Blown

by Francine Mathews

  “Cy, them two want a slice each to go,” the waitress chirped as she bounced up to the register with a twenty-dollar bill flapping between her long crimson fingernails. “They said as how I could keep the change. Man oh man, is that an evil-lookin’ sonofabitch or what?”

  They were staring at the television screen, mouths open and avid, and in that instant Daniel understood. He dropped the menu to the floor and reached for the gun cradled in his shoulder holster, drawing it so quietly and so swiftly that by the time Cy and his waitress glanced up, directly into the face of the killer they’d just imprinted on their brains, there was only a second’s fraction of appalled recognition before he let both of them have it full in the chest.

  After that it was like shooting trout in a barrel to round up the other three.

  He took the twenty bucks from the fat girl’s hand and a whole cherry pie he found in the refrigerated case.

  Chapter 34

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 7:12 P.M.

  Candace O’Brien had lived since her divorce in that leafy section of town that falls somewhere between the eastern half of Georgetown and the western edge of Dupont Circle and that is called, depending upon the taste of the resident, by either name. It is bounded to the north by Embassy Row; but Candace had turned her back on Massachusetts Avenue tonight. She had no desire to walk anywhere in the direction of the Naval Observatory, the white-porched and turreted confection that had briefly been Sophie Payne’s home. Candace had passed some very pleasant and hectic months in the mellow paneled library that served as her office, with its gentle view of sloping lawns and distant traffic. But she’d quit her job as Sophie Payne’s appointments secretary the day the news broke that the vice president had been murdered. She had already collected her few things from her borrowed desk.

  The great house would be floodlit tonight like the crime scene it was; she did not wish to see it again.

  She was killing time this evening, walking despite the wet night and the fall of darkness, her solitude drawing her to the end-of-workday bustle on Connecticut Avenue. She considered browsing among the new offerings at her favorite bookshop or searching for a fast and dirty dinner at the local gourmet caterer. But she had no appetite, and fictional escapes couldn’t help her. So she wandered aimlessly, her face damp and her hands plunged into her pockets, avoiding the gaze of passersby with that perfect fixation on the middle distance that is an art among urban dwellers.

  For days Candace had been gripped by indecision. Should she remain here in Washington, where life was extinct? It was the town she’d always chosen for other people’s reasons—first Gerry, who’d set her up as an academic’s wife in those long-ago years of the 1970s—and then Sophie, who’d become her friend despite her best efforts to remain at a careful distance, and whose consuming life of constant exposure and glittering celebrity had seemed, for a while, like Candace’s own. As keeper of the social books, she’d walked in spirit with Sophie to those state dinners, those cocktail parties on P Street, those meetings with Italian prime ministers and heads of international agencies. But Sophie was dead. All the elegant clothes she had amassed in private fittings with Candace’s help hung like cast skins in her darkened closet. Poor Peter, Sophie’s son, had not known what to do with all those clothes; he’d asked Candace for help, but she turned him over to Conchita the maid; she’d refused to watch while they packed the boxes for homeless shelters.

  She ought to go away—find a house in a remote corner or establish herself on a prolonged vacation in the south of France. Such things sounded reasonable for women as lonely as herself who attempted, among the pages of Anita Brookner, to conduct lives of meaning; but Candace could not summon their kind of resignation. She was waiting for the conclusion of the disaster. She had been waiting ever since the day Sophie disappeared from Berlin.

  I was told to call you if I needed help.

  Jozsef’s words over the telephone line in the wee hours of the morning had seemed, for all their youth and faintness, like the voice of Judgment.

  They’re letting me go to the funeral. Will you be there, Mrs. O’Brien?

  Candace had lied and said she’d look for him—would introduce herself—but she’d been unable to face the high Episcopal rites in the National Cathedral, the words of tribute and sadness that could never encompass Sophie Payne’s life. She’d been unable to look this son of Mlan Krucevic in the eye. Instead, she’d sat at home while all the hours of mourning and interment sped away. Only twenty-three minutes ago did she learn that the boy had never made it back to his hospital bed.

  Had she failed him as completely as she’d failed Sophie?

  Candace saw now with surprise that her footsteps had carried her in a great circle, past the Phillips Collection and the Metro stops and the diagonal thrust of New Hampshire Avenue. She turned reluctantly down her own brief block and reached for the keys she kept in her pocket.

  There was someone waiting in the rain at the top of her town house steps—an absurd figure in high heels, with overly protuberant breasts, a mop of auburn hair swinging pertly around the chin. Obvious, she thought wearily. Screaming her sex from the rooftops. Can men really be so stupid?

  The woman would be the latest acquisition of the attorney who owned the town house’s ground floor. Candace braced herself to slide past as the visitor stabbed aggressively at the front buzzer; but to her surprise, the figure turned to study her intently as she approached.

  In sudden apprehension, her breath caught in her throat, Candace kept walking down the street.

  “Something happened in Leipzig,” Caroline muttered in frustration. “Something that gave 30 April a hold over her.”

  For the past hour, she’d paced the floor of Price’s living room spilling her guts while he worked his magic. By six o’clock that evening, he had enough copy to fill the front page of the Washington Post—and a name to go with the phone number Jozsef had dialed at two o’clock Monday morning.

  Candace O’Brien. The dead vice president’s friend and appointments secretary.

  Caroline was tracking a whisper and a doubt now through a labyrinth of years, searching for the moment when Candace O’Brien turned traitor. She’d made considerable progress, mostly because she’d seized whatever help Steve Price offered: calls to Georgetown University and off-the-record access to Gerry O’Brien’s professional files; unofficial soundings of the social elite who’d observed Candace in action under Sophie Payne; an after-hours chat with the chairwoman of a local Smith College alumnae group, where Candace was respected but not well known. Never well known. The woman was visible and invisible at once: a surface calm hiding a turbulent depth.

  “You’re convinced it wasn’t just a social call?” Price asked. “You really think this broad’s tied to Jozsef Krucevic?”

  “Social calls don’t happen at two A.M.”

  “He’s a kid. Maybe he couldn’t sleep.”

  “Then he’d have rung the nurse down the hall,” Caroline retorted. “Come on, Steve! The kid’s never set foot in the U.S.—and he has this woman’s number memorized? His father gave it to him. Made sure he could recite it down to the last digit. It was Jozsef’s safety net. In case Mlan couldn’t be there to help him.”

  “Sounds far-fetched to me. Maybe the kid dialed a random number and came up with Candace.”

  “Nothing about 30 April is random,” Caroline countered tersely. “Ask Norm Wilhelm.” She went back to scrolling through Eric’s bootlegged files.

  There was a time when Candace O’Brien and Mlan Krucevic—Jozsef’s father—lived within a mile of each other. Leipzig, Germany, 1990 to 1991. Gerry O’Brien had served as a visiting professor of molecular biology to this distinguished institution of the fallen German Democratic Republic, only ten months removed from its status as a satellite Soviet power and falling over itself to embrace the capitalist intelligentsia.

  Mlan Krucevic was a holdover of the past: a Yugoslav scientist, brilliant, to be sure, and good enough for the Communist era, but p
ossibly eclipsed by the dazzle from the West. Gerry O’Brien emerged from Price’s hurried notes as a likeable fellow: charming, less introverted than one might imagine of a laboratory researcher, glad to undertake the role of academic ambassador in this Brave New World.

  Krucevic, Caroline decided, would have gravitated to Gerry and his wife. They represented what he most coveted: superpower status, an easy assumption of world dominion, and the despicably egalitarian approach to culture and education Krucevic despised. He would have learned from the O’Briens, cultivated their interest, used them in any way possible. And then, without warning, the connection was severed.

  In March of 1991, Gerry O’Brien and his wife returned home to Georgetown. A year and two months before the end of their funded stint in Leipzig, Krucevic had abruptly disappeared.

  “The breakup of Yugoslavia,” Caroline muttered, scanning her laptop’s screen. “The beginning of war between the Serbs and the Croatians. Mlan heads home and takes command of a bunch of guerrillas. Two years later he’s running a prison camp in Bosnia. By the end of the decade he’s indicted for war crimes, and 30 April is born.”

  “The O’Briens left when he did?” Price asked.

  “Six weeks later.”

  “Maybe it was an affair,” he suggested in the voice of experience. “Candace and the lady-killer. Mlan carved a wide swath among the women, didn’t he? Husband finds out, decides to run home, and divorces her . . . a bare eight months later. You notice the dates?”

  Caroline had noticed the dates. A decree granted by the District of Columbia in November 1991.

  “So she did it for love?” she murmured skeptically.

  “Violence can be very seductive. It’s a power thing.”

  “If you say so. Who got the kid?”

  “Jozsef? He’d have been a toddler in ’91.”

  Caroline shook her head. “Krucevic was still married then, and Jozsef was with his mother. I’m talking about the O’Brien girl—a daughter. Fifteen when they lived in Germany. I don’t see any custody provisions here.”

  Price frowned. “Nobody I’ve talked to has mentioned her. She can’t have lived with Candace for years. And besides—she’d be all grown up now.”

  “Yes,” Caroline mused thoughtfully, “if she survived. I think we should visit Ms. O’Brien, don’t you?”

  Chapter 35

  HILLSBORO, WEST VIRGINIA, 8:18 P.M.

  Julie Cohen had been in the FBI’s Charleston, West Virginia, field office for ten months now. It wasn’t her first choice—she’d have liked San Francisco or Chicago—but she was only two years out of Quantico and options were limited. She’d been raised in the heart of Boston, a New Englander to the bone, and her roots were obvious in the flatness of her vowels. The Charleston locals called her a Yankee, and their tone was rarely friendly. There was a gulf looming at Julie’s feet that had as much to do with geography and culture as it did with law enforcement. Another woman might have treated the place with scorn. Julie was intelligent enough to recognize she had a good deal to learn.

  This stormy Monday evening, for example, she’d have been utterly lost among the twisting roads surrounding Hillsboro if it weren’t for her boss, Stan Heyduk, directing her quietly from the passenger seat. It was a beautiful landscape, if you liked wilderness and farmland punctuated by mine shafts and the occasional gurgling stream, but in Julie’s eyes the rolling countryside was riddled with malice. She’d researched the region well before she reported for duty in Charleston last January. William Pierce’s three-hundred-acre compound and neo-Nazi radio station were here in Hillsboro, and she knew enough about Pierce to make her skin crawl. In his novel The Turner Diaries he had proclaimed that the bodies of Jews like herself should be heaped on bonfires on every street corner in America. She had a disturbing suspicion that the woman she was about to meet was one of Pierce’s fellow travelers. There was the name she’d chosen to give her son, for instance. Adolf Hitler Becker.

  The isolation of the countryside, the rainswept darkness cut by her own frail headlights, oppressed Julie’s spirits as much as the knowledge of the distasteful duty that lay before her. She’d been brought along because a female agent was considered helpful in dealing with women. Julie was the last person to defer to male strength, but she was glad tonight for Heyduk and the guy in the Camry’s backseat who’d appeared suddenly by helicopter only half an hour ago—a Stanford Business grad named Jason Bovian who was not much older than herself. Bovian was on Tom Shephard’s 30 April Task Force at Headquarters, which meant Rebekah Becker had something to do with the ricin attack. He was eager and unafraid, his seat belt off and his head leaning over the front seat, eyes fixed intently on the road ahead. Bovian had reason to want this woman: Thirty-six hours after the start of the Marine Corps Marathon, four hundred fourteen people had now died. Nearly as many looked like they would never recover.

  Julie shuddered involuntarily at the thought of the pictures she’d seen—wasted faces staring uncomprehendingly at the camera lens like refugees from a bewildering war. Everybody in the car tonight felt the same sense of urgency; it circulated like exhaust. They were all terrified of what Ricin Boy might do while they were driving.

  Julie had briefed Bovian competently enough with the information she’d culled from state databases. Norm Wilhelm’s next of kin, Rebekah Becker, no longer lived at the address he’d given in Charleston, and the new residents could offer no forwarding address. Becker’s name was not listed in telephone directories. Julie had tried to summon the woman’s vitals through motor vehicle registrations or tax rolls: She’d found absolutely no trace of Rebekah’s existence. No Becker children were enrolled in state schools; no public utility accounts were paid by Becker checks. Julie tried credit reports and discovered that Rebekah Becker—or Rebekah Wilhelm, as she must once have been—had never borrowed money or held a credit card. She had never signed a mortgage. In all the most obvious ways of modern life, Rebekah Becker did not exist.

  When Julie turned to criminal records, however, she unearthed a gold mine.

  Rebekah W. Becker was listed as the mother of an eight-year-old boy who’d been accidentally shot to death by a state trooper thirteen months before. The child had been a passenger in a pickup pulled over for lack of registration. The driver—a man named Lanier Hodge—had opened fire on the trooper as he approached the truck. The police officer had been wounded in the left shoulder and the pickup sped off, igniting a high-speed cross-country chase that ended tragically in a hail of bullets. It was Hodge’s girlfriend who identified the bodies and sent the Charleston police to the Becker family compound a few hours later.

  The Hillsboro address was in the criminal report. So was the name of Rebekah’s husband, Daniel Becker, and the fact that he was an old army buddy of Lanier Hodge’s. Hodge had taken the boy, Dolf, to a shooting range that afternoon for target practice. He’d been in tax revolt against the U.S. government and had refused to pay for his truck’s registration.

  It was the first hint the FBI got of Ricin Boy’s name.

  Daniel Becker. Private, First Class, U.S. Army, posted overseas in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1995. Held ten days by Croatian guerrilla forces and judged to be suffering resultant trauma by army doctors. Refused consideration for Special Forces. Honorably discharged 1998.

  It was Tom Shephard, Bovian’s boss, who’d discovered that last nugget of information. He’d also learned, from anecdotal reports, that Becker was a rare hand with a gun. He’d come into the army knowing how to shoot with an accuracy that was attributed to his West Virginia boyhood. What his commanding officers remembered, however, was how much Daniel Becker liked hitting his targets. It was a source of pride. One of the few in his sorry life.

  Tom was miles away from the car winding through the back roads of Hillsboro, standing over the body of a middle-aged man lying on the wet asphalt outside Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite. Gray-haired, staring wide-eyed at the sky, a ribbon of scarlet threading from his punctured chest and his high-crowned trucke
r’s hat lying where it had fallen a few feet away. Five more corpses lay inside the blood-spattered restaurant, but it was this man who most interested Tom. He was the last one killed, Shephard thought, and that meant he was a point of departure that must be studied and understood.

  Tom crouched low, his eyes running the length of the rain-soaked corpse. From the man’s wallet he’d already learned the victim was Buford Sayles and that he drove eighteen-wheelers for Rac Transport. A thirty-one-year veteran of the road, bound for Ohio and then North Dakota. Parked next to the body was a beat-up old pickup with the keys still dangling in the ignition and a blanket Tom recognized in the rear of the cab. Jozsef’s blanket. There were prints all over the interior of the truck and the Bureau forensic people were lifting them now.

  It was possible Sayles had witnessed the carnage inside Sunny’s and been shot for his pains. Possible the trucker had chased after Ricin Boy and tried to save the child confined in the backseat. Except for one thing. Buford Sayles’s eighteen-wheeler was gone. Tom had taken down the description and the registration given out by Rac Transport and thought he knew who was driving the big rig now.

  He rose and turned back toward Sunny’s, his gut clenching sickly on the smell of blood. Two of the dead were Sayles’s age; the women were younger, maybe in their mid-thirties; and the final victim just a kid—twenty-three if he was a day. News reports—sensational and magnified by the killings’ possible terrorist link—had lured a silent crowd to the edge of the police barricade despite the rain. One of them was the waitress’s father. Tom would have to talk to him soon.

  What to say? Your daughter was smashed like a bug on this guy’s windshield, tossed out like a piece of trash for no reason. I’m sorry. Sorry for her kids. He would manage something better, of course, but he could not drown out the fury that was building inside him, or the words of bigotry and violence threading through his brain.