This time he allowed them to applaud him briefly, before silencing them with another wave of his hand.
‘But we must return for the moment to our domestic problems, which are far more pressing. You see, I believe it is important that our own citizens are also made aware of the mettle of their new leader. I wish to provide them with an example that will leave no one in any doubt about how I intend to deal with those who consider opposing me.’ They all waited to see who Zerimski had selected for this honour.
He turned his gaze to the newly appointed Justice Minister. ‘Where is that Mafya hitman who tried to assassinate me?’
‘He’s locked up in the Crucifix,’ said Shulov. ‘Where I assume you’ll want him to remain for the rest of his life.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Zerimski. ‘Life imprisonment is far too lenient a sentence for such a barbarous criminal. This is the ideal person to put on trial. We will make him our first public example.’
‘I’m afraid the police haven’t been able to come up with any proof that he...’
‘Then manufacture it,’ said Zerimski. ‘His trial isn’t going to be witnessed by anyone except loyal Party members.’
‘I understand, Mr President,’ said the new Justice Minister. He hesitated. ‘What did you have in mind?’
‘A quick trial, with one of our new judges presiding and a jury made up exclusively of Party officials.’
‘And the sentence, Mr President?’
‘The death penalty, of course. Once the sentence has been passed, you will inform the press that I shall be attending the execution.’
‘And when will that be?’ asked the Justice Minister, writing down Zerimski’s every word.
The President flicked over the pages of his diary and began searching for a fifteen-minute gap. ‘Eight o’clock next Friday morning. Now, something far more important — my plans for the future of the armed forces.’ He smiled at General Borodin, who was seated on his right, and who hadn’t yet opened his mouth.
‘For you, Deputy President, the greatest prize of all...’
Chapter Twenty
As a prisoner in the Nan Dinh camp, Connor had developed a system for counting the days he’d been in captivity.
At five every morning a Vietcong guard would appear carrying a bowl of rice swimming in water — his only meal of the day. Connor would remove a single grain and place it inside one of the seven bamboo poles that made up his mattress. Every week he would transfer one of the seven grains to the beam above his bed, and then eat the other six. Every four weeks he would remove one of the grains from the beam above his bed and put it between the floorboards under his bed. The day he and Chris Jackson escaped from the camp, Connor knew he had been in captivity for one year, five months and two days.
But lying on a bunk in a windowless cell in the Crucifix, even he couldn’t come up with a system to record how long he had been there. The Chief of Police had now visited him twice, and left with nothing. Connor began to wonder how much longer it would be before he became impatient with his simply repeating his name and nationality, and demanding to see his Ambassador. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Only moments after Bolchenkov had left the room the second time, the three men who had greeted him on the afternoon of his arrival came charging into his cell.
Two of them dragged him off the bunk and threw him into the chair recently occupied by the Chief. They wrenched his arms behind his back and handcuffed him.
That was when Connor first saw the cut-throat razor. While two of them held him down, the third took just fourteen strokes of the rusty blade to shave every hair off his head, along with a considerable amount of skin. He hadn’t wasted any time applying soap and water. The blood continued to run down Connor’s face and soak his shirt long after they had left him slumped in the chair.
He recalled the words of the Chief when they had first met: ‘I don’t believe in torture; it’s not my style.’ But that was before Zerimski had become President.
He eventually slept, but for how long he could not tell. The next thing he remembered was being pulled up off the floor, hurled back into the chair and held down for a second time.
The third man had replaced his razor with a long, thick needle, and used the same degree of delicacy he had shown as a barber to tattoo the number ‘12995’ on the prisoner’s left wrist. They obviously didn’t believe in names when you booked in for room and board at the Crucifix.
When they returned a third time, they yanked him up off the floor and pushed him out of the cell into a long, dark corridor. It was at times like this that he wished he lacked any imagination. He tried not to think about what they might have in mind for him. The citation for his Medal of Honor had described how Lieutenant Fitzgerald had been fearless in leading his men, had rescued a brother officer, and had made a remarkable escape from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. But Connor knew he had never come across a man who was fearless. In Nan Dinh he had held out for one year, five months and two days — but then he was only twenty-two, and at twenty-two you believe you’re immortal.
When they hurled him out of the corridor and into the morning sun, the first thing Connor saw was a group of prisoners erecting a scaffold. He was fifty-one now. No one needed to tell him he wasn’t immortal.
When Joan Bennett checked in for work at Langley that Monday, she knew exactly how many days she had served of her eight-month sentence, because every evening, just before she left home, she would feed the cat and cross off one more date on the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall.
She left her car in the west parking lot, and headed straight for the library. Once she had signed in, she took the metal staircase down to the reference section. For the next nine hours, with only a break for a meal at midnight, she would read through the latest batch of e-mailed newspaper extracts from the Middle East. Her main task was to search for any mention of the United States and, if it was critical, electronically copy it, collate it and e-mail it to her boss on the third floor, who would consider its consequences at a more civilised hour later that morning. It was tedious, mind-deadening work. She had considered resigning on several occasions, but was determined not to give Gutenburg that satisfaction.
It was just before her midnight meal-break that Joan spotted a headline in the Istanbul News: ‘Mafya Killer to go on Trial’. She could still only think of the Mafia as being Italian, and was surprised to discover that the article concerned a South African terrorist on trial for the attempted murder of the new President of Russia. She would have taken no further interest if she hadn’t seen the line drawing of the accused man.
Joan’s heart began to thump as she carefully read through the lengthy article by Fatima Kusmann, the Istanbul News’s Eastern European correspondent, in which she claimed to have sat next to the professional killer during a rally in Moscow which Zerimski had addressed.
Midnight passed, but Joan remained at her desk.
As Connor stood in the prison courtyard and stared up at the half-constructed scaffold, a police car drew up and one of the thugs shoved him into the back seat. He was surprised to find the Chief of Police waiting for him. Bolchenkov hardly recognised the gaunt, crop-headed man.