“I think that’s a bit of a leap of logic,” Orla Nyren interrupted his train of thought. Noah looked her way, worried for a moment that he might have said part of what was going on in his head. Thankfully, she wasn’t looking at him. Orla brushed that errant strand of hair away from her face again. She moved her cell phone so that it sat exactly perpendicular to her on the table. It was a tiny adjustment that smacked of an obsessive need for order that went beyond needing things around her to make sense. It was all about controlling her world and what happened in it. Noah could respect that so long as it didn’t involve turning widdershins three times and rolling up a trouser leg before opening a door.
“That it might be, but anything else would mean a second layer of coincidence, wouldn’t it?” Lethe reasoned. He pinched at his nose. It was obvious he’d been staring at computer screens for hours; his focus had that kind of glazed quality life online brought with it. “If it isn’t Masada that links these suicides, then it is either a totally random collusion of circumstance, a coincidence to the power of thirteen, if you like, or somewhere out there, there’s another singularity where these thirteen unfortunate souls come together. My money is on Masada though, not a black hole. Occam’s Razor and all that,” Lethe said.
“Look hard enough and you’ll start to see conspiracies everywhere,” Orla shrugged. “And forgive me, but I don’t exactly see how this falls under our remit. We aren’t bodyguards. If someone is out to kill the Pope, we should pass on what we know to the authorities and wash our hands of it.”
“Very Pontius Pilate of you, my dear,” Sir Charles said, settling back in the seat of his wheelchair. “However, our remit is whatever I say it is on any given day. You knew that when you took this particular king’s shilling. Now, given the links to Masada and the Sicarii, I believe we are in a unique position to investigate. Perhaps our martyrs did find something on their excavations. It isn’t out of the question. And when you consider the fact that Masada is a biblical site, anything they found would very definitely fall under our area of interest, or could be twisted until it did, wouldn’t you say?”
Orla Nyren stewed in silence for a full minute. She did not look remotely convinced. She moved her phone twice, once nudging it slightly out of true, and again to return it back to its perfect perpendicular. Finally she pursed her lips and shook her head. It was a short, decisive denial. “No, not buying it. Sorry, boss. Dress it up any way you like, this isn’t our business. This is MI6 and defense of the realm stuff. Suicide…”-she paused, catching herself mid-breath. Noah wondered if she had been about to say bombers; it was such a natural extension of her old life the two words would almost certainly have fused together in her mind-“… and terror threats,” she continued, her eyes drifting unconsciously toward the screens, “are way beyond the capabilities of five people. We can’t be the last bastions of democracy.”
“Nor should you be,” the old man agreed. He leaned forward in his chair. It was a subtle shift in his body language that implied complicity. “We will, of course, be feeding any information we discover up the line, and it will be for Control to decide how it is distributed. But there is a convergence of events here that we will investigate, and that’s my final word on the matter.”
Orla shook her head. The gesture was barely perceptible. “Why do I get the feeling you know more than you are letting on here?”
The old man smiled indulgently and spread his arms wide as if to show just how helpless he was. Noah knew it was all an act. Sir Charles had been paralyzed by an IRA bomb in the London Docklands over twenty years ago, and even in the hospital bed in the days immediately after the attack, he hadn’t been helpless.
The story was, he’d whispered into the right ear, and in turn the right ear had placed a call to a not-so-upstanding friend of an even less upright gent. And while that chain reaction played out, Sir Charles settled back into the starched pillows, content that his whisper had lit a very short fuse. The chemist suspected of being behind the bomb was involved in a not-so-tragic accident less than forty-eight hours later.
That was the kind of man he was.
He didn’t get angry.
He didn’t rail against the world.
He got even in his own very quiet, almost understated, way.
And right then the old man’s smile was a match for any the Russian had ever conjured. “Because, my dear, I am dreadfully predictable and you know me far too well. It’s the curse of spending too much time together. I will admit this much, I have my suspicions. I can only assure you that some very good reasons underpin those suspicions-but I am not ready to voice them just yet. As soon as I am sure, you will be the first to know. Until then, he who speaks first and thinks later has an idiot for a mouth. And contrary to what you may believe, I am not an idiot.” This time his smile was both self-deprecating and honest. It was a gentle deflection.
Noah half-expected her to challenge the old man again. She could be like a dog with a bone sometimes. She didn’t. Noah understood why. Thirteen burning faces told them all it was an argument for another day.
“Okay,” she said instead, “let’s think about this rationally. The one question that’s begging to be asked is: who else was involved in that dig? For all the conspiracy theory nonsense, the dig is the one thing we know for sure that the suicides have in common. Logically, anyone else who had been there is either in danger themselves, or more likely, is wrapped up in the whole thing somehow. Either way, we need to find them.”
Lethe had a partial answer. It wasn’t what any of them wanted to hear. “More than fifty locals were used as casual labor. The dig was overseen by one Akim Caspi, who is not, I hasten to add, an archeologist. Caspi is a lieutenant general in Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Force. I sincerely doubt he has a list of names, unfortunately. Archeologists are great for keeping itemized records on fossilized donkey crap, but they don’t seem all that concerned about people if they haven’t been dead for a millennium or more.”
He put up a picture of Caspi in full military regalia on the screens. The man looked like someone a soldier would be willing to die for.
“Okay, so given that we aren’t going to be blessed with a convenient list of prime suspects, we need to hit the ground running. What ground though?” the Irishman asked.
“We’ve got thirteen potentially blind alleys to run down.”
“Rome or Berlin,” Konstantin said, breaking his silence. “There is a reason those calls deviated from the pattern.”
“I am inclined to agree,” the old man said, “and because of that, Konstantin, I want you to go to Berlin and walk a mile in the dead man’s shoes.”
The Russian raised an eyebrow. “Walk in his shoes?” He made his index and forefingers skip across the tabletop to demonstrate his understanding, or lack of it.
“Relive the last seventy-two hours of his life,” Sir Charles explained. “Go through it with a fine-toothed comb. Every place he visited, every person he saw. No man is an island, especially in this modern age of emails and phone calls. Lethe will support your investigations from back here, following the electronic paper trail. Somewhere in the middle of everything is his killer-and make no mistake about this, he was killed. They all were. Their murderers might not have pulled the trigger, but that is neither here nor there. Death comes upon his pale horse wielding fire, guns and other instruments of death. Nothing says death needs to be intimate anymore. So take his life apart, climb inside his skin. Become him. Let the dead man tell his last tale.”