“Now you open,” Devereaux said.
Le Coq bared his teeth, and Devereaux shoved the roll in his mouth and then fastened it with a handkerchief.
“This is the way this is going to work, Le Coq,” he said quietly, his face next to the other’s ear. “When Bourgaine comes back in a moment, I’m going to kill him.”
Le Coq’s eye went wide.
“After I kill him, I’m going to ask you a few things. If you answer correctly, I won’t kill you; if you don’t, I’ll kill you as well.”
Le Coq struggled in the chair.
“No. Sit still.” Devereaux was close, his voice low, soothing. “Sit still and watch and think about what I’ve told you.”
Devereaux got up and went to the door and waited on the other side. In one hand, he held the Uzi. The other hand formed an open palm, fingers tight together.
“What are you going to do?” Jeanne Clermont said from the shadows.
But Devereaux did not speak to her.
They waited in silence for a long time. Light began to form outside the single window.
Devereaux’s face was haggard, yet calm.
The door opened and Bourgaine stepped inside. He saw Le Coq in the chair and stood still for a half-second, unable to comprehend the scene, to understand where the danger would come from.
A fatal moment.
Devereaux stepped from behind the door and slammed his opened palm heel up into the other man’s nose at the bridge, driving splinters of bone backward into the brain cavity. The blow could work only with absolute confidence and an unerring sense of force and placement. Devereaux had not hesitated.
Bourgaine’s eyes were wide, not in pain but in wonder, as though he were already seeing eternity.
He was dead as his big body crumpled to the floor. There was no blood, no evidence that Bourgaine had been killed.
Devereaux closed the door slowly and heard the locks snap shut. He walked across the room to the window and looked out. He came back to the chair where Le Coq sat. He untied the handkerchief and pulled the tape roll out of his mouth.
“You killed him,” Le Coq said and gagged. Across the room, in shadows, Jeanne Clermont watched the two men with horror framed in her blue eyes.
“I told you that,” Devereaux said tonelessly. “Now tell me what you know.”
“I won’t be a traitor, I won’t betray—”
Devereaux sat down in the chair across from Le Coq. His eyes appeared sad, as though Le Coq had failed a reading lesson.
“Yes. It’s not so bad to betray when the pain becomes intense enough. You’ll betray everything, with pain or without.”
“Jeanne!” His voice suddenly caught in his throat. “Jeanne! He can’t kill me!”
Devereaux stared at his face.
He did not look behind him.
For a long time, Jeanne Clermont stared at Le Coq. She saw the face of the victim that she had been. She did not feel her wounds, she did not feel her pain in that moment; in that moment, she felt all the pain in all the prisoners.
So I must be the villain as well, she thought. I must betray, I must torture, I must be as villainous as they.
My God, she thought, we are all monsters. Why don’t You have mercy on us? Let us die, at least.
She stared at the thin, wretched face of the terrorist. She felt only pity for him.
Devereaux leaned forward and struck Le Coq on the eye.
Le Coq blinked. The eye turned red and watered. Tears formed and fell down his cheek.
“How can you permit this? Jeanne! Madame!”
She said nothing, but there were tears in her own eyes as well. She saw his fear, felt his pain, felt his despair. All the pity for all the victims welled in her; it was almost a pain in her. She felt her heart would burst.
Devereaux struck him in the good eye again and there was a small bloody cut above the socket, on a ridge with the eyebrow. Blood dripped down, into the red of the single staring frightened eye.
“Now tell me,” Devereaux said.
“My God,” Le Coq cried in tears and pain. “Don’t blind me, don’t blind me!”
“Tell me,” Devereaux said quietly, sitting still on the wooden chair opposite Le Coq.
And, in terror and pain and tears, Le Coq began, slowly, in a broken voice, to tell him everything that he knew about La Compagnie Rouge.
31
General Garishenko crossed the Boulevard of the Cuban Revolution, which was little more than a wide alley, and continued along Petrovsky Avenue. He was of a rank and importance to demand limousine service to his apartment each day, but now, in the good weather, he preferred to walk. The walk to Frunze War College each morning was his only time alone in the day, until he returned home at night to Katharin. In some ways, it counted as the only time when he felt alone with himself, a sort of precious privacy descending like a curtain over his thoughts, shielding them from the constant, vigilant eyes of others.
But for the past three blocks even this time of isolation had been intruded upon.
He has been aware of the black Ziv limousine waiting at the junction of Petrovsky Avenue and V.I. Stavsky Street.
In the shop windows, he saw the reflection of the limousine as it crept behind him.
It was absurd, Garishenko thought: an official car in Moscow following him, yet the occupants were making no secret of their presence even as they seemed reluctant to act further. What was he supposed to do?
The car annoyed him. He felt the freedom of the daily walk shattered by the intrusion of its existence.
In the middle of the block, he stopped and checked the reflection of the following car in the window of a butcher shop that Garishenko had noticed was always closed. This time, he turned and stared back at the car and waited for it with his hands on his hips.
Like a reluctant child called back to the scene of a childish misdemeanor, the black limousine crept slowly along and finally edged to the curb next to General Garishenko. He walked to the car and opened the back door.
“Get in, Comrade General.”
Garishenko recognized him. He had been at the secret conference three days before; he was a powerful man inside the Committee for State Security.
General Garishenko climbed into the padded softness of the limousine and sat down heavily next to the other man. He felt the edge of fear, as he always did when summoned to speak with an agent of the KGB. The other man smelled of cologne; his face was shrunken and white, his body was bloated like the body of a dead fish washed along the shoreline. General Garishenko realized he smelled not only the overpowering odor of the cologne but another smell, one of corruption, coming from the vast body next to him.
Garishenko waited as the car pulled from the curb and picked up speed. The glass partition between the driver and the passenger compartment was closed.
“Do you recognize me?”
“Yes, Comrade Belushka.”
“That’s good. I was at the secret meeting with Gogol three days ago.”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“What do you think of the plan of the apparatchiks?”
Garishenko stared at the sick, old face next to him.
“I know nothing of it.”
“Comrade, please. I understand your caution, but there is no time for it.” The old man turned to the window and stared vacantly at the empty street flashing by. “No time,” he said again, absently, as though speaking to himself. In a moment, he turned back to General Garishenko.
“You know who I am, you know I am in the Committee.”
“Yes.”
“I know many things,” the old man began. “Secrets. My life has been full of secrets.”
Garishenko waited.
“I know about the way that Naya was tampered with. I know even about Tinkertoy in Washington. You see, I was in Washington until this spring.”