Blown

by Francine Mathews

  Near Cambridge he knew he was rolling on fumes and he was about to tell the boy they’d have to hoof it when the bulletin came across the dash. Explosion in remote West Virginia trailer, casualties uncertain, FBI involved, possible suicide bomber. He’d known. Known instantly. He’d taught Bekah how to pack the plastique in the makeshift belt, how to set the circuit and keep it broken until the last second. They’d practiced belting trees they didn’t need on the farm, an old Army Ranger trick, circle the trunk and detonate from a safe distance. Bekah’s sorry eyes, the deep rifts running from nostril to chin, the pain cut into her wrists over and over—all flashed before his vision like a stigmata and he cried out, unconscious of the boy beside him, a knife gone straight into the gut.

  After that he didn’t care about the truck or exactly where they landed. He was hurting, and the edges of his mind had curled where the exhaustion etched them like acid. When the engine sputtered and died he grabbed the boy by the shoulder and shoved him hard down the alleyway, straight toward the neon bus station sign. Consigning Bekah to her Maker. They’d taught him about this in Basic, how it was hard to lose a buddy in the field, somebody you’d trusted with your back. Dolf, son, his thoughts raged. Your mama’s coming. I’ll be along soon.

  He’d told Jozsef he’d shoot him dead if he put a hair out of line and then sent him straight up to the Greyhound window with some of the last cash Daniel had. Enough to buy two tickets to Erie, heading north first to Cleveland and then east along the lake. Four, maybe five hours, the bus pulling out at nine-fifteen, and enough change to send the boy a second time to the fast-food counter with an order for hot dogs and soda. Daniel ate the tasteless food standing outside the bus station in the cloudless dark, his body shoved up against the building’s brick wall and his eyes constantly moving. Night patrol. He’d done it a hundred times. Only this time he had the Son of the Leader by his side. Jozsef shivering like a stray dog, food untouched, hands clenched in his pockets.

  “I don’t think you really knew my father,” he said once, in a voice so low Daniel barely heard it. “If you did, you’d have managed this better. You’re making it up as you go along, aren’t you? Papa always said that was the first sign of panic.”

  Chapter 39

  FRANKFURT, 9:12 A.M.

  It was Josie’s job to handle the details of her operations, and after nearly twelve years in semiretirement, calling her own shots, she’d grown to expect complete autonomy in the field. It was annoying, then, to have Scottie acting like she was a three-year-old. Telling her where and when to set up, what the constraints might be. As though she couldn’t research the situation for herself, case the area, analyze the opportunities. This jerk has him jumping, she thought as she deplaned in Frankfurt and reembarked for the short hop to Berlin. A serious threat to national security, he’d said. Pack your bags, Josie.

  She’d gone about it like the professional she was. Called her daughter and told her to cover for her at the fish store. Called Mike and cut her deliveries in half. But Mom, Sheila had protested, you can’t just take a vacation at the drop of a hat. You’ve got to plan for these things. It’s Thanksgiving week. We expected you Thursday.

  Josie pleaded doctor’s orders and overwork and the sudden need for a holiday in the sun. By ten that evening she was sitting at the Lufthansa gate with the tickets and passport Scottie had given her, a passable photo and name. Mary Devlin. Fair, fat, and fifty. With the separate components of a Steyr rifle worth nearly three thousand dollars in her checked baggage.

  Some women worried about their jewelry when they traveled; Josie worried about her scope. She’d wrapped it carefully as a baby in her pashmina scarves.

  At the last minute, almost as an afterthought, she’d tossed the bleached-out photograph of Patrick in her suitcase and shut the lid firmly on his grin. Patrick was always with her on these jobs, his chipped front tooth hovering somewhere beyond her peripheral vision. Patrick the Second-Story Man, Patrick the charming drinker, Patrick who could dance her off her feet and make her feel more gorgeous than Miss America. He’d worked for years cracking safes and burgling embassies for the CIA; hence the nickname. They were all Second-Story Men, the guys who could climb like cats into any room, no matter how secure or how high off the ground. Like Patrick, they’d grown up in the Boston mafia or the Chicago mob or somewhere off the Vegas strip and were trying to earn the gratitude of the Feds when they weren’t selling guns or whiskey. Bill Harvey, their ostensible superior, used to let the FBI know when one of his boys was traveling official; nobody arrested a Second-Story Man.

  Josie had met Patrick on one of his flying visits to Bogotá, back when it was still a glamorous Latin town and Scottie was cooling his heels there before a stint in Embassy Athens. Patrick had recognized the last trace of her Southie accent, knew immediately everything she’d tried to hide for years, and loved her for it. No Georgetown or Holy Cross stuck-up, he.

  Patrick taught her how to pick locks and how to hide contraband and how to smuggle her best friend across any border. Taught her how to bug a phone and clean a rifle, how to nail her five-shot groupings from three hundred meters, how to uncap a beer with her teeth. He left her pregnant, unmarried, and thirty years old on the night of his last job, when the Second-Story Man was shot off a window ledge and fell forty feet to his death.

  If I cannot be safe, Patrick me darling, she thought as her plane took off from Frankfurt, then for Chrissake let me be brave.

  She ignored the fancy place where Scottie was staying and checked into one of the no-longer-fashionable small hotels in the western half of the city, just off Ku’damm. It was possibly a three-star, probably a two, and the bathroom was smaller than Lufthansa’s. No minibar, the mattress nearly on the floor, a nice down quilt in the German fashion. She’d been to Berlin only once before, and though the jet lag was fuddling her brain she forced herself to take a long hot shower and then study her city map over coffee. She could sleep when her work was done.

  There were maybe ten prisons strung out around the inner suburbs and districts of Berlin, two of them juvenile detention centers, one specifically for women. She concentrated on finding the other seven, ignoring those that did not tally with Scottie’s instructions. It was a small place, unofficial, near the St.-Elisabeth Stift—a medical clinic. A scattering of buildings around an inner courtyard off Eberswalderstrasse. Scottie had suggested she rent a room in a building next door or get access to a stairwell—as though stairwells had windows—and wait for the armored van with the prisoner to return from its daily jaunt. Josie had other ideas. There was the clinic, for crying out loud—and why couldn’t she, Mary Devlin, have a relative waiting inside? I’ll get over there in an hour, she thought as she leaned back against the inadequate bedstead and stared thoughtfully at the leaden Berlin sky. But now I’m going to nap a little.

  We aren’t as young as we used to be, Patrick, and that’s a fact.

  It’s no use, Cuddy thought wearily as he waited for the next question to fall in the room’s thickening silence. He’ll never leave me alone with Eric, and I’ve got no way of reaching him. I might as well have stayed in Langley.

  He had gone to Dulles at the appointed hour and waited in a bar for Raphael. Contact had come in the form of a drink sent to his table by a leggy blonde, who smiled at him cheerily from the corner. He’d nearly choked on the Scotch as he read the note on the back of her business card—Bambi Trixx, Room 419, Hotel Adlon, Berlin—and had adjusted his glasses twice before he believed it. Raphael in drag. He wore a chamois-colored suede skirt and a black leather jacket. His platinum hair was entirely his own, loose and curled in a smooth bob. The angelic features transmuted perfectly, the makeup applied by an artist’s hand. Unlike Cuddy, Bambi traveled first-class, sipping champagne over the Atlantic. Cuddy had no idea where Raphael was now, but thought it was a good bet that Room 419, the Adlon, was one of the best suites in the house.

  Sleeper. Tool. Fist. Like Caroline, Cuddy had seen the empty folders with the Croat
ian names, and like her he’d translated them for himself. How to ask Eric what they meant in this room with the wolf at the door?

  They had landed in Berlin at noon local time. Wally Aronson was waiting for them in a khaki trench coat, looking for all the world like a collaborator out of Casablanca. November in that part of Germany was wet and harsh, and the vaguely sinister outline of mustard-colored cranes suited the atmosphere. More than a decade after unification, but construction pits still yawned throughout the city. The prevalence of skeletal buildings made the burned-out hulk of the Brandenburg Gate, destroyed by 30 April two weeks before, almost easier to bear.

  Scottie carried himself like a spymaster of old that morning. He barked orders and refused lunch and did not stop at the Adlon, where Wally had reserved rooms, demanding to be taken immediately to Eric. You would think, Cuddy commented inwardly, that he’d missed his wayward child. Eric—his prodigal. Scottie’s air was one of bewildered sorrow, a man grievously betrayed.

  He was lounging now in his chair as though overcome with boredom or perhaps the effects of jet lag, long legs outstretched idly in their perfect British suiting. A few imperious words to his German goons, Ernst and Klaus, had succeeded in winning the suspect’s temporary removal from solitary confinement to a CIA safe house, though Eric still wore shackles on his legs and wrists. The safe house was in the Grunewald, west of Berlin, down a cobbled lane hard by the lakes and forest that made the area a sporting mecca for city residents; but nobody within the tidy cottage was enjoying the view. The curtains were drawn.

  It was the obvious course. Any BKA interrogation room would be penetrated, and Scottie could never allow Eric’s confession to be recorded. He’d promised Ernst something—a public trial in a German court?—in exchange for exclusive debriefing rights; and the German agent had insisted he come along for the ride. Scottie and Ernst in the hunting grounds of the vanished Hohenzollerns, two survivors of a century of blood sport.

  Once at the door of the safe house, however, Scottie had nodded to Wally Aronson and the station chief had taken the BKA agent gently by the arm. Preventing him from following Scottie and Eric over the threshold. Ernst was smoking quietly outside now while Wally chatted in his amiable, nonsensical way; two prison guards wandered about the grounds, fingering the guns concealed in their pockets and blowing on chapped fingers.

  “You fucking piece of shit.” Eric said it quietly. “I went through hell for you, Scottie. I’d have died for you if you’d asked. And you sold me out. You know how stupid I feel? How unbelievably fucking stupid? You were like a father to me. Only I wasn’t your son—I was just somebody you could use.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Scottie mused to no one in particular. “Dare’s been murdered by one of your friends, Eric, and Rinehart’s taken over as DCI. Remember Rinehart? No? A nice young man. Obsessed with power. He’ll do whatever I tell him to keep it.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck who’s running the CIA, Scottie. Who’s running you?”

  “I’ve told Rinehart that Dare single-handedly shoved you deep into 30 April and successfully destroyed the evidence before her untimely death. Rinehart wants you brought to book. In the U.S. That’s what the President has ordered, too. If you don’t get the death penalty for Sophie Payne’s murder, Eric, you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail.”

  Eric grinned. All his teeth bared. The white cut through the mass of bruises was painful to look at. “I’ll be tried first, before a jury of my peers. Or a panel of German judges here in Berlin. I’ll tell them the truth about your brutal little games, Scottie.”

  “Which will get you exactly nothing.” Scottie’s gaze was still fixed on the curtained window, as though his eyes somehow saw the lake through it. “You and I used to play poker, Eric. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how I’d call your bluff, over and over again, and you’d come up short? I can read your death in your eyes. You’ve got dogs in that hand right now. Threes and sevens. I’m holding aces, asshole. Rinehart’s my ace. Jack Bigelow’s my ace. The American people, who are scared shitless and running for any hole they can hide in, are my aces. They want a terrorist’s head and I’m in a position to give it to them. I’ll be crowned king of the universe before I’m done.”

  “Cuddy knows the truth,” Eric said steadily. But he did not look at him, and Cuddy felt his face flush with shame. “Caroline knows.”

  “Caroline’s out on the street. The FBI’s tailing her under suspicion of collusion with her killer husband. Cuddy is working for me—and the day he stops is the day I turn him over to the law, burned from head to toe.”

  Eric’s eyes drifted toward Cuddy, found his face where it leaned wearily against his hand. Cuddy managed to shake his head slightly, once. A profession of faith. Eric’s expression remained impassive. The wound in his neck resembled a garrote.

  “Did you come to Berlin to gloat?”

  The CTC chief sighed with impatience. “I came to offer you a deal. The best I can do. The only thing I can do. With Rinehart’s okay.”

  “What deal?”

  “Your confession—your promise to enter a guilty plea—and your willingness to work with us, Eric. In exchange for twenty years to life. No trial, no risk of the death penalty. You’ve heard of turning state’s evidence, right? Thirty April’s rapidly making a charnel house of the District and we need whatever facts you store in that animal brain.”

  With sudden violence Eric thrust himself out of his chair. “Guilty plea?” he spat out, his manacled hands clanking against the conference table. “Guilty of what? Protecting your ass?”

  Scottie stood up and reached for his suit jacket. “I’ll tell Ernst you’re not cooperating. He can take you back to your cell.”

  With his fingertips, Eric lifted the edge of the table and tossed it at Scottie. It flipped once, and though Scottie stepped instinctively backward, one of the metal legs caught his cheek high on the bone, cutting instantly to blood.

  “Wilmot,” Scottie said calmly as he drew a gun and pointed it steadily at Eric, “get the prison guards. This boy’s beyond saving.”

  Chapter 40

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 9:53 A.M.

  “You can’t be serious,” Brett Foster said flatly. He raised his pen from the yellow legal pad he used for notes. “Resign? You won the last election with sixty-three percent of the vote, George. That’s a mandate. You’re Speaker of the House.”

  “I’ve lost Dana,” George Enfield shot back bitterly, “and I’ve got absolutely no interest in politics right now. I want to spend more time with Mallory. She’s all I’ve got left.”

  The two men were sitting alone in the Speaker’s inner office, a beautiful and spacious old room with deep crown moldings and twelve-foot-high windows. The drapes were a strong Federal blue velvet and the desk was Biedermeier; Dana had helped to choose both. Around the walls were photographs from nearly two decades in public office: George shaking hands with two previous presidents; George fly-fishing the Rappahannock; George standing tall on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Dana, gorgeous as a catwalk model, at the last inaugural ball.

  “Look,” Foster urged, “we’re in recess. Through the Christmas holidays. You don’t have to hang around here and you don’t have to make any snap decisions. Go home to Memphis. Take some time to think and to heal. But for God’s sake, don’t make any announcements you’ll regret. It’s way too soon, George.”

  He liked Brett Foster—the forty-year-old had been his Chief of Staff for nearly three years now, and he had not reached the pinnacle of a Capitol Hill career by dumb fucking luck, so George usually trusted his instincts and followed his advice. Except when everything in his being counseled otherwise. Like today.

  “I’m flying with Dana’s ashes to Massachusetts after the funeral Friday,” he replied. “She wanted them scattered in Nantucket Sound.” The part of her life that came before me, before Mallory, before the public scrutiny she frankly hated. Oh, God—why didn’t I let her live her life while we still had time
? “That means we’ve got a lot to do in the next three days. I want youto call a staff meeting for nine-thirty and a press conference for ten A.M.”

  “Dana wouldn’t have wanted you to give up,” Foster insisted urgently.

  “And I didn’t want her to die,” Enfield retorted. “So we’re even, aren’t we?”

  Candace O’Brien watched the press conference from the foot of her bed a few minutes before she checked out of the hotel. She was mesmerized by George Enfield’s face. She saw in it the traces of her own guilt and grief at Sophie Payne’s murder. He understands, she thought. He’s just like me.

  She had never returned to Dupont Circle the previous night. Instead, she had walked swiftly past her own home and cut down the alley to the detached garage where she kept her car. She’d driven into the darkness without a notion of where she was heading, knowing only that she had to leave this place—this place where she was hunted. She’d briefly considered the small Eastern Shore town of St. Michael’s, which had felt like a haven the only other time she’d been there; but she could not quite remember the way and was too rattled to find a map in her sterile glove compartment. She’d thought of Adrienne, with the sick feeling of inadequacy that always attended the memory of her daughter; and in the end she’d driven in circles for two hours, roaming the Beltway. A few minutes after eleven P.M. she pulled up to a traveler’s hotel outside Silver Spring and accepted it by default.