Blown

by Francine Mathews

  Ricin is composed of two hemagglutinins and two toxins, RCL III and RCL IV; these are dimers roughly 66,000 daltons in molecular weight . . . the B chain of polypeptides binds to cell surface glycoproteins . . . the A chain acts on the ribosomal subunit . . . inhibits protein synthesis . . . leads to cell death. Basic structure is similar to botulinum toxin, cholera toxin, diphtheria toxin, tetanus toxin . . .

  In other words, he thought savagely, you rot out your guts and then you die.

  “Tom?”

  He glanced toward the door. Steve Price, the Post reporter, flashing his badge at the conference room guard. “You missed the show,” Tom said.

  “No choice. I got a call from George Enfield.”

  “The Speaker?”

  “His wife’s dying of ricin poisoning.”

  “Jesus,” Tom muttered.

  Price swung toward him, an athletic figure in a plaid shirt and down vest. He looked like a war correspondent: craggy face, unkempt hair, and functional clothes, hot on the trail of a major story. The Front was down there somewhere on the street.

  “Dana remembered a guy at Hains Point,” he told Tom. “Handing out water. It tallies with the letter.”

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “I taped it.” He lifted his recorder tantalizingly in the air. “She asked me to get it to people who could use it. I figured that meant you.”

  Sibley Hospital sits off Massachusetts Avenue, in a section of Washington known as Spring Valley, where the homes and the trees are a century old and antiques stores vie for commerce with gourmet food shops. Unlike most urban hospitals, Sibley, the preserve of the well-heeled and the genteel, is usually immune to violence. Tonight, however, Tom Shephard was forced to abandon his rental car three blocks from the emergency room entrance. A thicket of vehicles cut off access: private cars, television vans, and three ambulances desperately fighting to reach the main doors. It was four minutes past midnight, and busy as noon.

  “This is all because of the marathon?” demanded the forensic artist standing beside him. “Fuck.”

  Casey Marlowe had his IdentiKit under his arm. It was a baseline collection of facial features he could plug into a suspect sketch and refine as his witness suggested. If, Tom thought, the witness was still alive. They shouldered their way through the throng of people at the hospital doors.

  Tom forced himself to look into the victims’ faces: this red-haired woman, no more than thirty, whose brow was blistered with sweat and whose eyelids were closing, supported by a man who was lover or brother or husband—his mouth twisted with anxiety and fear. This kid of nineteen, in a Georgetown University sweatshirt, whose mother was struggling to keep him upright as he staggered forward. The couple who were helping each other walk to the door. The guy in his sixties who’d sunk down with his back against the hospital’s outer wall. He was vomiting blood.

  At least sixty people stood on the chilly pavement in front of Sibley, and more filled the waiting room beyond the doors.

  “The hospital is closed!” a voice rang out at the head of the line. Tom craned to find the source—a figure in blue scrubs, squat and grim-faced, who leaned through the half-open door. “The emergency room is full.”

  A groan went up from the crowd. “Who ever heard of a hospital closing?” one voice shouted furiously. “My daughter’s been poisoned! She needs an IV feed, not a cot in a gym, God damn it!”

  “City fire regulations prevent us accepting even one more patient,” the man in scrubs said brutally. “I repeat, the hospital is closed. If you require medical care, and you ran the Marine Corps Marathon today, we suggest you report to one of these four medical relief centers being set up in area schools. Volunteer doctors are standing by to help. If your emergency care is unrelated to the marathon, return home and call a private physician.”

  A roar of protest rose from the wavering knot of people as the man in scrubs waded into their midst, a sheaf of papers held high. Tom grabbed one and scanned the printed lines. The closest medical station was at American University, a few blocks away. The woman beside him was weeping from frustration.

  “Hey, Shep,” Casey Marlowe said. “Ever seen a war zone? Best advice I can give you: Keep moving. This is going to get ugly.”

  Tom fumbled in his pocket for his FBI badge. He held it high and surged forward.

  Dana Enfield was adrift in uneasy dreams. She had lost Mallory in the marathon crowd, but the little girl’s voice followed her relentlessly, high-pitched above the roar of the spectators. Mommy! Mommy! Don’t leave me! Mommy!

  Dana knew, with a surge of panic, that George had let go of her daughter’s hand. He was running through the tight ranks of people lining the race course, yelling something she couldn’t hear. What was he telling her? What was he trying to say? Was she in insulin shock? She tried to stop running—tried to fight against the current of the racers sweeping her forward—and failed. George slipped backward. She reached for him, panic surging—Where was Mallory? And then she saw The Man. Standing stock-still in the middle of the oddly deserted road, a cup of water in his outstretched hand.

  “Dana,” George murmured in her ear. “Dana. Sweetheart, can you hear me?”

  She forced her eyelids open. Her lips were thick and parched, the animal smell of blood in her nostrils. She tried to speak. No sound came.

  “Honey, these men are from the FBI. They’d like to talk to you. Steve sent them.”

  Her memory returned then: She was sick. The race was over. Every fiber of her body screamed with pain and the blur of faces—how many faces?—swam above her.

  “Mallory,” she croaked.

  “She’s home with Marya,” George soothed. “Sleeping.” He reached for a cup of chipped ice, tipped a few fragments onto her tongue. She closed her eyes again and savored the cool and perfect presence of this one thing. For an instant she remembered the brilliance of snow. She’d skied last winter in Utah.

  “Dana.”

  She brought George into focus: dark hair graying at the temples, lined face, worried eyes. Too worried.

  “Am . . . I going to die?”

  “The FBI wants to talk to you. Will you try, honey? Can you try?”

  She managed to nod. One of the blurred faces swam closer. The other stayed near the door, watchful and silent.

  “Mrs. Enfield, I’m Casey Marlowe,” said the voice at her elbow. She strained to see him, but the face ballooned sickly and she squeezed her eyes shut. “You remembered a man who gave you water at Hains Point. You thought it might have been tainted. Can you describe this man for me?”

  She swallowed hard and groped for George. He slipped another piece of ice between her lips. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “that I did this to you.”

  “You did nothing, sweetheart. Except run your heart out. Do you remember the man?”

  The Man. Of course she remembered.

  “Can you tell me what he looked like, Mrs. Enfield?”

  The face had a sketch pad and pencil now.

  Dana gathered all the life that remained to her, and tried.

  Chapter 9

  GEORGETOWN, 12:03 A.M.

  “Ever been to the DCI’s house?” Cuddy asked as Caroline negotiated the narrow cobbled streets of Georgetown.

  “Once. Years ago. She had a party when she became division chief.” Caroline spotted a single empty space among the cars lining O Street and pulled the Volkswagen neatly into it. “She came to my wedding. And to Eric’s funeral.”

  Cuddy unbuckled his seat belt. “Doesn’t mean she’s going to like your idea.”

  “No. But she’ll listen to it.”

  The ancient maple trees lining the brick sidewalk had thrust their roots well under the paving, heaving the surface as efficiently as a family of moles. Caroline stepped carefully over the curb and glanced up at Dare’s house. A classic three-story Federal with black shutters and a historic plaque; lights burned behind the curtained windows to the left of the door. A few dead leaves skittered down the street;
from the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a man slouching along the sidewalk with a duffel over his back. Homeless, she thought. Vietnam vet. And mounted the three marble steps, waiting for the bellow of Dare’s dog from within.

  The bark came right on cue as she lifted the door knocker, followed by a brisk patter of high heels. Dare would be fully dressed, although it was nearly midnight. She’d been on her way to the Agency when they called.

  “Caroline,” the DCI said as she swung wide the door. “Cuddy. Come in, won’t you? Don’t mind Alistair—he’s a big lap puppy.”

  The Airedale was as tall as Dare’s thigh; he grinned at them hugely and thrust his nose into Caroline’s palm. The distinctive terrier smell of wet lambs’ wool rose comfortingly from his coat. She followed the DCI down the hall’s checkerboard of black and white marble and into the sage green living room.

  Daniel had parked his motorcycle three blocks away on O Street, near the entrance gates of Georgetown University, where the welter of locked student bicycles and secondhand cars offered useful cover. He’d stored his rifle in a duffel bag he’d strapped to the motorcycle’s rear, and it was easy now to sling it over his shoulder and head toward the lights of Wisconsin Avenue. He knew exactly where he was going. He’d cased the place before. He intended to take his time getting there, and make certain he wasn’t being followed.

  He’d done his recon well. He’d followed the DCI’s chauffeur-driven navy blue Town Car on his motorcycle several times over the past two weeks, from the CIA’s back entrance to this street in the heart of Georgetown. Once, the Town Car had led him to the gates of the White House and he’d been tempted, there and then, to weave through the concrete security pylons and straight up to the guardhouse, shooting as he went; but Daniel was no hothead. He was too smart to throw away his chance at glory in the End Times with some kickass assault on the Zoggite Seat of Power. He’d cut past the Town Car as it turned off Pennsylvania. And kept going toward Georgetown and the door that he knew was left unguarded.

  Darien Atwood’s house sat halfway between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-fifth Streets. It had no garage, but a narrow brick walk fronted by an arched door separated the house from its neighbor. The path led around the side of the old structure to the walled garden behind. It had taken Daniel only minutes to learn that the lock was just a simple Colonial latch.

  “You’re telling me there’s a 30 April cell in Washington?”

  “We think so. With at least one member in the vice president’s residence,” Caroline said.

  She and Cuddy were seated uncomfortably on a camelback sofa. The living room ran the length of the row house, with an area for dining set out in front of a pair of French doors. Beyond these lay the walled garden, a well of darkness Caroline kept at her back. Her eyes stayed fixed on the DCI.

  Dare Atwood turned restlessly before the fire. She was a tall, angular woman with iron gray hair and a face as lined as crumpled tissue paper. Tonight, in deference to Sunday, she’d worn gray flannel trousers instead of correct executive suiting; a cashmere sweater gripped her throat. “Why didn’t we get this information out of Budapest?”

  It was her oblique reference to Eric Carmichael, and the CD-ROM full of data he’d downloaded from 30 April’s computer. Terrorist networks and financial backing worldwide. Names, dates, and places of hits ample enough to roll up cells in half a dozen European countries. Nothing that suggested a terrorist presence in the United States.

  “We don’t know,” Cuddy answered. “Maybe because Eric never had it.”

  “—Or deliberately held it back.” The DCI’s cool gray eyes flicked remorselessly over Caroline’s face. “This could be his bargaining chip. The most essential piece of the puzzle. The one piece he knew we’d need.”

  “Maybe,” Cuddy agreed cautiously. “Or maybe he never knew there were 30 April cells in the U.S. Maybe that truth died with Krucevic. We can’t say.”

  “Tell that to the President,” Dare retorted bitterly. “Hundreds of people are showing up at hospitals, all of them poisoned, eight days after he declared victory on 30 April. He looks clueless. Worse—he looks weak. We’ll be the first people Jack Bigelow blames, of course. This is our blunder. The hit we didn’t see coming. Even though we’ve got no jurisdiction in this country—”

  “What if we tried to find him?” Caroline interrupted.

  “Eric?” The DCI stopped pacing, hands on her hips. “Are you nuts? Do you think I want to see Eric Carmichael’s face anywhere this side of hell, Caroline, with the vice president’s blood on his hands?”

  “He could help. He may know something.”

  Dare laughed harshly. “Too late. It’s absolutely out of the question. Eric screwed the deadliest terror organization on the face of the earth—and the President of the United States. I’m not going to let him screw me, too.”

  Daniel was lying on his stomach as he’d been taught to do by the army overlords who’d driven him like a steer through that Bosnian winter, years ago. His fingers were steady on the M16’s barrel as he focused his telescopic sight. He hardly needed it, here in the November garden, motionless beneath the bare twigs of a dogwood tree. He was only thirty feet away from the three people talking around the fire.

  He could smell the wet clay of the Potomac riverbank, the sickly sweetness of decaying leaves. Woodsmoke from the chimney of this three-hundred-year-old house. It was strange, how often he’d found himself outside in the dark like this—watching the perfect life of another human being unfold before his eyes. The richness of the silk damask on that sofa, copper red; the black and tan dog sprawled with its muzzle reaching toward Atwood’s feet. The younger blond woman, thin and tense as she gestured with her hands. The faded pattern of the Oriental rug and the dark gleam of mahogany throwing back the flames. Order. Beauty. And the chaos he alone could bring.

  He fixed her head in the crosshairs, and fired.

  Chapter 10

  BERLIN, 10:03 P.M.

  It was not the first time he had wandered one of the world’s great cities without a place to call home. As he hoisted himself out of the trunk of Dagmar’s sedan and kissed her on both cheeks, the two solemn little boys watching from the backseat, Eric had already decided where he would go. The Mitte District of Berlin—where Sharif’s wife had bolted with him to an underground parking garage—was too chic, a decade after unification, for flophouse hotels. Dossing in one of the parks would get him arrested. He’d double back toward the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, the gloomy old train station that had once been the main portal to East Germany, and catch one of the all-night elevateds to the western part of town. There he could wait for the first fast train of the morning. Frankfurt, maybe. Munich. Even Paris was only fourteen hours away.

  His blood quickened at the thought of Paris. Border security might ask for his passport as he approached the edge of France—but in unified Europe, they usually did not. Somehow he felt he could be safe in Paris. It was a city 30 April had never hurt.

  He mounted the concrete steps leading out of the garage into the chill drizzle of a persistent rain, and glanced casually in both directions as he reached the street. It was dark and empty of life. Better to run surveillance detection regardless, he thought. Sharif had been followed.

  He turned right, allowing himself a few seconds to get his bearings, locate this street corner on the map of Berlin he carried in his mind, and drop into one of the pretimed and perfectly cased routes he’d perfected over months of wandering black in the German capital. Surveillance detection was a simple technique, though hard to master: A man walking a route he knew at a briskly maintained pace would always outstrip his more tentative followers, and the distance between them would lengthen inexorably as the agent covered more known ground. Eventually he could enter The Gap—the brief period of time when he would actually be out of sight of his pursuers—and get his real business done. Service a dead drop. Leave film in a letter box. Hand off a document in a brush pass with an apparent stranger. Or simply vanish. Withou
t the surveillance team ever realizing he’d known they were there.

  Tonight, Eric intended The Gap to fall squarely near one of the entrances to the Friedrichstrasse train station. But at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, as he waited for a light with the rain beading his black leather jacket, he felt rather than saw the black Mercedes slide alongside him. Nosing at the curb as two men got out.

  They aren’t on foot, he thought, and they came out of nowhere.

  And then the automatic pistol in his ribs. The hands, firm and insistent, gripping his arms. They thrust him headfirst into the backseat without a word.

  It was Scottie Sorensen’s habit to rise before five-thirty, an hour of darkness in the fall of the year, but on this night he had no intention of sleeping. He sat in his oak-paneled library with a glass of vintage rum close at hand, and listened to the news bulletins on public radio. By the time Cuddy called from the DCI’s house in Georgetown at 1:13 A.M., Scottie was already tearing down Langley Pike alone.

  He’d left his wife sprawled facedown in the king-size bed, her slim brown arms flung out like an angel’s and her fan of blond hair lying like a discarded wig on the pillow. Now that he was nearly sixty, insomnia spiked Scottie’s sleep at least four times a week—and he would wake, mind churning, to creep through the vast spaces of the house, a shadow amid other shadows. How many surreptitious entries had he made, over the long spiral of years? All the Soviet consulates in remote corners of the world, plundered by night through a faulty window or a coded lock whose secrets he’d bought with his faultless charm; the voice-activated transmitters stashed in such ordinary objects as ashtrays and chair legs and even, once, the stuffed heart of a child’s teddy bear. All the rooms of women, too, with marriages and secrets to betray—some of them seduced for the greater good of America, others for the greater good of Scottie Sorensen.