The Eleventh Commandment (1998) (30 page)

He turned his gaze to the newly appointed Justice Minister. ‘Where is that Mafya hitman who tried to assassinate me?’

‘He’s locked up in the Crucifix,’ said Shulov. ‘Where I assume you’ll want him to remain for the rest of his life.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Zerimski. ‘Life imprisonment is far too lenient a sentence for such a barbarous criminal. This is the ideal person to put on trial. We will make him our first public example.’

‘I’m afraid the police haven’t been able to come up with any proof that he …’

‘Then manufacture it,’ said Zerimski. ‘His trial isn’t going to be witnessed by anyone except loyal Party members.’

‘I understand, Mr President,’ said the new Justice Minister. He hesitated. ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘A quick trial, with one of our new judges presiding and a jury made up exclusively of Party officials.’

‘And the sentence, Mr President?’

‘The death penalty, of course. Once the sentence has been passed, you will inform the press that I shall be attending the execution.’

‘And when will that be?’ asked the Justice Minister, writing down Zerimski’s every word.

The President flicked over the pages of his diary and began searching for a fifteen-minute gap. ‘Eight o’clock next Friday morning. Now, something far more important - my plans for the future of the armed forces.’ He smiled at General Borodin, who was seated on his right, and who hadn’t yet opened his mouth.

‘For you, Deputy President, the greatest prize of all …’

A
S A PRISONER
in the Nan Dinh camp, Connor had developed a system for counting the days he’d been in captivity.

At five every morning a Vietcong guard would appear carrying a bowl of rice swimming in water - his only meal of the day. Connor would remove a single grain and place it inside one of the seven bamboo poles that made up his mattress. Every week he would transfer one of the seven grains to the beam above his bed, and then eat the other six. Every four weeks he would remove one of the grains from the beam above his bed and put it between the floorboards under his bed. The day he and Chris Jackson escaped from the camp, Connor knew he had been in captivity for one year, five months and two days.

But lying on a bunk in a windowless cell in the Crucifix, even he couldn’t come up with a system to record how long he had been there. The Chief of Police had now visited him twice, and left with nothing. Connor began to wonder how much longer it would be before he became impatient with his simply repeating his name and nationality, and demanding to see his Ambassador. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Only moments after Bolchenkov had left the room the second time, the three men who had greeted him on the afternoon of his arrival came charging into his cell.

Two of them dragged him off the bunk and threw him into the chair recently occupied by the Chief. They wrenched his arms behind his back and handcuffed him.

That was when Connor first saw the cut-throat razor. While two of them held him down, the third took just fourteen strokes of the rusty blade to shave every hair off his head, along with a considerable amount of skin. He hadn’t wasted any time applying soap and water. The blood continued to run down Connor’s face and soak his shirt long after they had left him slumped in the chair.

He recalled the words of the Chief when they had first met: ‘I don’t believe in torture; it’s not my style.’ But that was before Zerimski had become President.

He eventually slept, but for how long he could not tell. The next thing he remembered was being pulled up off the floor, hurled back into the chair and held down for a second time.

The third man had replaced his razor with a long, thick needle, and used the same degree of delicacy he had shown as a barber to tattoo the number ‘12995’ on the prisoner’s left wrist. They obviously didn’t believe in names when you booked in for room and board at the Crucifix.

When they returned a third time, they yanked him up off the floor and pushed him out of the cell into a long, dark corridor. It was at times like this that he wished he lacked any imagination. He tried not to think about what they might have in mind for him. The citation for his Medal of Honor had described how Lieutenant Fitzgerald had been fearless in leading his men, had rescued a brother officer, and had made a remarkable escape from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. But Connor knew he had never come across a man who was fearless. In Nan Dinh he had held out for one year, five months and two days - but then he was only twenty-two, and at twenty-two you believe you’re immortal.

When they hurled him out of the corridor and into the morning sun, the first thing Connor saw was a group of prisoners erecting a scaffold. He was fifty-one now. No one needed to tell him he wasn’t immortal.

When Joan Bennett checked in for work at Langley that Monday, she knew exactly how many days she had served of her eight-month sentence, because every evening, just before she left home, she would feed the cat and cross off one more date on the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall.

She left her car in the west parking lot, and headed straight for the library. Once she had signed in, she took the metal staircase down to the reference section. For the next nine hours, with only a break for a meal at midnight, she would read through the latest batch of e-mailed newspaper extracts from the Middle East. Her main task was to search for any mention of the United States and, if it was critical, electronically copy it, collate it and e-mail it to her boss on the third floor, who would consider its consequences at a more civilised hour later that morning. It was tedious, mind-deadening work. She had considered resigning on several occasions, but was determined not to give Gutenburg that satisfaction.

It was just before her midnight meal-break that Joan spotted a headline in the
Istanbul News:
‘Mafya Killer to go on Trial’. She could still only think of the Mafia as being Italian, and was surprised to discover that the article concerned a South African terrorist on trial for the attempted murder of the new President of Russia. She would have taken no further interest if she hadn’t seen the line drawing of the accused man.

Joan’s heart began to thump as she carefully read through the lengthy article by Fatima Kusmann, the
Istanbul News’s
Eastern European correspondent, in which she claimed to have sat next to the professional killer during a rally in Moscow which Zerimski had addressed.

Midnight passed, but Joan remained at her desk.

As Connor stood in the prison courtyard and stared up at the half-constructed scaffold, a police car drew up and one of the thugs shoved him into the back seat. He was surprised to find the Chief of Police waiting for him. Bolchenkov hardly recognised the gaunt, crop-headed man.

Neither of them spoke as the car made its way through the gates and out of the prison. The driver turned right and drove along the banks of the Neva at exactly fifty kilometres an hour. They passed three bridges before swinging left and crossing a fourth that would take them into the centre of the city. As they crossed the river, Connor stared out of the side window at the pale green palace of the Hermitage. It couldn’t have been in greater contrast to the prison he had just left. He looked up at the clear blue sky, and back down at the citizens walking up and down the streets. How quickly he had been made aware of how much he valued his freedom. Once they were on the south side of the river the driver swung right, and after a few hundred yards pulled up in front of the Palace of Justice. The car door was opened by a waiting policeman. If Connor had any thoughts of escape, the other fifty officers on the pavement would have caused him to think again. They formed a long reception line as he climbed the steps into the huge stone building.

He was marched to the front desk, where an officer pinned his left arm to the counter, studied his wrist and entered the number ‘12995’ on the charge sheet. He was then taken down a marble corridor towards two massive oak doors. When he was a few paces away the doors suddenly swung open, and he entered a packed courtroom.

He looked around at the sea of faces, and it was obvious they had been waiting for him.

Joan typed a search string into the computer:
attempt on Zerimski’s life.
What press reports there were all seemed to agree on one thing: that the man who had been arrested in Freedom Square was Piet de Villiers, a South African hitman hired by the Russian Mafya to assassinate Zerimski. A rifle discovered among his belongings was identified as identical to that which had been used to assassinate Ricardo Guzman, a presidential candidate in Colombia, two months earlier.

Joan scanned the Turkish newspaper’s line drawing of de Villiers into her computer, and enlarged it until it filled the entire screen. She then zoomed in on the eyes, and blew them up to life size. She was now certain of the true identity of the man about to go on trial in St Petersburg.

Joan checked her watch. It was a few minutes past two. She picked up the phone by her side and dialled a number she knew by heart. It rang for some time before a sleepy voice answered, ‘Who’s this?’

Joan said only, ‘It’s important that I see you. I’ll be at your place in a little over an hour,’ and replaced the phone.

A few moments later, someone else was woken by a ringing telephone. He listened carefully before saying, ‘We’ll just have to advance our original schedule by a few days.’