onto the street of Jesuit Square. He had enjoyed rattling Devere, but there was more to it than that. He called Lethe.
“Fifth thing,” he said.
“Like the Hatter, five impossible things before breakfast. That’s me, Jude Lethe, Mad as a Hatter.”
“Trace every line in and out of Devere Holdings’ office here from about two minutes ago.”
“May I ask why?”
“I just told Devere I was going to kill him,” Konstantin said. Beside him, a woman turned and gave him the weirdest of looks, halfway between horror and embarrassment. She obviously didn’t know if she was supposed to take him literally at his word-after all people threatened to kill each other every day and didn’t actually mean it-and was clearly ashamed she’d been caught eavesdropping. Konstantin shrugged and she hurried off.
“Smooth,” Lethe said. “Nothing like putting the cat amongst the pigeons.”
“He’s going to make a call, or he already has, depending upon how much I upset him,” Konstantin said. “Find out who he calls.”
“You know I will.”
Konstantin hung up.
How the next hour or so would play out depended very much on who Miles Devere called. If he called the shooter, it would act to trigger one chain of events. If he called Mabus, it would trigger a very different one. And if he called someone else, then it would mean Konstantin really hadn’t got the measure of who he was up against and would necessitate some thinking on his feet as he improvised a third one.
More people had begun to congregate for the papal visit. The parade route was beginning to look quite crowded. If Konstantin had judged the route right, and the crawl of the Popemobile, he had about half an hour before they reached here. Looking at the majority of them he found it hard to imagine any of this flock had a religious bone in their bodies.
The difference in the quarter of an hour or so that he had been off the streets was noticeable. He checked his watch. The parade ought to have started a few minutes ago. In a little over half an hour the benediction would begin.
Konstantin closed his eyes, recalling as best he could the layout of the city, and headed in what he thought was the direction of the Florinsmarkt. Five minutes later the phone in his pocket began to vibrate. He answered it. “Who did he call?”
“I love you, Koni, in a very manly way, of course. I don’t think I’ve said it before, but I just wanted to make sure you knew.”
“Yes, yes, who did he call?”
“Not one, not two, but, wait for it, three calls in as many minutes. The first was to the mothership in Canary Wharf, the Devere Holdings building. That one took me by surprise. It certainly wasn’t the call I was expecting. The second was more interesting, to an unlisted pay-as-you-go cell phone which was part of a bulk order placed in London a month ago. I think it is safe to assume this one was to your shooter. The third call was the shortest of all of them, to a landline in Switzerland. Again the number’s registered to another branch of the Devere corporate network; this time, though, it was one of daddy’s.”
“Spit it out.”
“There you go spoiling my fun again. The third call was to the Humanity Capital offices in Geneva. Happy now?”
Not really, but he didn’t say anything to Lethe. He needed to think. He hadn’t expected Devere to call daddy-that threw his thinking for a loop. London made sense because it was the base of operations for the multinational concern; information would traffic through the hub and filter out to wherever it needed to be. Calling the shooter to warn him made sense as well. It was the call he had hoped to illicit with his impromptu visit. That was the call that told him he had read Miles Devere correctly. The man was used to being in control. He hadn’t been able to resist checking in with his man.
No, what surprised him was that he had expected one of the calls up the chain to Mabus, meaning a number out in Israel. Tel Aviv, most likely. It was possible that Mabus was in either London or Geneva, but it was unlikely. Given the level of mystery around the terrorist’s identity he couldn’t imagine Devere entrusting that call to one of his grunts, especially considering Devere’s psychology.
ize="3Could you trace the second call?” Konstantin asked, still thinking.
Lethe sucked in a wounded breath. “I’ll let you off this once, Koni, but only because I just professed my love for you. That’s how good I am to you, remember that. Could I trace the call, indeed? Sheesh. Does a naked Pope shit in the woods?”
Konstantin said nothing.
“The answer you’re looking for is ‘of course’ because he’s Papa Bear, get it? Goldilocks? Sometimes I think my genius is wasted on you, Koni. Yes, I triangulated the signal from the cell phone to a building on one of the approach streets to St Florin’s. Mehlgasse, number 13.”
“Unlucky for some,” Konstantin said, killing the connection. He pocketed the phone.
It took him seven minutes to cover the ground from Jesuit Square to Mehlgasse. It wasn’t one of the streets cordoned off for the papal visit, making it ideal for the getaway. Konstantin walked along the sidewalk. The buildings rose higher here, up to five and six stories. He scanned row after row of blind windows as he walked down the street.
He checked his watch again. Less than thirty minutes before the benediction was due to begin. He didn’t like the way time seemed to be accelerating on him.
There was nothing remarkable about number 13, nothing that said this was the house hiding an assassin. It was an utterly average facade, with row after row of plain windows. There were no balconies. He studied the top row of windows. A flicker of movement below caught his eye. A curtain moving in the window furthest from the Square. The window was open six inches. Enough clearance for a shot.
Konstantin turned, following the trajectory from the window as best he could from below. The angle of the shot was tight. The shooter would only be able to see a fraction of the square itself, but he had a partial view of the stage that had been constructed. Assuming the steps up onto the stage were on the left, what the shooter had was an unobstructed view of the Pope as he climbed them up onto the stage and his first four or five steps across the red cloth toward his papal chair.