“Don’t push me,” she mutters.
“I won’t. One, two, three—”
He sweeps his left arm forward, as though that might release her. She doesn’t budge.
“Let’s try it again.”
“Would you stop touching me?”
“One, two, three—”
“I said don’t push me!”
Eric glances over his shoulder at the waiting line of trainees, looks back at her profile. She will not meet his gaze. “It’s the perfect distance, Caroline,” he says conversationally, into her ear. “Forty feet. That’s why they built the tower this high. To make you sweat, to show you the power of your fear. Anything less, and you think you’ll survive; anything higher, and you’re too remote to care. Nobody knows why. Forty feet. It terrifies us all.”
She swallows, nods.
“Trust the line. Trust me.”
“Just let me jump by myself.”
“It’s a little like sex,” he continues, in the same tone. “Some of us need a push now and then. To get over the edge.”
She pivots and stares at him, amazed at his recklessness; but his expression is perfectly neutral. Only a watchfulness in the blue eyes, a shrewd calculation of her response. She glances away, feels the heat flood her face.
She is exactly twenty-five years old. Eric is maybe thirty, a lean and agile man she barely knows. He belongs to the Agency’s Special Activities Service, SAS, a paramilitary force designed to be sent at a moment’s notice anywhere in the world. He has ruled Caroline’s life for the past month, demanding what she once thought impossible. And for Eric, she has tried to do it. She has navigated alone across ten thousand acres, dodging armed Chinooks hunting her by air; she has rappelled off a helicopter skid with an M-16 strapped to her back. The desire for his respect, his grudging acceptance of a woman in a man’s world, is like a junkie’s need for a drug.
He has begun to invade her dreams with a desire so complete that she awakens wet and shaking in the predawn darkness, crying out for his touch. Sleep for Caroline has become both seduction and purgatory. She will return soon to Langley Eric will stay in deepest Tidewater. It is unlikely she will ever see him again. The vital thing, the essential thing, is never to let him know the extent of his power.
She crouches once more in the tower doorway, knees bent, eyes fixed on the line. “Give me the count.”
“One, two—”
And then she feels his hand shove her ruthlessly off the platform, and she is sailing down the line with her mouth open in a full-throttled yell, half terror, half outrage, the anger surging up with the force of the ground. She rolls and tumbles. Tears off the harness. And turns to shout up at him. “You asshole! You pushed me!”
But he is already urging the next trainee to jump.
So much, Caroline thinks, for trust.
She begins to feel him watching her, blue stare averted as soon as she looks at him. In the base club he bends low over a pool cue, blond hair grazing his brow. The click of the balls, the crowing as a shot goes home— they resonate through the clamor of voices like bullets singing across an empty range. He ignores her deliberately, flirts with her friends, waits to see if she has noticed. In the manner of men who toy with desire, afraid of what they want.
Caroline begins to hate him. When she speaks to Eric at all, it is with something like contempt.
The last evening of her paramilitary training, the class holds a farewell dinner. Caroline endures the speeches, the increasing inebriation, only so long. Then she slips outside to walk the trail along the river, alone in the cooling dark. She considers leaving early, a drive north in silence. Preferable to predawn hangovers and awkward farewells.
There is a footfall behind her, noiseless as a cougar’s. A sigh that might be the wind stirs last year’s cattails, although the night is windless. She stops short, keenly aware of her isolation, sensing the menace of a predator. To the right, the densest woods. To the left, the blackest water. Somewhere ahead, the Yorktown Bridge twinkles, remote as Brooklyn. A scream would be lost here; to run is suicidal. And she has been trained, after all, in self-defense. She has been taught to kill with a single sharp jab of her cupped hand to the windpipe, although even now she does not believe it.
She turns. Sees the watchful blue eyes, unaverted for the first time. He is poised to spring or run, she is uncertain which.
“You,” she says.
He takes a step toward her. She retreats, and halts him in his tracks.
“I know it seems safe,” he says. “The safest place in the world. Guards at the gate and grenade launchers in every corner. But you shouldn’t walk alone in the dark by the river.”
“I have never wanted very much to be safe.”
“No.” A flash of teeth in the darkness. “It’s a type of cowardice in your book. You look for risk instead. Why is that, Caroline?”
That’s not who I am, she thinks. That’s what you’ve made me. “You don’t join the CIA for job security, Eric.”
“No. You join to sit at a desk and analyze cables all day. To write up your opinions as fact and generate more reports. A numbing dose of computer screens and low-level briefings, day in and day out. The life of reason. Is that what you want, Caroline?”
Reason is safe, she wants to say; reason can’t cut the heart out of your body.
He is within inches of her now. She catches the scent of his skin—sunlight and underbrush, a secretive life lived out-of-doors. “I think you’d die a slow death, like a diver cut off from air. I think you’re made for better things.”
“Are you recruiting me?” she asks in disbelief. “The SAS has no use for women.”
“I’m no longer in the SAS.” His voice is exultant, the voice of conquest. “As of tomorrow, I belong to the Directorate of Operations. Case officer training. It’s what I’ve wanted for years.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
He studies her for a few seconds, saying nothing. Then his finger traces the skin of her shoulder, bare tonight in her party dress. Gooseflesh under his touch: The demons of sleep come to life.
“What does this have to do with me, Eric?”
“I’ve been poised on the edge a long time, Caroline. Afraid to step out into nothing. Some of us need a little push.”
The hand curves to find her shoulder blade, circles the sudden tautness of a breast. She arches away from him, unreconciled, even as her pelvis melts toward his. And then his mouth is at the base of her throat and her fingers are raking through his hair. The grip of wanting so fierce it robs her of breath.
“I know who you are,” he whispers. “I know what you crave and what you fear, what you pretend and what you hide. I know the depth of your strength and your doubt. I even know what you think of me, Caroline.”
She wants to run, she wants to sink down into the grass and take him deep inside her, she wants never to see him again.
The urgency of his mouth is a kind of whip. She feels his hand trace the flesh of her inner thigh, find the heat at its core—and then he releases her so abruptly she nearly falls. In the sudden quiet there is only his breathing, the sound of river water slipping through the weeds. She considers telling him to go to hell. But nothing he has said—nothing he knows—is untrue. And he is staring at her as though she could decide his life with a word.
“What does this have to do with me?” she repeats.
“You’re the one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything. You’re what I need, Caroline. And I’ve never needed much.”
She closes her eyes, takes a shuddering breath. “Let’s leave tonight,” she says. And steps off some inner tower.
The one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything.
Caroline paces the bathroom floor and considers her options. Had Eric left her behind deliberately in Frankfurt airport, ignorant and faithful and trusting and stupid, while he set off to rema
ke the world? Had she been his ultimate cover, the grieving widow no one would blame? Or was today’s bomb at the Brandenburg an impossible accident, his face in a helicopter a bizarre coincidence, that defied her attempts at rational explanation?
What was she supposed to believe, exactly, in this particular hell?
Belief, like trust, isn’t rational, she thought. Belief is blind, a wash of black in a room full of light, a breath suspended at the end of a diving board. She had loved Eric, but she never trusted him with much. There were parts of his life forever closed to her, regions of his soul she could not navigate. She had gone with her gut when she married him, ignored the advice of family and friends, giddy with all she was not considering.
But the High Priestess of Reason is not easily silenced. Voices had persisted in Caroline’s brain. There were the questions she asked, and answers he tried to give; terms they negotiated like peacemakers at parley.
Until the final silence of the Frankfurt airport, and the final explosion.
What are you thinking? Eric asks.
His body is perfectly still in the cratered grass. All around them the Virginia night is thick with pine pollen, with midges, with the musky smell of spent sex; but his skin, where her fingertip traces a rib, is marble cool. Stillness is one of his talents. He keeps the world at bay, he opts out of action, he retreats inside his head where the best secrets always are. Six months at the Farm, in case officer training. And so it begins, Caroline thinks—the life he cannot share. He has traded his fatigues for chinos and oxford cloth, in the classroom he rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie, he looks like a wolf sleeping by a primeval fire, partly tamed but never domesticated. What do they have to teach him, really, these retired CO’s pensioned off into training? Six months, and he knows what he has always known: how to watch without being seen.
She feels him watching even while she sits alone in Arlington, a hundred miles away—that silent surveillance like a stroke on her neck. The sense of him burns in her throat as warm as whiskey, and she thinks, He is watching me. Eric’s love, Eric’s too-intent and narrow-eyed passion, her breath catching thick at his touch.
“What are you thinking?” he asks her again.
“Have I given you that right, too? The inside of my head? You’ve never given it to me.”
She sounds deliberately amused. Her way of keeping the world at bay.
“That’s important, isn’t it? What I give and don’t give.”
“Only when you want something in return,” she says.
“You try very hard. To love me without conditions. You think that’s what I need.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You’re afraid of losing me. If you build me a cage.” His voice is remote.
She sits up, pulls her bare knees to her chest, the sticky wetness between her legs nothing more than a mess. She reaches for her clothes.
“All right,” she says. “I’m thinking about loyalty. Whether it’s possible to give without thought, without conditions. Blind loyalty.”
His hand closes on her wrist. She stops pulling up her jeans. Slides into the crevice between his side and his arm and lies there, her cheek against the marble skin.
“Blind loyalty is always possible. And it’s always a mistake.”
She lets out a little sigh of despair. “Where are your loyalties, Eric? I’m not talking about love or sex or even myself. I’m curious. About you. What claims your soul?”
A snort. “You think I’ve got one?”
She turns away from him. Shoves her foot into a shoe.
He watches in silence. Another man would be smoking now, but Eric gave up cigarettes when he gave up the streets of Boston, gave up his foster family’s name, gave up the idea of fairness. He is watching her trying not to notice him watching her.
“You can’t do this job without some kind of loyalty,” he says. “You can’t be a marine, a Green Beret, or an Intelligence operative—not unless you decide that something matters beyond yourself.”
“Your country?” She tugs a sweater over her head and mutters, “Bullshit. Country is an excuse for wanting to die.”
He thrusts her back into the grass with such unexpected force that she’s winded for an instant. She lies there, Eric’s weight on her chest, his eyes inches from her own, and stares into the blue.
“Okay. One loyalty drives me, one thing I won’t betray. Call it a pact with myself, Caroline, if you’re tired of country. A long time ago I said I’d never close my eyes on deliberate evil. That sounds pretty broad, and pretty simple. But it’s my brand of integrity. Of keeping the faith. Of an inner standard I walk every day. I may hurt the people around me, I may fail them in ways they never expected—but I will not do less than the best job I can with the work in life I’ve chosen.”
“Which is?”
“Making the world a safer place.”
She moves under him restlessly, an objection forming. He ignores her.
“You think that sounds stupid. Or grandiose. Fine. I’m not like other people, Caroline, who dream of a perfect world and try to create it, even if it’s just in their own backyards. I pace off the property and find out why it’s for sale. I test the broken board in the fence where the fox creeps in, I poke spikes in the rat holes. I name every weed and mark where it grows. It’s all I’ve got, Caroline—this permanent fixer-upper. You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you.”
Caroline stares at herself now in the fourth-floor bathroom mirror. There are lines scrawled at the corners of her eyes, dark blotches under the skin. Her lips are thin and dry. She closes her eyes, waiting for a whiskey rush, for the sense of Eric watching her—but nothing comes across the miles that separate them, no sense of love or loyalty.
You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you. Only she hadn’t stopped. She’d been working for years, plugging holes and nailing up fences. And he’d never bothered to tell her he was alive.
Where were you going from Frankfurt, Eric? And why are you hiding in those weeds you marked so carefully?
What exactly am I supposed to believe?
EIGHT
Langley, 11:53 A.M.
CAROLINE’S STRONGEST IMPULSE upon quitting the women’s room was to leave the Old Headquarters Building. She could retrieve her car from the acres of asphalt that lapped the campus like a modern-day moat, and drive through the back roads of McLean, the high banks of horse fields and elm. In a car, however, she would have no buffer from her raging thoughts. No work to consume her, no colleagues to force the daily pleasantries from her mouth. She turned back into the CTC and strode toward the ranks of gray metal shelves that rose at one end of the room. She had researched the lives of the men—and they were all men—who made up 30 April. Their stories were presented almost clinically in the Agency’s biographic profiles.
These one-page reports were intended for use as briefing aids for government officials. The bios were chatty and informative, riddled with small detail and the occasional sweeping judgment. Text was punctuated with Intelligence controls—U for Unclassified, C for Confidential, S for Secret. The most heated debates flared over the use of ORCON information—Originator-Controlled—which signaled that the source was a foreign national, an asset on the payroll of the Directorate of Operations.
A secret agent, in the more romantic language of a vanished age.
Caroline pulled out a heavy green file and sat awkwardly on the carpet, high-heeled legs folded as discreetly as her slim skirt would allow. She would start with the apprentice in the group, the youngest of Mlan Krucevic’s recruits: thirty-year-old Antonio Fioretto.
Fioretto was a computer genius, twice incarcerated for fraud in Italy, where no one is imprisoned for fraud. The funds he’d illegally transferred out of a variety of Swiss bank accounts had never been recovered. He now served as 30 April’s main accountant and electronics whiz. The photograph in his biographic profile had been taken from a police mug shot—grainy, unsmiling, curly-headed, and
weak-jawed. The hair was blond; he was Milanese. What the photo failed to show was the healed scars of three suicide attempts. Antonio’s wrists were hacked to shreds.
She slid his file back into the stack.
Otto Weber. Native of Zurich, recovered heroin addict, an obsessive bodybuilder and martial arts practitioner. He had grown up on the streets, quit school at thirteen, worked episodically as a male prostitute. Weber was rumored to be a confirmed sadist. The 30 April member who enjoyed killing.
Vaclav Slivik. A retired captain in the former Czechoslovak Army, Slivik could fly anything with wings and served as 30 April’s explosives and weapons expert. A mild-looking man, from his photograph; cynical eyes, a humorous mouth. In 1972, at the Munich Olympics, he had won a gold medal in the pentathlon. He allegedly played cello in his spare time, although public performances were rare of late.
Caroline pulled the fourth file and opened it with unsteady fingers. This one she would read in its entirety.
Mlan Krucevic. Leader, 30 April Organization.
No picture for the bio she had written three years before, and updated every six months. Krucevic had never been captured on film.
Perhaps the most ruthless terrorist to emerge from the breakup of Yugoslavia, Mlan Krucevic is thought to reside in Germany, although his present whereabouts are unknown. A trained geneticist with advanced degrees from two European universities, Krucevic served as director of a Croat prison camp in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1990 to 1993. He is alleged to have approved the torture and murder of over three thousand Muslim and Serb men during his tenure at the prison camp, where he is believed to have used biological agents in human experimentation. He has been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal on nineteen counts of crimes against humanity and is currently a fugitive from justice. (C NF NC)
In 1993, Krucevic announced the formation of the 30 April Organization, a neo-Nazi militarist group, with the simultaneous firebombing of seven Turkish guest-worker hostels throughout Germany; sixteen people died in the acts of arson. According to a reliable source with limited access, 30 April is also responsible for the death of Anneke Schmidt, Germany’s former Green Party leader, and the kidnapping and murder of Dagmar Hammecher, granddaughter of the German federal court judge Ernst Hammecher. The terrorist group is also suspected of orchestrating last year’s assassination of Germany’s popular Socialist chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. (S NF NC OC)
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