Blown

by Francine Mathews

  She was looking at him, too, her dark eyes filled with something that might be pain. He held out a cup.

  “Is there an aid station?” she gasped, “somewhere around here?”

  He pointed toward the Marines who were working the crowd farther down the road.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  And drank his dose to the dregs.

  Chapter 2

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, 9:43 A.M.

  The beauty of that Sunday morning—the unseasonable blue of the arcing sky, the crisp breeze tugging at the few remaining leaves—was lost on Caroline Carmichael. There are no windows in the vaults of the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, no view but computer screens and cubicle partitions and the unremitting whiteness of the walls. The fluorescent lights sang to themselves somewhere high over her head, beyond the register of human sound, and a screen saver wove through its monotony of variation. Otherwise the Counterterrorism Center was quiet and almost empty. Only her branch chief, Cuddy Wilmot, was there to witness her act of defiance, and he did so from the safety of his office doorway, leaning wordlessly against the jamb. She was cleaning out her desk.

  It had been more than ten years since Caroline had received her security clearance, the badge with the bar code that admitted her to the CIA’s compounds and covert installations, the months of training in weapons and tradecraft and raw survival that most intelligence analysts never used. She was moving slowly this morning, like a woman who hadn’t slept in days, shifting the piles of useless paper into the brown paper burn bags with her left hand. Her right arm was wrapped in a sling. Seven days earlier she’d been shot in the shoulder while the vice president of the United States died a brutal death. Tomorrow she would attend the woman’s funeral. And then—and then what, exactly? She had no answer for the question of how to live the rest of her life. It was enough to burn the evidence she’d accumulated thus far.

  “You’ll have to come back for your exit interviews,” Cuddy told her. “There are papers to sign. Statements. Dare will want to see you.” Dare being Darien Atwood, Director of Central Intelligence, Grand Poobah of the nation’s spooks. Exit interviews. Vows of silence. They would take her badge. Caroline shrugged dismissively, and remembered too late that it was painful.

  What was Cuddy feeling, exactly? Regret? Helplessness? Abandonment? He was standing over her as she sat cross-legged on the industrial carpet in her jeans, no makeup on and her blond hair tumbled over her forehead. They’d met this way before, in the off-hours of a hundred Sundays wasted in the secure vacuum of the Tempest-tested vault. They’d shared sleepless nights of hunting the terrorist hydra, a beast struck down in one place only to rise in another. They were the U.S. government’s acknowledged authorities on a group called 30 April, neo-Nazi killers who’d kidnapped and murdered the vice president in Germany two weeks before. But she and Cuddy had been operating on partial information for years. Deliberately deceived by the one man they’d never thought to question—their boss.

  Caroline understood now exactly how she’d been used, and how she’d allowed it to happen. Thirty April had become her obsession, and like all consuming desires, this one had blinded her. She and Cuddy were the ideal pawns: eager for justice, hungry for revenge, dedicated and single-minded with time to burn. Neither of them had any family to speak of. Their hobbies were long dead. But they had each other and that perfect understanding that springs up sometimes between inhabitants of the covert world. A world gone black, Caroline thought now, where the only friend you trust is the one who remains a stranger.

  They’d been endlessly useful to their boss, Scottie Sorensen, the CIA’s subtle Chief of Counterterrorism. Two personable, intelligent people in their late thirties who could render the most complex organizational diagram into policymaker’s English. Scottie had backed them up and supported them to the hilt and unleashed them on the truth with a pocketful of lies. Cuddy looked prepared to continue telling those lies as long as necessary; Caroline had typed her resignation and e-mailed it to the chief an hour ago.

  Cuddy was on duty today, in the pressed khakis and Oxford cloth shirt of a man who might be summoned at any moment to the White House Situation Room. The fact that he could continue to slave for a boss who’d wasted more than two years of his life was disturbing to Caroline; but then, Scottie Sorensen had not planted Cuddy smack in the middle of 30 April. Scottie had saved that plum—that honor—for Caroline’s husband, Eric, the guy he’d loved like a son and thrown to the wolves without a backward glance.

  Eric is dead, he’d told Caroline nearly three years ago when a jet went down off the coast of Turkey; 30 April blew up his plane. That much was true, of course—only Eric hadn’t been on MedAir 901. He’d been busy crafting a legend: a perfect backstopped identity for an undercover operation so secret only Scottie knew it existed. Eric had become a terrorist killer in the employ of Mlan Krucevic, head of the 30 April Organization, while Scottie ruthlessly buried him in the minds of the people he’d known and loved. Nobody—not Dare, not Cuddy, not the budget wonks who funded covert ops—had suspected Eric’s survival. Not even Caroline, his widow.

  For two and a half years, the yearning for vengeance got Caroline up in the morning and kept her from bed at night. When she learned her husband was still alive—and had actually helped kidnap the vice president of the United States—it was Eric she accused of betrayal, not Scottie. Eric, after all, had walked away from a woman and a marriage and a life; Eric had handed her a living death. Sent out to find him—to find Vice President Sophie Payne—Caroline had wavered between hatred and a desire to hurt him the way she’d been hurting for years.

  Now she knew it was Scottie, not Eric, who’d pulled all their strings.

  Our boy got out in time, Scottie said as she walked off Air Force Two behind Sophie Payne’s casket. He’s 30 April’s last man standing and you’re never to speak his name out loud again, hear? Blow the whistle on me and I’ll have you up in front of a Congressional investigation so fast your head will spin, lady. Believe that.

  “I’ve already talked to Dare,” she told Cuddy now. “There’s nothing left to say. She has everything Eric could give her about 30 April’s networks worldwide. She knows all there is to know about Scottie. She won’t fire him, Cuddy. He’s too dangerous.”

  He glanced down at the document in his hands, as though it were a script. “And you won’t work here as long as he does.”

  “Would you?”

  Of course he would. Despite the fact that Eric was his best friend.

  “This is your career, Caroline. Christ—it’s your life. What’re you going to do out there alone?”

  A glimpse in her mind suddenly of water fragile as blue glass, palm fronds ruffled by a breeze. The beach was empty. Only she and the sun were on it. She said nothing, and went back to trashing her files.

  Chapter 3

  HARPERS FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA, 5:33 P.M.

  He’d changed into jeans and a hunting jacket once he got back to the truck, tossing the fatigues in a Dumpster full of marathon trash. It was a seventeen-minute drive through the late afternoon traffic to Adams-Morgan, where he stopped only long enough to send a fax. He ate the lunch Bekah had packed for him while he drove north, through the populous suburbs of Prince George’s County across the Maryland border. At the edge of Baltimore he picked up the interstate and turned southwest, toward Hillsboro. It all took maybe an hour. 5:33 by his digital watch.

  No one had questioned him. Nobody had thought his solitary water station looked strange among the boisterous Marines. Nobody followed him home. Daniel Becker took the endurance of his luck as a Sign. The Leader stood at his right hand.

  At Harpers Ferry, he eased the truck onto the verge of the road above the massive confluence of two rivers and pulled out his cell phone. Rebekah would want to know he was okay.

  A horn blared as a huge sport utility vehicle—Japanese, Daniel noticed—shouldered past his pickup. A woman with a blond head of hair solid as a military helmet commanded t
he wheel. She had four kids in the back and they rode in their raised seats like royalty borne on a palanquin. Bitch, Daniel thought wearily. Mindin’ my own bizness while you take over the entire highway with your foreign car costs more’n my whole trailer. You and your kids’ll be the first bodies on the bonfire, I’ll tell you what.

  He almost reached for the M16 he kept behind the driver’s seat, but then Rebekah picked up and he caught her voice like the lifeline it’d always been. “Hey, girl,” he said.

  “Daniel.”

  “First errand’s done. Couple more to go.”

  “All right.”

  “Need any milk?”

  “I’ll see you at home.”

  How long had it been, he wondered as she hung up, since his wife had told him she loved him? Not since Dolf was put in the ground. He stabbed at the phone’s buttons and looked around for the bitch in the SUV. Gone.

  Daniel pulled out into the stream of traffic. He’d dump the truck in the lot behind Lanier’s package store and pick up the bike. Just in case his calculations were wrong, and somebody had been watching after all.

  Chapter 4

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 9:15 P.M.

  The rumors of widespread illness began three hours after the marathon was officially over, and the broad hill on the Virginia side of the Potomac where the race ended was bare of everything by that time except protein-bar wrappers and empty electrolyte bottles and a space blanket or two, crumpled and dancing in the rising November breeze. Darkness fell early that day; a front had moved in from the west and rain threatened. By dinnertime the Marines had dismantled their water stations and checkpoints and loaded them into military transport trucks. Nothing of the race was left but bad news.

  The initial reports were anecdotal: nausea and vomiting among a disparate group of marathoners. There were twenty-six cases in the nation’s capital . . . there were forty-five . . . there were eighty-three. But who wouldn’t puke after running more than twenty-six miles? The newscasters downplayed the stories; one doctor suggested a flare-up of salmonella. Then the winner of the men’s race—a twenty-year-old Zairian named Felix Nguza, already in New York for a flight out of the country—turned up in a midtown emergency room prostrate with diarrhea. George Enfield caught a glimpse of the guy’s face, beaded with sweat, on the evening news.

  Dana had finished the race in four hours and sixteen minutes, though she’d been forced to stop twice at aid stations to have her insulin level checked. George had found her three times during the day: in Georgetown, at the Reflecting Pool, and finally at the chute reserved for late finishers in Arlington. He’d been waiting to wrap her in the shining thermal blanket Mallory thought was fit for a futuristic princess; and he’d been struck, as he did so, at how strong Dana felt. He’d expected her to fall to the ground once she crossed the finish line. She’d been laughing, instead.

  The pledges she’d gathered from all across the country would bring $262,000 to the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. They’d celebrated at home with a long hot bath and take-out Thai. Mallory stayed up late, eating noodles and drinking her first champagne. As he carried his daughter upstairs at eight-thirty, she’d whispered drowsily in his ear, “I’m going to beat the world someday, just like Mommy.”

  Dana started vomiting while he read bedtime stories to their daughter. Forty-three minutes later, when she slipped into unconsciousness, an ambulance arrived to take her to Sibley Hospital.

  Caroline had no intention of answering the door when the bell rang at ten minutes past ten that night. She’d been ambushed by the press at least eight times since Tuesday, with requests for exclusive interviews and talk show appearances and photo ops. Because she was a woman who’d entered a foreign terrorist compound completely alone, she was a media sensation. President Jack Bigelow had called her a hero—he badly needed to find one—and there was the pitiful fact of her wounded shoulder, the interesting effect of the sling.

  A few print journalists had camped on her front steps for a while, until her persistent refusal to talk to anybody about what she’d seen in Sarajevo discouraged them. Her face had appeared as a tiny inset above the vice president’s photograph on the cover of Time and Newsweek, but everything those magazines printed about her was completely sanitized and came from the CIA’s Public Information Office. Cuddy Wilmot had offered to put her up for a few days, just until the funeral was over, and Dare Atwood had told her to get a room under a false name at the Tysons Marriott; but Caroline knew that if she didn’t go home immediately, she never would. The fugitive impulse—shut the door on that past, that forsaken master bedroom, those bottles of wine stacked willy-nilly in hope of a party—was staggering.

  Caroline was afraid to talk to anybody—afraid that if the words started coming they’d never stop until she’d spilled her guts and screwed them all, Dare and the Agency and the husband who wasn’t lying cold in his grave in Arlington. How to keep going? How to pretend she was the same person she’d been two weeks ago? How to tidy up the bits of the past and throw them on some fire, like the burn bags full of useless paper she’d sent to the Agency’s incinerator this morning? Should she sell the town house she’d bought with Eric, get rid of its tidy front lawn with the boxwood hedge, its gleaming black door, the knocker in the shape of a dolphin she hadn’t been able to resist?

  Instead, she lay on her sofa in a pair of old pajamas and ate potato chips straight out of the bag for dinner.

  She was, if the truth were told, in a smoldering depression. Depression because the weight of failure and bitterness pressed down on her mind like a cinder block hurtling from the sky. Smoldering, because the flames of her outrage were banked now, waiting for the spark to flare and consume the man she hated. Scottie Sorensen. Who’d hijacked her past and gagged her future. Who’d made sure Eric could never come home again.

  So when the bell rang a second time, it took her a minute to react. A fist pounded on her front door and a voice shouted “Carrie.” It was possible she knew that voice, but she’d been washing the chips down with a venerable Mourvedre and her senses were a tad clouded. She glanced at the window light to the left of the door and saw shapes looming. Men.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” she muttered to the empty bottle. Where was that beach she’d glimpsed this morning, that tropic emptiness? She wanted only to slip out of her clothes and walk forward through the sand.

  Instead, she padded listlessly to the door.

  “This letter came in about an hour ago.” Cuddy spoke in a strained voice as he perched on the edge of the chair he always used at Caroline and Eric’s. They’d watched the pilot of Twin Peaks in this room. The first episodes of Seinfeld. Cuddy preferred beer to wine and he never touched Eric’s Scotch. There was a reserve about Cuddy—a careful holding back, even among his best friends—that Caroline found irritating.

  “Steve Price here”—Cuddy nodded to the Washington Post reporter who was studying her pajamas and sling wordlessly from the other end of the sofa—“contacted the FBI. They pulled in Shephard. Shephard called me.”

  Tom Shephard was the FBI’s legal attaché for Central Europe. He and Caroline had met over a bomb crater in Berlin a few weeks ago, and after the frenzied hunt for 30 April through half a dozen countries, Tom had flown back with her and the vice president’s body in Air Force Two.

  Tom was someone Caroline refused to think about in any depth right now because he only confused her. She was Eric’s wife and Eric was miraculously alive, so why did she feel this absurd desire to lean into Tom and rest? He was comforting and safe, too attractive at the wrong time, a man at loose ends with hours to kill. So why hadn’t he called her during the past endless week?

  She’d heard he was hiding out in a Dupont Circle hotel, waiting for Payne’s funeral and the Bureau’s decision about his future. Tom looked pretty much the same as always: tousled salt-and-pepper hair, craggy face, hands shoved in the pockets of his khaki raincoat. He was roaming the room as though Caroline weren’t there, his eyes straying from the bo
oks on her shelves to the photographs on her tables. Looking for Eric, she thought bitterly. He wouldn’t find him. What pictures she’d kept were locked in a bedroom drawer. Or the sealed vault of her mind.

  She glanced down at the sheets of paper the three men had brought her. “Faxed?”

  “From an Internet café in Adams-Morgan,” Shephard said tersely. “Right to the Post newsroom. Whoever pushed the button is long gone.”

  To the press slaves of the Beast System:

  Thirty April is everywhere, even when you least expect us. Today we delivered 150 gallons of water poisoned with ricin to a random group of competitors in the Marine Corps Marathon—

  “Thirty April?” she managed. “Cuddy, 30 April is dead.”

  “That’s what we thought,” he said gently. “Keep reading.”

  —4-ounce cups of water were handed to runners at Hains Point over a period of 5 hours. All are thus assured of a painful and lingering death.

  “We’re supposed to believe they’re operating in the U.S.?” she demanded. “Since when? Do we have any data to support that?”

  “No suggestion I’ve found.” Cuddy shook his head slightly. “No networks we’ve identified. Keep reading.”

  This is only the first in a wave of attacks mounted against the Jew World Order. We, the loyal followers of 30 April, dedicate ourselves to avenging our martyred brethren, not least among them the Leader himself, Mlan Krucevic, struck down by the criminals who rule in the name of the American people.

  Caroline snorted derisively.

  Death to Jack Bigelow & the corrupt maggots who keep him in power. Death to the whore who betrayed the Leader to his enemies. Death to the liberals and Jews who have infiltrated the United States government and handed it over to the filth of the world. Remember Waco. Remember Ruby Ridge and the murder of the patriot Tim McVeigh.