Free The Professor of Truth by James Robertson Page B

Germany. The German police, with our assistance, had broken it up a month before the bombing. That group had been making devices designed to bring down airplanes just the way this one had been brought down. Maybe there was a connection. We didn’t know how the bomb had been ingested into the baggage system but we were working on it. So we had all this. What else did we need?”
    In detective novels of the kind Emily had loved, the detective or someone else at this point says “a motive.” And sure enough Nilsen said it, or came close.
    “We needed motivation. You know what the motivation was. Revenge, retaliation, call it what you will. We were at war with another country, a Middle East state with ideological, political and religious aims diametrically opposed to ours. And that war isn’t over yet. It isn’t open warfare. Some of it makes the news, most of it doesn’t. There’s a lot of rhetoric, a lot of bluster. Back then there was hostage-taking, hostage-trading, military and naval stand-offs, and behind that another level of conflict. Assassinations and arms deals, negotiations that never officially took place, all of that.
    “But then something happened that was so big it couldn’t be hidden. One of our warships shot down one of their aircraft. A civilian aircraft. It was a mistake, a terrible one. Three hundred lives wiped out. Yet we didn’t admit responsibility. We said the action was justifiable, because the ship’s commander thought he was under attack. We regretted what had been done, but we defended it. We even gave the guy amedal. Eventually we paid some compensation, but that was years later. Six months after that warship fired off its missile, the flight your wife and daughter were on goes down. So, sure, there was motivation.
    “Motivation, suspects, method. We had two out of three. A hostile government that had commissioned a revenge attack, and a group prepared to do the job with the expertise to do it. It was the method, how the bomb had been ingested into the system, that we didn’t have. And we still lacked a lot of detail. Without the detail there were too many gaps. The narrative wouldn’t hold together. We had to firm it up, then we could do something with it. Make the accusation, take out the offenders, bring vengeance down on the heads of the avengers—whatever we wanted to do. But we couldn’t do it until we had fully constructed the narrative.”
    “You keep saying ‘we,’ ” I said.
    Nilsen looked quizzical.
    “Like you were running the investigation. You, the Americans.”
    He seemed to think about that for a few seconds. “The police were running the investigation,” he said, “but we were right alongside of them. These were our people who’d been hit. We had an interest, I think.”
    So far nothing was new. I’d been over this territory thousands of times, worked out or guessed it all. I remembered the word “ingestion” from the trial. It made it sound as if the aeroplane had swallowed the bomb. Nilsen wasn’t being specific. He didn’t need to be. We both knew exactly what he was saying, who he was talking about. We were way beyondthe specifics. What I didn’t know was where he was going next, and for a moment even he looked a little lost. Maybe my intervention had thrown him. I wished I hadn’t said anything, willed myself not to speak again. Not to nod or shake my head either: I didn’t want Nilsen thinking I was with him or against him. I just wanted him to continue.
    “Trouble was, the narrative we had, we didn’t like it,” he said. “Not at all, but the politicians wanted something from us. The usual thing. They were under pressure to deliver to the media, to the people.” Again, I detected a note of contempt. “Who had done this? Who was responsible? People always want to know the end of a story. So we told the politicians some of what we had but we kept the worst back and they didn’t like even what we did tell them, but for different reasons.