Dare winced.
“She could be bleeding inside.”
“And completely shut down over the next forty-eight hours. The woman should be in an intensive-care unit.”
“But surely Krucevic would have considered that. He's a biologist himself.”
“Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he never intended for Sophie Payne to survive.”
“But he injected his own son with the stuff!”
“He said that he did,” Scottie cautioned. “But what do we really know, Director?”
“Nothing,” she retorted, “and we don't have to know. All we have to do is assume. We have to project every possible scenario for the Vice President; we have to be prepared to offer solutions. That's why we exist, remember?”
Scottie was silent.
“Get somebody at the CDC working on this bug,” Dare ordered, “because when the Vice President comes home and I mean when, Scottie she'll need a treatment regimen already in place.”
“Got it,” he replied, and hung up.
Dare pressed her hands against her eyes and considered making coffee. Something about trees and an ax fluttered on the edge of her consciousness. She brushed it aside and called the President.
Three
The Night Sky, 3:47 a.m.
Caroline Carmichael is soaring across the Atlantic at thirty-nine thousand feet, an arrow shot straight at the heart of Central Europe; but in her fitful dreams, she crouches low in her grandfather's dew-drenched furrows and waits, tensed, for pursuit.
The smell of damp Salinas earth rises from the morning fields and mingles with the dense musk of artichoke leaves, with the flare of garlic flowers from across three hectares, with creosote and diesel fumes from the black ribbon of highway.
It is August 7, 1969, and she is exactly five years old. Her father has been gone for most of her life, gone somewhere in Asia without being dead, in a plane that failed him when he least expected it. She knows his face and name by heart, she knows the outline of his story as another child might know Santa Claus — Bill Bisby, Salinas hero, with the fields of artichoke and garlic in his blood; Bill Bisby, a flyboy at twenty-two, with his finger on the afterburner; Bisby the careless warrior, her daddy. A kind of elf, with his short, dark hair and his open grin, one hand waving forever before the cockpit shield comes down. Bill Bisby, who might just slide down her chimney come Christmas.
Your daddy was a hero, Grandpa whispers in her ear. Your daddy died for his country. Your daddy might be coming back, some day. It'd be just like you to fool us all. You've got to make your daddy proud.
A screen door slams. Caroline cocks her head and watches as Grandma shakes the crumbs from Grandpa's napkin, then turns back into the house without a glance for the warming day, without a hint of Caroline crouching secret in the acrid furrows. Grandma's lips are folded in a line as straight as an ironed napkin edge; her eyelids are red. Caroline bites hard at a hangnail trailing from her thumb.
Her knees are dirty, and one of them bleeds. Her hair has not been combed. She has been up for four hours, up since the last hour of darkness and the irrigation machines rolling like giant spiders across the landscape. She is waiting there among the green leaves, the scent of garlic and artichoke, for a last glimpse of her mother.
Brakes squeal as a truck slows at the crossroads, turning toward Gilroy, its outline shimmering like a mirage in the morning heat. Caroline ignores it. She has heard such things from birth, as common as birdsong and the whisper of surf when the wind blows from the west. Her ankles ache from crouching and she needs to pee, but she stares unblinking at the farmhouse's front door.
And there, thrusting carelessly through it in her worn jeans, blond hair flying, a pack already slung over her back, is Jackie. She clatters down the sagging wood steps. She shoves open the VW van's battered door and hurls her heavy rucksack — army green, probably from a surplus place, the irony of it lost on her — into the back. Then turns and waits for Jeremy. Or is it Dave? Last year it was Phil.
Caroline rubs at her streaming nose with a dirty hand, then wipes it on the skirt of her dress. Grandma would purse her lips and frown; she would think, inevitably, Just like her mother. When Jackie is gone, Caroline will creep into the house and stand furtively before the washbasin, before anyone sees. Have they missed her yet? Are they worried? Do they remember that it is her birthday?
The man with the beard and the long hair, the leather vest and the bell-bottom jeans with heart-shaped patches and peace signs scrawled in ink, avoids the door altogether. He shuffles around the far corner of the house from the direction of the privy, his thin frame curled in an eternal question mark. He stares at his own shoes as he walks. A mongrel dog lopes at his heels, tongue dangling. Its breath reeks of raw meat and decay, the good-natured slobber left in Caroline's lap.
“Carrie!” her mother calls. She cups her hands to her mouth and bellows again.
“Carrie! Shit! Where the fuck did that kid go?” Caroline crouches closer to the earth and tries not to breathe. Jackie turns, impotent and furious, her gaze roaming over the morning fields. Her daughter kneads the soiled cotton of her dress between hot and damp fingers. There was yelling last night, too, when she was supposed to be asleep; shouts and demands and a bitter sobbing that might have been her grandmother's. They would not let Jackie take her away, Grandpa said, cutting off the tears; they owed that much to Bill. And to the child. It was no life for a five-year-old, in the back of a van. It was no life for Jackie.
“Don't tell me how to raise my kid, old man,” Jackie had said.
“Seems to me you ain't raising her,” Grandpa had replied. And then, much later, the scent of pot and her mother's hand in the darkness, smoothing Caroline's hair back from her face. Caroline squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to sleep; she prayed that Jackie would stay all night, while the moon shifted across the face of the clapboard house and the cicadas died down to a murmur. But Jackie rose after a moment and shuffled back up the hall, the tip of her joint a wandering flare.
Now the man who may be Jeremy or Dave or even possibly Phil orders the dog into the back of the van. He slides the door shut with a rumble. Grandma is standing on the front porch, her fingers gripping the rail, her face wiped clean of emotion.
“Where's my kid?” Jackie snarls.
“Where've you put her, Elbe?” Grandma allows herself to blink.
“Nobody puts Caroline anywhere. The child has a way of hiding herself.”
“Right. Convenient. Isn't that flicking convenient, Dave? Christ. Well, let's find her. Carrie!”
Caroline's heart is suddenly pounding in her rib cage; she buries her face in the leaves. She is one second away from racing toward the woman with the blond hair, one second from hurling herself into her mother's arms. She so wants to be wanted. But she remembers, with the sharpness of a child's memory, what it was like being Jackie's girl. She can still smell the stench of her own unchanged diapers, the hunger of forgotten lunch and dinner and then breakfast again, the nights she slept hiding under a blanket in the back of a thousand cars, terrified that Joe or Zane or Eddie might remember she was there.
“Carrie!” The voice hoarse with smoke and rage.
Her grandfather's broken shotgun snaps suddenly to attention. The sound is small in the morning air, almost an indifference, but Caroline's head comes up and her eyes move unerringly to the man standing silent on the front porch, his gun leveled at Jackie. Bill Bisby's dad. The hero's father.
Jackie freezes where she stands, outlined against the waving artichokes, the van at her back. Caroline watches the anger drain from her face, sees her eyes close in bitterness.
“It's time to go,” Grandpa says quietly.
“You go on, girl, and get in that van.”
The blond hair writhes as she turns. She gives him the finger. But she goes.
When the minibus stops for an instant at the end of the dirt drive and hesitates, then lumbers with the pain of hard old age in the direction of Santa Cruz, Carolin
e rises from the ground. She is suddenly sobbing. She has wet her pants. Her mother is gone, as she has gone every year of Caroline's life. But Grandpa is sauntering slowly through the field, the shotgun barrel broken over his forearm. He is whistling a tuneless little song that might be “Happy Birthday.” He knows exactly where Caroline is; he has found her there before. In his other hand is a present tied in blue ribbon.
They do not hear from Jackie for another three years.
Caroline stirs in the airless dark of a hurtling plane. The gin has left her cotton-mouthed. She is flying toward Eric, who fell off her radar like vanished Bill Bisby — only this time the hero came sliding back down the chimney. It is Christmas in midair, and Caroline is supposed to believe in miracles now, however improvident. What would her grandfather say to all this? What would he think of Caroline's Eric?
He would wonder how she came to be so far from Salinas. “My condolences, Mrs. Bisby,” says the man at the edge of the cemetery as the rain spatters down around them and their pumps sink into the mud.
“Your husband was a good man. He died too young.”
Grandma weeps into her handkerchief. Caroline grips her elbow with one hand and an umbrella with the other. It is February, and Caroline is barely eleven years old — February, and whole sections of the coastline are falling into the sea, Highway 1 is closed. The artichoke fields and the expanse of garlic are drowned in mud. She tries not to stare at the crumbling edge of her grandfather's grave, the way the loamy earth is sliding downward. She tries not to think of him at all.
The rain swept over Caroline's grandfather while he drove south from San Jose in the dark; it dogged him down the curves of the Santa Cruz mountains; it filled his headlights and obliterated his windshield. He steered blindly into the grille of another truck, arms flung up before his face — and so he ended, the hero's father, still believing his boy was coming home.
The silver-haired man standing before them in the Salinas cemetery pries the umbrella from Caroline's hand. He clasps her chilled fingers in his enormous palm. She sighs deeply and, without thinking about it much, buries her face in his black raincoat. He strokes her hair while Grandma weeps.
“I'm Hank Armstrong,” he says. “Jackie's uncle. I've come to take you home, Caroline.”
“Home” turned out to be a duplex on Park Avenue, a house on Long Island, a woman named Mrs. Marsalis who presided over the kitchen in a starched uniform. Home was home for only a few months of the year, because Hank was wise and would never make Grandma an enemy; Caroline's real life was in Salinas, he knew, among the sodden fields. Hank sent Grandma money that year, “to help out with Caroline's upkeep,” and took the child to Paris. He made plans for the following summer; he told Mrs. Marsalis to redecorate a bedroom in Southampton. He rejoiced in this gift of a child to light the winter of his life. He altered his will. For the first time, Caroline flew in a jet plane and tried not to think of falling.
Grandma sold off the fields of artichoke and garlic; she took a pittance for the house her husband had built. She moved north to the city and accepted elevators.
She stood over her sink, where there was no longer a window, and stared unseeing at the wall.
Caroline returned from her travels with Hank. She talked of Manhattan and of the Eiffel Tower. She practiced French. Large boxes of books arrived from New York each week, and Caroline read them aloud to her grandmother in the evenings. She read in bed long after the rest of the lights were doused. Hank paid for her private schooling. She wore a plaid jumper, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a navy blue tie. Hank wrote to her on thick, cream-colored paper, in an elegant blue hand — or perhaps he dictated, and the hand was Mrs. Marsalis's. The news from Park Avenue. Nothing unfit for Grandma's ears. But Caroline did not read his letters aloud. She tied them with ribbon and buried them in drawers.
He was a quiet man, Hank Armstrong, who marshaled his thoughts and chose his words with precision. He loved Caroline without understanding the point of expressing it. When she cried for her grandmother or fell into moping silence on days of relentless rain, Hank invariably offered her a book. It was the only comfort he knew.
He had married and been abandoned by at least three wives. He had no children of his own — just Jackie, his sister's girl, who only called when she was broke.
It was on one of those occasions that Jackie had offered up Caroline, the prize chip in her floating crap game. And Hank had taken the gamble.
“I never understood your mother,” Hank told Caroline once, under the influence of gin and the Hamptons sunset. “But then, I never tried.”
She was supposed to go to law school and join Hank's firm. That was always the plan, from the time she was fifteen — Caroline will go to law school, Hank said, and make him proud. Her intelligence should not be wasted. Her flashes of brilliance, her cunning with words, her shy smile above the private-school uniform all offerings on the altar of good fortune.
What Hank wanted, Caroline knew, was safety. He wanted her life to be free from violence the rage of feeling, the tragedy of wandering, the upheaval of passion and loss. And for the most part Caroline agreed. After all, emotion had never done much for Jackie. But in the end she turned her back on Harvard Law and chose Langley instead.
Hank toured the CIA campus on Family Day. He boned up on foreign policy. He talked of law school as something she had merely deferred. Until Eric Carmichael burst out of the Tidewater and confounded them both completely.
“Caroline is no trouble,” Hank had said proudly when she was seventeen;
“Caroline follows her head, not her heart.” It was inevitable, she thought as her plane descended into German airspace, that the rebellion would come when Hank least expected it. There was something in her blood that was wholly un-Armstrong a hint of Bill Bisby and his wild contrail, a fascination for free fall.
What if she were to call Hank now, to pick up the cabin phone and say, Hank, I need you, I'm scared and I'm lost?
People had a way of betraying you. They died; they dropped off the face of the earth. Or worse, they traded their souls and came back down the chimney like vicious Christmas elves: a familiar face, a stranger's heart, and a load of baggage on his back.
The trick was not to let them see you still cared.
Four
Berlin, 8:30 a.m.
Greta Oppenheimer did not look like the sort of person who should be manning the phones in a stylish front office. Greta wore heavy shoes with thick soles and the sort of stockings that were intended to suggest a glossy tan but merely cast a brown pall over instep and leg. Her face was crinkled. She applied a heavy concealer to the dark circles under her eyes each morning, but by ten A.M. the camouflage had worn off, and the smudged sockets peered out at the world with undisguised exhaustion. Greta's clothes were sage green or charcoal gray. They conformed to the fashion of ten years previous, and might even have dated from that ancient period. Her dull blond hair was shot through with silver, unkempt, like a bird's nest abandoned high in a leafless tree. She was a woman formed by hardship; she expected to disappoint. Greta lived alone, and festered in her loneliness. She was thirty-four years old.
Fred Leicester, who worked in the new U.S. embassy on Pariser Platz and contrived to ride the number 8 U-Bahn from Wittenau every morning, although he really lived clear across the city in Dahlem, had a pretty good sense of who Greta Oppenheimer was. He knew that her parents had been poorly educated, that she had grown up in a small village in Thuringia and reported to the local factory at seventeen. He knew that her parents had died playing chicken on a single-lane highway when she was almost twenty, and that she had married and divorced before she was twenty-four. He thought she might be religious, in a private and stricken way. In another era she might have turned ecstatic and raised stigmatized hands in praise of a punishing Lord. But the latest millennium preferred the prosaic. Greta forgot to speak in tongues. She turned receptionist instead.
The convulsive end of the German Democratic Republ
ic in 1989 had carried Greta along like a Popsicle stick in a storm drain; history bewildered and drowned her. Ten years in unified Berlin had failed to improve her lot. Greta lived with one foot on the threshold of the present and her entire body leaning back into the past; she lived in ignorance and suspicion and a moral rectitude as lifeless as dust. She scrupulously saved every spare pfennig, without the slightest notion of what she would ever spend it on.
She was, Fred thought, a perfect target for recruitment. What Greta craved was a new dream, an ambition within her reach. And he was the man to give it to her.
Like most men of his training and background, Fred Leicester believed that women who live alone and who are unhappy should be grateful for male attention. The notion of grateful women and all that they might tell was hallowed in the annals of espionage. Grateful women talk. They make room on their seat in the U-Bahn, sliding heavy buttocks toward the smoke-fogged windows. Their hearts thud painfully beneath their drab sweaters at the prospect of another commute, of Fred Leicester ducking through the train's sliding doorways, his morning newspaper in one hand and a cooling cup of coffee in the other. Grateful women sell out the last man to neglect them without a moment's hesitation, and feel better for the betrayal. It was Fred's hope that with keen eye contact, a few warm smiles, a request for assistance with his stumbling German, Greta would begin to talk. She was his developmental in the middle of Mian Krucevic's empire, his sole prospect for Sophie Payne's salvation. For Greta, Fred had taken the S-Bahn north from Dahlem that morning, switched stations twice, and waited with innumerable cups of coffee for the hour to be ripe. He stood now on the underground platform and looked toward the approaching Wittenau train. She always chose the third car from the front, always sat on the far side of the aisle. It would be easy to raise the subject of yesterday's horror: the rail lines were shattered at Pariser Platz, all the trains were running late. She might express sympathy, perhaps, in view of his nationality; if the car was quite full, they might be forced to hang by the ceiling straps together, jostled by Fate and haphazard politics. The train would go nowhere with great difficulty. Fred would suggest they get off and share a taxi. Or stop for coffee until the crowds subsided. She would agree after an instant's hesitation, an anxious look half cast over her shoulder. It was one of Gretas mannerisms. By this time, he knew them all.
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