by Taylor Smith
“That’s what I hear. Welcome to jolly old England.”
“Rats. I guess we’ll have to do some museums.”
The Gunny’s buzzed head gave a nod. “You don’t wanna lose that umbrella. You’ll be needing it.”
Watching the girl tuck a few loose hairs into her knit tam, Carrie felt a sudden plunge in the pit of her stomach. They were about the same height, and although their coloring up close was different, dressed in rain gear as they were, they would be almost indistinguishable from a distance.
It gave Carrie the sort of brief shock she got every time her own reflection surprised her in passing a mirror or window. She’d had an identical twin sister once. When they were small, they were always dressed in matching frilly outfits, to be cooed at and admired in their tandem stroller.
“It made me so proud,” her mother used to say with a sigh. “My two little Strawberry Shortcakes—identical and perfect.”
As if anything less than a matched pair fell somehow short of the mark, Carrie had felt ever since.
Isabel, her twin, had died when they were eighteen—about this girl’s age, by the look of her. But even now, more than a decade later, the pain of losing her other half could still overwhelm her unexpectedly, like the phantom ache of a severed limb.
The girl in the lobby smiled shyly at the Gunny and Carrie in turn. “Well, thanks again. Bye.”
Carrie returned her smile and the Gunny gave a brief salute. As the young corporal at the front door unlocked it to let the girl out, Carrie turned back to the window.
“Anyway, Gunny, on the softball thing, I guess it depends how long the commitment is. We’ll be here till the end of the school year, for sure. I will, anyway. Drum says he may have to head back to Washington earlier. But if it means Jonah can be on a team with Connor, I’d try to hang in as long as possible and let him do that.”
“That should work out okay. We’re going to set up the schedule so the games are all done by the end of June. A lot of people are in the same boat, what with transfers and summer vacations. It makes for a pretty short season, but at least the kids get to play.”
“That would be great.” It was one last thing she could do to help Jonah through the transition they were about to make, Carrie thought—one that might turn out to be even more disruptive than a move from London back to Washington, if she followed through on her growing resolve to make some real changes in her life. “Put Jonah down then. He’ll be so happy when I tell him.”
The Gunny grinned and started to reply, but just then, a sharp bang shattered the hollow stillness of the empty lobby. Three or four more ear-splitting cracks followed in rapid succession. To Carrie’s ears, it sounded like firecrackers exploding outside, but to the two Marines in the lobby, it obviously meant something else altogether.
“Weapons fire!” The Gunny’s sidearm was already out of its holster. “What’s going on out there?” he hollered to the corporal at the door.
The young Marine had his nose to the glass, but he ducked back and pasted himself against the interior marble wall, his eyes huge. “We got a shooter, Gunny! It looks like at least one civilian’s down.”
“Oh, shit!” The Gunny grabbed the phone beside him and started yelling for backup.
Karen Ann Hermann had just left the embassy grounds, rounding the concrete barriers at the perimeter. She was running very late, but at the zebra crossing, she hesitated, confused by the glare of lights on the wet pavement and by the honking cars whizzing by on the rain-slickened road, all of them coming from the wrong direction.
She was getting her bearings, trying to remember the layout of the map in her guidebook in order to plan her route to Leicester Square, when she heard someone call her name. She glanced around. A black London cab slowed as it approached her from the left, its passenger side window down.
How could a cab driver know her name? She must have misheard. Unless maybe he had Kristina and Caitlin with him? Had they decided to come and get her? She ducked low to peek into the back seat of the cab. It looked empty, but the driver was staring at her expectantly.
Had she imagined it, hearing her name called? She must have. There was no way the other girls would have splurged on a taxi, and neither would Karen, rain or no rain. A luxury like that wasn’t in any of their budgets. Theater tickets and souvenirs for her parents were the only big-ticket items she’d bargained on, but a taxi would set her back a bundle.
Head shaking, she waved the driver on, but instead of pulling back out into the line of traffic, the squat little car pulled up closer until it stood directly in front of her.
She shook her head again. “No, thanks anyway! I don’t need—”
Before she could finish the sentence, the inside of the cab exploded in a flash of light. Karen felt a stinging slap to her throat and her head kicked back. A split second later, before she even had time to reach a hand up to feel what had stung her neck, a double smack to the chest sent her flying back as if she’d been kicked by a horse.
It was only as she hit the pavement that her ears finally registered the loud retorts. Her head bounced on the cobblestones, and then she lay on her back, the wind knocked out of her, heavy rain soaking her face and smearing the lights in her eyes. She felt an icy splash on her legs as the taxi sped away.
It was cold on the ground. Her sprawled arms and legs were wet and chilled, but across her chest, she felt a spreading pool of warmth. When she was finally able to catch her breath a little, it came in ragged gasps.
Faces appeared above her, a man and a couple of women, then two soldiers. No, not soldiers. Marines. She’d spoken to the cute one when she’d arrived. He’d been manning the sentry box at the front gate. At first, he’d said she’d have to come back the next day, but when she told him she just wanted to fill out a consular registration form, he’d called and gotten permission for her to go in. On her way out, when she’d stopped to thank him, he’d told her about a club near Piccadilly that he and the other Marines liked to go to. Maybe they could meet up there later?
Karen had promised to ask her friends. Then, she’d headed for the zebra crossing. That was when the cab had pulled up and the driver had called her name.
The Marines were standing over her now, guns drawn, looking nervously from the street and down to her, then back to the street again. She saw their mouths move, but her ears were still ringing from the crack of the thunder that had exploded in her face and she couldn’t hear what they were saying. One of the women was crying.
“I’m okay,” Karen told her. Or tried to, except no sound came out.
She rolled onto her side, her hand reaching for her throat. Her neck felt mushy and wet, like soggy oatmeal, and she was feeling so dizzy she thought she might fall off the earth. But she had to get moving. She was going to be so late. She was supposed to be…somewhere.
Where was she supposed to be?
Tears sprang to her eyes as she tried to remember, cold rain mixing with the warmth running down her cheeks and with that other warmth that covered her front now. Bright lights swam around her. She wasn’t sure where she was anymore. All she really knew was that she wanted to go home. She was tired…so tired.
She curled herself up into a ball, nestling into the cobblestones, her lower arm tucking into her side. Her hand curled up beside her face, the movement instinctive. She had no awareness of her thumb settling instinctively on her chin, nor of her fingers waving laxly.
Feet shuffled around her, and worried faces swam in and out of her line of sight, lips moving soundlessly. She strained to make out their fading features, but none of these was the face she wanted to see. Her thumb was still on her chin, her four fingers waggling limply as she called out in her primal language. To the confused faces, it was probably just random fluttering, but for Karen, it was her first word, rising out of the deepest recesses of her fear and sadness and intense loneliness—Mommy.
She signed it over and over, a silent cry from long ago, a small child calling mutely in the only
language her mother could recognize. But this time, there were no comforting arms to take the little girl up and hold her close to let her know she was safe.
Then, Karen Ann Hermann’s eyes closed for the last time, and her fluttering hand fell still on the wet, hard cobblestones, silenced for all time.
The sky wept.
CHAPTER FIVE
BY J. P. TOWLE
Special to the Washington Post
LONDON—Nearly four months after the shooting outside the U.S. Embassy in London that took the life of a young American tourist, questions remained as to the motive of the Pakistan-born taxi driver blamed in the attack.
U.S. and British intelligence officials say there is little doubt Ibn Mussa Ibrahim attacked to protest American foreign policy.
But if so, skeptics ask, why shoot an unarmed civilian? And why was Ibrahim himself later found shot to death and stuffed in the boot of his taxi?
Security cameras outside the embassy captured the attack on video. The tapes show a shadowy, bearded figure behind the wheel of the black London taxi. The cab pulled up at the embassy’s outer gates just before the driver let loose with a spray of automatic gunfire.
The embassy had already closed for the day when 19-year-old Karen Ann Hermann of Oakview, MD, who had just left the building, was caught in the hail of bullets fired from the cab. She died at the scene.
But friends of the 26-year-old cabbie insist he had no interest in politics. Ibrahim immigrated to the U.K. in 1996.
“All he wanted was to earn enough money to bring his fiancée from Peshawar,” said Ibrahim’s roommate, Farid Zacharias. “Al Qaeda? No way. He loved American movies and Burger King.”
An alternate theory is that Ibrahim’s taxi was hijacked before the embassy attack.
“You can’t tell me that’s him in those videos,” Zacharias argued. “It was dark and raining. How can they be sure?”
But security spokesmen say Ibrahim’s were the only fingerprints found in the cab and on the murder weapon, later recovered in London’s High Park.
“We think he was a sleeper, like the Sept. 11 hijackers,” a senior intelligence source said. “Several have been inserted into Western Europe and the U.S. to await assassination orders.”
As to why the cabbie was subsequently killed, it may be because he missed embassy personnel in the April attack.
“Murdering one young tourist probably didn’t pack the political punch his Al Qaeda masters were looking for,” the same high-level source said.
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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION
(continued…)
So, Carrie, we were talking about the murder of Karen Ann Hermann.
Right. As I said, I didn’t learn her name until later, but she was there in the lobby when I came out of the reception for the visiting senators. She left the building ahead of me. If I hadn’t gotten held up talking to the Gunny at the front desk, I probably would have been outside, too, when it happened.
You might have even been shot. Has that ever occurred to you?
Of course it has. It’s amazing more people weren’t hurt in that attack. It was really bad luck that she happened to be there the moment that terrorist drove up.
And so Karen Hermann died in your place.
I—what? In my place? Wait a minute, what are you saying? Are you suggesting he had a specific target? And I was it?
What do you think?
That’s not what the papers have been saying, and my husband never mentioned there was any suspicion it could have been something like that. Why would a terrorist target me specifically?
You said yourself you were struck by the similarity in your appearances that evening—yours and Karen Hermann’s.
Strictly superficial similarities.
You said you were taken aback by how much you looked alike.
It was a rainy day. Raincoats and umbrellas tend to be pretty generic. Plus, we both had our hair tucked up under berets, so, yes, we looked a little alike.
Enough that you were struck by it. You said it spooked you for a second.
Yes, but that’s because I’m a twin.
You have a twin? An identical twin?
Yes—or rather, I did have. Isabel died when we were eighteen, along with our parents. When you grow up with an identical twin, though, you never quite lose that sense that there’s supposed to be a mirror image of you out there somewhere. Even now, I get a shock when I accidentally see myself reflected in a store window or something, thinking it’s Izzie. Except, of course, it can’t be. She’s been gone over ten years. Still, I never seem to stop looking for her.
Was it a car accident she and your parents died in?
You must have this somewhere in those thick files of yours.
If so, I haven’t seen it. I mean, we try to be thorough, but unless it’s directly relevant to this investigation, the Bureau hasn’t got resources to waste on trivial details.
It isn’t trivial to me.
No, I’m sure. Sorry. That’s not what I meant. How did they die?
A fire. Our house burned down just after New Year’s in 1993. I was back at school by then. It was during my freshman year at Georgetown.
Your sister didn’t go?
No. She was still living at home with our parents back in San Diego. She didn’t go to college because she—well, she just didn’t go, that’s all. Anyway, the fire broke out in the middle of the night. No one survived.
I’m sorry.
Yes, well, anyway—as I said, after spending the first eighteen years of your life as half of a twosome, something always seems incomplete when you’re alone. That’s why I was momentarily struck by the similarity in Karen’s and my appearance that day at the embassy.
And it never occurred to you that someone else might have been confused by it, as well. The shooter in the cab, for example? And shot the wrong person?
But that would mean—wait a minute, are you serious? Is there any proof at all that man was lying in wait for me?
I’m asking if it might have occurred to you.
Well, the answer is, no, it didn’t. What possible evidence could you have that he was?
Security cameras at the embassy recorded the attack. We’ve analyzed those tapes six ways to Sunday. There’s no audio, but when the cab pulls up in front of Karen, she ducks down and looks inside, like the driver hailed her. And the Marines at the front gate said they heard the driver call out to her just before he opened fire.
He called her by name?
He called out a name. It might have been Karen, the Marines thought. Then again, it could just as easily have been Carrie.
You’re serious, aren’t you?
Dead serious. We even called in a lip-reader to look at the tapes. She confirms the Marines’ story, although she couldn’t be sure, either, exactly what name he called.
My God. You mean…? That poor girl.
Yeah, that poor girl. And her poor family back home. Did you know Karen Hermann’s parents are both deaf?
I think I read that, yes.
Here’s something you probably didn’t read. Her father? He had a stroke three days after her funeral. He’s back home now, but paralyzed, they say. He can’t sign anymore, so even though his wife can still talk to him, he can’t answer. Can you imagine the mom? She lost her only child, and now, on top of the grief of that, she hasn’t even got her husband’s support.
That’s awful. I’m so sorry.
You’re sorry. Yeah, well—anyway—let’s put Karen Hermann back in the file for the moment and move on, shall we? You were saying that you and your family were supposed to stay on in London until the summer. But then, right after this shooting, you left early and came back to D.C.
That’s right. Drum had already been notified that he was being promoted to Operations Deputy at Langley. We’d been delaying our departure so our son could finish out
the school year. But after the attack at the embassy, the official threat level was notched up and dependents and non-essential personnel were being shipped out. Drum decided there was no point in sticking around any longer, so we left a couple of weeks later.
And then?
Then, nothing. He started his new job at CIA headquarters. I was tied up with getting us settled after the move.
You went to live with your husband’s mother?
Yes. The MacNeils have a big old family home over in Virginia, right on the Potomac—but you know already that, don’t you? Anyway, it’s just a few miles from Langley, so it was convenient for Drum. His mother has been rattling around in it by herself ever since his father died. She has a daughter, as well—Drum’s sister, Eleanor—but she lives in New York and hardly ever returns to D.C. Anyway, I think I said that Drum inherited the house when his father died. When he was posted back to Langley, neither he nor his mother would hear of us living anywhere else.
How did you feel about that?
It wasn’t the first time. We’d lived there before the posting to London, too—after Africa, when Jonah, our son, was a baby.
I know, but I asked how you felt about it. Not many young wives would want to live with their mothers-in-law.
Well, no, neither did I particularly, to be honest. But we left London so suddenly, I didn’t have time to convince Drum we should be looking for our own place.
So you just went along with what he wanted?
To begin with, yes. You have to understand, I had a lot on my plate. There’s a ton of personal admin that has to be taken care when these transfers come through. With Drum as busy as he was at work, that all fell on me—the shipment of our personal effects, getting what we’d left behind out of storage. Drum’s Jag was in storage, but I had to find a car for myself. I also had Jonah to get settled. Had to try to find a summer day camp that was still accepting registration. There was no way a six-year-old could be expected to hang around the house all summer. He would have been bored silly, and Althea—that’s Drum’s mother—she wasn’t used to having noisy children underfoot, either.