She looked terrified. “Ryan, I—”
He grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, let’s go.” He guided her to the edge of the air conditioner. The rain was following the wind, which was howling along the course of the river. Lightning rippled over their heads, the jagged forks of electricity obscured by side-blown clouds of water. The thunder was so close it seemed to shake the very foundation of the building.
“On the count of three, turn the corner and jump,” Kealey shouted. “I’ll fire to cover you.” She shook her head instinctively, but he knew she would do as he asked. “I’ll be right after you. Ready? One…two…three. Go!”
She turned the corner instantly, exposing her body to the roofs on the other side of the river. Kealey was aware of distant flashes as he blindly squeezed off 2 rounds of his own, then instantly adjusted his aim, shooting toward Vanderveen’s muzzle signature. He heard the supersonic crack as a round passed by his ear, no more than a few inches away, but Naomi was already over the edge. He fired twice more as he dived after her, falling into the darkness, something plucking at the sleeve of his shirt. Then he hit the water, and everything went black.
On top of the opposite building, Vanderveen threw off the poncho as he got to his feet, running to the edge of the roof. He looked down at the river. The view was almost completely obscured by a curtain of rain, but he lifted the rifle anyway, having already loaded a second 5-round magazine. Peering through the scope, he thought he caught sight of a dark shape in the water. He fired quickly, emptying the magazine in a matter of seconds. He was beside himself with rage; the dealer in Dresden had obviously lied about the weapon being sighted in. He was almost certain he’d missed Kealey on top of the roof. The other man’s covering rounds had passed several feet over his head, which was shockingly close for a handgun, given the range. The covering fire had thrown off his aim at the crucial moment, giving Kealey the chance to dive after the woman. He suddenly realized that Raseen had been right all along: they should have simply waited and taken them on the street. With the advantage of surprise, the ambush would have worked perfectly.
There was nothing to be done about it now, though, and he could see emergency service vehicles racing over the bridge to his left. He dismantled the rifle, removed the scope, and placed everything back in the case. Then he retrieved the poncho and the mat, stuffing them into the pack. Ninety seconds later he was back on the street, jogging through the rain to the idling Mercedes. He opened the back and tossed in the pack. Moving around to the passenger-side door, he got in and propped the case between his legs.
Raseen dropped the car into gear. “Did you get them? Did it work?”
“I don’t think so. I might have clipped the woman, but I can’t be sure.” He swore viciously and slammed his hand into the dashboard, causing Raseen to jump in her seat. “That fucker in Dresden….”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your supplier lied to us, Yasmin. That rifle was never sighted in. I had Kealey on the roof at one hundred meters, and I missed. I fucking missed.”
“It must have been the rain,” she protested. “You can barely see your hand in front of your face. I’ve worked with that man before, Will. I don’t think he would—”
“It was the rifle,” Vanderveen insisted. “But it doesn’t matter. I’ll come back and settle up when I get the chance.” He leaned back and took in a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “We need to get out of here. Stop near the Oberbaumbrücke. I’ll toss the case in the river, and then it’s the airport.”
She looked at him. “Canada?”
He nodded and glanced at the dashboard clock. “Our plane leaves in two hours. We’re due in the morning. With any luck, we’ll be in the States by tomorrow evening. Driving time from Montreal to New York City is about seven hours, but it’ll take nearly twice as long since we’re using Nazeri’s normal route.” During the drive from Potsdam to Berlin, he had told her about Amir Nazeri and his part in the upcoming attack. “I don’t want to deviate from the norm.”
“And then?”
“And then we finish it. We may have left them alive, but we left them with nothing.” He smiled at her. “They can’t do a thing to stop us.”
Kealey hit the water hard, his stomach imploding, the air rushing out of his lungs. He went down fast, then started to kick for the surface. Just as it seemed he was about to lose consciousness, he broke the surface and took a huge breath. The rain was bouncing off the surface, finding its way into his mouth and nose. He fought to keep his head above the water, looking around blindly.
He was tempted to call her name, but something deep inside, some lingering thread of rational thought, told him it would be a waste of time. Then he spotted her. She was trying to swim with the current, but even through the rain he could see she was having a hard time of it, her right arm doing all of the work. He started toward her. When he reached her side, she grabbed for him instantly.
“I can’t do it,” she sputtered. “I tried, but…”
“Just hold on to me,” he said. “Don’t panic, and try to keep your head out of the water.”
She nodded weakly, and he started to swim, aiming for the houseboats beneath the Luisenbrücke. Her wounded arm was wrapped loosely around his torso. She was definitely slowing him down, but he knew she was trying to do her part, because she wasn’t struggling, and he could hear her splashing the water with her free arm. Finally, they reached the wooden ladder of the pier. Pulling her forward, he guided her arms to the ladder.
“One more time, Naomi.” He tried to sound reassuring. “Come on, it’s just a few rungs.”
She was obviously exhausted, but she reached up with her right arm and grabbed hold. Her left arm came up slowly, and she struggled to make it up the ladder. Kealey followed right behind her, supporting her body, helping her whenever he could. They reached the pier, and she rolled onto the wooden planks.
He helped her up and paused, looking around, trying to figure out his next move. He looked to his right. There were five houseboats tied up in a row. The first two had lights in the windows, and he could hear the low hum of portable generators. The next three were dark.
He looked over and saw she was shivering violently in the cold rain. A brief flash of lightning lit her pale face; her lips were tinged with blue. The temperature had plummeted since nightfall, and he knew it couldn’t be more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe closer to 30. She needed to get inside immediately.
He grabbed her good arm and pulled her down to the last houseboat. It was a large craft—nearly 60 feet in length—with a fiberglass arch over the flying bridge. Kealey climbed over the rail and helped her over. There was an aluminum table bolted to the deck, surrounded by chairs, potted plants by the rail. He went to the sliding glass door and tried to open it, but it was locked. There was a mat under his feet. He lifted it but didn’t find a key. Looking around, his gaze was drawn back to the plants. Ignoring Naomi’s bewildered expression, he crossed the deck and kneeled by the clay containers. He started dumping the soil out of them, one after the other, running his fingers through the dirt. Finally, he saw something glinting silver. He grabbed the key and went back to the door.
“How did you know that was there?” Naomi managed to ask. She was leaning against the exterior wall, shaking impossibly hard, her arms wrapped tightly around her body.
He didn’t reply, unlocking the door and sliding it open. He stepped inside, and she followed him in.
The salon was filled with comfortable, overstuffed couches, worn rugs on the floor, the galley beyond. There was a little light from the riverside lamps, enough to make out the general layout. Naomi went to one of the couches immediately. She collapsed onto the cushions and curled into a tight ball, her whole body trembling. Kealey went straight through to a side hall, finding the master stateroom a few seconds later. He searched the room, but it quickly became apparent that no one had been on the boat for a while. Unable to find any clothes, he stripped the bl
anket off the bed, then went through to the head. He rinsed the dirt from his hands in the sink. There was one towel on the rack. He grabbed it and went back to the salon. Kharmai was still in the same position.
“Naomi, you have to get out of those clothes.” She didn’t respond, her face pressed into the back of the couch. He sat on the edge and shook her gently. “Come on, sit up.”
She slowly did as he asked, and didn’t protest when he lifted the fleece pullover over her head, only wincing slightly when her left arm came up. Kealey thought the cold must have numbed the pain. The T-shirt came next. Then he pulled off her shoes, socks, and finally her jeans. Kealey quickly grabbed the towel and pressed it into her hands. She absently started to rub it over her damp skin. He looked away, resisting the urge to appreciate her seminude form. When she was mostly dry, he wrapped the blanket tightly around her and used the towel to finish drying her hair. Then he sat next to her and pulled the blanket down from her left shoulder.
“How bad is it?” she asked, turning to look for herself. Her voice was stronger now; she was starting to warm up a little. Her lips had returned to their normal color, and there was a pink glow to her cheeks which he found encouraging.
“Not as bad as I thought,” he said honestly. He could only find three puncture wounds. Two of the bearings were just beneath the skin, but the other was much deeper. He was guessing the first two were ricochets, the third a direct hit. She had been behind and to the left of Bennett when the explosion occurred; it was possible that the bearings just beneath her skin had passed through Bennett’s body before hitting her, which would explain why the wounds weren’t deeper. He felt a sudden, insane urge to laugh out loud. “You have no idea how lucky you are.”
“What about you?” she asked, looking suddenly alarmed. “Were you hit?”
Kealey hadn’t had time to think about it. He’d pulled off his pullover in the river, so he checked his exposed arms, then looked for holes in his T-shirt. The cuts on his hands had been rinsed clean, and he could see they weren’t too bad. He tried to focus, letting the adrenaline ebb, feeling for anything wrong. Nothing seemed to be out of place.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Listen, you have to get to a hospital. Your arm isn’t bad, but you can’t leave it. Not even until the morning.”
She shook her head immediately, the anxious expression falling away, replaced by a look of intense concentration. “The police will be checking the emergency rooms. We can’t risk it.”
“What about the embassy?”
She closed her eyes and leaned back on the couch, desperately trying to think of a way out. Bennett had been working with them as a favor to Jonathan Harper. Nobody else at the embassy even knew they were in the country, let alone what they were doing, but once they went to the CIA’s chief of station, they’d have to explain what had happened. His reaction would not be pretty, but that would be nothing compared to the fallout at Langley.
Naomi shook her head, realizing that there was no way she could fix the situation. The truth would come out sooner or later, and when it did, her career would be beyond saving. She suddenly felt a hot wave of guilt; she was thinking about her career while Shane Bennett—a fellow officer, a decent man—was lying dead in Rühmann’s apartment. She remembered what had popped into her head as she’d stared down at Rühmann’s ruined face, and she suddenly realized it was true: she had lost something fundamental, some inner sense of compassion. Somehow, without even noticing the change, she’d become a harder person than she’d ever thought possible.
“I guess we have no choice,” she finally said. Her voice was heavy with resignation and something else that Kealey couldn’t quite place. “The truth will come out sooner or later. Let’s just get it over with.”
“I have to find a phone. It won’t take long. I looked around…I don’t think anyone’s been here for a long time. You’ll be fine until I get back.”
He started toward the door. Naomi hesitated, then called his name. He turned to face her.
“Ryan, I…” She looked away and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, hoping the dark obscured her features. Her face felt hot. Once again he had saved her life at the risk of his own. If there was ever a time to express her feelings, this was it. But even though the words were on the tip of her tongue, she just couldn’t get them out.
“Don’t take too long, okay?”
CHAPTER 41
BERLIN
The U.S. Embassy in Berlin is a boxy, charmless building of gray stone located in the embassy district south of Tiergarten, shielded behind a vast array of red and white barriers, concrete planters, and rows of razor-sharp concertina wire. The guardhouse is manned by unsmiling German police officers bearing automatic weapons; to stumble upon the sight, a tourist might start to wonder if the tangible divide between East and West was still in place.
Just after 7:00 the next morning, Ryan Kealey lay on a bunk in a spare room on the second floor. A television tuned to CNN was mounted against the far wall. The volume was barely audible, as Naomi was sleeping soundly in the next bed, but he could hear enough to get the general drift. The situation in Iraq was escalating day by day. Twelve hours earlier, a series of coordinated attacks had taken place in Basra, propagated by Syrian insurgents. Three police stations were bombed in the space of forty minutes, along with a local office of the International Red Cross. Since the attacks occurred in the evening, the number of reported casualties was surprisingly low. As a result, the story took a backseat to the more dramatic events in Baghdad. Six hours before the bombings in Basra, a truck laden with seventy pounds of HMX had crashed into a Green Zone checkpoint. Seventeen were reported dead, including 5 U.S. soldiers, among them a captain in the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
The images on the screen changed, and the newscaster moved on to a different story. Kealey let his mind drift, thinking about the events of the past few weeks. It was hard to see any kind of pattern in the recent escalation of violence, but the truth was that everything seemed to stem from the attempted assassination of the Iraqi prime minister and the murder of Nasir Tabrizi in Paris. Both men were powerful, influential politicians, and that made them natural targets, but there was something else to consider. Nuri al-Maliki and Nasir Tabrizi were also on either side of the most prominent divide in Iraq, that between the Shia and Sunni faith. After the bombing of the Babylon Hotel, the Shiite-controlled Mahdi Army had publicly accused the Sunni insurgency of masterminding the attack. As a result, the violence over the next week seemed to primarily target Sunni businesses and places of worship. But then Tabrizi had died, causing the violence to swing the other way. Shiite places of worship had suffered the brunt of what appeared to be retaliatory strikes, despite the discovery that Tabrizi’s assassins were Iranian nationals.
Given the current situation, Kealey couldn’t see a solution on the horizon, and apparently, he wasn’t the only one. A number of prominent Democrats had already revived an old debate on the floor of the Senate, arguing that U.S. troops were not trained to intervene if the situation dissolved into civil war. A number of retired generals had also weighed in on the issue. Most seemed to believe that the military would not be able to control the situation if the Iraqi government fell into disarray. Privately, Kealey agreed, but it threw the whole situation into a new light, and he couldn’t help but reconsider his earlier thoughts. What if someone wanted to destroy the Iraqi National Assembly? What if someone had retained Vanderveen’s services to that specific end? The former U.S. soldier had definitely participated in the bombing of the Babylon Hotel—that much was fact—but had Vanderveen somehow played a part in the assassination of Tabrizi in Paris? If so, he had covered his tracks remarkably well.
Naomi stirred on the other bunk, and Kealey looked over, his thoughts switching to the previous night. The car from the embassy had arrived less than ten minutes after he made the call. The driver had brought clothes for Kharmai, and once she had changed, they’d driven straight back to the embassy. T
he chief of station, a florid, portly Texan by the name of Fichtner, had met them at the gates. He had screamed at Kealey for twenty minutes while a doctor removed the shrapnel from Naomi’s arm. Fichtner then made the call to Harper in Washington. Kealey had no idea how Harper had reacted—he had only heard one side of the conversation—but he knew that the DDO would not be pleased with what had transpired. A man he had personally recruited was dead, Rühmann was gone, and they were no closer to finding William Vanderveen. The whole thing was a complete disaster. For the first time since his dismissal from the Agency, Kealey was starting to feel that he’d earned his walking papers.
Naomi stirred again and sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She pulled back the covers and swung her feet to the floor, revealing a white T-shirt that hung like a dress on her slender frame. Kealey could see the bandage beneath the fabric near her left shoulder, but his attention was quickly drawn elsewhere, as the bottom edge of the shirt barely reached the top of her bare thighs. He looked away, embarrassed, but then he felt her eyes on him, and he turned back. She was wearing a slight smile, obviously amused.
“You didn’t seem so shy when you were pulling my clothes off last night,” she said, pulling her hair back from her face.
The comment caught him off-guard. “You were soaking wet, Naomi, and it was freezing out there. I was just trying to—”
“I know, I know. Relax. I was only joking.” She stood and looked around for her jeans. Once she had pulled them on, she sat back down on the edge of the bed. Kealey saw that her smile had disappeared. As if reading his mind, she studied him with a serious expression. “This isn’t good, is it?”
He shook his head, then seemed to hesitate. “I’m sorry I brought you into this. If I’d known it would turn out this way—”
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