She’d bought a Bushmaster first, then a Czech CZ, and most recently the Austrian Steyr, which was light and easy to manipulate in a woman’s hands. She could carry it, broken down, in a capacious kilim-covered carpetbag that suited her shambling form. She was carrying that bag now, tucked next to a box of chocolates and a basket of fruit and a couple of paperbacks, as she turned into the medical clinic. Her nap had refreshed her. She was blithe as a spring chicken. It was possible she would spend a few well-earned days in Paris after the job was done. All that remained was to scout out the proper killing ground, then head back to Ku’damm for a hearty meal.
“Did I tell you the Prick tried to hit on me in the first-class bar on the flight over?” Raphael inquired as Cuddy sank into the luxurious sofa that dominated one end of the Adlon’s Room 419. “God’s truth. Bought me a Cosmopolitan—which naturally Bambi loves but I had to choke down—and ran his fingertips along my thigh while he talked of his world travels. Told me he was an executive flying in to do a deal with Siemens. Pathetic old fart. That wife of his is hardly thirty, and already he’s searching for Number Four.”
“No, no,” Cuddy corrected as he rolled his sleeves to the elbow. His jet lag was becoming manageable now. “Bambi’s good for a quick fuck in the lav, but never a candidate for Number Four. Number Four is going to bring millions. She’ll have to.”
“Bambi’s very expensive,” Raphael protested, hurt.
“So is Scottie.”
The Prince of Darkness was back in form, black-clad and blasé as he lounged with a glass of Grey Goose. The drapes were drawn against the gray wet afternoon and a CD was playing softly; Cecilia Bartoli, Cuddy thought, singing something that sounded like Vivaldi. He caught the word sangue repeated with violence in her liquid throat: blood. Raphael’s equivalent of a fight song.
Cuddy reached for a minibar beer and struggled with the bottle opener. The blood looked like being Eric’s and Cuddy’s and all the good guys’ and he wanted very much to get drunk.
Raphael’s hair was tied at the nape this afternoon and he was wearing a pair of narrow, boxy spectacles that lent him an instant Euro cachet. He looked, Cuddy thought, positively German. Tomorrow he’d probably be French.
“Did you see him?” he asked Cuddy.
“Yes. They keep him cuffed—ankles manacled—and run two prison guards outside the door. Scottie puts the questions and Eric avoids the answers. Scottie offered twenty-to-life for a complete confession and state’s evidence. Eric went for Scottie’s throat.”
Raphael sipped the Grey Goose, his gaze that of a twelfth-century contemplative. “So he hasn’t given up.”
“Not yet. Scottie’s got the scratches to prove it.”
“Good. Did the Prick bite back?”
“He slapped Eric’s wrist and left in a huff. We’re supposed to revisit the whole thing tonight—Scottie can’t go home empty-handed. His future depends on polishing Rinehart’s butt.”
Raphael reached for a folded map of Berlin and spread it open on the coffee table. He had highlighted several roads in different Day-Glo colors: blue, pink, and yellow.
“Here’s the secret cell block where our boy’s being held,” he said, “and here’s the location of the safe house. Correct?”
“You knew that?”
“Talked to Wally. Wally’s a bud from way back. Here are the three main routes one could take from the Grunewald to Eberswalderstrasse. Notice they all converge right here.”
He laid one almond-shaped fingernail on an intersection where blue, pink, and yellow paths met. “At the Pankow U-Bahn station,” Cuddy said. “And? Your point is?”
“This is where we’ll stage our rescue.” Raphael sat back and smiled triumphantly. “The prison van carrying Eric has to take one of these routes back to St.-Elisabeth’s tomorrow. It doesn’t matter which. They all debouch at the same point, a block from the hospital. That’s where we’ll magic him out of the van.”
“How?”
Raphael reached for a graphite-colored pen lying innocently on the hotel desk next to his laptop. The music, Cuddy realized suddenly, was coming from the computer. The Vivaldi had given way to Mozart; fanciful and childlike after the bitter dregs of revenge.
“I’ve told Wally to visit Eric before he’s taken from his cell tonight. Urge him to sign the Prick’s confession. When he reaches for a pen in that safe house, give the boy this.”
Cuddy held it before his weak eyes. An unexceptionable gray barrel, a medium blue plastic clip for securing the thing to a pocket flap. But Raphael’s toys were never unexceptionable. “What’s it do?”
“Click it once, you sign your name. Click it twice, it’s a high-powered laser capable of cutting through steel.”
Cuddy had an image of Eric confined in his rolling van, waiting for the doors to open on freedom. The pen in his cupped fingers slowly burning through metal.
“And if the truck hits a pothole?”
“He loses a finger.” Raphael shrugged indolently. “He’s got steady hands. Or did. The best lock-picker I’ve ever schooled.” He reached for his vodka bottle. “Cheers.”
Chapter 43
ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA, 9:53 A.M.
He was down to the fundamentals now, down to the echoing tile in the public bathroom and the humid scent of the boy’s unwashed skin as he slumped against Daniel’s shoulder. Down to the last hundred bucks and the dry mouth and the constant thrum of his pulse in his own ears; down to the cramped certainty of the gun lying potent against his chest. Down to the last leg of the journey.
They’d hopped the 9:40 P.M. bus to Cleveland last night, sitting way in the back as darkness and peace enfolded them. Few people talked on this graveyard run toward the Great Lakes, and the words they shared were muffled by the high-backed seats. Daniel had kept his fingers locked on the boy’s wrist but it hadn’t really mattered in the end; Jozsef had fallen heavily asleep, his cheeks flushed, before the bus even stopped at Akron.
That’d been a bad time for Daniel, when the buffering ranks of passengers ranged between himself and the hunting world shifted like wheat under a spring wind, some filing off, new bodies taking their places. A situation in flux was a dangerous situation: He’d felt his fingers twitch, longing to pull his gun and freeze them all to silence. The bus driver had looked hard at Daniel, the only man who’d spurned this chance to stretch his legs and use the facilities, the clock ticking close to midnight; but bus drivers were used to eccentricity and a rampant desire for privacy and he’d probably figured Daniel was unwilling to disturb the sleeping kid. When the bus at last drove on to Cleveland, his insomniac brain was jumping.
Northern Ohio at two o’clock in the morning, the Rust Belt rain harsh and without pity. The next bus to Erie would not board for four and a half hours. He’d kept Jozsef hunkered at his feet in the claustrophobic night, the two of them outside in the raw darkness, Daniel alert as a sentry with his legs straddling the boy’s drooping head. Jozsef grew hotter as the night grew colder and the breath in his throat rattled painfully. He slipped in and out of dreams or fever. There’d been something about the boy being sick, Daniel remembered, and the doctors at Bethesda Naval trying hard to crack his disease; but Daniel had been certain that was behind them when he put his gun to Norm Wilhelm’s head. The idea that maybe Jozsef needed medicine—needed a hospital bed and a nurse—had never struck him before. It was out of the question anyway.
All tuckered out, he told the driver as he lifted the boy onto the Erie bus. Shame to make him travel this time of the morning.
But now as they waited for the ride to Pittsburgh Daniel’s anxiety was spiking. The boy’s eyes would not stay open and his head lolled like a drunk’s. Daniel kept a paper cup of tap water trained against Jozsef’s lips and forced him to drink, the water dribbling down his shirt like a baby’s. Ten o’clock in the morning. The next bus maybe twenty minutes away. Jesus Christ kid don’t fail me now. We got to keep goin’, keep serpentining under the crossfire, if yer movin’ the bullets ju
st sing over yer head, know what I mean? When he pulled the cup away at last, a pink ribbon of bloody spit clung to the boy’s lip.
He put his arm around Jozsef, propping him up, and kept his eyes stonily on the clock. The station’s ticket window had opened three minutes before, and the gray-haired black woman behind the counter fingered her dangling spectacles where they lay on her broad chest. Her lips were moving slightly and she held a piece of fax paper in her hand. A line was forming for tickets and people were shifting restlessly as the woman scanned her painful way through the text. Then she looked up sharply and studied the faces assembled before her, one by one. Leaned forward to stare into the waiting room.
Daniel’s eyes met hers without intending it, a failure caused in part by the clinging weight of the sick boy and the mesmeric ticking of the clock’s second hand and the exhaustion that welled like floodwater through his brain. He saw the woman’s eyes widen as she looked and saw her turn hastily away, as though searching for help or a phone or a button she could push, and that quickly he’d risen to his feet and screamed, “Don’t move you hear me?”
The cry cut the morning in half. Nothing routine, now, from the startled gape of the waiting passengers—were there ten? fifteen?—to the gun gleaming dully in his reaching hand. He could not remember whether he’d reloaded after Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite. Six bullets then. Nothing since. Had he left the extra magazine in the cab of the stolen truck, all the way back through the nightmare hours of Cambridge? Or was it sitting in the duffel bag at his feet?
A toddler started to wail—red hair dangling to her shoulders, thighs sweet as sausages in her dirty white tights—and the mother, an obese young woman with acne and a pierced navel, slapped a hand over the little girl’s mouth. What was the black bitch with her finger on the button fixin’ to do?
“Everybody down!” Daniel barked. “Everybody down with your hands out flat on the floor where I can see ’em. Move it.”
They fell like dominoes, heads plastered to the stained linoleum. He skirted their bodies and fired without aiming through the glass window, shattering it completely. There was a cry but he ignored it as he ran to the station entrance, throwing the bolts to lock the doors. Nobody leaves, he thought frantically, nobody in or out. Choke points. Command and control.
One of the people lying on the floor—a guy in jeans and a leather jacket with a redneck beard scraggling all the way to his belt—shifted and turned his head to stare at Daniel. His hands were thrust against the linoleum like he was doing push-ups or thinking about a spring for Daniel’s neck, and that quickly Daniel pointed the gun and fired again. The man sagged and flattened.
“Anybody else moves,” Daniel said calmly, “they die like Rambo there. Understand?”
A sob came from somewhere. He kicked open one restroom door and snaked his gun inside. Nothing. Nobody. He did the same to the other one. All quiet on the Western Front. The ticket seller was lying flat on her back, eyes on the ceiling, a can of Mace clutched in her hand.
He knew now that he’d remembered to reload, that the gun was potent and hot and victory just a few hours away. He glanced at Jozsef. The kid was sprawled on his hard plastic bench, not as dead to the world as the two Daniel had just shot. They would wait for a bus and driver to pull in to the terminal and then make their getaway. He had the situation, Daniel thought, well in hand.
“Erie,” Tom Shephard told Mackie Sterne as he cut off the call from Headquarters. “Gunshots fired in the Greyhound terminal and hostages inside. Police in a cordon and talk of a S.W.A.T. team. Can you find me a helicopter, Mackie?”
“I s’pose I could,” the police captain said grudgingly. “Told you there’d be a bloodbath.”
“That was always true,” Shephard replied. “A few bodies today instead of hundreds tomorrow. Somebody had to make the choice.”
Chapter 44
BERLIN, 5:00 P.M.
The styptic pencil Scottie kept in his shaving kit hurt like the devil when he pressed it against the edge of the cut. He took the pain unflinchingly, his gray eyes fixed on his reflection, hard and flat as lake ice in January. The table leg had been capped with metal and the cut was a clean one, high on the cheekbone. Without stitches it would undoubtedly scar.
He did not bother to curse Eric under his breath or hunt out a German doctor through the hotel switchboard. He merely plied the styptic pencil, watching it turn pink with blood. He did not expect Eric to break. The hatred in his face had offered no room for negotiation. Scottie would not have respected him if it had. He had never trained Eric for compromise.
We’ve got to try one more time, Cuddy had urged in the confines of the elevator as they parted on their separate floors. You can’t just turn your back on the only source we’ve got. People are dying at home, Scottie. We need what Eric knows.
Cuddy had been careful not to plead his friend’s case—not to wheedle or suggest plausible alternatives, parallel deals. He had been a model of deference and submission, Scottie thought with contempt; Cuddy would do anything he asked, and thank him for the indignity. It was unfortunate it was men like Cuddy who survived. And men like Eric who fell to the knife.
He turned the hot water faucet to a gush and soaked a washcloth. The Adlon’s linens were superb. He wrung out the cushy white square and pressed it against his face. The laceration sang out wildly under his fingers. He clenched his teeth. The entire atmosphere of the Adlon—the cultivated grace, the ancient lineaments of the historic building rising like a phoenix from its Cold War ashes—was a testament to an American triumph. The defeat of Communism and the rise of capitalist democracy. Liberty and justice for all. Scottie had dedicated his life to that proposition, and the luxurious toweling he now held in his hand was confirmation of its worth.
Of course I’ll try one more time, he’d muttered to Cuddy as he left him in the hall. I’ll try a dozen times if I have to. You think I’d let that bastard screw me?
Cuddy had no reason to know that Eric’s time was very short.
He left the marble-lined bath and walked to the phone. He’d forced Josie to tell him every last detail of her preparations, though he’d read the annoyance in her voice. She hated his impulse to ride her, but he’d been her boss too long and the habit of control was hard to break. She was staying in a hole-in-the-wall off Ku’damm, lying low until he called. It was, he decided, high time.
“Ms. Devlin?” the receptionist repeated coolly in his ear. “I’m sorry. Ms. Devlin has checked out.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m afraid it is, sir.”
“But—” He hesitated, struggling to regroup. “Is there an O’Halloran staying with you?”
He was forced to spell the name. Still he turned up nothing. The receptionist was growing impatient and he had no choice but to disconnect.
Josie had gone AWOL. A slow smile curled his lips. She was trying to teach him a lesson. By this time he ought to trust her.
Josie’s flight had taken her no farther than an airport hotel in the Tegel district, but she was deeply afraid as she sat in the comfortless bar, the remains of a vodka tonic before her. Someone had entered her room at the Kurfürstendammer Hof. She’d known it immediately upon her return from casing the target.
Whoever it was had made no effort to disguise his presence. There was the fragment of paper she’d left in the doorjamb, lying unnoticed on the carpet; the three hairs she’d arranged in the wardrobe, disarranged completely; the in-room safe where she’d stored her passport standing wide open. Nothing had been taken. A tour d’horizon, she thought as she surveyed the sifted room. A scenting of the enemy. On her bed was a piece of complimentary notepaper with a few words written in neat print.
Ask Scottie what happened in Bogotá that night.
She did not have to ask which night. Three years and seven months in Bogotá had come down, in the end, to a few hours of error and loss.
Three A.M. and she’d still been up, waiting for the phone call from Patrick, for
the lilt in his voice that told her he had never been more alive, for the rush of relief heady as sex. But it had not been Patrick who’d called. Scottie’s voice over the wire, hard and dry. He was blown. I’m sorry, Josie. You can fly out with the body on Friday.
She had vomited in the plane’s lavatory all the way back to Washington and watched as the casket was released to a man she’d never met, a man who looked through her and had no interest in her name; one of Patrick’s relatives from Boston, maybe, she’d never been sure. Most of that spring she was lost in a daze of morning sickness and misery. Home leave, compassionate leave, baby Sheila born in August and her next posting a Headquarters one, buried in biographic files.
It had been Scottie who’d rescued her three years later. He’d demanded she accompany him to Athens and get danger pay to boot. There was no end to the miracles he’d pulled on her behalf.
Ask Scottie what happened in Bogotá that night.
Her hands had trembled at the implications of that sentence. One, because the writer knew who she really was—not Mary Devlin but Josie O’Halloran—and her cover docs were blown. Two, because if he knew all that, he probably knew why she was in Berlin. Three, because he’d hinted at something terrible in the past she’d tried to bury. And four, because a seed of doubt was inevitably sown. Had Scottie kept something from her? Lied to her? God preserve us, killed Patrick himself?
She ordered another vodka and drank it neat.
Her first duty was to get out of the Kurfürstendammer Hof; her second was probably to get out of Berlin. But for now, she was attempting to plan her next step. There was the job to consider. The past and all its wrongs to think of. Scottie, and whatever he knew.
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