Thanatos

Chapter 20

An interrogation room wasn't part of the Chariot's original setup. In fact, it didn't have a holding cell either. Megan suspected that the intention behind the design of the airplane was strictly as a mobile Olympus station and nothing more.

However, in light of the sensitive nature of the "cargoes" on board the Chariot for that flight, the team had no choice but to make some modifications to the original setup.

Just as Megan took the last of the steps down into the garage, she saw that the vehicles had been moved to one side of the area. She reckoned Adolf must have helped because three rows of cars were neatly stacked, one on top of the other in four columns; and unless they had a crane hidden somewhere on the plane, superstrength was the only other option available.

"This way please, Miss Months." The operative with her, Todd directed her to the back of the garage where a makeshift demarcation had been erected using a large one-way glass. Long steel rods were used to further demarcate the inside of the space into cells that held the captured New Dawn brothers' operatives.

Good job, Megan remarked with a nod, impressed. The team had really made good use of limited resources.

"Here." Todd pointed to the biggest space in the demarcation where a man with a sunburned skin, black hair and goatee, seemly in his early fifties, sat at the single table in the otherwise empty room. Four operatives occupied the four corners of the room around the man, each one with their eyes and guns trained on him.

Megan knocked on the door and the operative closest to it moved to slide it open, passing her a tablet as she came in.

"Federico Marino," she read from an opened file as she sat at the other end of the table. "I've got to say it's quite the profile you have here..."

Federico was listed as a former Italian Special Forces soldier, with the GOI nonetheless. He was dishonourably discharged about ten years earlier on the counts of inhumane detention and torture, attempted rape, war profiteering, and a numerous other charges Megan wasn't quite sure if they were true or just fabricated to make his discharge all the more dishonourable.

"I'm more interested in the present you though," she swiped the tablet onto the next page, "or at least in the double role you've been playing in the ND in the name of your brother, Martin."

As it turned out, the New Dawn brothers weren't a crew headed by twin brothers; just Federico acting as his other twin, Martin Marino.

Martin, from what Megan could read in the file before her, wasn't an identical twin of Federico. But the Marino brothers had led such obscure lives before advent of the ND – Martin's life even more obscure than Federico's – that it was so easy for the latter to take up the other's identity without anyone being the wiser.

The file had listed that Martin had died in a mysterious car accident just a few months before the ND emerged in the underworld. In order to protect himself while further adding to the air of mystery around the organization, Federico assumed the title of Uno under his own name, and Due under his brother's name.

A very convenient sequence of events, Megan thought to herself but didn't probe it. That wasn't her point of investigation after all.

"Look Mr. Marino, this old history doesn't concern me." She put the tablet aside to face the man in front of her squarely. "How about we talk about something more recent? Like your trips to Bodo and New York in the past couple of months, for example."

Federico had been attentive throughout Megan's read-through; or at least, he had looked attentive. His eyes were on her the whole time, not once leaving her face even as she shifted a bit to the left or right during her talk.

However, now that she was done and obviously awaiting a response, his eyes remained trained on her without change. She began to doubt if he had been listening all along and his mind had only had his body play a trick on her with its automated pose.

"Mr. Marino," Megan called, waving her hand a little in front of his face for some reaction. "Are you with me, Mr. Marino?"

Suddenly, he laughed. It wasn't the pleasant, in response to a joke sound she was used to hearing, or even the mocking one that Kei would sometimes make to infuriate her.

This is madness, Megan realized. This is the sound of full-blown, no-holding-back madness.

But Federico's eyes didn't look insane when he focused on Megan again after the laughter had passed. They were calm, set, like the eyes of a predator on its prey.

"You're an interesting one," he said, his voice surprisingly gentle in its thick Italian accent. "You're much more interesting than the others who had faced me before.

"And your team is pretty good too; powerful unlike any I'd ever see before." He stood up and the operatives would have reacted with their guns had Megan not signaled to them in time to stand down. "A powerful woman with a superpowerful team. I guess you're not from the average security outfit out there."

"And what makes you think I'm with a security organization and not just some rival crew hoping to steal business?" she asked, genuinely curious now.

"Your eyes." He sat back down and leaned forward so much that Megan would have felt very invaded with his face only an inch away from hers had she not been mentally prepared beforehand. "Your eyes are different. People in my line of work usually have the eyes of a killer. None of them have such interesting eyes like yours."

He rested back in his seat and laughed some more.

Megan waited a few seconds after the laughter for the sound to fade from her ears before she proceeded.

"So, you admit then that you were in Bodø and New York in the past two months?" she went back to the matter at hand.

"Yes. What do they have to with you?"

"More like, what do they have to do with these?" She slid the tablet to his front with the pictures from the Thanatos explosion sites on display.

One look at the picture and Federico went stiff. In fact, he didn't just go stiff, he looked almost petrified. His hand went to his neck and he began to fiddle with a gold rosary Megan didn't notice he was wearing earlier.

He knows something, the thought came to Megan, but it was accompanied with the fear that what he knew might not be what she wanted to hear.

Thing is, if he, and by extension, the New Dawn brothers were the perpetrators of the incidents, his look should have been that of glee, or satisfaction, or perhaps even indifference if it was just another job on the organization's roster. But the vibe she was getting from him was deathly cold, as if someone had suddenly turned off the heater and tipped a bucket of ice over his head.

She probed anyway. "Mr. Marino, tell me what you know about these incidents."

"I don't know anything." He shifted the tablet from his front so hurriedly that it almost fell to the floor.

"Tell me what you know about the explosions," she said again.

"I don't know about any explosion," he returned.

"Tell me what you know about Thanatos."

"I said, I don't know!"

Out of nowhere, Federico flipped the table to the side and lunged at Megan, catching her by the neck. He would have begun to squeeze had one of the operatives not shot him in the arm and another in the leg.

She scrambled away from the fallen man just as the operatives rushed to subdue him. Her hand went to her neck and it came back with a stinging sensation. Her eyes went from the blood on the floor, to the bleeding man now restrained, and finally to the mad look in his eyes as his breaths came out in gasps almost reminiscent of her own.

The medical staff came in just then and jabbed Federico in the neck with a sedative, but just as his eyes drooped to close, he said to Megan, "I don't know anything about Thanatos, but I can tell you this for free: if you go looking for death, you will find death."