The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

36

THORNE TOOK ME BACK WITH HIM TO THE FRONT ROOM. Red came a few minutes later, dragging Kraft next to him. He had tied his hands and feet with the plastic cuffs. He tied my hands but left my feet free. He didn’t bother with Harvey, probably thinking him too weak to fight.

Thorne had the computer out of its case and in front of him on the coffee table. He handed the cord to Red. “Find a plug.” The kid crawled around until he found a wall socket under a side table next to the couch. If Cyrus’s inner soldier was a four-star general, Red’s must have been a buck private-happy to be told what to do and happier to do it.

“Okay, it’s in.”

Cyrus searched for the power switch, found it, and flicked it on. He sat back with both arms out, like a man waiting for his lover to come into his arms. He blinked a few times, waited some more, and then smiled. He rubbed his hands together and leaned forward. Just as he was about to hit the keyboard, his forehead creased. I couldn’t see the monitor, but I heard the familiar whine of a laptop going black and shutting itself down.

Thorne went through the whole routine again. After it shut down the second time, he looked as if he wanted to bash the uncooperative machine. Instead, he picked up his radio and called for someone else to come. We hadn’t seen anyone else, so it could have been anyone. It turned out to be Tatiana. She seemed to pop up wherever the action was. Or maybe it was wherever Thorne was.

Tatiana was dressed in jeans, polo shirt, and Kevlar vest, and she was bristling with weapons-just like one of the boys. Her quasi-soldier gear showed off strong biceps and broad shoulders that I hadn’t noticed on the plane.

“What’s up?”

“It doesn’t work. It keeps shutting itself down.”

“Let me see.”

Tatiana sat on the couch next to Thorne. He slid the laptop over and then hovered. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know. It might be the battery. Go away and let me work.” She was far less deferential than she had been on the plane, which meant her subservient act must have been for my benefit.

While all this was under way, Kraft stirred. First he turned over on his back and stared at the ceiling. When it occurred to him that he wasn’t in the room alone, he managed to sit up. With feet together and hands behind him, it took a few tries. He looked at me. He might have had a concussion. He might have forgotten his own name. He had not forgotten how much he despised me. He treated Harvey as if he weren’t there and spoke to Thorne.

“You won’t stop the story.”

Thorne lunged across the room, grabbed Kraft at the collar and under one armpit. He dragged him to the laptop and practically pushed his head through the monitor.

“What did you do to this thing?”

Kraft laughed at him. “Go to hell.”

Cyrus reached down between Kraft’s legs, grabbed his balls, and squeezed. Kraft let out a high-pitched yowl as he tried, without use of arms and legs, to twist out of his grip. Judging by the bright red hue of Kraft’s face and the escalating screaming, Thorne only squeezed tighter. It went on long enough that I started to feel sick.

“Okay…” Wheeze, wheeze. “Okay, you-” Cough, cough. “You asshole.” Drooling and choking, Kraft barely got the words out. “Let go.”

Thorne released him, and Kraft collapsed with his knees on the floor and his face on the couch. As he tried to catch his breath, Tatiana grabbed him by his scruffy hair and lifted his head. “What’s the deal?”

“The battery’s dead.”

“It’s plugged in. Why would that make any difference?”

“The power runs through the battery. If the battery is completely dead, it doesn’t matter. You can’t get power to it.”

“How have you been running it?”

“I haven’t. It worked long enough to print out the documents I needed. I think it will run on an auxiliary battery, but I haven’t run it since. I didn’t want to mess with it.” Tatiana let go. Kraft dropped to the floor and immediately drew his knees up, either for protection or for relief.

“What does it look like?” Thorne grabbed Kraft’s bag and dumped the contents. “This auxiliary battery.”

“I don’t have one.” Which begged the important question of how he had expected us to get our files off. It seemed to be a moot point.

Thorne went over and sat next to Tatiana. “There are auxiliary power sources you can buy,” she said. Then she lowered her voice, and the two of them conferred, glancing over at us and probably deciding whether to deal with the problem right then or take the machine back to the crack staff in Falls Church. I was voting for right then, because it meant we got to live a little longer.

Thorne closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He unwrapped a cough drop and plunked it in. Then he came over and stood in front of me. “Where’s a Radio Shack around here, and if you give me any crap, I’ll shoot Piss-Boy over here. I don’t really need him.”

I didn’t know the answer. Why didn’t he just check the phone book? “I can tell you where there’s a Staples.” I gave Tatiana driving instructions. She geared down and left.

Red was apparently still walking post, so that left Thorne and the three of us. He decided not to waste the time. He pulled a straight-backed chair in from the dining room and dropped Kraft into it.

“Where’s Hoffmeyer?”

“Dead. He died in the Salanna 809 hijacking. Didn’t you hear?”

“He’s the only one who could have told you the name of Operation Peloton.”

“I got it from the e-mails.”

“It wouldn’t be in any third-party communication. There were only two of us who knew the name of the operation. We never told the Martyrs.”

“How do you know Hoffmeyer didn’t give them the name? You left him out there to die. Why would you expect him to keep your secrets after that?” Kraft nodded toward the computer. It was sitting on the table, as useful as a rock in its current state. “You should have paid up. There would have been a lot less chatter.”

“I don’t pay for failure. Operation Peloton was a spectacular failure, and the objective was never accomplished. How do you contact Hoffmeyer?”

“He contacts me every time he gets a new chapter done.”

“Chapter?” Thorne tried not to look concerned, but the cough drop crunching pace increased considerably.

Kraft smiled. “I should have a Pulitzer and a best seller by the time it’s all over, and you will either be in jail or you’ll have oversight committees crawling up your ass. Knowing you, as I feel I do now, you might prefer prison to that.” Kraft was annoying to me, and we were supposed to be on the same side.

“So, you believe bringing me down will make the world a better place?”

With his hands clutched behind him and his eyes on the three of us, Thorne seemed to be calculating whether we were worth the effort. He must have decided we were.

“Who do you think is protecting you, reporter, and your right to print whatever left-wing, radical, uninformed drivel you come up with? Your elected officials?” Kraft tried to respond. Thorne rolled right over him. “No, they are not, and I’ll tell you why.”

I kept an eye on the door, watching for Tatiana. Once he had the money, Thorne would have no more use for Harvey or me.

“The U.S. government is filled with men who follow rules. It takes no imagination to follow the rules. It takes imagination to think up a plan to fly planes into a building, to conceive of a plan that was so elegant in its simplicity, so bold in its execution, and so unquestionably effective. Do you think our public servants are up to the task of hunting down people like that?”

Kraft rolled his eyes. “I hate people like you.”

“Of course you do. Power flows to those who can take it, friend. That means away from quibblers like you and into the hands of men like me, men who can make the tough choices and take responsibility for the outcome. I understand why you would hate me.”

I was checking the door again when Thorne planted himself right in my line of sight. “What about you? What do you think?”

“That we should all take up arms and start our own militias. Maybe we can organize ourselves into tribes and aspire to be like Rwanda or Zimbabwe.”

“Do you know how many nuclear weapons North Korea has built?”

“Not a clue.”

“Nor has a single one of our crack intelligence agencies. They don’t know how far along the Iranians are with their program. They didn’t know that Dr. Khan was selling the secrets to designing and building a bomb to anyone who would pay him.” He pulled a cough drop from his pocket and offered it to me. When I declined, he unwrapped it and popped it into his own mouth. “Let’s bring it down to something more personal. Would the world be better off without Drazen Tishchenko in it?”

“That’s not my call.”

“Here is a man who shoots his own mother, who trades nuclear weapons like baseball cards.” Thorne knelt down and put his hand on Harvey’s knee. It was an odd and inappropriate gesture. Harvey was aghast at being touched, which was probably why Thorne had done it. It was undoubtedly some kind of interrogation technique. “He will kill Rachel, you know. After I show him the video, he will hunt her down, and he will murder her, and he will take his time doing it. Surely, if you had the chance, you would put a bullet through this man’s brain.”

Harvey looked as though he would put a bullet through Thorne’s brain if someone would give him a gun and he had strength in his arms to lift it. But then he sat back and looked across at me, and a calm seemed to come over him. All he said was, “No.”

“What if I told you he could be responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans if you didn’t? What if I told you he had access to several transportable nuclear devices from the old Soviet arsenal and that he had them out for bid?”

“I would ask you to prove it in a court of law, and even then, I am not sure the penalty would be a bullet to the brain.”

“Then you probably believe that old canard, ‘It is better for one hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to go to prison.’ ”

“Or to have a bullet put through his brain.”

“But what if one of those one hundred guilty men develops a way to smuggle a nuclear bomb into Manhattan? Does that equation still work? Is it better for a million Americans to die than for a thousand innocent men to go to jail?”

“Perhaps it depends on whether you or your brother or your father or your son is one of those innocent men.”

“Or if you or your brother or your father or your child is incinerated in a nuclear blast. That is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? How do we balance the needs of the many against the needs of the few?”

“Due process,” Harvey said, “is what keeps us from being terrorists ourselves.”

“That’s a quaint idea, old man, but not very workable in these days of weaponized anthrax and transportable nuclear devices.”

“I suppose,” Harvey said, “one can justify any behavior using the mushroom-cloud defense.”

Thorne removed his hand from Harvey’s knee. “Where did you hear that term?”

“From your late partner.”

“How did you know Tony?”

He didn’t, but he had listened to him talking to Lyle on tape for four hours.

Harvey went on. “He was quite conflicted over the things you did and the person you became. Was he one of the difficult decisions you had to make?”

Thorne looked profoundly spooked. His skin had lost some of its ruddiness. He pushed his hand through his hair as he turned away. Kraft, ever the reporter, was keenly interested.

“Is that true, Thorne? Did you kill your own partner?”

Tatiana broke the tension when she came through the door. “I’m back,” she said, dumping a Staples bag on the couch. “I got exactly what we need.”