“They will not let me go to the funeral,” he said plaintively. “It is not fair! I want to say good-bye to Lady Sophie! Can’t you make them let me out?”
Cuddy shifted in the doorway, jabbed at his glasses. “Maybe they think you’re not well enough.”
“I am! I’m perfectly fine! I have been fine for two days! They’re not letting me go on purpose—to . . . to punish me because my father killed her! He nearly killed me, too!”
“Jozsef.” Caroline smoothed the blanket over the thin legs. “I’ll talk to your doctor. Okay? I’ll talk to him. I’ll let him know that I’ll personally take care of you and make sure you get through it. We’ll see what he says, all right?”
The boy gave her a look full of such desperate hope that she suddenly understood what Santa Claus must feel like on Christmas Eve. Did a funeral matter so much? Maybe. When it was for somebody you’d failed to save.
“How long ago did Mlan decide on Mrs. Payne?”
“At least a year,” he said rapidly. “He told me he had been planning for a year. Tracking her movements. Learning everything he could. Even in her shower at the Naval Observatory, he boasted, she was never alone. He knew her shoe size. Which restaurants she went to and what she ordered. He told Lady Sophie all that, the first day he took her. He liked to see people squirm. To invade their minds. She could not have escaped him, Miss Carrie. If it hadn’t been Berlin, it would have been Paris.”
“I can see that.”
“Even in her shower,” Cuddy repeated. His careful gaze drifted over Caroline. “At the Observatory. He said that?”
Jozsef nodded.
“There were people watching her at the veep’s residence? People on Mlan’s payroll?”
“I don’t know if he paid them. But yes, he had informants. People who followed her. People she would not notice.”
“Who were they?” Cuddy asked with deliberate casualness.
Jozsef laughed—a short, bitter bark. “My father never told me those things. He was not a fool.”
“No,” Caroline agreed. “He was not a fool.”
She studied the boy’s face for an instant, seeing the brutal shadows beneath the eyes, the sharpness of the facial bones. “Were there others? Outside Lady Sophie’s house? In her office, for instance?”
“I do not know! My father got his information in secret ways, Miss Carrie. He got messages over the Internet. On his computer. He did not show those things to me.”
“We know there was a laptop,” she said, “that always traveled with him. Thirty April’s database. Would the names be there?”
Cuddy shook his head once, involuntarily.
“Some things were never written down at all.” Jozsef tapped his skull with a weary finger. “He kept them in his brain. And they died with him.”
“Jozsef—we think it’s possible there are 30 April people operating here. In Washington. We need to find them before they do a lot of damage. Are you sure there isn’t a name you remember? An American friend, maybe, of your father’s?”
“You want me to betray his friends?” Jozsef sighed, his eyelids drooping. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“Will you think about it? And let me know if you remember anything else?”
“If you keep your promise—and talk to the doctor.”
“I will.”
“Then we’ll discuss it at the funeral. I’m tired now. I will see you tomorrow.” The eyes flashed open, dark and brilliant. “Do not forget your promise, Miss Carrie!”
“I don’t like that kid,” Cuddy said tensely as they walked toward Caroline’s car. “He’s evil inside.”
“He’s twelve years old, entirely alone in a foreign country, and everyone he knows has just died a violent death. Give him a break!”
“He’s manipulative, calculating, and ruthless,” Cuddy argued. “I don’t trust him farther than I can see him.”
“His life’s completely beyond his control. It always has been. I feel for the little kid.”
“He’s not so little. Are you really going to take him to Payne’s funeral?”
They had stopped at the nurses’ station and paged the doctor in charge of Jozsef’s medical team. Caroline had required exactly seven minutes of the man’s time before she’d won his consent to an outing.
“It’s a small enough thing to ask.”
“He wants to go too badly,” Cuddy said. “Have you asked yourself why?”
“He loved Sophie. They were a team, in those last few days. They got each other through. And then—and then she was dumped alone in a mine shaft and he couldn’t save her. But I’ll tell you something, Cuddy: It was Jozsef who brought that whole encampment down on his father’s head. It was that little lad who decided Mlan had to be stopped. That means something, to me. He’s not evil inside.”
If Cuddy disagreed, he didn’t show it. “We should tell Shephard about the Observatory. He’ll want to get somebody on it.”
“Use my cell.” Caroline fumbled for it in her purse, her left hand on the wheel. “There’s no point in heading to the Bureau right now. Even if they let us in—damage control is not our job. Let’s visit Dare.”
“At this hour?”
“She’ll be up. She’ll be dressed and working three phones. Trying to salvage what she can.”
“But will she want to see us?”
“She’ll have to.” Caroline paused at the intersection with Old Georgetown Road, debating whether to head back to the Beltway or drive straight down toward Dupont Circle and the DCI’s home. At this hour of the night, the snarled main arteries of the capital were relatively empty. “You realize, Cud—if Jozsef doesn’t know who these people are—and everyone else in 30 April’s European organization is dead—there’s only one person left. Only one person who can help us.”
“Eric,” he said.
Chapter 7
BERLIN, 9:12 P.M.
Eric Carmichael sat on the edge of the porcelain tub, his eyes on a digital clock. The hair dye took six minutes to work; he’d been waiting for three and a half. The skin of his fingers was turning brown and the smell of peroxide was sharp in his nostrils; he was thankful for these things, uncompromisingly real. They reassured him that he was alive.
He had lost too much blood in the past week, and his memory of some days was hazy at best. He knew he’d pawned his watch somewhere between Budapest and Berlin—it was gone from his wrist, and he doubted it’d been stolen. Krucevic had always kept them short of cash, and he had no credit card in a name he could use. He’d pawned the watch, then, probably in some shop near the Budapest West train station, the day he’d walked away from Caroline toward a certain death.
He’d been trying to save Sophie Payne but he’d gone across Europe in the wrong direction. By the time he’d realized Mlan Krucevic was not in Berlin, the vice president and Krucevic were both dead, along with every terrorist operative he’d known for the past two years. He alone had survived. The whole world would be hunting him down.
What time was it, when he stood at last in the shadows of the loading dock in Berlin? One A.M.? Two? He’d been cautious and alert. Moved as silently as a cat up the exterior staircase to the security door, through the darkened complex, past reception to the sealed lab. And then the silent rush of air as the knife blade plunged toward him through the darkness, fueled by hatred. He’d sensed the stroke at the last second and dove sideways—but the sharp steel bit into his neck, a savage arc from the base of his ear to his collarbone. With the instinct of the Green Beret he’d once been—the man trained to kill in darkness or light—he’d ignored the knife and reached for the wrists, dashing them brutally against the laboratory’s doors. There was a cry of pain—the clenched fingers released—the weapon clattered to the floor.
He thought maybe he’d lifted the woman—for his attacker was a woman, he was certain of that—high in the air and flung her like a dressmaker’s dummy into the opposite wall. He wasn’t sure. He only knew that when he finally flipped on a l
ight and stared down at the body at his feet, her neck was broken.
Her name was Greta Oppenheimer. One of 30 April’s loyal slaves. She’d used a laboratory scalpel to stab him; it lay, blade broken, near her lifeless fingers.
Why had she crouched in the office that night? Had she known he was coming?
A spatter of blood fell on Greta’s chest. Eric looked down, then, and saw the stream of it trickling from his neck.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Out in a minute.”
He rinsed his head under the bathtub spigot, careful to keep the flow of stained water from striking his wound. He hardly knew how he’d made it to Mahmoud Sharif’s apartment. The Palestinian lived with his German wife in Berlin’s working-class district of Prenzlauerberg. He’d pounded on Sharif’s door in the middle of the night, scaring the two boys out of their wits. Dagmar had been certain it was the German police, come to haul Mahmoud away on yet another terrorism charge. The Palestinian had crept toward the door with a semiautomatic in his hands. He’d thrown back the lock only when he saw blood seeping across his floor.
Sharif had sealed Eric’s gaping neck wound with plastic cement. Ugly, but efficient; a German hospital was out of the question. He’d bear the scar for the rest of his days.
He toweled his hair with both hands and studied his reflection in the mirror. His blond hair had disappeared, and with it, his blue eyes; he’d inserted brown lenses. It wasn’t a perfect transformation—he was still the same age and size—but it might get him out of Europe.
He settled a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose and stepped into the hall.
Mahmoud surveyed him critically. “I was followed tonight,” the Palestinian said.
“Who?”
“BKA.”
The Bundeskriminalamt—the German equivalent of the FBI. They might be surveilling Mahmoud out of habit—he’d once built bombs for Hizballah—or they might be looking for Eric. “Did you lose them?”
Mahmoud shook his head. “I was only coming home. A normal end to a normal day. Why should I arouse suspicion? But there is a man loitering in the street. He smokes far too many expensive Turkish cigarettes for a punk with no job.”
The sound of a child’s high-pitched voice, insistent and tremulous, drifted from the kitchen. Mahmoud’s elder boy, Moammar, demanding something from his mother. With reflexive Muslim courtesy, Mahmoud had not asked Eric to leave his home and spare his children the possible horrors of their father’s arrest. Eric was Sharif’s guest. He would die defending him if necessary.
Eric had offered as much eight years ago when Sharif was a penniless carpenter in love with a German girl from Hamburg. As chief of the CIA’s base there, he’d recruited Sharif, trained and instructed and molded him to betray the Hizballah cell that had planted him in Germany. Sharif had fed the CIA vital information for nearly four years, and when his cover was blown—when he was burned, in the parlance of espionage—Eric had saved his life and Dagmar’s. The two men were blood brothers. In a world rife with enemies, some named and some unknown, such things were precious.
“The BKA was all over 30 April,” Mahmoud told him apologetically. “They’ll have found that lab. The corpse with the broken neck.”
And who but a 30 April terrorist would have access to such a lab? Eric thought. They’ll have samples of my blood on the floor. My DNA.
“I’ll leave tonight,” he said.
“There’s no need. We can hide you for weeks. Move you, if necessary, among our friends, until the hunt dies down.”
Caroline’s face rose with painful clarity in Eric’s mind. “I don’t have weeks,” he replied. “I leave tonight.”
Mahmoud nodded, his relief so intense it bordered on shame. “I will take you down to the garage, fold you into the trunk of the BMW, and Dagmar will drive off with the kids as though we’ve had a fight. She’ll go to her sister’s—after she drops you somewhere convenient, of course.”
Somewhere convenient. Where exactly would that be, for a man hunted the length of Europe? But he merely nodded, and held out his hand. “Thank you, Mahmoud.”
“I settle a debt, only. Too long unpaid.” He grasped Eric’s palm.
When Mahmoud had gone, Eric moved quietly into the Palestinian’s bedroom and drew a small screwdriver from his pocket. It was essential that he remove every trace of himself from Sharif’s apartment.
Behind the collection of Italian wool trousers and the sweeping black cloak Dagmar favored was a small wood panel. Screwed into the plasterboard wall, it covered a hole between closet and bathroom: a plumber’s trap, a clean-out. The builder had designed it for easy access to the workings of Sharif’s shower, but Eric had found another use for it. In all the years of his undercover operation with 30 April, his bugout kit had lived in Sharif’s wall.
The bugout kit was every clandestine agent’s hope for survival. When your cover was blown and the whole world wanted you dead, the bugout kit just might save your ass. In Eric’s case it held a false identity: a British passport in the name of Nigel Benning; a Visa card and driver’s license belonging to the same man. Five thousand dollars in cash. A gun. Enough damaging evidence to send Sharif to prison for years.
He stared at the photograph of Nigel Benning: dark brown hair, brown eyes, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. Himself, in disguise. That and a token would get him a ride on the U-Bahn. The passport was too dangerous to use.
It was a stolen blank he’d bought years ago on the street in Prague. The serial number might already be listed in the world’s immigration databases. If Mahmoud was right—if the BKA was hunting a 30 April survivor—every border would be watched. Every passport studied.
He stuffed the contents of the bugout kit in his jacket and carefully screwed the wooden panel back onto Sharif’s wall.
Chapter 8
WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:48 P.M.
It was Tom Shephard’s job to tell Al Tomlinson, the FBI director, that the Marine Corps Marathon had been hit by a terrorist. While Tomlinson called the White House, Tom got in touch with the Marine colonel who’d spent more than a year planning the race, and broke the bad news. Stannis Morrow wasn’t sleeping—he’d been following the reports of mass illness with growing dread—and thirty minutes later he faxed Tom his computerized registration list of the fifteen thousand people who’d run that day. The FBI was calling each of them now, one by one.
Shephard demanded the names and service records of every Marine who’d worked the Hains Point water and aid stations—just in case the anonymous letter wasn’t joking. Then he asked Colonel Morrow to send the twelve men to the J. Edgar Hoover Building immediately.
With shuddering speed the machinery slid into place. There was a protocol for chem-bio attacks, established months before in the event of such a strike against Washington. An army of medical and law enforcement personnel fanned out across the city. District police took up stations along the marathon route. Hospitals called in extra staff and braced for the flood of worried runners with vague symptoms and imperfect memories of what they’d ingested where. Remaining supplies of fruit and bottled water intended for race-time distribution, along with twelve tons of garbage collected along the route, were seized and trucked to the Bureau’s Laboratory Division, where every scrap would be tested for ricin or other contaminants. And Tom Shephard held a press conference.
“Tonight the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the direction of the President of the United States, is forced to declare a national emergency,” he said bluntly into the microphone set up at 10:53 P.M. in the Headquarters auditorium. The briefing would be broadcast simultaneously on all the major television channels, preempting the eleven o’clock news, and might take out Leno and Letterman if questions ran long enough. Shephard in the nation’s living rooms, he thought acidly. A real stand-up comic.
“The FBI has received information tonight claiming responsibility for the poisoning of an undetermined number of participants in the Marine Corps Marathon with the ca
stor bean derivative, ricin.” Beyond the halogen bulbs flooding his eyes Tom could glimpse the shadowy figures of the reporters and cameramen, one hundred sixty-two at last count, but even this crowd didn’t begin to fill the auditorium and he was reminded incongruously of his high school drama club days, the dress rehearsals in a darkened house, audience reaction impossible to judge. “The ricin may have been ingested in water distributed by rogue operators unaffiliated with the Marine Corps. The attack is believed to have been the work of a person or group of persons loosely associated with a European terrorist group known as 30 April Organization, acting on U.S. soil, and may have occurred around mile twenty of the race course in the neighborhood of Hains Point. Anyone who observed suspicious activity at that location or elsewhere during the race is urged to come forward, and those race participants who may be experiencing gastric discomfort should report immediately to medical facilities. A hotline has been set up . . .”
The questions were predictable and the answers were few. No, we haven’t identified the terrorists involved. We have no estimate of the number of casualties but it is likely to run in the hundreds. There is no cure for ricin poisoning. We have no reason to believe that 30 April’s leader Mlan Krucevic survived last week’s attack on his compound outside Sarajevo . . .
The chief problem, Tom thought as he stepped down from the podium with a description of ricin’s chemical structure in his hand and the press still clamoring for information, was that they hadn’t a single fucking lead to follow. Caroline had called from her car and urged him to check out Payne’s Naval Observatory staff—but the FBI had already reviewed the personnel files and clearances of everybody employed by the vice president, from the moment she’d been kidnapped two weeks before. They’d found nothing suspicious. All five of Payne’s employees looked clean as a whistle.
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