Blown

by Francine Mathews

  “Fuck,” Scottie burst out. “What the fucking hell—”

  “Try to go around,” Wally told his driver calmly, and with a snort, the man hauled on the Explorer’s wheel.

  Cuddy’s pulse was throbbing painfully. He could recognize Raphael from thirty paces, even if Scottie couldn’t. There isn’t much time. Shit, Eric, get out of there—

  The armored truck’s doors flew wide and Eric stood in the headlights, cuffs and manacles gone.

  The embassy Explorer jammed to a halt.

  Scottie scrabbled for his door handle. His other hand held his gun.

  Cuddy shouted, “Eric, run!”

  Thirty April’s last man standing jumped to the ground. Over the open car door, Scottie leveled his weapon. Eric tore around the truck toward the Humvee; and at that moment, as Cuddy watched, he stuttered in midstep, his arms arching wide.

  Staggering.

  Falling.

  Clutching at the pavement with his hands.

  Pulling himself across the rain-wet asphalt with a dark flower of blood blooming through his jumpsuited back, until he collapsed suddenly with his face in the street.

  Cuddy was yelling his name and running through the downpour, away from the protection of the embassy car and Scottie standing amazed with his weapon unfired in his hand, away from Wally screaming at him to get down, toward the leggy blonde with the terrible expression of sorrow on her face and the man lying as though dead, three yards from freedom.

  Chapter 52

  ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA, 11:27 A.M.

  It was the woman with the little girl who’d memorized the digits of the phone number Tom Shephard had boomed out over the megaphone, and she shouted them in an agonized voice over the screams of her terrified daughter as Daniel Becker lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Two of the hostages had raced to pin him down when he fell, while a third vaulted the ticket-seller’s window and grabbed the phone.

  Jozsef stood alone. The pistol dangled from his right hand until his nerveless fingers released and the gun clattered to the floor. He sank down onto his knees, whimpering, spent, no longer looking at the man he’d dropped with a single bullet. The slug’s impact had done something to Daniel’s legs; perhaps the spinal cord was severed. Blood was pooling beneath his body on the dirty linoleum floor, and his lips were moving soundlessly.

  Jozsef was trembling from fever. He’d committed what his father would consider the greatest gesture of cowardice: He’d shot a man in the back without offering a fair fight. He did not regret Daniel lying on the floor. He linked his fingers together and dipped his forehead down. He wanted nothing more than to rest. The little girl wouldn’t stop wailing.

  The man on the phone was talking urgently now and Jozsef caught a few of the English words.

  “. . . shot by that kid he brought with him . . . ambulance . . . two dead here and people pretty messed up . . . disarmed the guy . . . don’t shoot if they walk out . . .”

  With a shout somebody unlocked the main station door, and the first to leap forward were the little girl and her mother, both of them sobbing hysterically as they staggered into the flashbulbs and the surging police and the Victims’ Assistance representatives and the paramedics in their brightly colored clothes. Jozsef slid slowly sideways until his cheek touched the cool linoleum; his eyes closed. In the babble of voices and noise he heard a different kind of ending. Lady Sophie, he thought, why did you have to die? We were going to live together. Now there is no one. What do they do in America to boys who kill?

  Tom Shephard found him there in the empty station waiting room, barely conscious and dreaming, while the Instrument of the Lord’s Vengeance mouthed the word dishonor as his life swiftly bled away.

  “Gerry,” Candace O’Brien said.

  She was standing outside his office door, almost humbly waiting in the line of students who brought their questions and difficulties to him for resolution two afternoons a week.

  Professor, I’m having trouble with the organic chemistry assignment.

  I just don’t think I deserved a C on the midterm, Professor.

  That T.A. is openly sexist. He said girls don’t “get” science, Professor.

  Professor, where did we go wrong all those years ago? How did our beautiful child end up alone on her perilous trip down to the Underworld?

  He was struck, as he gazed at the woman he persisted in thinking of as his wife, at how nakedly she carried her suffering. Candace had never been interested in hiding things. It was he who’d thought it best to send Adrienne away while she brought the child to term, as she’d insisted on doing. He who’d tried to pretend for the benefit of his peers that his daughter was spending her junior year of high school abroad. Candace had wilted under the burden of pretense. Curling inward on herself, she’d withdrawn from him more each day. Until here she stood, the most familiar of strangers.

  He gestured her inside. She closed the door gently behind her but did not take the seat he offered.

  “I told them everything today,” she explained. “About Adrienne. Where she lives, and how. I had to tell them, Gerry, but I thought you ought to know.”

  “Them?” he repeated blankly. “But who are they?”

  “The FBI.”

  He sank down into his desk chair, removed his glasses, rubbed at his eyes. “Oh, God, Candace. What were you thinking? The FBI is after her?”

  “I guess. Yes.”

  He stared at Candace in the unfocused way of the nearsighted. “But what has she done?—other than live in the purest way possible for the sake of her research?”

  “It’s more a question of what she intends to do, Gerry.”

  He looked away from her, his mind racing. “Could I stop them? If I tried to explain? Is there someone I could talk to?”

  “But what can you explain?”

  “How young she was. How intelligent, and how vulnerable.”

  “She’s not a little girl anymore. She had the brains to choose differently. Those choices were not made by us.”

  “No,” he conceded bitterly. “She made them alone. She had to.”

  All the unresolved quarrels of their last months of marriage blazed in the silence between them—his need to excuse every flaw in his daughter for the sake of her promise; Candace’s insistence that even genius should be balanced with humanity. Adrienne is dangerous, she’d argued, because her intellect is ruthless. She has no pity, Gerry. Nothing close to love.

  “There’s still the boy,” she said at last. The words hung in the air.

  “The boy? You mean . . . Misha?”

  “If Adrienne is taken into custody . . . I thought . . .”

  “That we could step in? Get a second chance at parenthood?” He barked with laughter, amazed at the simplicity of her mind. “You can’t redeem one life with another, Candace. There are no second chances. Adrienne knows that—and so do I.”

  The thiopental sodium worked almost instantly, but it wore off with equal swiftness and the process of getting answers to their urgent questions was slow. Caroline Carmichael talked without hesitation, but she offered up the contents of her mind unedited. Adrienne began with simple things: questions about CTC’s structure and operational methods, how the CIA tracked Mlan for years in Europe when his face had never once been photographed. How they’d managed to find his bunker in Budapest and the last spider hole south of Sarajevo. All the words and memories boiled down to one theme: a man Caroline called Eric.

  Adrienne sat while the love and hope and raw fear tumbled from the woman’s dry lips, no emotion visible in her dilated eyes. For a scientist like herself to witness the degree of emotion harbored in a brain was distinctly troubling. The brain was the seat of thought. The analytic control center. A machine as precise and mapped as a computer, the data stored in neat compartments. This torrent of feeling was impossible to reconcile with a thinking organ.

  “Who knows you’re here?”

  “Just Cuddy. He gave me to Price.”

  “Will Cuddy
come after you?”

  “Cuddy’s in Berlin!”

  “What have you told Cuddy?”

  “To ask Eric.”

  “Ask Eric what?”

  “About Sleeper, Tool, and Fist.”

  Adrienne tensed. “Where did you hear those names?”

  “They’re on the disc.”

  “What disc?”

  “Eric’s disc.”

  Adrienne glanced at Price. He was frowning.

  “Her laptop,” he said. “It’s probably still in the car.”

  Adrienne motioned him to the door. “Caroline, does Eric know who Sleeper, Tool, and Fist are?”

  “He should. Asked him to tell Cuddy.”

  “Where’s Eric now, Caroline?”

  “In prison. In Berlin.”

  Adrienne stood and turned her back on the woman slumped in the chair. The CIA is in Berlin. Interrogating the traitor. They may already know my name. The face of her son rose in her mind. Misha. Oh, God, Misha—

  Her veins turned to ice.

  They were coming for Misha.

  Adrienne ran to her son’s locked door.

  Chapter 53

  BERLIN, 10:35 P.M.

  It was late that evening when he walked back into the Adlon, the lights of the glittering palace immensely comforting after the squalor of death on Eberswalderstrasse. Scottie hesitated before crossing the luxurious lobby. He wanted a shot of ice-cold vodka to settle his nerves. It had been a close-run thing.

  Too close, he thought now as he decided against the public bar and moved swiftly toward the elevator. How had he freed himself from those cuffs and chains? Who helped him? One of the prison guards?

  Cuddy’s face rose in Scottie’s mind, and the single phrase half caught in the kaleidoscope of moments: Eric, run!

  Cuddy, then, in all probability. The thing would have to be investigated in the morning. This would give him an excuse to fire the bastard; Cuddy had served his purpose.

  He loosened his tie as the steel cage ascended, jet lag and a curious sensation of anticlimax flooding his body. Josie, wherever she was, had come through in the end like the professional she’d always been. One instant there was a man teetering on the edge of freedom—a man with the face of Nemesis and Scottie’s entire future trapped in his hands—and the next second, a discarded parcel of flesh and bone, dead on the Berlin street.

  Problem solved.

  He would call Rinehart immediately, regardless of the time difference.

  The elevator door slid open, and he stepped decisively out into the hallway. It was remarkable how easy they had all made it for him—his devoted colleagues. There’d been Cuddy, falling to his knees beside the body, and Wally Aronson urging in a persistent undertone, “You’ve got to get away from here. You drew your gun and Eric’s dead. The BKA isn’t going to like having their terrorist prize snatched from the jaws of justice. They’ll call it a CIA setup.”

  “I never fired the thing,” he’d protested, still bemused by the velocity of what had happened.

  “The shot came from somewhere to the east, but we can’t risk your involvement with the police. They’ll be here soon. You’re too important, Scottie. Get in the car. Get out of here. I’ll deal with this mess. That’s my job.”

  He and Cuddy had been hustled into the Explorer and driven immediately south toward Pariser Platz, the anonymity of their cover names on the hotel registry. Cuddy’s hands were smeared with blood where he’d touched Eric’s back, and his breathing rasped audibly in the car’s silence, fast and hoarse, as though he’d been running. Or weeping. He kept his face turned toward the streaming lights of the Mitte District, and Scottie could not tell if his cheeks were damp; it was still raining.

  Let Cuddy cry. Somebody ought to mourn Eric. He’d been a good man in his way, but all good men were expendable.

  He thrust the key card into the electronic pad and turned the heavy brass door handle. The room beyond was pitch-black. As he groped for the light switch, he wondered irritably what had happened to his turn-down service. No soft music, no plumped pillows, no square of linen spread neatly under his complimentary slippers. The door clicked shut behind him as the room flooded with light, and he saw her.

  Josie.

  She was leaning in the doorway of his marble bath as though she’d been waiting for him.

  Of course she’d been waiting for him.

  He grinned hugely and held out his arms. “Hey, beautiful! That was a hell of a show you put on tonight. Why are you sitting in the dark? And how’d you get in here?”

  She smiled back, a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m a Second-Story Girl, remember?”

  “Patrick taught you all his tricks, didn’t he?” He strolled toward her—toward the familiar coarse-skinned face and strawberry-colored hair, the thickened middle-aged body and the stumpy calves, the clothes she persisted in buying at discount warehouses despite the fortune he’d paid her over the past dozen years. “Josie. My one true friend. It’s been a hell of a ride, hasn’t it?”

  “Tell me what happened in Bogotá,” she said abruptly.

  He stopped short, his hand on the silk tail of his necktie. An instant’s pause and he dropped it carelessly to the bed. “The night Patrick died? I’ve told you. Countless times. He was blown in the middle of a ticklish job and shot in the back. Killed instantly—by the bullet or the four-story drop to the street below. Why?”

  “Who fired the gun, Scottie?”

  She was still leaning against the bathroom doorframe, staring at him intently, and it occurred to him to wonder whether her jobs left her this way—whether the act of pulling the trigger and cutting off a man’s life inevitably brought Patrick and his sins to mind. “God knows. He was climbing into the Soviet embassy. Any one of those goons could have done it. An unfortunate casualty of the Cold War.”

  “But they didn’t, did they? I know the second-story drill. One guy on the ground, one effecting entry. Radio communications. Dead of night. The guy on the ground covers his partner’s back. He pulls him out when the shit goes down. Only you didn’t pull him out, Scottie. You shot Patrick like a coward. You left him to die. Why? What had he ever done to you?”

  Her teeth were bared in the terrible grimace of tears and she was close to snapping, Scottie realized.

  “You need a drink,” he said.

  “I need the truth.” She raised her right hand and he understood for the first time why she’d been leaning so fixedly against the doorframe, that incongruously slack yet rigid posture: She’d been hiding her handgun. Not the Austrian Steyr she used for long-range shots, but a neat little Beretta with a silencer he’d never seen.

  He stepped backward, his hands rising in a gesture of calm. “Josie. We can talk about this.”

  “You can talk. I’ll listen.”

  He sank backward onto the edge of the king-size bed. “Patrick was a good man.”

  “So why’d you kill him, Scottie?”

  Her eyes locked on his; the faded blue held no compassion, no pain or mercy. Only a frightening resolution. But charm had always worked with Josie; she was lonely as hell, the sort of woman no man looked at twice; she craved male banter, the cajoling sense of camaraderie. She craved Scottie, had slaved for him over the years despite the string of wives and lovers; she craved Scottie and had settled instead for Patrick.

  “You know, Josie,” he said genially, “if Patrick had a fault, it was that incredible curiosity of his. He couldn’t leave things alone. Couldn’t let certain dogs lie.”

  “He blackmailed you?”

  “He blackmailed me. We won’t bother discussing about what. It was all so long ago. But what could I do?” He lifted his palms, a helpless little boy.

  “Send him home,” she said tersely.

  “Too insecure. There was the future to consider.”

  “Ah. The future. So you traded my and my daughter’s and Patrick’s future for your own, is that it?”

  “You’d have done the same yourself,” he an
swered reasonably. “You know how these situations work.”

  “Yes, Scottie. I do.” She studied him thoughtfully. “A professional always thinks of Number One. Never leaves an end untied.”

  “Exactly. And we’re both professionals. Look at the work you did out there tonight. Was that the mark of an amateur? A softy who doesn’t know the ropes? Not a chance.” He stood up and stepped toward her, all his affection in his face. “And it hasn’t been so bad. Think of the life we’ve shared, Josie! I owe you everything. Thanks.”

  “No thanks necessary.” She lowered the silenced Beretta. “I didn’t do your job tonight, Scottie. I’ve been sitting here in the dark for the past three hours. Sometimes the truth is worth more than you can pay.”

  It was Cuddy who found him: Cuddy who’d come over to Scottie’s room at one o’clock in the morning with his resignation typed and ready. He found the door ajar and the music softly playing, light spilling out gently into the hallway. Scottie’s elegant silver head lying back on the pillows with a single neat hole in the center of his brow.

  It’s too bad she didn’t leave her gun, Raphael said dispassionately when Cuddy ran down to Room 419 and pounded on the door. We could have made it look like suicide. The important thing, all the same, is to get that signed confession. Do you know where he put it?

  They lifted Eric’s last sacrifice from the inner pocket of Scottie’s briefcase, careful to leave no prints. And left the body for the Adlon’s maids to find.

  Chapter 54

  ROCHESTER, PENNSYLVANIA, 1:21 P.M.

  When Adrienne had gone, shooting like an arrow toward the rooms at the rear of the house, Caroline opened her eyes. Though her right arm hurt like hell and she didn’t want to think about what her nose might look like, she was no longer groggy. The effects of the thiopental sodium were wearing off. Price had gone for the laptop. Adrienne had left her alone. She would have only seconds.