The irony that Judas’ line was again being exploited for the gain of others didn’t escape her. As far as Devere was concerned it wasn’t about faith at all, it was about money. His own thirty pieces of silver.
She sat back in the chair. It was all there to see.
That left Solomon as the fanatic, the one man who really did believe all of it-the broken faith, the false church, the defamation of Judas-and through it all, the truth of what being a messiah really meant. It was never about being the son of God.
Surely that made him the most dangerous animal of them all, because a man like that couldn’t be reasoned with. Fanatics by definition weren’t open to reason. They didn’t want their eyes open to alternatives. And if they were persuasive, they could draw others closer to their flame of madness; but that wasn’t reason, that was trading on their rigid insanity. And he was insane. Make no bones about it. He could act the part in public-he could be convincing-but underneath the skin he was gone. That made him all the more frightening. A man like that would stop at nothing to see his dream of a new Jerusalem, a new recognized Israeli state for people of the one faith, come to pass. A man like that wouldn’t care if it meant stripping down the faiths of the Catholic Church and all of those other religions that didn’t subscribe to the glory of man. The trappings of religion and heresy were meat and potatoes to a man like that. It played into his messianic complex.
It was like a trail of breadcrumbs had been left for her to follow, and all the way she’d been picking them up and not thinking about what they really meant. But now she’d got it. She knew who they were. She knew how their roles fitted together. Everything made sense.
She called Lethe on the toad’s home phone and told him everything.
Then she waited for Mabus the Herald to come home.
And while she waited the sun went down.
Downstairs, she heard the front door slam.
The toad was home.
She waited.
She heard him breathing heavily as he labored up the large staircase. Gavrel Schnur was a grotesque man. He was gasping hard, seriously out of breath, before he was even halfway through the ascent. Orla was patient. She waited, looking at her ghostly reflection in the glass.
The toad came into his study. He paused momentarily, stari the reflection of the devil in his wife’s blue dress, and then he composed himself. “Did you think seeing you in my wife’s dress, with your hair like that, would stop me from killing you?” he said. It was the last thing he ever said. Orla turned the chair around slowly. She looked at him. The arrogance faded when he saw the Jericho 941 she held low in her lap. She didn’t see the man responsible for torturing her. She didn’t see the man behind the terror attacks on Berlin and Rome and all of those other cities. She saw a fat, frightened man who had never recovered from losing his wife.
And right at that moment it didn’t matter whether she had seven shots or four left.
She only needed one.
29
Konstantin Khavin didn’t know whe he was.
There was a glass of water on the table, a tape recorder and microphone, and two chairs on the other side of the table. He was alone in the room. They worked him in shifts, refusing to let him sleep. They had taken his prints and run him through the system. They knew who he was. Worse, they knew what he was. They wanted to know who he was working for, who else was with him in Germany, why he had killed the Pope. Then someone came in with a security photograph of him in Berlin on the day of the sarin gas attack.
They put it on the table in front of him and asked, “Is that you?” He couldn’t deny it. It was a good picture. It caught all of his features in full frontal. Any half-decent facial recognition software would identify him. There was no point lying. “Yes.” He said and suddenly they were looking at a two-for-one deal on a sociopathic killer.
Because they knew who he was, they knew all about his training. They knew he was versed in interrogation techniques and torture. And they knew his experience wasn’t just theoretical.
They came back in.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” the woman said, taking the first seat on the other side of the table. “Things don’t look good for you, Konstantin. You story does not check out.”
Her partner, a straight-faced bodybuilder in a suit, sank into the seat beside her.
“That’s her polite way of saying you’re screwed. We’ve got hundreds of witness testimonies, video evidence, your prints on the weapon, all the physical evidence we could dream of, including the sworn testimony of the Swiss Guard who tried to stop you. That’s what she means by ‘things not looking good.’ It gets substantially worse when we add your own story to the mix. A Russian defector, Konstantin? Do you have any conception of the word loyalty? Or is that it, you’re some sort of sleeper agent? Did they plant you on this side of the Wall and wait for you to grow? Maybe this was always your mission? Is that it, Konstantin? Were you ‘let go’ so that you could do this all these years later? Did they think the humiliation of another defector was worth it in return for the death of the Holy Father? How did they sell the mission to you? Or are you programmed to obey?”
Konstantin stared straight ahead. He didn’t so much as twitch. The words didn’t register on his face. He gave them nothing, knowing it would frustrate them. People were behind the one-way glass watching the whole dance.
“In Moscow they would have brought a doctor in by now,” he said, looking at the woman.
“Why?”
“To elicit a confession,” Konstantin said.
“You mean soften you up with sodium pentothal to weaken your resolve? We have ways of making you talk and all that bullshit,” the man said, full of scorn.
“I see you watch the movies,” Konstantin said.
“I suppose they’d send the muscle in next to beat the confession out of you if the drugs didn’t work?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps they would let the doctor use the instruments of his trade. A lot of truths can be learned under a doctor’s scalpel.”
“That’s barbaric,” the woman said.
“It is one of the reasons I left Moscow. Not the only one. It was another world back then. Do not think you can intimidate me with threats like your colleague is trying. I come from a different world, one where violence is commonplace. I do not fear pain. I do not fear torture. But if you want to hear it, I will tell you the truth of torture, officer.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Everyone talks. That is the truth. Everyone talks even if they know it is going to kill them in the end. They just want the pain to end. The movies where the square-jawed hero doesn’t break is just that, a movie. The reality is he will foul himself. He will cry snot and tears. He will piss down his legs and he will scream, and in the end, he will beg you not to hurt him anymore; he will tell you everything you want to know and more; he will offer secrets you didn’t know he had, just to lessen the pain for a little while.”
“Are you telling us to torture you?”
“Would you if you thought it would give you the truth?”
“We have the truth,” the man cut across their little dance. “It’s on bloody film for the entire world to see.”
That is not the truth,” Konstantin said.
“You’re insane. Do you know that? You’re a freakin’ sociopath! So what, you want us to waterboard you?” The man shook his head in disgust.
“There is no way I can convince you. Even if you open my stomach and reach in with your bare hands to pull at my guts, my truth will not change. I did not kill him.”
“Easy to say,” the man said. “We can all be brave when it’s only words.”
“Then cut me,” Konstantin said. “My people will not save me. I am alone here. I have nothing to gain by lying and nothing to lose by telling the truth.”
“I don’t believe you, Konstantin,” the man said. “You’re a liar. One way or the other. Either you lied to your people when you fled to the West, or you lied to us when we welcomed you? Which one is it?”