John Weisman - Direct Action

10:31A.M. Showtime . Tom stepped through the doorway. His face a neutral mask, he reached behind himself and pulled on the handle until he heard the heavy bolt snap shut.

10:31A.M. The interrogation room was bare and palpably cool-at least fifteen degrees cooler than the corridor. There was something else in evidence, too: the faint but unmistakable scent of Salah’s parfum pénitentiaire .

She was tiny-fragile as a soft-boned baby chick and obviously as vulnerable. Not more than five two or five three. She stood, fists clenched, behind a metal table. She had the sort of delicately featured yet hugely plain face that made her look ten years older than her actual age. Her appearance certainly wasn’t helped by the shapeless gray prison shift and dirty tennis shoes with no laces.

She looked at Tom with wide-eyed apprehension. Under his relentless gaze, her right hand jerked upward in order to smooth down her uncombed, short, mouse-brown hair. She was largely unsuccessful. An absurd, recalcitrant cowlick completed her hapless and wretched appearance.

Her body language read exhausted written in capital letters, but her brown eyes were clear, even-Tom found this surprising-piercing. Equally promising, she displayed neither the zombie look, the loony’s smile, or the thousand-yard stare. Salah had done well. He’d wrung her dry, yet been careful not to break her into unusable emotional shards.

Tom slipped into character and kept his voice neutral but commanding. “Assieds-toi.” It was the way you told a dog or a naughty child to sit.

She slipped demurely onto a straight-backed chair that was bolted to the concrete. She looked like a schoolgirl: knees pressed together under her shift, ankles locked. She raised her hands from her lap and clasped them together, interlocking her fingers as if she were about to play the old nursery game. “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.”

Tom allowed himself a quick scan of the room. The cameras had to be behind him. And the microphones? There were probably three or four of them, spread out so nothing would be missed.

He looked down at her. “Parle-moi de Mal-ik,” he said, speaking in a slow, almost pedantic Marseillaise accent. “Tell me everything the two of you did on that first”-he punched the word-“ wonderful trip to Paris last March.”

She cocked her head as a child would do and looked up at him for fifteen, perhaps twenty seconds. He could see the gears engaging. She was trying to figure out what he wanted, where he was going.

He gave her nothing. “Paris. Last March.”

Finally, a single tear formed in the corner of her right eye. When it had built up enough mass, it rolled down her cheek and plopped from her chin onto the front of her shift. “Oh, Malik,” she said. “Poor, silly, romantic Malik. I loved him so.”

She started to blubber and tugged at the sleeve of her shift so she could wipe her nose. Then she caught herself and stopped, muffling a huge sob.

“Here. Use this.” Reaching into the pocket of his coveralls, Tom played with the fresh, starched handkerchief he’d brought until it released what he’d hidden inside its opaque folds. He extracted the hankie, shook it out, advanced, reached over the chair that had been placed for him, and dropped it onto the surface of the table.

She picked it up. It was an oversize gentleman’s handkerchief made of French linen. It had hand-rolled edges and it smelled ever so faintly of Givenchy Gentleman. Tom knew Malik had used the same cologne. And just like Salah, he understood sensory triggers can often help interrogators prime the pump, so to speak, when they’re dealing with emotionally frail personalities.

He watched her body language. He silently counted the seconds-one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three-until the emotional tidal wave washed over her.

Fire in the hole! She held the handkerchief to her face and silent-screamed, caught her breath, silent-screamed again, and collapsed on the tabletop, her arms splayed out around her head.

He waited until the dry-heaving finally abated. “Dianne,” he said. “Dianne, we have to talk.”

Her shoulders pumped up and down. She pressed the handkerchief to her face like a talisman. “Have to talk.”

“Paris. The George V. Malik.”

She swallowed hard. “We took the Friday train from Waterloo. We…we’d…” She bit her lips, then wiped at her nose, which was wet.

Tom said nothing. There were perhaps eight, nine, ten seconds of silence. And then she inhaled deeply to get herself under control, wiped her nose with her sleeve, and began again. “We’d decided to take the day off. We met on the platform. I’d come from my flat by subway.” Her French was perfectly enunciated and unmistakably upper-crust British in its inflection. She sounded somewhat like the late and unlamented Princess Di-the same nasal, stiff-upper-lip Sloane Ranger tone.

“Where is your flat?”

She held the handkerchief to her face and inhaled deeply. “I live in Islington. On Gerrard Road-just above the canal.” She looked at him strangely. “I’ve been over this material before.”

Tom ignored her. “Of which canal do you speak?”

Her eyes were eloquent. They said, You absolute shit. You are doing this for no reason at all other than you can. But still, she responded to his question. “The Grand Union.”

“How long is the walk from your flat to the Metro stop?” He purposely misspoke.

She gave him a reproving glance. “We call it the Underground in Britain.”

Tom rephrased the question.

“About four blocks.”

“And you carried your baggage the whole distance?”

“I had a carry-on. I could wheel it.”

“And the train took you directly to Waterloo Station?”

“I had to change once-at Euston.”

“What underground did you travel?”

“The Northern Line.”

“The whole time?”

“The whole time.”

Tom adjusted the straight-backed chair on his side of the table, then dropped onto it. “And you met Malik at Waterloo.”

She put the handkerchief to her face and inhaled again. “Yes.”

“Who arrived first?”

“I did.”

“Where did you meet?”

“There is a board, showing all the departing trains.”

“Yes?”

“We met in front of it.”

“When did you buy your tickets?”

“Malik had bought them.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. He had them when he arrived.”

“So you went directly to the train?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you sit?”

“In first class.”

Tom nodded. What he’d just done was to pose a series of neutral “control questions,” in order to gauge her physical reactions under nonthreatening conditions. She’d responded as he’d hoped she would: breathing even, eye contact steady and nonevasive, and hand-and-foot movement minimal.

He was taking her back to the Paris trips for another reason. The Israelis had been interested in her relationship with Malik because they were deconstructing the bombing. Reverse-engineering everything leading up to the event so they could see where the chinks were, and how they could be closed.

Tom had his own ideas about Malik. The obvious thing was that he’d recruited her as a mule, to carry the explosives. Virtually all agent recruitments are based on four behavioral elements: ego, money, sex, or ideology. EMSI, pronounced “emcee,” was the abbreviation they taught at the Farm. Dianne’s was a classic sex recruitment. The scenario with plain-Jane targets usually followed similar patterns: a taste of the good life-a few bottles of the bubbly, followed shortly by a romantic French dinner, followed thereafter by a healthy bout of the old in-and-out at a stylish bachelor flat. Tom’s eyes scanned the prisoner, read her body language, demeanor, and aura. She was an open book. One great, sweaty orgasm and she’d be wrapped around Malik’s little finger forever.