"No," said Petra Mayer. "I mean really?"
The Colonel blew out his breath. He was having trouble seeing this small woman as a general. In fact, he had trouble seeing her as anything other than trouble. Her brief stint as the President's tutor he knew about. Her intelligence assessments of Beirut and all places similar was on a need-to-know basis, and he didn't.
"Questioning," he said.
Petra Mayer nodded. "Obviously," she said. "Take this man to the US and a whole different set of rules apply. You want that?"
Something was troubling Colonel Borgenicht. "I'd have thought--" The Colonel stopped, considered and wondered how to finish.
"That this is exactly what I would have wanted? Of course it is," said the Professor. "It's also exactly what the US can't risk. At least, according to the Attorney General." Petra Mayer stared at the Colonel, who now leant right forward to ensure their conversation remained private. "What do you think the verdict would have been if this had been tried in an open court?"
"I can guess," he said, after a moment's thought.
"Quite," said Petra Mayer. "You've seen the files."
"He made a confession."
"Indeed," said the Professor. "We're getting really good at letting others do our dirty work. That would be the first thing to go. Throw out his confession and what do we have? A lunatic who should never have been allowed out in public. Unfortunately he also happens to be a genius."
"So we retry," said the Colonel, his words almost a whisper. "Keep the court military."
"And reach what verdict?" Petra Mayer stared at the crop-haired black officer. The man was built like the proverbial shithouse and had biceps that still, fifteen years after he was commissioned, betrayed the fact he'd started in the ranks. Petra Mayer had seen the Colonel's file. She knew about his divorce, last year's less than discreet battle against OxyC, a prescription analgesic better known to most of Dr. Petrov's clients as "hillbilly heroin."
The man had a high IQ fighting to escape the limitations of its uniform.
"It gets worse," Petra Mayer said.
The Colonel looked at her. "How can it get worse?" he demanded.
"The meeting's to be televised in real time," said Petra Mayer. "They're going to walk out there in front of the cameras, look at the stars and shake hands."
"Why?"
"Because it's part of the deal."
"Whose deal?"
"Prisoner Zero's."
"Jesus fuck." From the look on his face, it seemed Colonel Borgenicht finally understood that his certainties were coming unravelled over a cup of cold coffee in a hastily emptied hotel room on an island in the middle of nowhere.
The square was carefully selected. Although it was only chosen after several alternative locations had been considered and rejected; Camp Freedom was the first to go.
As this was Colonel Borgenicht's first choice he expected no less.
The camp was secure, wrapped tightly with razor wire and had high-powered searchlights set up at all four corners on scaffolding towers. Machine-gun encampments guarded the roads in and out. The very qualities that made it Colonel Borgenicht's first choice led to its rejection by Gene Newman.
Razor wire and searchlights said the wrong thing for his administration. They said fear of the world outside. Gene Newman wanted something warmer, more media-friendly. He wanted historic, elegant, statesmanlike...
The town hall in Lampedusa had to be dropped when the ruling Northern Alliance wanted to be part of the handshake. A seventeenth-century palazzo, now functioning as a five-star hotel on Punta Muro Vecchio, reluctantly went the same way, even though it had its own heliport, the terraced gardens were entirely walled and the Milanese manager loved the idea.
Astronomical insurance costs, claimed the owners. The real reason was more pragmatic. Palazzo Muro Vecchio had a wide and loyal Italian clientele who were none too happy with the way the Marrakech incident had been handled and the Swiss group owning the hotel took an entirely sensible decision to protect their investment.
This left Valera, an old white-walled villaggio near Punta Parise, at the western end of the island, beneath the shadow of Monte Alberto Sole. A press release from the White House revealed that the village variously had been Byzantine, Arab, Norman and Spanish. For much of the Renaissance, while condottieri set themselves up as princes in the north and southern Italy continued its war of attrition against the Barbary pirates, Villaggio Valera lay derelict, a home to goats and the occasional fugitive.
All of this changed in 1881 when what remained of the derelict village was bought by Baron del Smith, a cotton trader from Liverpool who'd fought alongside Garibaldi at the battles of Volturno and Aspromonte, been created baron by Victor Emmanuel II and then, five years later, been sent into exile by the same King for trying to introduce communal farming to Sicily.
The village was rebuilt to a plan drawn up by Baron del Smith's wife and the slopes around it divided into workable farms. Olive trees and lemon groves were planted, as were almonds and oranges. The experiment was a brave one but lack of adequate irrigation, the heat of a few bad summers and the mistrust of other landowners saw the village fall back into near ruin. By 1910 the almonds were being picked, sorted and husked by old women who spoke sadly and often of their sons making new lives for themselves in America.
President Gene Newman's great-grandmother was born in Villaggio Valera. In retrospect, it was an obvious choice.
"There'll be a gun on you at all times. You understand that?" Colonel Borgenicht's voice was tight. "We've got snipers in the bell tower and on the roof of the town hall."
Prisoner Zero smiled.
Part of Colonel Borgenicht wanted to beat the man's head against the nearest wall, the other bit wanted to get on his knees and beg the bastard not to fuck this thing up. Instead, he just nodded, as if Prisoner Zero had given him the answer he wanted.
"Yeah," said Petra Mayer. "You've told him that already."
They were standing beside the church. And at the opposite end of the square, behind waist-high metal barriers, waited the press, plus selected members of the public and Katie Petrov, Miles Alsdorf and all those who didn't rate being included in the Presidential entourage.
Colonel Borgenicht would have preferred the barriers to be higher, but then he'd have preferred the bit parts and media not to be there at all, which was obviously impossible since the entire meeting had been turned into one big press call.
He had snipers stationed at both ends of the square, a precaution helped by the fact that the town hall's roof was flat and the bell tower of the church was easily reachable by stairs from the inside.
A sniper in the ornate bell tower was responsible for the laser dot on the back of Prisoner Zero's head. It would have been simple to give laser sights to the man on the roof of the town hall opposite, but then Prisoner Zero would have had a rag dot visible in the middle of his forehead. And that would send out all the wrong signals, apparently.
The plan was simple.
President Newman would arrive by helicopter at a field outside the village. He would walk up the hill, rather than take a jeep. This was his choice and against the express advice of his Secret Service men. A side effect of this was that extra snipers had to be found to cover the lower slopes of Monte Alberto Sole, stretching the Colonel's resources even thinner.
He would walk along a short section of Via Smith, from which cars and pedestrians had been banned, and enter Piazza Solforino from the north, crossing the cobbles with the press and token public behind their barricades to his right. In the middle of the square he would stop and take a salute from Colonel Borgenicht, before pausing to examine the seventeenth-century bell tower silhouetted against the twilight.