The Enemy (26 page)

So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past Carbone's empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov bunked three doors further down. We got there. His door was standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on the narrow cot, reading a book.

I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had no Special Forces. Truly elite units were not common inside the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia had a pretty good airborne brigade, and Poland had airborne and amphibious divisions. The Soviet Union itself had a few Vysotniki tough guys. Apart from that, sheer weight of numbers was the name of the game, in the eastern part of Europe. Throw enough bodies into the fray, and eventually you win, as long as you regard two-thirds of them as expendable. And they did.

So who was this guy?

NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time. Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys, built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six, maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn't doing him any favours. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands. He was wearing brand new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.

"On your feet, soldier," I said.

He put his book down on the bed next to him, carefully, face down and open, like he was saving his place.

We put handcuffs on him and got him into the Humvee without any trouble. He was big, but he was quiet. He seemed resigned to his fate. Like he knew it had been only a matter of time before all the various log books in his life betrayed him.

We drove him back and got him to my office without incident. We sat him down and unlocked the handcuffs and redid them so that his right wrist was cuffed to the chair leg. Then we took a second pair of cuffs and did the same thing with his left. He had big wrists. They were as thick as most men's ankles.

Summer stood next to the map, staring at the push pins, like she was leading his gaze towards them and saying: We know.

I sat at my desk.

"What's your name?" I said. "For the record?"

"Trifonov," he said. His accent was heavy and abrupt, all in his throat.

"First name?"

"Slavi."

"Slavi Trifonov," I said. "Rank?"

"I was a colonel at home. Now I'm a sergeant."

"Where's home?"

"Sofia," he said. "In Bulgaria."

"You're very young to have been a colonel."

"I was very good at what I did."

"And what did you do?" He didn't answer. "You have a nice car," I said.

"Thank you," he said. "A car like that was always a dream to me."

"Where did you take it on the night of the fourth?"

He didn't answer.

"There are no Special Forces in Bulgaria," I said.

"No," he said. "There are not."

"So what did you do there?"

"I was in the regular army."

"Doing what?"

"Three-way liaison between the Bulgarian army, the Bulgarian secret police, and our friends in the Soviet Vysotniki."

"Qualifications?"

"I had five years" training with the GRU."

"Which is what?"

He smiled. "I think you know what it is."

I nodded. The Soviet GRU was a kind of a cross between a military police corps and Delta Force. They were plenty tough, and they were just as ready to turn their fury inwards as outwards.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"In America?" he said. "I'm waiting."

"For what?"

"For the end of the communist occupation of my country. It will happen soon, I think. Then I'm going back. I'm proud of my country. It's a beautiful place full of beautiful people. I'm a nationalist."

"What are you teaching Delta?"

"Things that are out of date now. How to fight against the things I was trained to do. But that battle is already over, I think. You won."

"You need to tell us where you were on the night of the fourth."

He said nothing.

"Why did you defect?"

"Because I was a patriot," he said.

"Recent conversion?"

"I was always a patriot. But I came close to being discovered."

"How did you get out?"

"Through Turkey. I went to the American base there."

"Tell me about the night of the fourth." He said nothing.

"We've got your gun," I said. "You signed it out. You left the post at eleven minutes past ten and got back at five in the morning."

He said nothing.

"You fired two rounds."

He said nothing.

"Why did you wash your car?"

"Because it's a beautiful car. I wash it twice a week. Always. A car like that was a dream to me."

"You ever been to Kansas?"

"No."

"Well, that's where you're headed. You're not going home to Sofia. You're going to Fort Leavenworth instead."

"Why?"

"You know why," I said.

Trifonov didn't move. He sat absolutely still. He was hunched way forward, with his wrists fastened to the chair down near his knees. I sat still, too. I wasn't sure what to do. Our own Delta guys were trained to resist interrogation. I knew that. They were trained to counter drugs and beatings and sensory deprivation and anything else anyone could think of. Their instructors were encouraged to employ hands-on training methods. So I couldn't even imagine what Trifonov had been through, in five years with the GRU. There was nothing much I could do to him. I wasn't above smacking people around. But I figured this guy wouldn't say a word even if I disassembled him limb by limb.

So I moved on to traditional policing techniques. Lies, and bribery.

"Some people figure Carbone was an embarrassment," I said. "You know, to the army. So we wouldn't necessarily want to pursue it too far. You spill the beans now, we could send you back to Turkey. You could wait there until it was time to go home and be a patriot."

"It was you who killed Carbone," he said. "People are talking about it."

"People are wrong," I said. "I wasn't here. And I didn't kill Brubaker. Because I wasn't there, either."

"Neither was I," he said. "Either."

He was very still. Then something dawned on him. His eyes started moving. He looked left, and then right. He looked up at Summer's map. Looked at the pins. Looked at her. Looked at me. His lips moved. I saw him say Carbone to himself. Then Brubaker. He made no sound, but I could lip-read his awkward accent.

"Wait," he said.

"For what?"

"No," he said.

"No what?"

"No, sir," he said.

"Tell me, Trifonov," I said.

"You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?"

"You think you didn't?"

He went quiet again. Looked down. "Tell me, Trifonov," I said. He looked up.

"It wasn't me," he said.

I just sat there. Watched his face. I had been handling investigations of various kinds for six long years, and Trifonov was at least the thousandth guy to look me in the eye and say it wasn't me. Problem was, a percentage of those thousand guys had been telling the truth. And I was starting to think maybe Trifonov was, too. There was something about him. I was starting to get a very bad feeling.

"You're going to have to prove it," I said.

"I can't."

"You're going to have to. Or they'll throw away the key. They might let Carbone slide, but they sure as hell aren't going to let Brubaker slide."

He said nothing.

"Start over," I said. "The night of January fourth, where were you?"

He just shook his head.

"You were somewhere," I said. "That's for damn sure. Because you weren't here. You logged in and out. You and your gun."

He said nothing. Just looked at me. I stared back at him and didn't speak. He went into the kind of desperate conflicted silence I had seen many times before. He was moving in the chair. Almost imperceptibly. Tiny violen! movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn't. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place.

"The night of January fourth," I said. "Did you commit a crime?"

His deep-set eyes came up to meet mine. Locked on.

"OK," I said. "Time to choose up sides. Was it a worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head?"

He said nothing.

"Did you go up to Washington D.C. and rape the president's ten-year-old granddaughters, one after the other?"

"No," he said.

"I'll give you a clue," I said. "Where you're sitting, that would be about the only worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head." He said nothing. "Tell me."

"It was a private thing," he said.

"What kind of a private thing?"

He didn't answer. Summer sighed and moved away from her map. She was starting to figure that wherever Trifonov had been, chances were it wasn't Columbia, South Carolina. She looked at me, eyebrows raised. Trifonov moved in his chair. His handcuffs clinked against the metal of the legs. "What's going to happen to me?" he asked.

"That depends on what you did," I said.

"I got a letter," he said. "Getting mail isn't a crime."

"From a friend of a friend."

"Tell me about the letter."

"There's a man in Sofia," he said.

He sat there, hunched forward, his wrists cuffed to the chair legs, and he told us the story of the letter. The way he framed it, he made it sound like he thought there was something uniquely Bulgarian about it. But there wasn't, really. It was a story that could have been told by any of us. There was a man in Sofia. He had a sister. The sister had been a minor gymnast and had defected on a college tour of Canada and had eventually settled in the United States. She had gotten married to an American. She had become a citizen. Her husband had turned out bad. The sister wrote about it to the brother back home. Long, unhappy letters. There were beatings, and abuse, and cruelty, and isolation. The sister's life was hell. The communist censors had passed the letters, because anything that made America look bad was OK with them. The brother in Sofia had a friend in town who knew his way around the city's dissident network. The friend had an address for Trifonov, at Fort Bird in North Carolina. Trifonov had been in touch with the dissident network before he skipped to Turkey.

The friend had packaged up a letter from the man in Sofia and given it to a guy who bought machine parts in Austria. The machine parts guy had gone to Austria and mailed the letter. The letter made its way to Fort Bird. Trifonov received it on January 2nd, early in the morning, at mail call. It had his name on it in big Cyrillic letters and it was all covered in foreign stamps and Luftpost stickers.

He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out where it was.