She picked up her carpetbag and headed for the elevator.
Chapter 45
WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:23 A.M.
“Do you know anything about the sacrament of penance?” Candace O’Brien sank into one of the Speaker’s conference chairs. “Have you ever submitted to it at all?”
“I’m a southern Baptist,” George Enfield replied, “by policy if not conviction. In Tennessee we scream our sins out loud and the world applauds. How can I help you, Ms. O’Brien?”
“Be my priest, Mr. Speaker.”
He’d agreed to see her because she’d mentioned Sophie Payne, and he vaguely remembered a factotum hovering in the vice president’s background. The middle-aged woman looked like a social worker come to inspect his premises, he thought, with her knees locked primly together and her neat black purse suspended from her hands.
“Let’s backtrack a little. You were Sophie Payne’s social secretary, I think? We met once or twice at the residence. Are you looking for a job?”
“No. May I say first how desperately sorry I am, Mr. Speaker, for the loss of your beautiful wife?”
He ducked his head as though to avoid a blow. He had heard similar things all day, offered apologetically or diffidently or in the timid fashion of a subordinate who fears to invade; but somehow Candace’s words were more heartfelt and they pierced the wall he’d thrown up in self-defense.
“I remember her,” she said, “in silk that beautifully suited her hair; and I remember her sitting before a group of your colleagues and telling them exactly why they ought to support stem-cell research. She had poise and character, Mr. Speaker, and we cannot spare either.”
“Thank you,” he said with difficulty. “I don’t mean to rush you, but I’m afraid I have a great deal to do. If you could explain why you came, perhaps . . .”
“I saw your press conference.” Deliberately, she unsnapped her purse and withdrew a single sheet of paper. “You want to find 30 April. My daughter can tell you exactly where they are and what kind of horror they’re planning next. But you will have to find her quickly.”
He was staring at her bleak expression rather than at what she offered. “I don’t understand.”
“My daughter Adrienne is one of 30 April’s agents in America. I’ve known that for the past three years. In a foolish attempt to protect her, I’ve betrayed everything and everyone important in my life. Mlan Krucevic demanded information about Sophie Payne, a woman I loved and admired and who believed I was her friend. I told him all I knew, on a regular basis, because I thought it would keep him from destroying my child.”
Her fingers fluttered slightly on the hasp of her bag.
“You have a daughter yourself, Mr. Speaker. I hope that some small part of you can understand why I acted as I did.”
“You gave 30 April Payne’s schedule?” Enfield’s voice was harsh.
Candace nodded. “Every last detail, from the moment she took office. I told myself that nothing really bad could happen to her—she had a crackerjack Secret Service detail, and Krucevic could never hope to enter this country with the kind of indictment he carried—but there was the foreign travel as well. The less-protected exposure. From the day of the Berlin kidnapping I’ve been unable to live with myself.”
“Jesus Christ,” Enfield whispered. A dull throb of rage was mounting in his gut, shattering the careful box he’d built around his pain. Sophie. Dana. All those bodies on the Mall. And this prim lump of a woman telling him calmly how she’d done her bit for disaster. “You deserve to burn in hell.”
“I am,” she said, rising. “I will. You can send your investigators to find me. I won’t run away. I’ll talk on the record. But use what I’ve given you, Mr. Speaker. I still don’t have the courage.”
She was gesturing toward the piece of paper. He glanced down at it, disbelieving.
Adrienne O’Brien, it read, 39 Fern Gulch Road, Rochester, Pennsylvania.
“In the end that’s my true sin,” Candace said. “Cowardice.”
She’d been up since dawn, sitting on the stool in her jeans and an old sweater, a glass of orange juice near at hand. Misha was playing in an adjoining room with the blocks he loved to set out in patterns across the wide expanse of oak floor, and his music was humming softly in the background. No other sound but the rain on the tin roof and the enfolding leaves, the secret comforts of a tree house. Adrienne’s attention was completely focused on the sticklike array of human DNA she had captured in electron micrographs minutes earlier; she was barely conscious of the passage of time, or the distant sound of an approaching car.
She was looking for a few specific genes that she knew must work in concert: genes that dictated the quality of human intelligence. She had been hunting her quarry for five years, and although she had isolated several likely candidates, there were gaps in the array. Adrienne was confident she would fill them; she knew the genes were out there. The human brain was formed according to the imperious logic of deoxyribonucleic acid; therefore, the limits and possibilities of the entire sea of thought must be genetically determined as well.
She glanced up from the ghostly images and reached for her juice.
It was a pleasant place to build a laboratory: isolated, shade-enshrouded, with the haunting call of owls at midnight and the scurry of hidden things in the undergrowth. She had never needed the stimulation of colleagues. Of a university campus. Not since she’d left Johns Hopkins with her doctorate three years ago, at the extraordinary age of twenty-two. Adrienne thrived on solitude and the uninterrupted world of thought; and Mlan’s money—Mlan’s limitless fund of gray cash from unknown sources and unquestioned motives, flooding electronically through front companies and numbered accounts—had made her world possible.
Now Mlan was dead.
She winced and thrust the thought away. She mourned him, of course—he was one of the few people in the world who could talk to her. They shared a common tongue. But Mlan had died the way he’d lived and he’d protected her to the last. No matter how many accounts the FBI froze, how many front companies Interpol unmasked, Mlan had given her the most marketable commodity of all: her career. He’d paid for the years of schooling, the internships in Switzerland, the breathlessly expensive equipment in this lab. Now she had her MacArthur Genius award. Her reputation. Her work.
If she ran out of funding she’d abandon Rochester and get a conventional researcher’s job. But it would be a tug, for Misha as much as herself. Misha had never been suited to what was termed the real world.
“Mama,” he called fretfully as though in answer to her thoughts, “I need turquoise. This blue is too red.”
She jumped off the stool and walked swiftly across the floor he’d turned into a block mosaic, the delicate gradations of color so infinitely subtle they defied the eye’s attempt to make sense of their transition. The movement of shades was like a shoal’s path through a tropic sea. Brilliant, she thought. So brilliant. None of them will ever know.
They had told her when her son was four that he was a high-functioning autistic. He possessed a remarkable intelligence, certainly, but his obsessive absorption in minute patterns, in the daily assembly of a perfectly ordered world, was akin to a record needle caught in a groove. Playing and replaying the same phrase of sound. Arranging his blocks. Getting the order right. He was adept with objects and numbers and facts, but the world of emotion—the human world of love or pain or laughter—was difficult for Misha to interpret or understand. He could put his arms around Adrienne’s waist and squeeze them together perfunctorily; but if he drew comfort or sustenance from the contact it was impossible to say. Therapy, the experts had suggested. Intervention. Adrienne had listened and nodded and raged in her mind: My son defies your petty conventions.
She’d said nothing of it to the boy’s father. She’d told Mlan the good things: small glittering moments that captured Misha’s essence, dispatched in a variety of e-mails around the world. If her son intended to create and live in a closed univ
erse only he could understand, she would give him that right. That freedom. She despised all the categories the world could devise, except the ones she invented herself.
Where, she thought, would she go when the money dried up? Stony Brook? CalTech? The Institute for Advanced Studies? Falling over themselves to claim her. No one had yet isolated “the smart genes,” as she called them; there was one team working desperately in France and another in Japan conducting parallel research; but Adrienne was certain the map she was drawing had only one name on it. Hers. She’d been born for this. Her research would revolutionize world culture. Not since the research of Watson and Crick had science held such potential to redirect the course of human history.
“I’ll find you turquoise,” she said, and touched Misha briefly on the shoulder. He did not respond, did not look up, his entire soul focused on the small wooden chips he turned in his fingers.
When the truth breaks, she thought as she rummaged among the cans of oddments she kept stacked in the kitchen for just this purpose—the truth that intelligence is programmed before birth like the color of your skin or your sex or the texture of your hair—the truth will change life as we know it. Ostracize some people and elevate others. Spur genetic screening of fetuses for intellectual ability. These were the obvious consequences, of course, but she saw beyond that first wave to the far more destructive second: With the potential of genetic engineering and the will to pursue it, the possibilities were limitless. There would be selective breeding of smart-gene bearers. The systematic marketing of a race of genius. She could envision a world in which those who lacked smart genes would eventually be barred from bearing children—or eased naturally out of the reproductive process by their lack of attractive genetic material. The human race would finally control its own evolution: honing the powers of the brain in conscious ways to craft something far superior to the familiar biped animal.
It was for this that Mlan Krucevic had paid, time out of mind, until death do us part. For the right to be present at the creation. That the super race would come from a country that prided itself on individual freedom was ironic; that it would destroy those freedoms, and the government that enshrined them, was inevitable.
The car she’d heard a few moments ago was coming nearer. Aware of it suddenly, she raised her head from Misha’s blocks and listened. The engine was neither tentative nor slow. The driver knew exactly where he was going and how to find her. Secretly, to herself, Adrienne smiled.
Chapter 46
BERLIN, 6:12 P.M.
They left him manacled even in solitary confinement. A deliberate effort to turn him into an animal, fumbling at his unshaved face and at the fly of his prison suit when he had to pee. He was a man who’d been trained in the psychology of interrogation, both as a Green Beret and a CIA case officer. He had been beaten by experts hired to break him. Had his mind probed by drugs and sadism until he’d raved. Had been confined, once, in a cement box small as a coffin for a month at a time. There had been days when he’d wished he was dead, and if offered the slightest implement of destruction would gladly have killed himself. Eric had explored his own vulnerabilities so intimately over the course of the past two decades that he knew exactly what he could not tolerate, and when it was coming.
Denied food, he turned vicious. Denied sleep, he spiraled rapidly into depression, which was far more dangerous. He had a high threshold for pain and feared physical torture less than mind-fucks. He could not endure the sight of pain inflicted on someone he loved.
Caroline, he thought. They’ll try to use Caroline to get to me. She was the only person left in his world.
He gritted his teeth and strained once more at the chain connecting his handcuffs, although the effort was useless. German steel, he thought mordantly. The best. He had two doors out of the present situation: Succumb to Scottie’s threats or fight him.
Live like you’re going to die anyway and the choices get easier. Scottie’s a shit and I will not give him the satisfaction of answers to a single question. I will not. No matter how they use Caroline. It’s all a game and she and I are just pieces now.
He heard the entry door to the cell block clang open and the approaching thud of footsteps on concrete. More than one man, and no conversation among them. His skin prickled and he sat up on the cot, wrists clanking uselessly. If it was Scottie he would lunge for him and drive him screaming out of this hole with teeth marks in his neck. This hole is mine, God damn it—
A command in German: He was to stand away from the door. He waited, tensed to spring. But when the steel panel slid back, it was Wally he saw. Wally with the faint expression of a satyr above his good cloth coat, a diversion from the morning’s trench. Wally with a small bag of peanuts in his hand.
Beware of spies bearing gifts, Eric thought. As though I give a fuck for peanuts.
“Eric,” Wally said genially. “How’re you keeping?”
Eric did not reply.
Wally stepped forward into the cell. They met in the exact center of the eight-by-five-foot room, a bare ten inches between them. Wally reached thoughtfully for a peanut and began to crush the shells between his fingertips, the casings dry as old paper as they sifted to Eric’s floor.
“He’s coming for you again,” he said bluntly. “I thought you should be prepared. He thinks if he keeps questioning you into the night you’ll reconsider your level of cooperation. He says you’re the kind of guy who needs his sleep.”
“He’s wrong.”
“Peanut?”
Eric shook his head tautly. The cell was wired for sound and his image would already be broadcast to the small screens in the main office, possibly for Scottie’s viewing pleasure, but he was angry at every one of these people he’d loved—Wally and Cuddy and Scottie himself, all of them possessed of Boy Scouts’ names and the morality to match. “What’s in this for you, Wally? Did he promise you another good posting? Or just a payoff to your retirement account? Is he screwing Brenda? Or one of your kids?”
A flicker in Wally’s mild eyes at that: Part of Eric’s interrogation training was the mastery of fighting back; he’d just used it on his old friend.
“Scottie likes threats,” Wally answered. “I prefer to beg. We need your help, Eric, and I’m here to ask for it. We need your help to save innocent lives.”
“The innocent die every day. People like Scottie live forever. I want his blood and anybody who stands in my way won’t go home again. Understand?”
Wally broke open another peanut. The smooth brown seeds slid easily between his pink lips; his jaws worked rhythmically. “The drama’s getting old,” he said. “It’s not the Eric I knew.”
“That Eric was knifed to death.”
Wally set the bag of peanuts on Eric’s cot. “Do what Scottie asks. I’m telling you, it’s for the best. And eat those nuts. They’ll do you a world of good.”
The station chief nodded once, a benevolent doctor who’d offered his spot of healing, and backed out of the cell. The waiting guard slid the door closed without a word.
Eric lifted his chained hands and swept the bag of nuts off the bed with a roar of anguish. They scattered like candy from a birthday piñata. He beat the shells to sawdust, the concrete floor of the cell thrusting back, reverberating through the flesh of his hands. The cuffs bit into his wrists and he welcomed the pain, welcomed an enemy he could face. And then, abruptly, he stopped. Hands poised in midair.
A fragment of paper with minuscule writing on it stared back at him from one of the shells.
Beware of spies bearing gifts.
He sank down and began to frantically piece together the shreds of Wally’s message.
“Sleeper, Tool, and Fist,” Cuddy said as the mellow lights of the safe house glowed around them and Scottie paced indifferently across the room. “Thirty April code names. What do they mean?”
Eric frowned. “I sent you all that on a disc. The one Caroline brought home.”
“Caroline brought nothing home,” Scottie inte
rrupted, “but the habit of posing as a hero. We learned about Sleeper, Tool, and Fist from . . . other sources. What can you add?”
“Do you mean to tell me you’ve done nothing about them?” Eric demanded, his voice rising. “Christ—I send you the key to the American cell—names, dates, operations—and you sit around diddling yourselves?”
The red ink on the polygraph printout jumped violently, a knife-peak of emotion scrawled the width of the page. Wally had slipped the rubber cap with the branching wires over Eric’s finger himself before he’d been booted, along with Berlin station’s polygrapher, out of the room. Scottie would allow no one but himself to interpret the truth. Only Cuddy remained.
“In the time-honored tradition of intelligence,” he said now, “yes, we sat around diddling ourselves. You’ve said you’re willing to cooperate, Eric, and though I’m surprised, I’d like you to pick up the pace. What do you know?”
Eric half rose from his seat. The movement was instinctively one of violence. The conference table was gone tonight; Scottie had intentionally given his victim a wide berth.
“Three years of my life were on that disc, asshole.”
“Your wife’s fault it never arrived, not mine.” Scottie drew his gun from its holster. He leveled it at Eric’s head. “Sleeper, Tool, and Fist, or I’ll blow you out the back door.”
The two men stared at each other. Neither moved except for the faint tremor of Scottie’s hand on the butt of the gun, and for an instant Cuddy saw the willingness to die in Eric’s eyes, the seductive power of refusal, and was terrified that all their planning and hope would be for nothing.
“They’re the names of three network heads in the United States,” Eric said. “The idea was to mount a multipronged attack against the U.S. infrastructure and demolish it from within. Sleeper is Adrienne O’Brien, a biologist Mlan Krucevic knew for years and left buried until now. She’s the linchpin of a small group of influential people, well placed throughout the American academic and research community, who believe in better living through science and are willing to overthrow governments to achieve it. She was supposed to raise funds from like-minded members of the financial world and infiltrate the corporate and pharmaceutical nexus. Mlan communicated with her on a private basis, and much of her intelligence was never stored in his computers. He kept it locked in the safe of his own mind. Which suggests she’s profoundly important.”
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