Blown

by Francine Mathews

  “Give me half an hour,” he said. And thus terminated Wilmot’s audience.

  The Office of Technical Services had been known for years as “Q branch,” but it was gradually acquiring another name: Raphael’s Chapel. Most of the people who benefited from his perfection had no idea where he’d come from, or even if he had a last name. Raphael preferred it that way. He wore only black, as though prepared at any moment for clandestine escape. His tow-colored hair reached to his shoulders and was tied back efficiently with narrow black ribbon. In another man the look would be effeminate; in Raphael, it suggested he came from a vanished century—the eighteenth, perhaps—and could kill with a rapier’s touch.

  It was unclear where he lived. When the others who worked for him arrived each morning, he was already there; when they left, he remained behind to close the vault. It was rumored that he drove an antique green Lotus of a model not seen since Steve McQueen’s salad days; but the assertion had never been proved. Some members of OTS argued that the picture of Raphael doing anything other than flying under his own wing power was completely absurd.

  He had been born in North Dakota thirty-six years before and named Pete Petersen. At the time of his hiring by Andrew Nunez, the OTS chief, he was on his way to prison. What fell in between—the transformation of a North Dakota boy to a Prince of Darkness—only Raphael and Nunez understood. He never spoke of the past to anyone. He knew deception for what it was: the highest form of survival.

  Nunez was on the verge of retirement when he discovered Raphael in the Metro section of the Sunday New York Times. A young man of extraordinary beauty, photographed in handcuffs in the midst of a Princeton University lecture hall. The previous year, Pete Petersen had decided he was tired of his inconsequential life and had set about creating a new one. At the age of twenty-eight, he had crafted what clandestine operatives would call a legend: a fully fleshed-out alternative existence, complete with an assumed name and birth certificate, which suggested he was eighteen years old.

  He had called himself Raphael Alighieri, after two heroes of the Renaissance; described himself as home-schooled in Switzerland by a philosophy professor from Rome and his sculptress wife, both long dead; and given himself an orphaned adolescence wandering the world. He submitted a portfolio of charcoal sketches and a set of test scores well above the Princeton mean. Princeton admired the artistry, approved his SATs, and offered financial aid to the impoverished boy with no visible means of support.

  It was only when a former acquaintance from Bismarck spotted him at a football game that the imposture was exposed.

  He was charged with theft by deception and sentenced to a year’s penal servitude.

  In Nunez’s eyes, as he scanned the Times article, Raphael had just written a near-perfect application for the CIA.

  During forty years of service, Andy Nunez had made OTS what it was: the premier technical innovator of Agency Ops, the heart of forgery and deceit, green room to the Greatest Show on Earth. When he joined the CIA in the early sixties, the Office of Technical Services did not exist. It was called something else and it employed a coterie of accomplished artists and draftsmen, many of whom regarded themselves as unionized labor working in the equivalent of the government printing office. What they carved, etched, engraved, and printed was criminal when viewed from the perspective of their adversaries: foreign currency, foreign passports, foreign birth certificates, and letters of recommendation, not to mention the myriad entry and exit visas from places technically immured behind the Iron Curtain.

  Andy Nunez began his career by learning how to open mail without leaving a trace. How to detect and replicate the pitfalls and deliberate traps embedded in visa stamps from mainland China. How to mix foreign inks and reweave paper fibers to ward off the bloodhounds of forgery. Nunez progressed to working exfiltration from Beijing to Hong Kong, to managing defectors and disinformation during the Vietnam War. He replicated Vietcong diaries filled with false intelligence and made sure they found their damaging way back home—although he knew not a word or character of Vietnamese. He flew in more prop planes to more airstrips in the heart of the jungle than any man should be able to survive. He was best known, however, for the creation of elaborate disguises culled from the techniques of Hollywood special effects, whose innovators he befriended and admired.

  Under Nunez’s direction, Raphael Alighieri came into a kingdom. The old man passed on every secret and skill he possessed to the young Prince of Darkness. When he retired, it was with the knowledge that OTS was in the hands of the angels.

  Raphael was waiting for Cuddy when he reappeared exactly twenty-five minutes later in the OTS conference room. He had a narrow black laptop open on the shining surface of the table.

  “This is a very close hold,” Cuddy cautioned, and handed him a DVD.

  Raphael slid the disc into his laptop without comment.

  The footage was brief: perhaps thirty-five seconds of Sophie Payne’s last public appearance. She stood on the podium in Berlin’s Pariser Platz in front of the new American embassy while the Brandenburg Gate exploded.

  The screen flickered, went blank, and then resumed with a shot of a stretcher being raised into the belly of a medical chopper.

  “Is that Payne on the gurney?” Raphael asked with a quickening of interest.

  “Forget the gurney. Look at the man on the inside, working the winch.”

  Raphael’s eyes narrowed. Then he sat back in his swivel chair, a pen delicately tapping his elegant lip. “Eric Carmichael. I worked with him only once. Disciplined and not unintelligent. He’s supposed to be dead.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  The Prince of Darkness sighed and closed his eyes. The air of the conference room was suddenly charged with an energy that was almost sexual. “Tell me.”

  “Scottie put Eric under deep cover with 30 April two and a half years ago. When Payne came back in a coffin, Scottie burned him. Eric’s under arrest in Berlin and his wife’s just been fired.”

  “How thorough.” The voice was acid. “Federal police, or local?”

  “BKA.”

  Cuddy had learned a good deal about Raphael during several tense seconds the previous year, when they’d crouched together in a pit behind a roll of barbed wire waiting for a terrorist asset to cross through the teeth of an Israeli border patrol. The guy had been shot in the back by his own people before he reached the ditch, and it was Raphael who wormed through the barbed wire and hauled the bleeding man to safety. The next three hours were ones of screaming tension and near death, an exquisite shell game that had not succeeded in saving the asset’s life. He was a child of Hamas, nineteen years old, and he’d died in the trunk of an embassy car.

  Scottie Sorensen blamed Raphael. It was Raphael who’d planned the botched exfiltration and provided the necessary documents and facial camouflage. Scottie had accused Raphael of selling secrets to the enemy for favors that were probably homosexual. Raphael had submitted to polygraphs, hour after hourin various outbuildings in Virginia. Whatever was concluded about the nature of his libido was irrelevant; he had sold nothing to anybody. The dead agent had been blown within Hamas for the previous two months; the organization had merely been waiting for the perfect moment to kill him.

  “Scottie just stopped by and rifled my drawers,” Raphael told Cuddy casually. “About an hour before you showed up. I let one of the Girls deal with him.”

  The Girls were Betty and Alice, fifty-something women who’d trained under Andy Nunez and whose deceptive skills were prized above rubies. Raphael loathed Scottie and refused to perform the slightest miracle on his behalf.

  He lifted a set of earphones to his head and murmured into a microphone.

  “Yo,” said a disembodied voice.

  “Betty, sweet, what did the Prick want this afternoon?”

  “Cover docs for an op in Berlin.”

  “His own?”

  “A woman’s. She’s traveling NOC.”

  NOC: nonofficial cover
, unaffiliated with government. The woman would be posing as an academic, then, or a businesswoman.

  “Think he’s flying in his latest lay?” Raphael asked.

  The voice snorted. “Not by the look of her picture.”

  “Was it on file?”

  “He brought it with him.”

  “A private contractor, then. How delicious. I’d like a list,” Raphael said abruptly, “of everything he took. Also the woman’s photograph. The Prick has no idea you’re here?” he demanded of Cuddy.

  “None. He sent me home to pack.”

  “You’ve been fired, too?”

  Cuddy shook his head. “I’m on my way to Berlin. Eleven-thirty tonight. Scottie and I are supposed to explain the truth to Eric.”

  “The Prick said nothing about this woman?”

  “Nothing at all. She could be a polygrapher.”

  “I would be astonished if she were. Thanks, Betts.”

  He shoved the headset down around his neck and stared into the middle distance for a few seconds. “Eric. Berlin. You want me to pull a Houdini? Get him out of the chains and the locked box before he drowns?”

  “Better than that.” Cuddy’s voice dropped, as though Betty or Alice might still be listening. “I want you to end his life for good this time.”

  There was an instant’s silence. Then the Prince of Darkness stretched and flexed his fingers, a cat unsheathing claws. “Only if I can screw Scottie in the process,” he bargained softly.

  “Why bother, otherwise?”

  Raphael smiled. “Go home and pack, Cuddy. I’ll be at Dulles to kiss you good-bye.”

  Chapter 33

  WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA, 7:00 P.M.

  Cy Phillips had spent his weekday afternoons on the battered stool behind the counter of Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite for more years than he could remember. The big rigs that rumbled through Wheeling, West Virginia, on their way to the rest of the continent—chuffing off one mammoth interstate before diving into another—had always fascinated Cy, even when he was a boy growing up under Eisenhower, long before the octopus-tentacle roads had reached out to strangle his quiet town in noise and exhaust. He had a picture of himself in overalls, standing proudly on the step of his grandpappy’s cab, back when such rigs were called tractors. Grandpappy’s was bright red with an eagle taking wing across the hood; its sloping fenders reminded Cy of the curving hips of the bombers his dad had flown in the war. The colors of that photograph, his gap-toothed smile and Dennis the Menace grin, were bleached and almost indiscernible now, and his heart no longer beat faster when an eighteen-wheeler pulled into the asphalt lot beyond the door. He was sixty-one years old and the smell of fry-cookers and cigarette smoke was permanently embedded in his clothes and hair. He spent hours staring at the screen of a minuscule black-and-white television set he kept plugged in near the register.

  Only three people were sitting in Sunny’s when Daniel Becker walked in out of the rain at seven o’clock that evening. This was unusual, because most of the haulers who made Wheeling their first stop on a transcontinental run had a fondness in their stomachs for Sunny’s. Cy’s cooking was old-fashioned and comforting. Beef pot pie and meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy. Deep-batter-fried chicken. Lemon meringue and chocolate silk pie. Sunny’s prided itself on its pie. It offered thirteen varieties on any given day. Some of the truckers rolling in from the west at five A.M. ate nothing but pie and coffee for breakfast, and it was Sunny’s they thought of during the long downhill run off the Appalachians. Maybe the empty seats around the curved counter could be chalked up to the new industry regulations the government had imposed—telling the most seasoned of drivers when and how they could break their runs. Or maybe it was Monday night football: haulers pushing through to Ohio so they could pull off at eight o’clock and catch at least part of the game in their sleeping lofts.

  Regardless, Cy had already sent his Maureen out to fill Tab Lowar’s cup a third time with coffee and Minnie and Mort Jacobs were plowing steadily through their pies. Tab was flirting with Maureen outrageously—he had an eye for a pretty girl, and despite the fact she’d never quite lost the fat from the third kid, she had a nice head of hair on her and a good pair of pipes. Cy had already turned back to the news broadcast when the rusting bell over the door jangled.

  Daniel didn’t speak to the boy during the first part of their drive. The kid was still groggy and confused by the sensation of the pickup truck wallowing through the rutted back roads of Hillsboro. Daniel was feeling groggy himself; the long two days of sleeplessness and tension—the chemical surge of death in his blood—had finally taken their toll. His eyes were red-rimmed and he had a permanent hack in his throat. There was a pain between his shoulder blades that felt like a slowly tightening wire, but the luck had held so far—the luck had held. He had to seize the singing current of this luck, the Leader sitting at his elbow, and drive on. He had to stay alert. He drummed his fingers restlessly on the steering wheel, and hummed a tuneless tune.

  He had wound deliberately through the rolling farmland and isolated hillsides, familiar from endless days of childhood boredom, and stopped only once before the highway junction in Wheeling, just as the rainy dusk came down. The small plot of ground where he pulled up outside Charleston was shabby and painful in its ordinariness, the plastic nosegays from a convenience store stabbed into the damp sod. ADOLF H. BECKER, the carved letters read, 1990–1998. He had stopped to whisper his love over this muddy hump in the ground not because he needed to remember the reasons for vengeance but because the boy in the backseat was ungrateful, and this failure troubled him.

  “Who are you?” Jozsef had asked suddenly in a clear and undrugged voice from just behind his left ear. “Where are you taking me?”

  He had tried to tell him, then, about his dedication to the Leader and the greatness of the Army the Leader’s Son was destined to rally—about the Glory of the End Times and the power of a blow struck against the Devil’s Spawn—but the boy had stared at him blankly from fathomless black eyes. Daniel had no idea whether Jozsef understood what he was saying. Some kind of intelligence moved in that fragile head, of this Daniel was certain, and the boy’s mastery of English seemed broad enough. But no comprehension—no joy at the liberation—came through the boy’s expression. Daniel almost thought he saw fear in Jozsef’s face.

  “Why did you take me?” Jozsef repeated.

  “We delivered you from that nest of godless Zoggites they call the Federal Government because we knew your daddy woulda sooner died than seen you paraded for the cameras at that Jew whore’s funeral,” Daniel shot back. “Seems to me you ought to be down on your knees thanking us, boy, for everything we done. That place was crawling with police and federal agents. We all coulda been killed.”

  “Like the woman you shot in the ambulance.”

  Daniel did not reply.

  “What happened to my driver?”

  It was a natural question—but at the memory of Norm, at the raw terror that flickered briefly from his brother-in-law’s kindly eyes as Daniel pressed the .32’s muzzle against his skull, a small fire blazed in Daniel’s brain. Norm had died a soldier’s death. A patriot’s sacrifice. Daniel had merely been the Instrument.

  “What we did, we did for your father,” he told the Accuser in the backseat. “I can tell you one thing, boy: He’d have shot you himself rather than seen the fool you made, sitting up there next to the President.”

  When he stopped at Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite, it was in the hope that this faceless parking space off the thundering highway would temporarily shield him, absorb him as it did all the hapless wanderers in need of coffee and a warm meal. Jozsef had said nothing directly to him in the past half hour, but from the pallor of the boy’s face Daniel guessed he was hungry. The last bite he’d taken himself was from a packet of five-year-old military rations, desiccated and foul-tasting, just before dawn. More than twelve hours ago.

  He would have liked to be able to trust Jozsef, but that was
impossible. The boy had no faith, no gratitude for what Daniel had risked to save him. Daniel could hardly walk him into the truck stop, where anybody at all might hear what the boy had to say, so he left Jozsef bound and gagged in the pickup’s cab while he fetched the grub.

  He stopped short just inside the heavy glass door, the bell still jangling, and glanced around the restaurant. Three people finishing up, a waitress with a good bit of flesh on her bones, the old man behind the counter.

  “Evenin’,” he said curtly. “I’d like some food to go.”

  The old guy handed him a menu without even glancing at his face, eyes fixed on the television in front of him. “What is this world coming to?” he asked of nobody in particular. “Those police in Washington just sleeping? All those folks sick and dying, and now this joker’s snatched some kid. Makes you sick, dudn’t it?”

  Daniel’s fingers felt like wood as he opened the menu and the typeface—luridly orange—wavered before his eyes. He could feel the dull thud of anger surge in his blood—Who is this fucker dumb as a stump with a gut big as Christmas to talk so loud about what he don’t understand? Sweet Jesus the trials I been through and all for the love of You—

  “Fried chicken’s good,” the man suggested helpfully, eyes still on the screen.