Steven Savile - Silver

And right at that moment it didn’t matter whether she had seven shots or four left.

She only needed one.

Konstantin Khavin didn’t know whe he was.

There was a glass of water on the table, a tape recorder and microphone, and two chairs on the other side of the table. He was alone in the room. They worked him in shifts, refusing to let him sleep. They had taken his prints and run him through the system. They knew who he was. Worse, they knew what he was. They wanted to know who he was working for, who else was with him in Germany, why he had killed the Pope. Then someone came in with a security photograph of him in Berlin on the day of the sarin gas attack.

They put it on the table in front of him and asked, “Is that you?” He couldn’t deny it. It was a good picture. It caught all of his features in full frontal. Any half-decent facial recognition software would identify him. There was no point lying. “Yes.” He said and suddenly they were looking at a two-for-one deal on a sociopathic killer.

Because they knew who he was, they knew all about his training. They knew he was versed in interrogation techniques and torture. And they knew his experience wasn’t just theoretical.

They came back in.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” the woman said, taking the first seat on the other side of the table. “Things don’t look good for you, Konstantin. You story does not check out.”

Her partner, a straight-faced bodybuilder in a suit, sank into the seat beside her.

“That’s her polite way of saying you’re screwed. We’ve got hundreds of witness testimonies, video evidence, your prints on the weapon, all the physical evidence we could dream of, including the sworn testimony of the Swiss Guard who tried to stop you. That’s what she means by ‘things not looking good.’ It gets substantially worse when we add your own story to the mix. A Russian defector, Konstantin? Do you have any conception of the word loyalty? Or is that it, you’re some sort of sleeper agent? Did they plant you on this side of the Wall and wait for you to grow? Maybe this was always your mission? Is that it, Konstantin? Were you ‘let go’ so that you could do this all these years later? Did they think the humiliation of another defector was worth it in return for the death of the Holy Father? How did they sell the mission to you? Or are you programmed to obey?”

Konstantin stared straight ahead. He didn’t so much as twitch. The words didn’t register on his face. He gave them nothing, knowing it would frustrate them. People were behind the one-way glass watching the whole dance.

“In Moscow they would have brought a doctor in by now,” he said, looking at the woman.

“Why?”

“To elicit a confession,” Konstantin said.

“You mean soften you up with sodium pentothal to weaken your resolve? We have ways of making you talk and all that bullshit,” the man said, full of scorn.

“I see you watch the movies,” Konstantin said.

“I suppose they’d send the muscle in next to beat the confession out of you if the drugs didn’t work?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps they would let the doctor use the instruments of his trade. A lot of truths can be learned under a doctor’s scalpel.”

“That’s barbaric,” the woman said.

“It is one of the reasons I left Moscow. Not the only one. It was another world back then. Do not think you can intimidate me with threats like your colleague is trying. I come from a different world, one where violence is commonplace. I do not fear pain. I do not fear torture. But if you want to hear it, I will tell you the truth of torture, officer.”

“Go on,” she said.

“Everyone talks. That is the truth. Everyone talks even if they know it is going to kill them in the end. They just want the pain to end. The movies where the square-jawed hero doesn’t break is just that, a movie. The reality is he will foul himself. He will cry snot and tears. He will piss down his legs and he will scream, and in the end, he will beg you not to hurt him anymore; he will tell you everything you want to know and more; he will offer secrets you didn’t know he had, just to lessen the pain for a little while.”

“Are you telling us to torture you?”

“Would you if you thought it would give you the truth?”

“We have the truth,” the man cut across their little dance. “It’s on bloody film for the entire world to see.”

That is not the truth,” Konstantin said.

“You’re insane. Do you know that? You’re a freakin’ sociopath! So what, you want us to waterboard you?” The man shook his head in disgust.

“There is no way I can convince you. Even if you open my stomach and reach in with your bare hands to pull at my guts, my truth will not change. I did not kill him.”

“Easy to say,” the man said. “We can all be brave when it’s only words.”

“Then cut me,” Konstantin said. “My people will not save me. I am alone here. I have nothing to gain by lying and nothing to lose by telling the truth.”

“I don’t believe you, Konstantin,” the man said. “You’re a liar. One way or the other. Either you lied to your people when you fled to the West, or you lied to us when we welcomed you? Which one is it?”

“Silence is not a lie.”

“Why did you do it, Konstantin?” the woman asked, taking over the interrogation. Her voice was calm, honeyed. She smiled at him. It was a “we’re all friends here” smile. It was the biggest lie of the day so far.

“I didn’t do it.”

“We know you did, Konstantin. What we don’t know is why. We’ve got a lot of other questions as well, things we don’t understand, like, how does killing the Pope link in with the Berlin subway attack? And how are you tied to Rome and the people who burned themselves alive in London and all of those other cities? We’re only seeing part of the picture, Konstantin. Help us see all of it. Talk to us. If you help us, we can help you.”

She wasn’t particularly good. She wasn’t one of the A team, Konstantin thought, listening to her. Neither was her partner. They were the breakers, the waves sent to crash against the shore just to wear him down. They were never meant to get the truth out of him. It was all about weakening his resolve. They were the sodium pentothal, figuratively speaking.

But they could ask all the questions they wanted, they could badger and push and probe; they were never going to catch him in lies, because he wasn’t lying.

Or he could give them something.

“You want another truth?” he asked.

The woman nodded eagerly, like Pavlov’s detective.

Konstantin’s memory was good. It had to be. He remembered the zero plate from the car in Berlin.

He gave it to them. It was up to them what they did with it.

“Who does the car belong to? Your boss? Your contact?”

Konstantin shrugged. “How would I know? But the car is connected. It all is. Everything is connected.”

“Very zen of you, Konstantin,” the man said.

“Find the owner of the car, find the Berlin cell. Everything is connected.”

The woman glanced toward the glass. Konstantin knew that behind the mirror people were frantically trying to connect the dots, work out who the car belonged to and if Konstantin was telling the truth. They had no reason to assume he wasn’t, and every reason to believe he was selling one of his collaborators out. That was the way they broke terror cells, one small confession at a time. If Konstantin gave them the man behind Berlin, it would hardly prove his innocence, though. If anything, it would only serve to compound his guilt as far as they were concerned.

“Find Berlin and you will find Rome, or London or Madrid or Paris. Everything is connected. Information travels down channels; it isn’t just plucked out of the air. Everything is connected. It has to be, because of the precision. The suicides had to know when to burn themselves. The poisoner in Rome had to know when to poison the water. He didn’t want people dying early. He didn’t want the deaths blending in with the deaths in Berlin. He didn’t want the majority dying the same day the Pope was killed. Everything had to be separate. Forty days and forty nights of fear, see?”