The Enemy

time before all the various logbooks 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 pushpins, like she was leading his gaze toward 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 inward as outward.
    “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    “Things that are out-of-date now.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