Steven Savile - Silver

Lethe had a partial answer. It wasn’t what any of them wanted to hear. “More than fifty locals were used as casual labor. The dig was overseen by one Akim Caspi, who is not, I hasten to add, an archeologist. Caspi is a lieutenant general in Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Force. I sincerely doubt he has a list of names, unfortunately. Archeologists are great for keeping itemized records on fossilized donkey crap, but they don’t seem all that concerned about people if they haven’t been dead for a millennium or more.”

He put up a picture of Caspi in full military regalia on the screens. The man looked like someone a soldier would be willing to die for.

“Okay, so given that we aren’t going to be blessed with a convenient list of prime suspects, we need to hit the ground running. What ground though?” the Irishman asked.

“We’ve got thirteen potentially blind alleys to run down.”

“Rome or Berlin,” Konstantin said, breaking his silence. “There is a reason those calls deviated from the pattern.”

“I am inclined to agree,” the old man said, “and because of that, Konstantin, I want you to go to Berlin and walk a mile in the dead man’s shoes.”

The Russian raised an eyebrow. “Walk in his shoes?” He made his index and forefingers skip across the tabletop to demonstrate his understanding, or lack of it.

“Relive the last seventy-two hours of his life,” Sir Charles explained. “Go through it with a fine-toothed comb. Every place he visited, every person he saw. No man is an island, especially in this modern age of emails and phone calls. Lethe will support your investigations from back here, following the electronic paper trail. Somewhere in the middle of everything is his killer-and make no mistake about this, he was killed. They all were. Their murderers might not have pulled the trigger, but that is neither here nor there. Death comes upon his pale horse wielding fire, guns and other instruments of death. Nothing says death needs to be intimate anymore. So take his life apart, climb inside his skin. Become him. Let the dead man tell his last tale.”

The Russian nodded.

Sir Charles turned to Noah. “I want you to go to Rome. Whether we consider the threat credible or not, the scant evidence we have points toward the Holy See. To ignore it would be negligent in the extreme,” the old man said. “And given the veneration half the world feels for His Holiness, I can’t say I am particularly eager to have his blood on my hands. So let’s see if we can avoid that, shall we?”

Noah nodded.

“Good. Get out there. Get a feel for the lie of the land. There’s a reason these two messages were different. I don’t know what it is, but my gut instinct is screaming that it is important. Do what you are best at, Noah, make yourself a pain in the arse. Get in there and ruffle some feathers. Shake the holy tree. Just do whatever it takes to unearth that reason. And, for God’s sake, don’t let the Pope die, there’s a good man.”

“Dig up secrets, don’t get His Holiness killed, understood.”

“Let’s not forget the one thing in our favor right now is the sheer scale of this. Everything about today’s events cries spectacle. It’s terrorism in the truest sense of the word. It is theater. If ten times the amount of people had died in a plane wreck, the world would barely have blinked an eye. Planes crash. Nine-eleven changed the nature of fear. It made it global. As a society we have become so desensitized to death that anything less is almost mundane. Terrorists bring down planes and bomb embassies. That is what they do. It’s tragic, yes, but any way you look at it, it’s old news.

The old fears aren’t enough in this brave new world. Everything has to be bigger,”-he let that sink in for a moment-“which is a salutary lesson for us. What it means in this case is, they don’t martyr themselves in broad daylight without having achieved some obvious goal. So what was that goal? Thirteen people burning themselves alive is not frightening, not on a global scale. It is off the front of the newspapers in a few days, forgotten in a few weeks, which is a crime in and of itself, but not one we can afford to worry about.

“If you want my opinion, it is the threat they deliver right before they burn that is frightening. That’s what sends shivers through the strata of society. That’s what makes the good people of the world look over their shoulders.

“Forty days of terror is very precise and obviously picked for its religious connotations. It’s a common biblical time of transition: And I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. Later Moses convenes with God on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, and Mark tells us that Jesus emerged from his forty days in the wilderness reborn, having resisted the temptations of Satan. To my way of thinking this all adds credence to Mr. Lethe’s theory about Masada holding the key.

“Ask yourself this: Can our modern society resist forty days of listening to Satan’s overtures? Will it emerge from the terror, from the purge, as every living substance is wiped from the face of the earth? And if it does, if society comes out of the flames, triumphant, what will we have become?”

Before anyone could answer, the old man turned to Orla. “My dear, I am going to take advantage of you shamelessly,”-there was nothing remotely sexual about the overture, despite the glaring double entendre-“I want you to find out everything there is to know about the day-to-day lives of the other victims. Work your contacts. Even though the world has been reduced to ones and zeroes, machines will only tell us so much, no matter how brilliant Mister Lethe is. Paper trails are all well and good, but what paper trail ever had loose lips or guilty body language?

“Frost, in Masada. Track down Caspi, he’s the one name we have out there.”

“One thing I did find out about Caspi,” Lethe said. “In 2004 he received an insurance payout in excess of two million dollars, which he dutifully paid an ungodly amount of tax on.”

“Same year as the dig? Well, isn’t that just another happy coincidence?” Frost said. “Now, if that’s everything,”-the Irishman started to push back his chair-“I think a couple of hours of shuteye before dawn wouldn’t go amiss. It’s going to be a long day.”

“This is bullshit,” Orla muttered under her breath. She picked up her phone. For a moment Noah thought she was going to wring the mechanical guts out of it. Instead she pocketed it and pushed herself to her feet. “I spent six years in Israel. I know its heart. I know how it works. I’ve got a network of hundreds of contacts I can fall back on, people in all walks of life. And you’re sending him? This is bullshit.”

“Calm down, Orla.” The old man reversed his chair away from the table, in the process turning his back on her.

“Don’t you walk away from me!” Her voice rose until the last syllable was almost twice as loud as the first.

“I will not be argued with, Orla. Ronan is going to Masada, you are staying here, and that is the end of it.”

“No,” she said, “it’s not.” The defiance in her voice surprised everyone in the room. There was an established order to things. No one argued with the old man when he’d had his final word. It was just the way of things. “It’s a crock of shit is what it is. But it is not over.”

“Orla,” the old man said, a hint of warning in his voice. His patience was stretching thin. “I suggest you sit, take a few deep breaths and calm yourself down.”

“Don’t patronize me. I’m thirty-one years old. I was a field operative for MI6 for almost a third of my natural life, and half of that was spent swimming in the shit of Israeli politics. I’ve been shot at, and blown up, and I’m still here. The country is in my blood. I know it better than I know myself. And you want me to sit here twiddling my thumbs while Ronan goes trampling all over the place with his size nines?” She shook her head. “You need to understand Israel. It’s like nowhere else on earth. And no disrespect to Ronan, but he can’t understand it. It’s impossible.”