Silver

22

The ICE train from Berlin to Koblenz took six hours.

Konstantin Khavin chose the first airline-style window seat in the silent carriage. The seat backed onto the restroom, meaning no one could sit behind him and he could see anyone walking toward him. It was an ingrained habit. He didn’t want noise. He didn’t want people pretending they were important and talking into their mobile phones for the entire journey. He didn’t want kids with their annoying little computer games chirping and bleeping at him. And most of all he didn’t want someone sitting next to him and talking at him for six hours. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts, either looking out of the window at the world rolling by or with his eyes closed, pretending sleep.

The carriage was five degrees cooler than it was outside, and maintained at a constant sixty-eight by precision German engineering. The air was lifeless, pumped into the car as though it were an airplane.

Konstantin breathed deeply, letting the manufactured air leak slowly out of his nose.

Lethe had briefed him an hour ago. He had filled him in on everything the rest of the team had discovered. It was a lot to digest.

When Lethe finally stopped talking Konstantin said simply, “And I am to kill them, yes? That is what the old man wants?”

That was the Russian way. Already his mind was running through possible scenarios. He could walk into Devere’s office and take him out of the picture. One bullet was all it would take. Not even that, men like Devere were seldom fighters. Konstantin could simply walk up behind him and snap his neck as brutally and efficiently as that. Or he could wait for him in the street, drag him down a dirty alley and leave him in a stack of garbage sacks for the rats to gnaw on. He could rent a car, run Devere off the road, then stand over his flashy sports car while it burned. There were as many different ways to die as there were hours in a year. The end result was the same. That was all that mattered.

There was a certain elegance to the Russian solution sometimes.

It would be different with Orla. Extraction not execution. It would need more thoughtful planning. He didn’t have time to thoroughly case the area, so he would have to rely upon shock. Hit them before they had a chance to react. Come at night. Make lots of noise. Full of fury. In the dark of night fear was as good a companion as a second shooter. But he would need more than just his Glock 19.

Lethe killed the fantasy before he could lock the slide on the imaginary gun. “No. You’re not to kill anyone, Koni. At least I hope you’re not. The old man’s got other plans for you. Devere’s in Koblenz. He’s the money-he isn’t likely to do the thing himself, but he’s going to want to watch what he’s paid so much for. He won’t be able to resist. It’ll be like the Kennedy Assassination. Everyone will say ‘where were you when the Pope got shot?’ and Miles Devere wants to be able to say ‘I was there. I saw the whole thing with my own two eyes.’ Koblenz fits the prophecy-it’s a city split by two major rivers, the Rhine and the Moselle-and the Pope is scheduled to be in the city for the next forty-eight hours before moving on to an engagement in Krakow. Your job is simple,” Lethe said without a hint of irony. “You stop it from happening at all costs. Whatever it takes, Koni. Keep him alive. It’s as simple as that.

“I’ll be raising flags on the Bundeskriminalamt INPOL database. I’ll give them every face from that photograph in Masada, every name from the dig. I’ll build them as complete a profile to work off as I possibly can in the time, and meanwhile the old man will be calling in the cavalry. You won’t be alone, Koni, but here’s the kicker: you won’t be able to trust anyone. As far as we can tell Orla spoke to no one outside of the IDF in Israel, and Mabus took her. If they can infiltrate the Israeli Defense Force, they can sure as hell infiltrate the BKA, or at least know how to pose as some down-at-the-heel German detective. Trust no one, my fine Russian friend.”

“It will be just like old times,” Konstantin said.

“I thought you’d like that,” Lethe said.

Konstantin thought about it.

It made sense.

Orla was in trouble. But Orla was a big girl, big enough to look after herself. She had done it before, and she would do it again. She was a soldier. She was trained for this. She was resourceful. Capable. The old man had chosen her for a reason. He trusted the old man’s judgment. For that reason he shunted her out of his thoughts. He needed to focus on the things he could influence.

“I appreciate the irony of the situation,” Konstantin said, “but I do not like it. I would be much happier going to Tel Aviv and killing the men who have taken our girl.”

“Me too, my friend. You doing the killing, obviously, not me. I could barely crush a wasp. Look after yourself, Koni. I’m going to send a data packet to your cell phone in a minute; it’s got the Pope’s itinerary on it for the next forty-eight hours-who he’s meeting, where, and how he’s getting there. I’ll also send you the parade route. His Holiness is scheduled to lead prayers tonight in the Florinsmarkt. The dais is being constructed on the exact same spot where the gallows used to stand. Part of the prayer service will also be to sanctify the unholy ground. I’m thinking, if anything is going to happen, this is the most likely place. It’s a crowded square overlooked on all sides. Plenty of angles of opportunity.”

“Precisely why it is least likely, then,” Konstantin said. “It is where security will be tightest. What about the parade route?”

“The cavalcade will run along the riverside and through the Old Town. The route’s a little over three miles with plenty of meet-and-greet spots. It’s going to be pretty exposed from what I can see on the computer screen. Hardly any of the streets have the same sort of blanket surveillance camera coverage we’re used to, so I’m not going to be a lot of use when the shit starts hitting the fan.”

“You do what you do, I will do what I do,” Konstantin said, and hung up.

The rhythm of the wheels on the tracks was soothing. He found himself dropping into a thought pattern that coincided with the duh-duh-da-duh duh-duh-da-duh vibration that shivered te floor beneath his feet.

Provided the train ran according to the schedule, he would arrive around two and a half hours before the Pope was scheduled to deliver evening prayers. That gave him a little time to walk the parade route, looking for possible vantage points a sniper might use and that kind of thing, but crowds would be gathering at the same time, making his job more difficult.

There was corruption here. The entire thing reeked of it.

Humanity Capital was big business. Devere Holdings was bigger business. That Miles Devere had been in Israel at the time of the quake and worked with the real Akim Caspi put him right at the middle of this particularly tangled knot Konstantin was trying to unravel.

He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe was right; Devere would want to see the endgame played out, but he wasn’t an ideologue like Mabus. Devere was a money man. Devere had money. Money bought people. It was a fairly simplistic worldview, but he’d yet to have it disproved. He had corporate muscle. He developed corporate strategies that exploited the system, and he loved the system quite simply because it allowed him to exploit it.

Mabus was a different beast entirely. He didn’t hire mercenaries to prolong a conflict or bribe men to hit a civilian ward so that he could be hired to rebuild it. He wasn’t a profiteer. He didn’t need to be. He was a zealot, just like the Sicarii had been two millennia ago. And like any zealot he relied upon fanaticism as his stock in trade. Mabus had a single core belief: the Church was founded upon a lie. The man history loathed as the great betrayer was in truth the real Messiah, a religio-martial liberator who made his sacrifice out of love, sealing it with a kiss.

That belief had caused Mabus to bring together thirteen others and forge them as self-styled Disciples of Judas. Those thirteen had cast their nets out, recruiting others to their faith. Together they formed the Shrieks. Their purpose? The only one that made any sort of sense to the Russian was an attack on the very foundations the Catholic Church was built upon. After all Judas was their Messiah, not Jesus. Why should the world pray to the cross and drink the blood of Christ if his entire life was a lie? What salvation was there in that? It was a seductive way of reasoning.

He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He checked it. Lethe’s data packet had arrived. He opened it, checking the locations, dates and times, and realized there were far too many for comfort. Protecting the man was going to be a nightmare. Even without walking the parade route he knew there would be far too many places an assassin could hide. Modern sniper rifles made it possible for a skilled shooter to be so far removed from the scene that chasing them was next to impossible if so many of the variables of the murder weren’t already fixed. So, of course, the last ting Konstantin was going to do was waste his time trying to protect the Pope. Besides, he had his personal guard, willing to take a bullet for him and earn their place in heaven. And of course, the entire BKA would be on high alert from the moment he stepped out into public. No, Konstantin would put his particular skills set to a slightly different use. As the old football adage went, attack was the best form of defense.

He would find the man and kill him before he could pull the trigger.

That gave him anything from three hours to two full days to find the assassin, depending upon when he had decided to take the shot.

The train rolled on. Konstantin found himself drowsing. He let himself slide into a shallow sleep. He had no idea when he might sleep again.

While he slept he dreamed in Russian. In his dream Mabus was the snake in the darkness, whispering with its forked tongue. He held his Glock but couldn’t see what he was aiming at. And then he saw it, the snake coming out of the darkness. He pulled the trigger again and again and again, making the snake writhe. He shot ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred bullets into its cold skin. He was a snake charmer, making it rise. Then the creature arced forward and bit him. He fired and fired and fired again.

He woke with a start, lurching forward in his seat.

The ICE train was pulling into a town that looked like it had been lifted straight from the fairy tale world of Grimms’ fables.

The driver announced the next station. It wasn’t Koblenz. He closed his eyes again. This time he did not allow himself to sleep. He was hungry, he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. He walked along to the restaurant car and ordered a too-hot cup of black coffee and a microwaved pizza slice in a silver-lined box along with a cinnamon bun dripping white icing, and a candy bar. It was all sugar food. Fast energy junk. But he didn’t feel like a sit-down silver-service dinner, which was the only alternative, so it would have to do.

He worked his way back through the train, rolling with the motion of the car as it leaned into the long curves in the track, until he was back in his seat. He sipped at the coffee. He ate the pizza in six bites, barely taking the time to chew before he swallowed, he was so hungry. He licked the stringy cheese from his fingers.

If he thought like a Russian, it made sense that the Disciples of Judas would want the Church’s “papa” dead. It was a bold move. It was a strike right at the heart of their false messiah. It obeyed the Moscow Ru come hard, come fast and leave them frightened. It was just like breaking down the door at four a.m. and dragging a man out of bed, naked, kicking, screaming and, most important of all, helpless. But more than that, with the eyes of the world watching, it turned the murder of one man into a spectacle.

The driver announced Koblenz Hauptbahnhof.

Konstantin wrapped the bun in the napkin it came with and crammed it and the candy bar into his pocket and moved toward the door.

He stepped off the train straight onto the set of a macabre morality tale straight from the Grimms’ repertoire. It was fitting, given the gingerbread quality of the houses and the quaint narrowness of the cobbled streets. There were police waiting at the end of the platform. Instinctively Konstantin reached for his pocket for his papers. The fear was ingrained in him. It took him a moment to remember this wasn’t Moscow and these men weren’t looking for traitors to the Soviet cause. They didn’t care if he was a defector, but it was hard for him to forget that he was exactly that. He walked toward the station house. Not too quickly, not too slowly. The policeman nodded slightly as he past. Konstantin inclined his head a fraction.

The station house had that unique railway station smell, a combination of flowers, fast-food grease, diesel engines and the desperation of a place where people were forever saying goodbye.

There were ten uniformed officers that he could see spread out across the platforms and the main entrance. In the few minutes it took him to walk across to the coffee stand beside the ticket office, buy a piping hot Americano that came served in a paper cup thin enough to burn the fingers, sit down on a bench and drink it, they didn’t challenge a single traveler. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but they obviously didn’t see it in the faces of the bald businessmen, the skinhead in the torn Clash tee-shirt that said London was calling, or the woman in the high heels and A-line skirt whose powerful calf muscles turned all the heads as she walked by. They didn’t see it in the bearded man in his college professor jacket with worn-out elbows, or the lanky student with his sunglasses and dyed-black hair that hung down past his shoulders.

He took the crushed bun from his pocket and unwrapped the napkin. The icing stuck to the tissue, the tissue stuck to the bun and then both stuck to his fingers as he tried to tease them apart. Konstantin took his time, savoring the bun. A tramp came and sat down on the bench beside him. He smelled as though he hadn’t bathed in a month; it was that sour stench that reached down his throat and made him want to gag. Konstantin took the candy bar from him pocket and offered it to the man, who took it, peeled it out of its wrapper and ate it hungrily. Pigeons gathered around their feet. One hopped up onto the bench beside the tramp. A woman came and sat on the other end of the bench and started to read a newspaper. The tramp spread his arms out, trying to shoo the birds away, but that only brought more. Together they looked like a curious reworking of the Last Supper: Jesus, Mary, Judas and the birds.

Konstantin finished his coffee and threw the sticky napkin in the bin.

The police guarding the station watched him walk toward them. The timetables and maps were on the wall beside them.

They didn’t stop him.

He took his phone from his pocket. At less than two inches squared the route map was almost useless, but it was enough for him to check up against the street map beside the timetables and ICE, Inter City and regional rail schematic maps. He studied the two for a few minutes, committing them to memory. “Do you need any help?” the nearest of the uniformed officers asked, seeing him staring at the street map.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Konstantin told him without looking away from the map. The parade route followed the line of the Rhine for two of its three miles before turning in toward the Old Town. There were several landmarks, including, of course, the massive Ehrenbrietstein citadel on the opposite bank of the river. Then there was the aluminum factory and the automotive brakes manufacturing plant. Both had a lot to offer in terms of isolation, but without seeing them he had no way of knowing whether they presented a genuine shot. Office buildings, hotels, boarding houses-those were the kind of places he was most interested in. Places offering a view, which meant they had to be a few stories above ground level. That almost certainly discounted a lot of the older buildings of the Old Town, meaning the shooter would probably favor the new town with its wider streets and higher buildings. But again, he wouldn’t know for sure without walking the parade route.

Beyond the main portico of the station a curious glass roof rippled out into the center of the main square. The road curved around a paved area. To the right of the entrance a bright yellow DHL van was collecting the day’s deliveries. To the left was the short-term parking lot. It was filled with almost identical “people carriers” and family cars. Bicycles were chained up against every post that supported the glass roof. Even through the glass, the sky above was like some crystal blue mountain stream. Across the street was one of those chain-store cafes that had turned the simple pleasure of drinking a coffee into visiting an emporium. On the far side of the square he saw a building almost entirely constructed of glass. It might have been a design school or a fancy office block, he couldn’t tell. It was at odds with almost every other building around it.

There were signs pointing every which way. He followed the pedestrian route down to the Rhine. The path divided into two, half for cyclists, half for walkers. There was no one for three hundred yards ahead of him. Konstantin took his time walking, looking left and right like a tourist drinking in the medieval architecture. A small cafe spilled out into the street. The eight wooden tables were empty, but two of them had dirty espresso cups on them and the corner of a napkin that fluttered in the wind. Next door, buckets of tulips, sunflowers, velvet-headed roses and other colorful bunches of flowers had been arranged around the doorway. There was a white handwritten sign in the door saying “Closed,” but a striking middle-aged woman stood in the window, fixing the display. Seeing him, she smiled. Konstantin smiled back. The windows of the first floor were dark, as there were no skylights. He turned to follow the angle of trajectory from the first floor as best he could, but it was far from ideal. In the shooter’s place he wouldn’t have used it. That was enough for him to dismiss it.

Down at a waterfront kiosk he bought a packet of unfiltered cigarettes. The man took his money. They exchanged pleasantries. Konstantin mentioned the barriers and the shopkeeper burst out laughing. “Where have you been for the last month, my friend? The Pope’s coming to cleanse us of all of our sins,” he said, still grinning. “In a few hours you won’t be able to walk here for people. It’ll be crazy.” He didn’t smoke, so he didn’t have a lighter to light the cigarette he put in his mouth. The barriers ran all the way along the riverside. A few people had already taken their places at the front as though they were queuing for pop royalty at a sellout concert. They had their picnic baskets and neat little tripod stools. He liked the way a father took a chocolate bar and broke it into squares, giving one each to his wife and the two children.

“Any trouble?”

The shopkeeper kept on smiling. “Here? Trust me, the only reason kids hang around on street corners is because they’re waiting for the lights to change.”

Konstantin smiled at that. Most people believed the towns they lived in were safe, at least averagely so, but looking around him he knew he could probably take the shopkeeper at his word. There was some industry, so that meant there was probably some friction, and given the tight economic climate all across Europe, that friction probably escalated into the odd fist fight on a Friday night. Fairy tale twin town didn’t look like it had a high instance of breaking and entering, car thefts or other antisocial crimes. There was very little in the way of graffiti that he had seen, even on the tunnel walls or along the wall that kept pedestrians back from the water’s edge. Of course that could have been due to clean-up crews for the papal visit.

And as idyllic as it looked on the surface, plenty of nastiness could be happening behind those cookie-cutter windows and he would have been none the wiser.

Konstantin hopped over the metal barrier and walked down the center of the road. He intended to walk the parade three times before the Popemobile drove the Pope to the steps of St. Florin’s.

Contrary to what he had told Lethe there was almost nowhere along the entire riverside part of the parade that would make for a good, clean shot. He walked over to the wall and looked across the water up at the citadel. If the shooter was up there, he didn’t have a prayer. It made sense from a tactical standpoint. The Popemobile was a specially adapted Mercedes Benz M class SUV. There was a special glass-enclosed “room” built onto the rear of the vehicle. The glass would be bulletproof, of course, and the roof reinforced with armor plating. To pierce the glass, the shooter would need to be good enough to fire a fatal triangle-three shots in a triangle so tight they literally joined the dots. An experienced sniper would be capable of making the shot in the right conditions, but then it came down to trajectory, distance, wind, whether it was a moving target, reaction times of the security detail and all of these other intangibles the shooter couldn’t know before he lined up the shot.

Taking the shot either as the principal entered or exited the protection of the bulletproof cage made more sense but lacked the spectacle. In an intense moment of paranoia he wondered if someone couldn’t have tampered with one of the windows, prepping it for the shot? The agents riding along would be expecting the glass to protect the Pope. They wouldn’t expect it to betray them.

He reached for his cell and called Lethe. “Two things,” he said before Lethe finished saying hello. “One, get the security detail to triple check the integrity of the glass on the parade car. Two, run the utility bills on every address in a mile radius of the route. I’m thinking the shooter will have found himself a spot two weeks, ten days ago. He could be the kind of cold pro used to privation, but the guys in Berlin were a joke. Which means it is unlikely-but it’s possible-that this guy might have turned the water on. No phone, the cell coverage is fine. Three, look for buildings that are supposed to be empty, leases out, that kind of thing.”

Lethe didn’t point out that he was only supposed to say two things, not three. “Will do.”

The more he thought about it, the less likely it felt that he was looking for a shooter.

The window of opportunity was so small, and certainly this waterside route didn’t offer more than one or two possible vantage points, which in itself discounted them because any shooter good enough to hit a fatal triangle on a moving target from the kind of distance they were talking about would be good enough to know that statistically only one or two possible vantage points meant, barring miracles, a zero chance of getting away from the scene. It was uncommon that really good shooters went on suicide missions.

Fanatics went on suicide missions.

This brought him back to thinking about Mabus and Miles Devere.

“Four things,” he said, calling Lethe back up.

“Fire away.”

“You’ve got Devere’s cell, can you trace it?”

“As long as the battery is connected I can run GPS tracking, sure. Wonders of modern technology. There’s no such thing as off the grid.”

“Don’t tell me you can do it, tell me where he is,” Konstantin said. He turned the cigarette over and over again in his fingers. He could understand why nervous people smoked: it gave them something to do with their hands.

Lethe gave him an address in Jesuit Square, part of the Old Town.

Thirty minutes later Konstantin was staring up at one of the curtained windows, sure that the shadow looking back down at him through it was Miles Devere. There was a beautiful symmetry to it. Hunter and hunted locking eyes without either man quite knowing his role in the play of violence. Who was the hunter? Who was the hunted? It appealed to Konstantin’s overdeveloped sense of the theatrical. He was the first to break eye contact, walking toward the building. He wondered if Devere even knew who he was. But of course he did, the Russian reasoned. A man like Devere had to be a control freak. This was his game. He wouldn’t have been able to bear not knowing all of the pieces that were in play.

But how much did he know?

The answer, of course, depended upon how good Devere’s people were. Konstantin Khavin’s service record was sealed, as was everything Her Majesty knew about him, right up until the moment his feet landed on the western side of the Wall. But someone like Lethe would have been able to tell Devere what he’d had for breakfast the day before, the color of his boxers that morning, the last time he’d taken a dump and everything in between. And knowing Lethe, it would have taken him less than five minutes to gather those little gems of personal hygiene. So Konstantin had to assume Miles Devere knew everything two governments held on him and a fair bit beside. He had no idea how that would affect the way things played out, but a good strategist knew what he was going up against and planned accordingly. So again, Konstantin must assume les Deverere would be building his plays around a detailed knowledge of who he was up against.

Was it hubris on Konstantin’s part to think that Devere would give a rat’s ass about who he was and what he’d done during his forty-something years on the planet? If this was Moscow, the answer would have been obvious-even in the microcosm of Nonesuch it was obvious-but out here where people played by money’s rules? Devere had proven he could do whatever he wanted, and not even within reason. He wasn’t averse to buying the guns that killed the men who built the house that Jack built, then he’d sold the mortars that razed the house, meaning someone else had to come along and rebuild it. It was all good business so long as you didn’t care about poor old Jack. Devere had proven he could buy people as easily as he could buy places and things, and that he cared just as little about them. The oligarchs in his country were no different. Perhaps it was the gift of money that did this to people?

Konstantin walked up to the door. The small silver plaque beside it read Devere Holdings was on the third floor. Two of the other businesses in the house belonged to Devere as well. Only the restaurant downstairs wasn’t part of his property portfolio. He pressed the buzzer and, when the voice crackled back unintelligibly through the small speaker, he leaned in and spoke into a concealed microphone: “Konstantin Khavin to see Miles Devere.”

He counted to five, listening to the silence, when the door buzzed open.

Konstantin went in.

He hadn’t intended to confront Devere and had no idea what he would say now he was inside the building. He walked up the narrow marble staircase rather than take the caged elevator, using the two minutes it took to ascend to formulate a plan. The next few minutes were going to be interesting, if nothing else, especially with the opening gambit he had in mind.

pretty young thing stood in the open doorway waiting for him. She looked him up and down, then held out her hand as he stepped onto the landing. “Konstantin, Mister Devere is expecting you. Is there anything I can get you? Tea? Coffee? Something a little stronger?”

She had a disarming smile. He could easily imagine that smile making otherwise sensible, rational men moon about like love-struck fools.

“Water is fine, thank you,” he said.

“Not a problem. Sparkling or plain?”

“Straight out of the tap is fine.”

“Of course. Please, take a seat.” She showed him through to a small reception area that was in complete contrast to the Old World charm of the rest of the building. It was all glass, steel and sharp angles. There were two black leather couches, one beneath the window, the other against the side wall. On the circular steel-framed coffee table lay the usual clutter of well-thumbed magazines. Other than the magazines there was nothing in the small room to suggest that business was ever actually conducted there. The pretty young thing came back through with his water, a bottle of Perrier along with a tall glass and a slice of lime. He’d had worse service in hotels.

Devere made him wait for nine more minutes. It was nothing more than cheap psychology, Devere attempting to establish dominance before they even met. Konstantin uncapped the screw cap on the water and poured himself a small glass. He sipped at it, then walked across to the window. He looked down into Jesuit Square, reconstructing the view in his head and reversing it. This was the window he’d seen Devere looking out of a few minutes earlier. Taking another swallow, Konstantin shifted his attention from the square to the waterside. Even given the relative elevation he couldn’t see more than a few feet of the parade route at a time between the rooftops. For a sniper to take a shot from up here he’d need someone down on the ground giving him a countdown so he knew when to expect the converted white Mercedes to come into view and didn’t end up snatching his shot. Even then, creating a fatal triangle to blow out the bulletproof glass was going to be virtually impossible in the fraction of a second the car would be in view.

At least he could discount the building as a possible base of operations for the shooter. No serious pro would deliberately take a shot three or four times as difficult just for the sake of convenience.

Behind him, Miles Devere entered the reception.

He knew it was Devere without turning. The weight of his footsteps was different. He could smell the cologne-too much of the stuff. And compared to the pretty young thing’s, a considerably richer signature.

“Mister Khavin? It is Mister Khavin isn’t it? How can I help you?”

onstantin didn’t turn. Facing the glass he said, “I believe you’re planning on killing the Pope in little over an hour. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I thought it only fair to warn you, it’s not going to happen.”

“Oh? And why is that?” Devere said, seemingly amused by this turn of events.

“Because I am going to stop you,” Konstantin said, reasonably.

Now he turned.

Miles Devere was a chiseled sculpture of a man; a David with too-soft features, too perfect a tan and one of those orthodontically enhanced smiles made for the glossy ad pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He was pretty, not handsome. Too pretty to be taken seriously, Konstantin thought, looking at the man. And too pretty not to be hated by half the people who ever saw it. It was the kind of face that no doubt got Devere whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it, be it the smile from the pretty girl behind the shop counter or the head of John the Baptist on a plate. The world liked the pretty ones.

Devere didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by the Russian’s unexpected appearance in his office, nor his allegations. He licked his lips, his smile spreading. “How dreadfully exciting,” Devere said. “Do go on, I love a good story. Come through, make yourself comfortable. I can’t wait to hear how this one ends.”

“There’s only one way it can end,” Konstantin said.

“Oh, do tell?”

“In tears,” Konstantin said. He hadn’t really thought of what he was going to say beyond this point. His sole intention in coming here had been to rattle Devere. It didn’t appear that it had worked quite as well as he had hoped it might.

“Well, well, it seems we agree on something, after all. There was me thinking this was going to be a thoroughly boring afternoon. I do so hate waiting, don’t you?”

They walked through to Devere’s office, though office was something of a misnomer. It was like a geek boy’s nerdvana, floor to ceiling gadgets. There was a miniature robot on his glass-topped desk that swiveled its head at the sound of their voices. The shelves were book-ended with silver Daily Planet globes. He noticed smaller memorabilia from other science fiction movies, and it took him a moment to realize they were all mechanical, like the golden androids of Metropolis and Star Wars, Maria and C3-P0, Dewey from Silent Running, Box from Logan’s Run, Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, K9 from Doctor Who and others he didn’t recognize. It was strange that a grown man would surround himself with toys. The decor no doubt said a lot about Miles Devere the man.

“Sit, please, make yourself comfortable.”

Konstantin sat in one of the two armchairs in the room while Devere sat behind his desk. It was another subtle power play, the desk between them, the slight height difference between the armchairs and the desk chair all combined to give Devere dominance over the situation. Konstantin didn’t care. He sat back in the armchair, crossed his right leg over his left and breathed deeply, stretching the muscles of his back.

“Perhaps you could answer a question for me?” Devere asked, quite reasonably. “Why, if you are so sure I intend to kill the Pope, would you come here and start annoying me? I am not quite sure I follow the logic of it.”

“Because that is the way it is done in my country, face to face. Death is man’s business, not a coward’s.”

“So you’re saying you are going to kill me now? You really are quite unbelievable. What was your name again? I think I should learn the name of the man who is going to kill me, don’t you?” Devere shook his head slowly, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard.

“Konstantin Khavin.”

“Konstantin Khavin,” Devere repeated, saying it slowly.

“Yes. First I will stop your man, then I will come back for you. That is a promise. When you hear that first gunshot you should start running, Mister Devere, because the second one won’t be all that far behind; and as the villain says in all the bad movies, it will have your name on it. I doubt that someone who still likes to play with toy robots will be all that hard to kill, no matter how much money he has. What do you think?”

“I think you should leave now,” Miles Devere said. The smile had left his lips.

The meeting had been rash, and unwise, and so many other words that meant “really bad idea” but Konstantin couldn’t help smiling as he walked out onto the street of Jesuit Square. He had enjoyed rattling Devere, but there was more to it than that. He called Lethe.

“Fifth thing,” he said.

“Like the Hatter, five impossible things before breakfast. That’s me, Jude Lethe, Mad as a Hatter.”

“Trace every line in and out of Devere Holdings’ office here from about two minutes ago.”

“May I ask why?”

“I just told Devere I was going to kill him,” Konstantin said. Beside him, a woman turned and gave him the weirdest of looks, halfway between horror and embarrassment. She obviously didn’t know if she was supposed to take him literally at his word-after all people threatened to kill each other every day and didn’t actually mean it-and was clearly ashamed she’d been caught eavesdropping. Konstantin shrugged and she hurried off.

“Smooth,” Lethe said. “Nothing like putting the cat amongst the pigeons.”

“He’s going to make a call, or he already has, depending upon how much I upset him,” Konstantin said. “Find out who he calls.”

“You know I will.”

Konstantin hung up.

How the next hour or so would play out depended very much on who Miles Devere called. If he called the shooter, it would act to trigger one chain of events. If he called Mabus, it would trigger a very different one. And if he called someone else, then it would mean Konstantin really hadn’t got the measure of who he was up against and would necessitate some thinking on his feet as he improvised a third one.

More people had begun to congregate for the papal visit. The parade route was beginning to look quite crowded. If Konstantin had judged the route right, and the crawl of the Popemobile, he had about half an hour before they reached here. Looking at the majority of them he found it hard to imagine any of this flock had a religious bone in their bodies.

The difference in the quarter of an hour or so that he had been off the streets was noticeable. He checked his watch. The parade ought to have started a few minutes ago. In a little over half an hour the benediction would begin.

Konstantin closed his eyes, recalling as best he could the layout of the city, and headed in what he thought was the direction of the Florinsmarkt. Five minutes later the phone in his pocket began to vibrate. He answered it. “Who did he call?”

“I love you, Koni, in a very manly way, of course. I don’t think I’ve said it before, but I just wanted to make sure you knew.”

“Yes, yes, who did he call?”

“Not one, not two, but, wait for it, three calls in as many minutes. The first was to the mothership in Canary Wharf, the Devere Holdings building. That one took me by surprise. It certainly wasn’t the call I was expecting. The second was more interesting, to an unlisted pay-as-you-go cell phone which was part of a bulk order placed in London a month ago. I think it is safe to assume this one was to your shooter. The third call was the shortest of all of them, to a landline in Switzerland. Again the number’s registered to another branch of the Devere corporate network; this time, though, it was one of daddy’s.”

“Spit it out.”

“There you go spoiling my fun again. The third call was to the Humanity Capital offices in Geneva. Happy now?”

Not really, but he didn’t say anything to Lethe. He needed to think. He hadn’t expected Devere to call daddy-that threw his thinking for a loop. London made sense because it was the base of operations for the multinational concern; information would traffic through the hub and filter out to wherever it needed to be. Calling the shooter to warn him made sense as well. It was the call he had hoped to illicit with his impromptu visit. That was the call that told him he had read Miles Devere correctly. The man was used to being in control. He hadn’t been able to resist checking in with his man.

No, what surprised him was that he had expected one of the calls up the chain to Mabus, meaning a number out in Israel. Tel Aviv, most likely. It was possible that Mabus was in either London or Geneva, but it was unlikely. Given the level of mystery around the terrorist’s identity he couldn’t imagine Devere entrusting that call to one of his grunts, especially considering Devere’s psychology.

ize="3Could you trace the second call?” Konstantin asked, still thinking.

Lethe sucked in a wounded breath. “I’ll let you off this once, Koni, but only because I just professed my love for you. That’s how good I am to you, remember that. Could I trace the call, indeed? Sheesh. Does a naked Pope shit in the woods?”

Konstantin said nothing.

“The answer you’re looking for is ‘of course’ because he’s Papa Bear, get it? Goldilocks? Sometimes I think my genius is wasted on you, Koni. Yes, I triangulated the signal from the cell phone to a building on one of the approach streets to St Florin’s. Mehlgasse, number 13.”

“Unlucky for some,” Konstantin said, killing the connection. He pocketed the phone.

It took him seven minutes to cover the ground from Jesuit Square to Mehlgasse. It wasn’t one of the streets cordoned off for the papal visit, making it ideal for the getaway. Konstantin walked along the sidewalk. The buildings rose higher here, up to five and six stories. He scanned row after row of blind windows as he walked down the street.

He checked his watch again. Less than thirty minutes before the benediction was due to begin. He didn’t like the way time seemed to be accelerating on him.

There was nothing remarkable about number 13, nothing that said this was the house hiding an assassin. It was an utterly average facade, with row after row of plain windows. There were no balconies. He studied the top row of windows. A flicker of movement below caught his eye. A curtain moving in the window furthest from the Square. The window was open six inches. Enough clearance for a shot.

Konstantin turned, following the trajectory from the window as best he could from below. The angle of the shot was tight. The shooter would only be able to see a fraction of the square itself, but he had a partial view of the stage that had been constructed. Assuming the steps up onto the stage were on the left, what the shooter had was an unobstructed view of the Pope as he climbed them up onto the stage and his first four or five steps across the red cloth toward his papal chair.

He pictured the scene, the white Mercedes Benz pulling up beside the dais, the Pope and his guard climbing out, and being escorted to the stage. For the short time it took to get from the car to the chair the old man was a sitting duck. The bottom of the street closest to the church square was blocked off. He saw two BKA agents standing bythe barricade. Worshippers had come to stand beside them. By the time the Holy Father arrived the crowd would be twenty or thirty deep.

Konstantin looked back up at the window.

There it was again, the slight movement of the curtain as though whoever was behind it was checking the stage area obsessively. It was oddly amateurish, but not out of keeping with the debacle of their surveillance efforts in Berlin.

He counted the windows: fifth floor, forth window across.

He shielded his eyes, trying to see more of what was going on behind the glass, but he didn’t have the angle to see much more than a patch of the ceiling.

He checked his watch again. Twenty-five minutes until the parade was due to reach the square. He thought about calling in to Lethe, alerting the BKA officers, playing it by the book, but not only would that have made a liar out of him, it would have risked compromising him. It wasn’t only that he had told Devere he was going to stop the assassination, and then he was going to go back and kill him-which pandered to his overdeveloped sense of justice-his movements put him in Berlin before the sarin gas attack, and now he was here. It was too much of a coincidence, and he couldn’t call on the Service to help him out. It also meant he was a prime suspect. They’d close off the road and rail, hit every lodging house and hotel, turning the place over. He was alone. Which meant making the best out of a bad job. It was as black and white as that, as far as he was concerned. That didn’t mean he was happy with the situation.

He tried the street door. There was an intercom on the wall beside it. Assuming the buttons mirrored the layout of the building, he pressed his way down the line, skipping the buttons for the fifth floor. Thirty seconds later someone buzzed him in. It never failed. He tried to tell himself this was one of the good things about living in the West, but really all it meant to him was if he wanted to go on a killing rampage, statistically speaking, some idiot would let him into whatever building he chose. It didn’t matter how secure or safe it was supposed to be.

Again he took the stairs, but as a precaution he opened the door on the cage elevator, breaking the circuit so it couldn’t be called.

He climbed slowly and steadily.

He didn’t draw his gun until the third-floor landing.

He carried on up to the fourth, the muzzle of the Glock 19 leading the way.

He stopped before he reached the fifth floor and leaned against the elevator cage. The steady rise and fall of his own breathing was the only sound he could hear in the entire stairwell. He moved up to the landing, keeping his center of gravity low, his stride powerful as he climbed the stairs three at a time. The stairwell came out in the middle of the landing. There were two doors to the right, two to the left. The two farthest doors opened into apartments that looked out over the back of the street, the two middle doors onto the front. The doors themselves were old-fashioned heavy wood, but the locks were nothing special. He could have bumped it in thirty seconds flat. Instead he put a shot right into the middle of metal ring and kicked it down. The wood around the latch splintered under the force of the blow and the door flung inwards, slamming off the wall.

He felt the timing ticking away from him.

Konstantin stepped into the apartment, gun aimed straight ahead.

The place had that musty unlived-in smell that only comes with months if not years of emptiness. The carpets had been ripped up, leaving bare wooden floorboards and, in places, patches of old newspaper that had obviously been used to line the floor before the carpets had been laid. They were yellow with age and brittle beneath his feet as he walked over them.

He checked left and right, clearing each room as he went.

The kitchen and bathroom were empty. He tore back the shower curtain. There was no one there. The shooter hadn’t passed him on the stairs and he hadn’t been able to call the elevator, so he had to be in the room. He stepped into the lounge, the room overlooking the corner of the Florinsmarkt.

It took him a split second to process what he saw.

There was a sniper rifle on a tripod by the window, a cell phone on the windowsill, a little, plastic toy robot dog that yapped while he stared at it, the sudden burst of noise startling him. He stepped back instinctively toward the nearest wall, cutting off the number of angles he could be attacked from. On the windowsill the sudden motion of the dog caused the curtain to twitch. It barked twice while he was watching, then fell quiet. There was nothing else in the room.

Heart hammering, he checked the two bedrooms.

Both of them were empty. There was no furure and no cupboards for the shooter to hide in.

The apartment was empty, but it didn’t look like it had been abandoned in a hurry, unless the shooter had incredible discipline. There was no trash, no drink cans, no sleeping bag, nothing to suggest anyone had been in the place since the sniper rifle was set up on the tripod.

He leaned down, checking out the shot through the scope. It wasn’t lined up on the stage or any of the area around it. In fact it seemed to be aimed at one of the five trees in the main square, a fair distance from the stage itself. It seemed odd to go to the effort of setting the shot up early and not have it lined up precisely, but it was possible the shooter had knocked it as he’d cleared the room. Or perhaps it was a superstition thing and he didn’t want to aim at the target until there was something there to kill. He squinted at the tree itself and realized a dozen or more bird feeders had been strung up from the branches. The tree was hiding an entire flock of hungry birds.

That was interesting.

There was quite a crowd gathered in the square already. He checked his watch yet again, feeling like an obsessive compulsive. There was less time on it than before and no shooter. Individually, both facts were bad enough; together they were the worst of all possible worlds.

He checked out the gun itself.

That was when he knew for sure the entire thing was a set-up. There was a small timer set on the side of the stock and attached to the trigger guard. The timer was ticking down. It had 27 minutes left on it. Twenty-seven minutes would not only have placed the Pope in the square, it would have put him up on the stage. Konstantin checked his watch to be sure. The benediction was due to begin in 21 minutes. This gun was never intended to kill the Pope. Devere’s call to the cell phone here had triggered the timer, setting everything into motion. It was like that kids’ game, Mouse Trap. The shot would go off, itself triggered by the timer, the bullet would fly straight into the tree where it would startle the birds nesting there. The sudden explosion of movement and the ricochet of the gunshot would trigger panic in the crowd. In the seconds immediately after the shock of the gunshot someone close would then step in and kill the Pope while everyone else was looking frantically left and right for a shooter that didn’t exist.

He took the cell phone from his pocket and called Lethe to fill him in.

“I hate to say it, Koni, but it makes sense,” Lethe said in his ear. “Think about who we’re dealing with here. If they’ve modeled themselves on the Sicarii, surely they’ll mirror the Sicarii MO: get close, be trusted, and slip the knife in even as you’re calling out for help.”

“Great,” Konstantin grumbled. “Trust no one.”

He looked at his watch again: 19 minutes.

“What doesn’t make sense is why Devere would trigger the remote timer immediately after your visit… He must have known we’d trace it and find the gun. He’s not an idiot, you said so yourself. You don’t plan something as elaborate as this and then blow it on a single phone call.”

“But it wasn’t a single call was it? There were three. He played us. Mudak,” he cursed in his mother tongue. “He hid the important call in plain sight, giving us something closer to home to worry about.” He slammed the side of his fist off the window frame and cursed again. “Geneva!” he spat, the pain focusing his brain. “Swiss Guard! Every member of the Guard have to serve in the Swiss Army, right? That was the call. It’s one of the Guard. The inner circle’s been breached.” Konstantin realized the implications of what he had just said. He had 18 minutes before the papal cavalcade arrived at the stage, and the people he needed to trust the most to do their job, to protect the Pope, were the ones he could trust the least to do their job.

e looked out of the window. There were perhaps a thousand people congregated in and around the square now.

“What do we do?” Lethe asked.

The truth was Konstantin had no idea. He knelt and started to strip the timer away from the gun, but stopped. Devere had warned the assassin-that’s what the call to Geneva had been about-but it didn’t mean he had called the man off. But if the gun didn’t go off, the assassin wouldn’t strike. That was a stone cold certainty. If the assassin didn’t strike in the next half an hour, when they knew where he was, he could strike tomorrow or the day after or the day after, anywhere along the pilgrimage’s long road. And if he was right and the assassin was part of the Swiss Guard, he could wait until they were “safe” in the Holy See and no one would be any the wiser. No, this was the one place they knew something was planned to go down.

Knowing gave them a hand, if not the upper hand. There was a chance the assassin could take the gunshot to mean Konstantin wasn’t as good as he was, wasn’t as close. It was a risk. All he could do was get close to the stage. That way when the gun went off and the birds exploded from the trees in a flurry of wings and screams, he would be the one person watching the stage. It was a dangerous game to be playing, but he wasn’t about to throw his hand in now.

“We use the Pope as bait,” he said, realizing, even as he said it, the stakes of the gamble he was about to make. It wasn’t just one man’s life he was playing with here.