“I love you too, baby.”
I carried the warm memory of her voice over to the hangar next door and found a cot in the corner. After a few prayers, I lay down. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow and slept dreamlessly until Mahoney shook me awake at four a.m.
“He’s here,” he said. “Viktor Kasimov.”
Ten minutes later, I was drinking coffee once again and listening to the brief on the suspect awaiting us in the same room where we’d spoken to Morris Franks.
When the briefing was finished, Carstensen said, “You ready, Dr. Cross?”
“Yes,” I said. “Cameras?”
She nodded. “Running on the other side of the mirror, trained tight on his face. If the body-language experts catch anything, we’ll call it in to you.”
“Translator?”
“There will be one in the booth with me, but you’ll find he’s fluent in English.”
In both English and Russian, Viktor Kasimov told us he was spitting mad when Ned and I entered the interrogation room and found him manacled and chained to the table.
“You!” Kasimov shouted at me and Mahoney. “You two think crazy imbecile thoughts! Invent these things!”
“I could say the same about you, Viktor,” Ned said, unruffled.
Kasimov looked like he wanted to rip both our heads off, but he took several deep, trembling breaths before saying, “I am a Russian diplomat, an envoy of the Kremlin, and there will be serious repercussions if—”
Mahoney cut him off. “We don’t care about your bona fides or your diplomatic passport.”
I said, “We’ve gone far beyond the normal rule of law here, Mr. Kasimov. Martial law allows us to do pretty much whatever we want. And I can tell you that there could be painful and perhaps deadly repercussions for you if you don’t start helping us right now.”
“I have no idea how to help you,” he snapped.
“Tell us about Sean Lawlor.”
There was a twitch at the corner of his lips before he said, “Who?”
Over the earbud I wore, I heard Carstensen say, “That’s a lie.”
I said, “Lawlor, Sean. The former SAS sniper you hired to perform at least three murders in the past four years. Your name turned up in his Scotland Yard file after he was killed following the assassination of Senator Walker. But of course you know all that.”
“I do not know what you’re talking about.”
Mahoney said, “You understand that by refusing to cooperate, you are aiding forces hostile to the sovereign security of the United States?”
“I am not cooperating with any—”
“You could be taken out and shot or hung, Mr. Kasimov,” I said. “It’s not what we want, but it is what could happen if you don’t start speaking truthfully.”
When Kasimov glared at us, we both returned flat gazes.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I did know this Lawlor person. He did two jobs for me, not three. Both domestic affairs. Russian domestic affairs.”
We asked him how he’d contacted Lawlor. Through a middleman, a number he called when he needed such work done. He agreed to give the number to us but said the access code was usually changed every six months, and he hadn’t needed any such services in more than a year.
“Beyond that, I tell you for certain, and on my mother’s grave, I know nothing more,” Kasimov said.
“I think you’re in it up to your eyeballs,” Mahoney said.
The Russian threw back his head and laughed. “I am not that smart or cunning or ruthless, Mr. Special Agent of the FBI. Believe it or not, I think we should all coexist in peace. I mean, who needs war?”
“Right,” I said, “who needs war if you can achieve the same ends through political assassinations?”
Kasimov sighed. “Whoever are these masterminds you look for, they are playing games with you, I think. Yes, they are theorists, like the chess player. You know, somebody who thinks ahead twenty, fifty steps, this is the kind of person you search for, Dr. Cross. Me? My mind is simple. I do what I’m told.”
“Unless you’re raping women,” Ned said.
He gave us a weary expression. “I don’t know how these lies follow me.”
I decided a different route might be more helpful. “So what else do you think was behind the assassinations? Hypothetically. What’s the purpose? A takeover?”
Kasimov perked up, thought about that, and then shook his head. “If it was to be an attack on your shores, it would have happened already.”
“We had multiple cyberattacks coming out of your country and China and North Korea in the immediate wake of the assassinations,” Mahoney said.
“Just what you’d expect,” he said dismissively. “The sudden shift in power leaves a vacuum and gives an excuse and opportunity to look around, to — how do you Americans say it? To see what’s what? The U.S.A. would do the same thing if the situation were reversed. Look, in my humble opinion, the money is where you should focus your attention. The whole Russia thing? It’s a dead end, I tell you. What did your Watergate Deep Throat teach you? Follow the money.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, and I was thinking Bree had better get back on the phone with her contacts at Scotland Yard to find out if they’d managed to track down Lawlor’s bank accounts. But then there was a knock at the door.
In my ear, I heard Carstensen say, “Who the hell is that?”
I got up, opened the door a crack, and saw Rawlins standing there.
“Keith, I’m in the middle of—”
“Take a break,” he said. “Your trap? It caught a bug, maybe two.”
Chapter 87
When I looked up from the screens and data the FBI consultant had been showing me, it was 5:21 a.m. on Sunday, February 7, two days after President Hobbs and the others were assassinated.
“Do that second sweep we talked about, and I’ll be right back,” I said, and I ran to the booth outside the interrogation room where Kasimov was still talking with Mahoney.
I knocked sharply, stuck my head in. “Madam Deputy Director, I need to show you something ASAP.”
Carstensen looked annoyed at having to leave the Russian, who was explaining how he’d paid Lawlor for his services, but she came out into the hall.
“What is it?”
“Probably better to let Rawlins explain,” I said. “Mahoney needs to see this too. Kasimov can wait a few minutes.”
Rawlins soon had the three of us looking over his shoulders at the trio of screens before him.
“The algorithm’s function was Dr. Cross’s idea,” the FBI consultant said. “He asked me to write it to sift through NSA-gathered data limited to international phone calls and international data transmissions cross-referenced with proximity to eight specific locations and times.”
He typed on his keyboard. The screen changed to a satellite image of the lower forty-eight states. Seven digital pins glowed on the map.
Rawlins zoomed in on each, and I identified them.
1. Senator Walker’s murder scene in Georgetown
2. The murder scene of the assassin Sean Lawlor, a few blocks away
3. GW University Hospital, where the former Senate president pro tempore had died two mornings ago
4. The DC arena where the late president and the secretary of defense had been shot
5. The street where Bree and DC Metro SWAT had engaged in a firefight with West Coast gangbangers
6. The West Texas ranch where the Speaker and secretary of state were assassinated and, to the north of it, the site of the remote cabin that had been burned down
7. The motel room that Kristina Varjan had booby-trapped
8. Lower Manhattan, where the treasury secretary had been shot