Blown

by Francine Mathews

  Until this morning.

  I’ve got to get home, he’d said. I haven’t a cent or a document I can use, Wally, and I’m wanted by everybody under the sun. I need an exfiltration. Talk to Caroline. Or Cuddy Wilmot. Go as high as Dare Atwood, if you have to. But don’t go through Scottie.

  “Don’t go through Scottie,” Wally had repeated, a strangeness in his eyes. “Why not?”

  Eric shook his head.

  “Do you know what you’re asking?”

  “For absolution,” Eric had said bluntly, and would say no more.

  Wally got the news about Dare Atwood’s murder as soon as he walked through the embassy door. It was Mrs. Saunders who told him—the station’s acid-tongued, scarlet-lipped career secretary, who arrived before any of the case officers each day. He’d tossed her a “Morning, Gladys” with deliberate cheerfulness before he noticed that she’d been crying. Her mask of makeup was blotched with tears and her eyes were brilliant behind her glasses.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just in,” she muttered, handing him a cable. “And this one. Not that I believe it.”

  The first transmission had gone out from Washington only an hour before—the middle of the night on the East Coast, Wally noted.

  IMMEDIATE NOFORN NOCONTRACT CONFIDENTIAL HQS ADVISES DIRECTOR SHOT AND KILLED BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANT 00:15 HOURS THIS MORNING ACTING DCI RINEHART IN CHARGE. DETAILS TO FOLLOW AS AVAIL. RINEHART.

  He stared blankly at Gladys Saunders.

  “Read the next one,” the secretary ordered. “Not, as I say, that I believe it.”

  . . . CTC ADVISES THAT CASE OFFICER MICHAEL O’SHAUGHNESSY/NIGEL BENNING DECLARED DEAD APRIL 1997 IS ALIVE AND MEMBER OF 30 APRIL TERRORIST GROUP . . .

  Wally sank down into the nearest chair. “What the hell—?”

  “That’s Carmichael’s pseudo. You remember,” she prompted. “Eric Carmichael. Married to that woman who was here TDY last week over the 30 April business. He died in MedAir 901, Wally. There’s a star with his name on it in the Headquarters atrium. So why in God’s name are they telling us this bullshit?”

  “I don’t know,” he murmured, his eyes scanning the rest of the cable rapidly. Don’t go through Scottie. Because Scottie knew the truth? Because the CTC chief’s APB was already winging its way to Berlin?

  Wally’s body went sharply cold, then hot. “This went out to the FBI. Interpol. Which means German liaison will have it in a matter of hours. Gladys—”

  Any other day, Mrs. Saunders would have scowled at the use of her given name. This morning she never registered the abuse.

  “Where’s the report we got from the BKA—the woman with the broken neck at the 30 April front company on Kurfürstendamm?” Wally demanded.

  “It was a lab. Not a front company.” She handed him the report.

  As he’d thought: two different blood groups retrieved at the murder scene. One, the victim’s. The other—Eric’s? Who had a slice cut out of his neck and a body so battered he could barely stand?

  Go as high as Dare Atwood, if you have to. Only Dare Atwood was dead.

  Wally felt the first faint stirring of an inner glee—an operative’s exultation—that would eventually overwhelm and subdue all his acquired managerial caution and his sharp sense of present trouble. Here was a problem and a mystery. Enemies with the faces of friends. His first rogue op in nearly eight years.

  Trying hard to suppress a look of roguish joy, he said, “Get me Cuddy Wilmot on the secure line.”

  And closed his office door. He needed to think.

  Chapter 22

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 5:17 A.M.

  “Do you run?” Caroline asked as Tom fast-forwarded for the hundredth time through the marathon footage he’d culled from local news networks. On the screen, lean women in neoprene tights dashed through the starting line in a fluid knot, their smiles ebullient. His gaze slid past them, searching for Ricin Boy somewhere in the crowd. Like trying to pick out a single shadow from the hundred cast on a beach.

  “I ran this marathon once.”

  And that quickly, the stuffy darkened room in the bowels of the J. Edgar Hoover Building disappeared and he could feel the springy mud bank of the C&O Canal. Flowing away beneath the soles of his feet, endless as a cinema reel, empty and blessedly riddled with birdsong. The towpath had always been there, through the years of high school and the infrequent visits during college, through the early happiness of his doomed marriage, the hopeful

  apprenticeship in the Northern Virginia office. The C&O Canal stretched unimpeded across the District border with its mile markers and its occasional bridges arching overhead, its scattered outbuildings from the lost days of barge-borne commerce. During that final year of Jen’s illness, he’d willed himself to train for the Marine Corps Marathon. He’d taken the towpath each weekend for increasingly arduous runs, the miles mounting as the months passed. Ten miles. Thirteen. Sixteen. Twenty. He had logged his records of endurance each week as Jen slipped closer to death, the chemotherapy sapping her strength, the radiation mangling her chestnut hair.

  Caroline shifted restlessly and a scent he could not name drifted faintly to his nostrils. She smelled clear and green, somehow—like skin freshly showered—and the awareness of his own funk of coffee and sweat and used clothes depressed him suddenly. He was so tired. And desperate for a lead.

  “There’s nothing here,” he told her bitterly, turning from the screen. “There’s nothing anywhere. I’ve dragged a dozen people out of their beds in the middle of the night to monitor Internet chat rooms—the favorite place for neo-Nazi bullshit and pissing contests, all the good ol’ boys getting their rocks off preaching violence and bloodshed from the safety of their computers—but nobody’s talking tonight, Caroline, nobody’s congratulating himself for a kick-ass strike against the Beast System. The American Patriots are lying low, and who can blame them? Shit, it’s nearly five A.M. and these people believe in good clean living. They know how important it is to get their sleep.”

  “What else?” she asked bluntly.

  “I’ve got people at every field office in the country checking incident files for hotheads who’ve threatened to blow our house down. I’ve got airports and border checkpoints staring up the ass of every thirty-something guy with a crew cut. I’ve got Laboratory Division studying the ballistics of the bullet that took out Dare. And I’ve got fuck-all, Caroline. I’ve got shit. I’m just sitting here waiting for the next blow to fall.”

  “What about Payne’s staff?”

  “Your agents in place? Your American cell?” He snorted bleakly. “Didn’t want to bust up your party back there in the White House, girl, but you’re dreaming.”

  “Jozsef—”

  “Jozsef’s a kid who needs a place to belong. He’d tell you anything you wanted to hear.”

  “But it makes sense that Krucevic—”

  “All right,” he said too loudly, his anger breaking the surface. “All right. You want to read up on Payne’s people? Be my guest. Their personnel files are all on that desk. Extensive security clearances and background checks vetted by the Bureau’s best. Half the staff has worked there for years—before Payne even took office. The others she hired herself, when her husband the senator was still alive. I’m going to get more coffee.”

  He thrust himself out of his chair, snapping off the useless news footage, and left the conference room without waiting for her reply.

  It wasn’t Caroline’s fault. She was just trying to help. But the futility of this search for one needle in the nation’s haystack was driving him mad. He kept seeing faces: the faces of the dying at Sibley Hospital. For no other reason than a sick man’s pleasure. He was certain that 30 April had nothing to do with Ricin Boy, however much the creep might mention the terrorist group in anonymous letters. Tom knew a True Citizen when he heard one. In this matter of homegrown violence, Caroline could be no help at all. She’d only get herself killed.

  Worst of all, he felt responsible. Guilty
. For having failed. For years he’d been warning his bosses that Ricin Boy was coming, and when they couldn’t be bothered to listen he’d simply left the country. The people at Sibley were dying because he’d given up.

  Stupidity, he thought. Complacence. The unwillingness to believe in the fact of evil when it bears a familiar face. We’ve done this to ourselves.

  Caroline resisted the impulse to go after Shephard. She understood what the investigation cost him—not just the exhaustion and the unavoidable responsibility, but the frustration and the rampant desire to control what was happening. They were so much alike: intensely focused, analytic, driven people who could not stand the fact of evil or the destruction it caused. Both of them hated to witness pain. Funny, then, that they had such an ability to nourish it in themselves.

  The first time she’d seen Tom, standing amid the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate, she’d mistaken him for a mourner. He’d lost his wife to breast cancer a few years before, and she’d sensed instantly that he brought that pain to every crime scene he visited. The clipped speech and brusque impatience were merely Shephard’s protective cover, ways of disguising how deep this wave of terror had gone. For Tom, the loss of each marathon runner—the pitiful end of the cop in her backyard—was personal. He didn’t have to tell her. They were two of a kind. Maybe that was why she yearned toward him, toward the arms that had held her outside Dare’s house a few hours ago: She craved someone who understood and accepted her weakness as well as her strength.

  Except that Tom had no idea who she really was. He had fallen in love with a fraud. She’d been lying to him ever since they’d met: about 30 April, about Eric, about her own divided loyalties. She’d allowed him to believe she was single, for Chrissake. All to protect Eric—who probably didn’t give a shit if she was alive. She’d ruthlessly sacrificed a good man’s feelings for the sake of one who’d deceived and betrayed her at every turn. She should be shot by a firing squad at dawn.

  And if she could have all the lies back, unspoken—would she change a thing?

  She closed her eyes in the stillness of the abandoned office, the FBI files untouched. That quickly Eric’s presence filled her mind; he was never very far from the center of it. Eric, whom she still loved, would always love, no matter how pointless her ache of longing might be. Where had he gone, the night he’d walked away from her down a darkening Budapest street? Scottie would say he’d deliberately abandoned her to save his own skin. But Caroline had blown too many of Scottie’s lies, and she knew Eric had left her for only one purpose: to try to save Sophie Payne.

  He’d sent Caroline to Sarajevo and had probably gone himself to Berlin. He’d urged her to call in backup support through the embassy, but he’d walked toward the heart of evil alone. That was like Eric. He’d never tell her to hide from the hunters, as Shephard had. He’d never wrap her in cotton wool or bare every last thought of his secret soul. But as she sat in the quiet office an hour before dawn, six thousand miles from Berlin, she could feel Eric breathing. The deep, unspoken cord that had always bound them was the only thing keeping him alive.

  With a sigh she came back to the room, the predawn darkness, the monumental problem in front of her. She reached for the personnel files.

  Not even in your shower at the Naval Observatory were you alone, Mlan Krucevic had told his hostage; and Sophie Payne had showered, it seemed, under the eyes of Norman Wilhelm, chauffeur; Candace O’Brien, personal appointments secretary; Conchita Rodriguez, general maid; Nancy Williams, housekeeper; and Rosco Finn, chef.

  Payne had lived in the Naval Observatory—a classic Victorian white-framed beauty set back on wide, treed lawns off Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue—for nearly two years. It was an enormous house for a single woman with one son away most of the year at Yale, but she’d taken to the place like a duck to water. Redecorated discreetly. Borrowed art for temporary exhibits. Thrown parties on the wide covered porches and in the breezy dining room.

  She’d inherited the housekeeper and maid, Caroline saw, and both had been working for the vice president’s residence during two previous administrations. The chef, Rosco Finn, she’d brought over from her home in Georgetown.

  Rosco looked like a pleasant guy in his mid-forties. Raised in upstate New York; educated in a smattering of kitchens and then at the Culinary Institute of America; a sojourn in San Francisco afterward; personal chef on a yacht cruising the Mediterranean for two years before being hired by Payne. The Mediterranean. He could have met anybody there—in the balmy, luxurious moorings of Ibiza and Portofino. Even a terrorist.

  She glanced through the testimonials culled from FBI interviews: Rosco’s high school teachers; some friends from Rochester; the executive chef in San Francisco; the yacht owner. All of them benignly bland, remarkably free of incident. They praised his soulful way with fish and insisted he had never been arrested for speeding or the possession of illegal substances. None of them gave her the slightest sense of who Rosco exactly was.

  Candace O’Brien was more of a close personal friend than a secretary, it seemed; she’d graduated, like Sophie, from Smith College. O’Brien was the ex-wife of a university professor who’d spent most of his teaching career at Georgetown; the two women had struck up an acquaintance at some alumni function. When Payne’s husband died suddenly of cancer and she decided to finish out his Senate term, she’d hired O’Brien—newly divorced—to keep her appointments. A family face among the bewildering array of staff.

  Caroline studied the woman’s résumé. Art history at Smith; a classic nice girl’s major in the early 1960s. Marriage to a boy from Brown. One daughter. A stint abroad while her husband had taught at the University of Leipzig, in 1990.

  Caroline frowned. Mlan Krucevic had taught at the University of Leipzig in 1990. Had O’Brien met him there? Would she or her husband ever have come in contact with a molecular biologist? She leafed back through the file: no mention of what subject Dr. O’Brien taught at Georgetown. She would have to find out.

  And then there was Norm Wilhelm. Mrs. Payne’s chauffeur.

  The testimonials this time, she noticed, were from neighbors who’d known him all his life in a small town in West Virginia. The police chief. The local minister. Norm’s boss at the trucking company, who’d contracted with him for years as a driver. And three people from an organization called Joseph’s Table—a charitable group for the homeless operating along the Fourteenth Street corridor in Washington, D.C.

  Joseph’s Table? Had Sophie Payne found her personal driver lying on a heating grate in front of Capitol Hill?

  It would be like her, Caroline thought with a pang. Payne was the kind of woman who probably hadn’t been able to look away from the bundles of overcoats sprawled along the city streets every rainy winter. She’d have tried to practice the politics she preached. Tried to make a difference in at least one life.

  And Wilhelm’s file bore out her faith: not a single incident that might arouse suspicion. Norm Wilhelm seemed to have been devoted to Sophie Payne during the final months of her Senate term and the two years at the Observatory.

  She turned to the last page of the file. Wilhelm’s next of kin was listed there: a woman named Rebekah Becker, of Charleston, West Virginia. Caroline wrote the name beneath the O’Briens’ and Rosco Finn’s. If Tom refused to take the American cell seriously, she had that much more freedom to search.

  “We got this footage from your security people,” Tom told her as he dimmed the lights and adjusted the image on the monitor. “I want you to take a good look at the guy. And then keep your eyes peeled every time you’re unprotected on the street.”

  She should have expected pictures. Eric’s fiber optics would have sent them directly to the security firm’s monitors. She was looking at her own house, the staircase a pool of black and the figure vaulting up it a sickly glowing green. Infrared images of Ricin Boy. If it weren’t for Cuddy and Tom, she’d have been dreaming in her bed when he came with his knife.

  “That’s an M16
,” she said coolly. “Think he’s ex-military?”

  “Could be. Or haunts gun shows like the rest of his Patriot friends.”

  She watched as he smashed her full-length mirror. “Angry.”

  “Do you recognize him?” Tom was attempting a similar calm, a lid firmly clamped on his earlier anger.

  “He looks like that sketch of yours. Like the guy I glimpsed on Dare’s street. But there’s not much to distinguish. On infrared, he’s a heat source begging to be tracked. Nothing else.”

  “I’ve got people working on the film,” Tom said abruptly. “What I’m asking, Caroline, is whether he could be this guy—O’Shaughnessy. Benning. Whatever his name is. Thirty April’s last man standing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your boss sent this over half an hour ago.” He tossed a sheet of paper toward her; she scanned it swiftly; her chest constricted, the breath failing to come. Eric’s vitals; his photograph as Benning; and worst of all: a still shot from Sophie Payne’s kidnapping. The photo captured Eric lifting a stretcher bearing the vice president into the belly of 30 April’s chopper.

  Eric the terrorist.

  “Is Benning our Ricin Boy?”

  “No,” she answered. “How many people have seen this?”

  “The entire law enforcement world, probably. Did you know him?”

  “I knew him.”

  “You did? The whole time we were working the Payne kidnapping? You knew there was an Agency guy inside 30 April? And you never told me?”

  She would not look at the confusion and hurt on his face. “Why do you think I resigned?”

  “You said you were fired!”