“Say the guy used some office supplies from his day job for his own purposes,” Canning said. “Over the course of a few months, he collected all the pertinent details and had the device assembled by a physicist — a cutout who subsequently took a long vacation. Then he left the weapon for you — plug and play — close to the heart of Washington.”
“That’s a good story.” The Iraqi’s features didn’t budge. “I would have to take it with a few grains of salt.”
“The guy would expect that. So the ante would be low, just to cover his operating expenses. The ante gets you a remote detonator. If the device doesn’t work to your satisfaction, you go home having lost nothing.”
“Except the ante.”
“That’s how it is with games of chance, right?”
“What’s the ante?”
“Eight million.”
“And if the device works?”
“You wire the guy another two-ninety-two million. Then he supplies you with enough technical details that the e-mail you send taking credit to The Washington Post is the e-mail they publish. But it would be better to e-mail The New York Times because the Post won’t regain the ability to publish anything for weeks.”
Clouds dimmed the light through the latticework, shadows magnifying the reservations that creased the Iraqi’s brow. “How would I alleviate my concern that my friend’s service is gaming us?”
“To what end? To pick up a few million bucks by selling defective fireworks? To screw over an old pal from Moscow?”
“But he’s always been such a devoted servant of his country.”
“Of course. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have gotten the promotions to be in position to pull off an operation on the scale we’re discussing. Keep in mind his stepfather.”
“I know, he was Mukhabarat from Umm Qasr.”
“Not his father — may he rest in peace. His stepfather.”
“Ah, yes, the American Air Force colonel.”
“May he rest in peace.” Canning sipped his coffee. “Within the week.”
Canning’s resentment of the United States began the day his mother became one of the colonel’s personal spoils from the First Gulf War. The man soon uprooted mother and son from a village outside of Basra that wasn’t just idyllic; it was believed to have been the location of the Garden of Eden. In the States, he moved from one bleak military housing compound to another — that he provided a roof was the best that could be said for the guy. In a sense, Canning had been looking forward to this breakfast for twenty years.
Al-Hawrani set down his brioche and leaned closer. “The council would be concerned that the price reflects impure ideology.”
“You can assure the council they’re getting a hometown discount,” Canning said. “I have no doubt that, off the top of your head, you can name a dozen players who would happily pony up ten figures for this system.”
The Iraqi ceded the point with a grunt. “The Chinese have spent more just trying to steal the technology. But if your guy is flying the Son of Islam flag …”
“Sometime after this op, maybe immediately, he’s going to need to fly the coop. Why shouldn’t he have a golden parachute — not unlike the members of the National Council of Resistance of Iraq?”
Turning toward the window, al-Hawrani watched the Lyon train grind away from the station. He was deliberating, Canning suspected. The time passed slowly.
Finally, the Iraqi raised his orange juice and said, “To al-Ba’ath.”
Al-Ba’ath translated loosely as the resurrection, Canning knew, but in this context it meant, specifically, retribution. Laboring to maintain an appropriately sober mien, he clinked the juice glass with his coffee cup.
33
There were two new scorpions — that is, two that Thornton had seen during the few moments there had been light in the cell. So maybe more than two. He continued to play goalie from the cot, swishing the pillow, now in tatters, to ward the things off. The routine was interrupted only when a Souper Meal and water bottle dropped through the flap in the door. Each time he raced to the door and back along the safe path revealed by Flattop’s flashlight. These meals seemed to come on a random schedule, except that Thornton wasn’t hungry. Still the provisions were never enough and always repulsive. Days had passed since he’d slept. That is, it seemed days had passed. Maybe it had been a week. He could no longer delineate one day from the next. It didn’t help that the temperature fluctuated between freezing and roasting. Then there were the runs. He’d had to heave the cot as if it were a sled, himself aboard, so that his ass was positioned inches above the toilet rim — not on it — so he wouldn’t sit on one of the damned bugs. The toilet didn’t flush. Or maybe it did, weakly, and he didn’t hear it over the men’s screams from the surrounding cells. Also a baby cried for hours on end. Thornton recalled that Iraqi interrogators, believing that no sound induced greater psychological stress, piped recordings of wailing infants into subjects’ cells. Or was that Russian interrogators? His mind wasn’t firing. Once, a gunshot in close vicinity left his eardrums throbbing. He felt hot blood leaking down his face, but it turned out to be a hallucination. A delusion, technically; he still couldn’t see anything. The point was, the new scorpions in his cell were more adventurous than the first, frequently tapping close to him. The other sounds he could tune out. But the bugs forced him to stay awake to maintain his perimeter. Since the Dark Ages, sleep deprivation had been recognized as an effective means of coercion. Or maybe it was the Middle Ages. Anyhow, in most modern democratic countries, depriving a detainee of sleep for more than forty-eight hours — or was it seventy-two? — was an illegal form of torture. After seventy-two hours, Thornton had read, your electrolyte balance drops to the point that your brain goes haywire. By now it had been forty or fifty hours since the parilla. Plus thirty or forty hours awake before the parilla. And, Jesus Christ, the parilla. A minute on that thing probably equated to another 100 hours of sleep dep. The next ride could be worse. Electroshock torture often results in cardiac arrest. Thoughts of the next “interview” expanded in his head like toxic gas, further filling him with a nightmarish sense of foreboding.
Finally Flattop came to fetch him, then prodded him into the interview room. At the sight of the parilla, and Bow Tie kneeling beside it, tweaking a control knob on the retrofitted car battery, Thornton couldn’t get the words out fast enough: “I made up Meade. I made it up to stall you. I have some suspicions about Sokolov’s death, but, really, I don’t know shit.”
The interrogator rose, regarding him with sympathy. “We figured as much, Russell,” he said.
Flattop drew his HK45, pressed its cold barrel against Thornton’s right temple, and snapped the trigger.
Another delusion.
Thornton was still in the cell.
Don’t do that, he urged himself. Don’t do that again.
He felt a scorpion shimmying up his back. He swatted until his back was raw, and …
He must have imagined the bug.