Seven Grams of Lead (20 page)

He would have to eat and drink sooner or later, but
abstaining now might make the difference in whether there was a later. The longer he held out, he reckoned, the longer he lived.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m good.”

Captain South looked to Flattop, who shrugged. Then the captain scooped up the items and silently trailed the other guard out of the room.

Their place was taken by a tall man in a white lab coat, gray flannel slacks, and shiny black lace-up shoes. Pulling the door shut with more force than necessary, he proceeded to the chair six feet from Thornton’s. He sat, folding one lean leg over the other, then turned to face Thornton. Fiftyish, he had a long face with wavy blond-going-white hair and close-set, clear blue eyes. At first glance, he was the sort who might be found selling real estate or giving tennis lessons at a country club. Finer details suggested a different story. His excessive pallor, particularly in light of a Nordic complexion, told of a predilection for the indoors. Perhaps for places like this. Black site personnel typically didn’t bother to bring razors from home. This guy had not only shaved this morning; he’d dressed up. His lab coat was freshly starched and spotless. The creases down the front of his slacks were perfectly straight. He sported a sunny yellow bow tie and gleaming black leather shoes laced in perfectly symmetrical loops. An Army Intelligence officer had once told Thornton that, often, good men were assigned to black sites, and the blackness coated
their souls; others assigned to black sites found their element.

“Before we commence today’s questioning, Russell,” the man with the bow tie said in a midwestern baritone, “I want you to know the reason that we plucked you off 79th Street and out of your life: We want information. To get that information, we can do anything we want. I can do anything I want. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.” The gravity of the man’s tone infused Thornton’s tone with deference. He felt to his marrow that this guy meant what he’d said.

“No one knows what has happened to you, Russell. You have simply disappeared.” Bow Tie snapped his fingers, as if performing a magic trick. “These two tiny islands are known only to a handful of cartography fanatics who believe them to be uninhabited and uninhabitable. This is your entire world now. If you are ever to leave here, you will answer all of my questions. If you are not entirely forthcoming, if you tell half-truths, or if you tell anything other than the full truth, I’ll know it as surely as I would know if the lights were switched off. And I’ll become angry, and my superiors will become extremely angry, and then things will get far worse for you. Do you understand me, Russell?”

“Yes.” Thornton suspected that, if he were entirely cooperative, they would in fact allow him to leave here—but only in a shark’s belly.

Bow Tie flicked a droplet of moisture from the corner of his mouth, then launched into a wide range of questions, beginning with Thornton’s childhood.
What elementary school did you attend? What did your father do for a living?
Establishing a baseline, Thornton suspected.

He answered truthfully. Had to, he figured, because interrogators studied extensively for this initial questioning, memorizing everything they could about their subjects. In part this gave the impression that they were omniscient and that any lie would be easily uncovered. On a more pragmatic level, once they reached the important questions, they could ill afford to pause and ask subjects to repeat names and places. If a subject realizes he’s revealing information, he stops.

Mindful of this, Thornton waited for the interrogator to start fishing. And waited, his throat increasingly raw as he contended with two hours’ worth of the likes of
What was your grade point average at Concord Academy? What were your SAT scores? What was the name of your freshman football coach at UMass?

Finally, Bow Tie asked, “Who tipped you off about the ballistics in the Sokolov investigation?”

If this were about Sokolov, Thornton thought, then the eavesdroppers’ game could be obtaining electronic weaponry, meaning he was hardly the only one whose survival was at issue. “No one tipped me off,” he said. “It was just old-fashioned information wheedling.”

The interrogator looked down his nose. “Come on, Russell, we know about your agency connection.”

To Thornton, it was as if dark clouds had suddenly parted, allowing sunlight to illuminate not only the objective of the rendition, but a means by which he might survive. O’Clair’s counterintelligence play in Torrington had caused Bow Tie’s people to fear that Thornton was working in cooperation with some agency, thereby jeopardizing their operation. Thornton could delay the release of the guillotine blade by maintaining the fiction that he really did have an agency connection.

“Ballistics had nothing to do with anything,” he said. “If I had had a shred of substantiation, the story would have been about an administration of midazolam gone wrong.”

“How could you have known that about the midazolam?”

Speculation, Thornton thought. Unconfirmed until now, thank you. On account of a morsel of Stalin trivia, he realized, he’d been on the money two months ago: The seven-gram lead bullet was a red herring. He must have struck a nerve at the time with his hypothesis that whoever killed Sokolov had known more Soviet history than your average hit man. Whoever had been attempting to stick a listening device in Sokolov’s head went on to stick one in Thornton’s as damage control. The bug’s feed would have alleviated their concern: His investigation was headed
toward the same dead end as the FBI’s. But then came his “meeting with someone from the agency” in Torrington, Connecticut.

“How did you learn about the midazolam?” the interrogator asked again.

Like a successful seduction, Thornton reminded himself, a good lie is built upon truth. “O’Clair figured that your operator used ketamine, because hardly anyone has an allergic reaction to it. From there it was mostly deduction.” True and true.

The interrogator plucked a chin whisker that must have escaped his razor. “We know that Kevin O’Clair was not your agency contact. He was a low-level analyst at NSA.”

Thornton said nothing. Pointedly, he hoped.

“We also know that after you discovered your Littlebird device, you told O’Clair that you’d been contacted by ‘someone at the agency’ whom you planned to meet in Torrington, Connecticut, at Bill’s Diner. Please don’t tell me the diner’s proximity to a forty-thousand-kilowatt radio tower was coincidental.”

“No, of course not. The purpose was to jam the Littlebird.” Thornton made a point of saying
Littlebird
as if he’d been tossing around the term for ages.

The interrogator glanced at the mirror. Thornton wondered who Bow Tie’s superior was.

“Who met you in Bill’s Diner, Russell?”

Easy to tell the truth here. “No one.”

“No one showed up at Bill’s Diner?”

“No one showed up to meet me.”

“We know about the encrypted Hushmail you received beforehand, Russell. Surely you know who sent it.”

“I hoped someone from the NSA was going to help me.” True enough. And of the intelligence agencies who were candidates to conduct an operation on the scale of Littlebird, Thornton could rule out only the NSA with any confidence, albeit not much.

“Who, Russell?”

“I don’t have a real name.”

“Do you have a pseudonym?”

“That’s often how it is. For instance, when calling me on a disposable cell phone, Catherine Peretti went by Jane Johnson. If you’re trying to stay below the radar, you’re not going to go by Jane Jingleheimerschmidt, right?”

Bow Tie cleared his throat. “What was the pseudonym?”

“Meade.” Untrue, and if the interrogator read it as dissembling, great.

“Is Meade a man or a woman, Russell?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” Thornton pretended to rub his chin involuntarily. “No one showed up at the diner, remember?”

“But you did meet someone at the Exxon station.”

“No, I just went there to get gas.”

“You went inside.”

“Oh, yeah. I bought a Gatorade. The cashier was cute, but she wasn’t Meade—as far as I know.”

“So to your knowledge, you never met Meade?”

“Never.”

“And you never received an explanation for that?”

“None. Maybe whoever it was saw the AT&T van parked a few stores down. I mean, if I can pick up a watcher, surely the pros can.”

The interrogator shot another look at the mirror. Snapping his eyes back to Thornton, he asked, “Did you have any further contact with Meade?”

Thornton hesitated, as a subject might do if inventing. “No, no further contact.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. If they tracked the AT&T van, maybe they got what they needed?”

The interrogator uncrossed his legs and sat up. “Russell, you remember what I said about leaving here, about the necessity of you telling the full truth?”

“I remember.”

“Who is Meade?”

Thornton shifted in his seat, causing it to squeak. “I would assume Meade is a reference to Fort Meade, Maryland, home to NSA headquarters. Then again the NSA often poses as the CIA and vice versa, so …”

“Do you expect anyone to believe that a skilled journalist with curiosity to a fault failed to dig deeper than that?”

“I understand why you wouldn’t believe that. But, I swear to God, it’s true. I’m usually working on five or six stories at a given time, plus I have another twenty or thirty on the back burner. By the time I saw
the full scope of this story, I was being chased by hit men dressed as New York City cops.”

Bow Tie clamped his thumb and forefinger over his mouth. Bridling emotion, Thornton suspected. An interrogator can’t show frustration. It encourages the subject to hold out. And the interrogator can’t foster the hope that he might give up.

“We’ll take a break here,” Bow Tie said, rising. He pivoted toward the door, which someone opened on his approach. Thornton couldn’t see who.

The interrogator hurried into the corridor, fading into the darkness well before his footfalls subsided. Thornton bit back a smile. He would bet his apartment that he’d succeeded in planting concern in his captors that their operation faced an unknown and potent threat. Which was a hell of a lot better than their having ascertained the truth: that they had nothing whatsoever to worry about. Now, however, they would seek to extract from him the true nature of the threat. He didn’t expect the process to be pleasant.

Thornton preceded Flattop
and his flashlight through the dark corridors, the journey culminating in an unlit ten-by-eight-foot concrete cell coated in grime, the ceiling too low for an adult to stand without stooping. The furnishings consisted of a wooden pallet topped by a mattress not much thicker than a magazine and a pillow of similar proportions. The adjacent wall sprouted a stainless steel toilet bowl, its seatback rising into a tiny cold-water-only spigot and basin.

Flattop swept the flashlight beam over the floor, pausing when the light centered on a large brown scorpion in the corner opposite the toilet.

“Watch out for that guy,” he said, backing out of the cell.

The door swung shut and a heavy bolt snapped into the steel jamb, leaving Thornton in a blackness that seemed solid. Eyes shut, eyes open, there was no difference. Once the echoes of the closing door faded, the silence was complete.

He hurried to get to the cot, away from the scorpion. His progress was limited to small increments, a hand extended to avoid smacking face-first into a wall. The sticky cement floor sent a chill from the soles of his feet all the way to his kneecaps. Finding the wall, he lowered himself to the slick, rubber-coated mattress, which compressed to the point that it felt like he was sitting directly on the wooden pallet. He placed his back against the wall, drawing his knees toward his chest both to keep warm and so that his feet were three or four inches above the floor. While following the Pentagon-funded cancer treatment initiative to use the chlorotoxin from the venom of the Deathstalker scorpion—
Leuiurus quinquestriatus
—he learned that of the 1,000 species of scorpion, just twenty-five posed a mortal threat. He doubted his cell mate was one of them, if only because his captors needed him alive. But he couldn’t be certain. Also 1,000 of the 1,000 species of scorpions stung without provocation. If his captors sought to keep him up at night, this would do the trick.

He held the thin pillow as a shield, sweeping it from side to side to fend off the scorpion should his scent lure the nocturnal hunter to the cot. Unfortunately,
he still couldn’t see. Not even his hand in front of his face.

He heard the scorpion clicking toward him, or he imagined he heard it; then he felt a tickle on the back of his scalp. He jumped up to shake off the bug but found no trace of it.

And this was only the beginning. He thought it ironic that, before today, he’d considered it torture to be left alone for more than ten minutes with nothing to read.

The fifty-seat ExpressJet bound for Montgomery, Alabama, was too small to plug into the Jetways at any of LaGuardia’s departure gates, so Musseridge and his fellow passengers had to go down two flights of service stairwell, exiting onto the tarmac. The FBI agent didn’t bother standing on line to borrow an umbrella from the gate agents, deciding the walk to the plane would take less time. The umbrellas were almost useless anyway; the jet engines shot the freezing rain sideways.

During the flight, Musseridge forked over seven bucks for a can of Bud. Ridiculous, but worth it. When the hell else did he get a chance to sit down for more than twenty seconds without someone wanting something from him?

He immersed himself in figuring out what the fuck Thornton and the billionairess, Beryl Mallery, were
up to. Amtrak had had no record of either of them purchasing tickets to Alabama—or to anywhere. But they could have used cash. He’d seen Penn Station’s security video of a couple paying cash for tickets to Mobile, Alabama—Mallery owned a beach house nearby. Could have been Thornton and Mallery; the video was shot from so far away that no one could really tell shit. But an agent from the Bureau’s Mobile field office interviewed a cabbie who said, yeah, he’d had a fare who looked just like the lady in the photograph. He took her to the nearby beach town, Point Clear, Alabama. And with her was a guy who looked like Thornton. Meanwhile Mallery sent an e-mail to her assistant saying she’d met someone and needed some time alone with him. The only trace of Thornton since his disappearance was also an e-mail, to
RealStory
’s managing editor. He’d met someone, he wrote, and was taking a vacation for the first time this millennium. Love was blind and stupid, Musseridge knew well, but that didn’t explain Thornton shirking his duty to give a deposition, and in this case the victim had been a close friend of his, Kevin O’Clair. What’s more, the seven-year-old who’d survived O’Clair was Thornton’s godson.