Blown

by Francine Mathews

  “As much as we can, without violating their civil rights. The Domestic Terrorism unit was ginned up as a direct result of Oklahoma City. It handles roughly a thousand cases a year—”

  “But somewhere along the line,” Shephard interrupted, “the American public decided McVeigh was a maverick and a wacko who represented only himself. A lone operator. Whereas McVeigh’s just the tip of the iceberg, Mr. President. And we refuse to see it.”

  “Why?” Bigelow asked simply.

  “Some people would say that this whitewash of the terrorists in our own backyard is due to the fact that the Radical Right is a vocal part of your party, sir. A fringe part, of course. Most of them don’t even vote. However—”

  A pregnant silence fell; Shephard was on dangerous ground here, and knew it. He’d achieve nothing if the President threw him out of the Oval Office.

  “Go on,” Bigelow said.

  “As Americans, we’d all like to believe our enemies are outside. Aliens with names we can’t pronounce. Illegals. Even the words we use to describe them are designed to distance. It’s them, not us. We’re united against terror, aren’t we? Victims, not thugs. We don’t want to believe the bomb will come from the guy two blocks down the street we’ve known all our lives.”

  Bigelow threw himself into his desk chair and stared ruminatively at Caroline’s sling. “What I never understood,” he muttered, “was how he could kill all those children. In the day-care center. Which he must’ve known was there, right?”

  He was talking, she realized, about McVeigh.

  “There’s a photograph,” she said slowly, “that I saw once and have never forgotten. Two little boys dressed in wool jackets and short pants—like the kind John-John wore to JFK’s funeral. They’ve got those bony knees and thick shoes and the older boy has his arm around the younger one. He’s trying to comfort him. Because they’re walking, alone, toward the door of the showers at Auschwitz.”

  She paused. The room was very still. Tom was watching her as though determined to mount a rescue.

  “You look at that picture and know they were pulled away from their parents just minutes before. You can see that the older boy is trying hard to be brave. For his little brother. He’s taking care of him. That image has come to mean everything about the Holocaust to me—the murder of innocence. The evil implicit in that walk from daylight into shadow. But also the love. The love between two people in the face of unspeakable horror.”

  She cleared her throat. “What I’m trying to say, Mr. President, is that you can kill anyone—even a frightened little boy and his brother—if you no longer see them as human. McVeigh did it. Our guy with the ricin and the gun did it. I believe he’s going to do it again.”

  Chapter 14

  ARLINGTON, 2:21 A.M.

  Daniel turned off the motorcycle’s headlamp as he cruised slowly down Paddock Road and swung into Dressage Lane. The development was named Tara, as though the echo of Vivien Leigh in a white tulle ball gown might elevate the moderate-income housing to breathless elegance. Barely fifteen years old, Tara had once been a Virginia horse farm. All the streets were wistfully named for aspects of stables that had little to do with the D.C. suburbs. On this sharply chilly night in November the town houses—some clapboard, some brick, all vaguely Colonial—were silent and slumbering. Most were ablaze in white exterior lights that picked out their blank windows and concrete stoops.

  The Carmichael place sat at the endpoint of a cul-de-sac. It was narrow and high, the living areas built over the garage, with a raised set of steps leading to the front door. A dense mat of zoysia grass, dun-colored now, stretched from sidewalk to juniper foundation plantings. Daniel had noticed that the house was frankly anonymous the first time he cased the place a few days before. No plastic play structures fading in the rain, no wreath on the dark green door. No garden, and not a hand tool misplaced. She probably paid a bunch of Hispanics, he thought, to cut her grass each week. She’d pay ’em to have her kids for her, if she could.

  Unlike the rest of Dressage Lane, the house was dark inside and out. He circled the cul-de-sac, rode slowly back up the street, and killed his engine at the intersection with Paddock Road. No sense in alerting the woman he was there by gunning the bike in her driveway. He couldn’t quite figure Caroline Carmichael: smart enough to kill the Leader, but stupid enough to be listed in the phone book. No security system on her house. She must actually believe she was safe. Unimportant. Despite the floating pack of press people who showed up during daylight hours.

  Or maybe, he thought suddenly, she wanted to be killed. Wanted this kind of penance for the war she’d waged.

  He shifted his duffel over his shoulder and trudged back up the street, keeping his booted feet on the grass to muffle his approach. He’d expected at least the pale blue glow of the television screen flickering from a window. He’d hunkered enough in these bushes during the previous three days to know how she was living. The bags of chips on the coffee table. The bottle of wine at the ready. Lying on her sofa like trailer trash in her sweatpants and bedroom slippers. He could understand that—the woman had to be haunted by the blood she’d shed. She’d meddled in things that didn’t concern her—and the Leader had died for her sins. Cut down by the Beast System he’d sworn, like Daniel, to overthrow.

  Because it was an end unit, a nice swath of lawn wrapped the far side of the house. He dropped the duffel in the shadows and quietly unzipped it. The M16 was a matte black; it did not even gleam in the neighbors’ lights. He’d learned to use it years before, during a harsh winter’s tour in Bosnia.

  He’d joined the Army Reserve when the cost of farming and the taxes on the Hillsboro land strained his budget past breaking point. It’s only one weekend a month, Bekah, he’d told his wife as

  he signed the papers, and maybe the Feds’ll look more kindly on me once I’ve served my time.

  Four months after basic training, he’d been deployed to Bosnia to keep the Dayton Peace Accord.

  It was a Sign, he thought now: a Purpose preordained by the mystery of the Lord’s ways. He was lost among the ranks of the Fifth Corps and the Old Ironsides Division, twenty thousand strong, and he had no idea why he was expected to tramp through the cold ten thousand miles from home in the dead of winter. Dolf was four years old. Daniel sent a letter back to Bekah signed Your tax dollars at work, Sweetheart, and spent Christmas Eve on night patrol, terrified he’d trigger a land mine.

  Instead, he’d encountered the Leader: Mlan Krucevic, a desperate and brilliant fugitive, charged with crimes against humanity by the Tribunal at The Hague. Krucevic and his men scattered Daniel’s patrol and took him captive. In the dark hours before morning, the two of them began to talk. Or rather, Krucevic talked. Daniel listened.

  Remembering that face now—the uncompromising cruelty of the mouth, the clear dark eyes and crushing intelligence—bitterness surged through Daniel. He had been robbed. First of his son—his Dolf—and now of the man he’d worshipped like a god. Anger surged upward and his grip tightened on the duffel bag. He’d intended to simply shoot Caroline Carmichael in the head while she stared drunkenly at the television screen, but he could see now that that kind of death would never satisfy him. He needed to feel her pain—needed her to beg for mercy on her bleeding knees—needed to see the terror in her face as she died.

  He lifted the gun in one hand and drew a knife from his boot with the other. He didn’t care if the entire U.S. government was hunting him right now for Dare Atwood’s murder—he’d force open the back door and take the woman while she slept. The Leader’s vengeance was singing in his veins.

  Chapter 15

  BERLIN, 7:37 A.M.

  Wally Aronson’s apartment in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel sat on the top floor of a converted nineteenth-century mansion, one that had survived two world wars with only minor reconstruction. It was a largish place, particularly for a man whose wife and kids had departed the previous month for Maryland: a high-ceilinged living room filled with antiqu
es gathered in postings to Moscow and Budapest; equally antique plumbing; a couple of deserted bedrooms that echoed when his polished shoes clicked down the parquet-covered corridor. The CIA’s station chief in Berlin was a major player—a linchpin in the delicate business of liaison with German intelligence—and he merited the kind of expansive accommodation State Department officers coveted. But Wally was unusual in choosing to live in the Scheunenviertel, the old Jewish Quarter of Berlin, rather than the expat ghetto of leafy Charlottenburg. He liked the food he found in the Quarter—it reminded him sometimes of Queens—and he liked the feel of the old walls leaning toward one another across the narrow streets. Only the black swastikas sprayed on the nearby synagogue had the power to trouble him.

  He rose early by embassy standards and walked out in search of the morning papers, German- and English-language both. He bought fresh soft doughnuts and steaming Turkish coffee and consumed them while he read the papers. The loneliness Brenda had left behind felt less weighty then, as he sniffed the Berlinerluft—the light, soft air that was the pride of the city, but which Wally always thought smelled dampeningly of the soft brown coal burned throughout Central Europe. He could imagine himself the spy with a thousand faces, haunting the no-man’s-land of the Cold War as le Carré had done. He was a good case officer—Caroline Carmichael had said once that Wally was born to hold somebody’s hand in a rundown bar and pay them for the privilege—and he’d risen fast through the covert world. Wally was spare, short, and kindly-faced with a graying goatee and a waspish sense of humor. His father had been a successful salesman. Which in fact was what Wally had become: a dealer in souls and morals. Your secrets for our dreams. Your hopes for solid cash. With a cyanide pill on the side.

  Chief of Station—COS, as it was known among Agency people—was primarily a managerial role. Wally sat in on embassy meetings and trained up the kids fresh off the Farm and reviewed cables before they were sent home, chafing all the while at the ops he no longer got to run. He was not so far removed from the street, however, that he’d lost his tradecraft. And so, even before he had a chance to turn around, he felt the man following him back from the newsstand this morning. Wally, Caroline once remarked, had eyes in his ass.

  He was intrigued by the surveillance. Was it his old friends the Russians? The North Koreans, perhaps, operating in Berlin? A training run for the German service, which had picked him out like a familiar landmark, Wally the Chief of Scheunenviertel? He strolled casually past the entrance to his apartment building, sipping his coffee, and dropped into one of his surveillance detection routes.

  It was possible, of course, that a more sinister construction could be placed on this watcher. It was barely a week since Sophie Payne’s body had been recovered; her funeral would take place back home in a matter of hours. Thirty April might be blasted to smithereens by his good friend Caroline, but revenge was ripe for the taking. It’d be a terrorist coup to snuff the CIA’s man in Berlin; Berlin was 30 April’s backyard. He made a play of dropping one of his newspapers and, as he bent to retrieve it, glanced casually back the way he’d come.

  The paving was empty.

  Vaguely irritated—disappointed, if the truth were known—he wandered on for a few hundred more yards. Checking, surreptitiously, to see if the tail had reappeared. By this time he’d left the Scheunenviertel behind—had crossed the Spree near Mon Bijou Park—had the buildings of Humboldt University looming before him. He glanced back.

  Nothing.

  He turned into a side street and began to walk home.

  When he reached the elegant old building on Sophienstrasse, his footsteps slowed. A man was slumped on the marble steps leading to the entry. His watcher. Wally was sure of it.

  “That’s ballsy,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t want to tire you out with a long walk, friend. What can I do for you?”

  The man raised his head. His face was a mass of bruises, the blood still fresh and the features raw and swollen. His hair was incongruously brown. But Wally had never forgotten the look in those eyes—like a wolf too wild to be taken.

  “Eric,” he said.

  Chapter 16

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, 3:38 A.M.

  She’d been called into the Agency in the middle of the night many times, but it was always unnerving to see the vast parking lots empty under rank upon rank of brilliant lights. The electrified barbed wire that surrounded the compound was less obvious in daylight, and the SPOs—the security police officers who manned the gates—walked right up to the car window to stare intently at her badge and face before waving her through.

  She and Cuddy would do what they could in the last few hours before Sophie Payne’s funeral. There might be some clue Cuddy had overlooked in the disc full of data Eric had sent out of Budapest—or a name lost in the thousands of pages of 30 April files. A link between the neo-Nazi group and somebody here at home—an academic conference where two men had met, a stint in a jail cell where two killers joined forces.

  “I’ll get out a tasking cable to Berlin,” Caroline was saying as she and Cuddy swung into the Counterterrorism Center at 3:14 A.M. “Wally may have some assets left he can query—”

  She stopped short, staring at the silver-haired man seated in her cubicle. He had a pile of her files—the ones she’d yet to destroy—before him on the desk and was systematically going through them, half-glasses resting on his nose, red pen poised.

  “Berlin has already been tasked,” he said, holding out a copy of a cable. “They have all they need to wrap up this investigation.”

  Caroline took the sheet of paper.

  C/CTC ADVISES THAT CASE OFFICER MICHAEL O’SHAUGHNESSY/NIGEL BENNING DECLARED DEAD APRIL 1997 IS ALIVE AND MEMBER OF 30 APRIL TERRORIST

  GROUP . . .

  “You burned him,” she said hollowly. “Cuddy—he’s blown Eric sky high. There’s no cover left.”

  Cuddy took the copy of the cable and scanned it rapidly. The core of Caroline’s body had deadened, as though all function of heart and bone had suddenly shut down. There was no way back. No help to be found.

  “Pity you tossed so much in the incinerator, my dear,” Scottie said easily. “These files are sadly incomplete. That will look very bad when the Inspector General investigates what you knew, and when. Rather as though you had something to hide.”

  “Get out of my desk,” she said with effort. “Please.”

  Scottie laughed and swiveled in her chair. “I received your letter of resignation, Carrie. It saved me the trouble of firing you. But I must say I’m rather surprised to see you here. I’d have thought you’d borrow a page from Eric’s book—and turn up dead.”

  “That’s not funny,” Cuddy said sternly, as though Scottie were a little boy with a bad sense of humor. “You know Dare Atwood has been murdered. Why weren’t you at the White House?”

  “I had documents of my own to incinerate,” Scottie replied comfortably. “Sad about Dare. Who’ll take the dog, I wonder? We all know who’ll take her office. I must make my obeisance to Rinehart sometime this morning.”

  Caroline was holding the shreds of her temper in both hands. Cross Scottie now, and she’d lose her final slim hope of bringing Eric home safe and alive. “I’m withdrawing that resignation. I’m here to help.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Scottie replied. “I’ve already informed the Inspector General’s office of your decision, and added my own Memorandum to the Record detailing Eric’s survival. I’m sure there will be quite an extensive investigation, Carrie. Of how you managed to cover up this sordid mess for so long.”

  “You know I knew nothing about it! Dare—”

  Dare was dead, and any truth she might have believed had died with her. The only other person who understood how Eric had been used—how Caroline had been deceived—was Cuddy Wilmot. And he was easy enough to destroy.

  “Under the circumstances,” Scottie said dryly, “I cannot possibly allow you access to classified information. Your clearances are completely compromi
sed.”

  “You wouldn’t dare do this.” Somehow she managed to keep her voice level. “I know enough to end your career, Scottie. Enough to ruin everything you’ve worked for.”

  “But it would be simply your word against mine. And I’ll make very sure your word is dirt.” Scottie reached for his phone. “I’ll call the SPOs now. They’ll escort you to your car.”

  “You realize you’re prejudicing this entire investigation? That Eric is the only possible lead we’ve got to the 30 April cell in D.C.? You need Eric, Scottie. He’s the one person who can save your ass.”

  He gazed at her pityingly. “You don’t really think he’d bother, Caroline, after all we’ve been through? Having burned my bridges with Eric, as it were, I had no choice but to burn him.”

  “Scottie,” she lashed out, “people are dying out there. Innocent people. They’re dying because of you. The evil you’ve done for your own amusement. You owe it to Eric—to everybody in this institution—to try to put things right. To find this killer before he does further damage.”

  A buzzer sounded at the entrance to the vault; Scottie rose briskly from Caroline’s desk. “I have no intention of supporting this investigation. I want it to spin out as long as possible, Carrie. I want the Bureau to make their usual hash of it and I want the media to come calling. While the bodies fall and the nation screams in panic, our jobs are the most secure they’re ever likely to be. The President will be forced to admit just how much he needs us.”

  “Good God,” Cuddy said blankly. “You don’t mean that, Scottie. You’ve spent your life—”

  Their chief reached for a cardboard box sitting at his feet. It held a jumble of items: a cup full of pens, a framed photograph of William Webster shaking Caroline’s hand; an award for merit she’d earned five years ago. He handed the box to Cuddy.