Blown

by Francine Mathews

  “That’ll be the SPOs buzzing. Walk Caroline to the car, will you, Wilmot? And decide on the way whether you want to leave with her. It’s a decision you shouldn’t make lightly.”

  Chapter 17

  ARLINGTON, 2:33 A.M.

  Daniel had crept from his own bedroom in the black heart of night often enough to know that the quality of silence in a sleeping house is different from an empty one. There were the times he’d lain awake and the times he’d wanted to be sure that Dolf was blissful and unaware in his own small room; times later, when Dolf was in the ground, that he’d sprawled on the boy’s sterile bed and cursed Bekah for washing the sheets. He craved the scent of his son like another man craved drink or sex, and sometimes he huddled in the boy’s closet, just to breathe in the elusive memory of him. It took Daniel only three seconds in Caroline Carmichael’s pitch-black room to know she wasn’t there.

  As the realization came, he was passing in front of her full-length mirror, and the sudden unexpected reflection of his own shoulder, his head beneath the tight wool cap, startled him so much that he swung around and smashed at the figure staring back at him. The hard metal haft of his M16 slammed straight through the plasterboard wall and the mirror shivered into a hundred pieces, glancing off his face like the most vicious of kisses. He stood panting, engulfed by disappointment.

  After that it was enough to pull the covers from her bed and hurl a lamp to the floor before he turned and fled down the narrow stairs to the side window he’d cut open. He tossed the rifle through the opening and slid one leg out onto the grass. Thinking: Where the fuck is that bitch I come all this way to kill her maybe she knew maybe she knew I was coming and ran Jesus H. Christ I’ve got to find the girl there’s no time left I—

  He stood still, balancing on one leg, aware suddenly of the flashlight’s beam edging around the back of the house, a small perfect orb of light that bled an elliptical trail like a comet’s. Bobbing. Shifting. A man searching with a flashlight for a burglar who might just be there.

  Daniel sank like a stone into the narrow space between the house’s outer wall and the juniper trailing sharp fingers across his cheek. A neighbor’d heard or seen him. How many trackers were there? One? Five? He disregarded the M16 lying blatantly on the frost-tipped lawn. The comet was bobbing closer, and he could hear the man’s breathing now. Footsteps. The light circled the gun.

  If the guy turned and sprinted back around the house toward whatever vehicle had brought him, or if he reached for a radio and called in backup, it would all be over. Daniel was cut off from his motorcycle and his road home, his road forward. He teetered slightly on his haunches but with the luck that sustained him, the cop—a uniformed patrol officer on the night shift, Daniel could see his stubble in the flashlight’s beam—was bending forward, a handkerchief in one hand. Reaching for the M16.

  Daniel sprang.

  He landed heavily on the man’s shoulders, pitching him forward so that his chin butted painfully against the ground. The cop gave a grunt of surprise but Daniel’s left hand was over his mouth by that time and the knife was curving around the front of the throat, nicking at the flesh as the man’s head strained against him. He smelled cigarette smoke and shampoo and the tang of fear, then the knife slashed confidently through the jugular and the windpipe and the head was just a latex mask dangling from his hands.

  The body slumped forward and blood spurted over the frozen grass. Daniel wiped his knife on the cop’s jacket and dragged the M16 from beneath his hip. With a burst of static the man’s radio went off and Daniel jumped as though he’d been shot. His hands were shaking and slick with blood. He’d have to toss his gloves somewhere. But first, he had to get to the bike.

  Chapter 18

  BERLIN, 7:39 A.M.

  Wally hoisted Eric to his feet. “You’re dead. Aren’t you? Dead?”

  “Nearly three years.” His broken lips were painful to look at. He swayed where he stood. “I can tell you everything, Wally, but I can’t make it much farther.”

  “Come inside. There’s an elevator.”

  He helped him negotiate the steps and the heavy door, noticing the grimace of pain when he touched Eric’s ribs. Broken, probably. Once Eric had taught Wally how to march three days without food, how to creep silently over an enemy and throttle him without a sound, how to lie in ambush and avoid forward-looking infrared. Wally had tried to be worthy, to live up to Eric’s toughness and physical courage, to win a word of praise from this man he and his buddies regarded with awe. They’d vied for the right to buy Eric a beer at the Farm’s bar. And now here he was, slumped like a bum on Wally’s doorstep. Both of them middle-aged.

  When he’d heard of Eric’s death in that bombed plane, Wally had left his station’s vault at a run and taken shelter for half an hour in the embassy’s men’s room. Swallowing the pain that hardened his throat and attempting to believe that a man like Eric could be gone. Dead like anyone else.

  “Who beat you up?”

  “Don’t know.”

  He thrust back the ancient lift’s iron grille and steered Eric inside. Pushed the button for number four and waited for the elevator to ascend. Eric sagged against the cage, his eyes closed. “Thanks, Wally.”

  “You weren’t on MedAir 901. When it went down.”

  “No.”

  “Caroline—”

  “Knows now. She didn’t until last week.”

  “—When she came to Berlin chasing Sophie Payne,” Wally said. Remembering the feeling he’d had that Caroline was holding something back—that he was denied access to the ops in her mind. Fuck. This is fucking going to get me fired. “Who else knows?”

  “Scottie,” Eric said vaguely, and clutched at the elevator’s bronze bars as the cage lurched to a stop.

  Wally sighed inwardly with relief. If Scottie Sorensen had brought Eric back to life, everybody else could go to hell.

  Chapter 19

  LANGLEY, 3:54 A.M.

  “I’ll resign.” Cuddy strode beside Caroline and the security police officers toward the parking lot. The SPOs said nothing, but they held her elbows as though she were a prisoner who might break for daylight.

  “No. You need to be here.”

  “And work for him? Caroline—” Cuddy stopped, too aware of the presence of outsiders. “I’ll call you at your hotel tomorrow. We’ll discuss this.”

  “But you’ll go back inside now. You’ll tell Scottie you’ll stay. Understand? You have to, Cuddy. Otherwise we’re all screwed.”

  He understood in those few syllables what she expected. Not blind loyalty to the institution or the martyrdom of leaving by her side, but a far crueler sentence: She was asking him to turn traitor. To double back against the only family he could name.

  As they walked briskly toward her car she added, “And get that disc.”

  The one Eric had sent out of Budapest last week, Cuddy thought; the single shred of proof he’d actually been working for the good guys.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

  “Call Shephard. And volunteer.”

  Tom’s voice, when she reached his cell phone, was like a lifeline unreeling through the predawn darkness. She clung to the careless confidence of that voice, the thoughtless strength, without allowing herself to consider why he was so necessary right now.

  “Did you know your house’s silent alarm went off an hour ago?” he demanded.

  “No.”

  The fiber-optic system Eric had installed while the house was under construction was undetectable to the naked eye. Threaded through the frame of the building itself, and monitored remotely by a crack government security contractor. She’d never had to use it. Until tonight.

  “Ricin Boy?”

  “There’s a dead cop lying in your backyard, Caroline. He’s stripped to his underwear and his head’s nearly cut off. You realize what this means? He found you. He found you.”

  “Just like he found Dare,” she said bitterly. “Now he’s got a police unifo
rm he can use. We’ve got to warn the Secret Service detail working Payne’s funeral.”

  “Already done. Where are you?”

  She was driving toward Chain Bridge, under the canopy of oak trees arching down to the Potomac River, where the rapids furled white against the concrete supports. Nearly four A.M., and no sign of morning on the horizon. Sophie Payne’s funeral in approximately six hours. She was due to pick up Jozsef at Bethesda Naval soon.

  “Where should I be?”

  “On your way downtown. Carl Rogers—he’s head of White House Security—wants you at a briefing. Before this show gets started at Arlington.”

  “What time?”

  “Soon as you can. Carrie—he could have murdered you in your bed.” Tom sounded strained to the breaking point, and she remembered the intensity of that drive to the White House, the emotion that had kept her firmly on her side of the car, terrified of what might happen if she touched him. “Once Payne’s funeral is done, you need to get out of this city. Have you heard anything about Atwood’s request for federal protection?”

  “Ain’t gonna happen, Tom.” She swallowed hard, concentrating on the steep upgrade to Arizona Avenue. “I was just fired.”

  “What?”

  How to explain? Tom believed Eric was dead. He thought she was a widow. He knew nothing of the many ways she’d deceived him. But he’d hear the truth in a matter of hours—or one version of it. Dare was gone and nobody with clout was left to help her. Scottie’s next move would be an international manhunt for Eric. It was a brilliant plan: Divert the public’s attention from Ricin Boy, and win a knighthood from Jack Bigelow for his pains.

  “Fired? Are they nuts? You’re the only person in Langley who knows her ass from a hole in the ground!”

  “We’d better talk, Tom.”

  “I’ll meet you at the Bureau in twenty minutes.”

  When a whistling Scottie Sorensen swung out of the office at four-thirty A.M., bound for the DCI’s corridor and his meeting with Cory Rinehart, Cuddy Wilmot decided to smoke his first cigarette in nearly two years.

  The darkness was still heavy as he fumbled for a match in the chill morning air of the courtyard that linked New Headquarters and Old. It was filled with daylilies in the summer; marble statues of an indeterminate modernist type; a plaque or two commemorating something already forgotten. Ducks, in spring weather, paddling in the fountains. The Agency—buildings, memories, people—felt like his whole life; but tonight it was all simply smoke and ash.

  He’d watched Caroline’s taillights disappear through the back gate and then he’d walked directly back to CTC and informed his chief he was backing him up the whole way. It was then Scottie had asked for Eric’s CD-ROM. Cuddy had taken it from his desk and watched while Scottie snapped it neatly in four and tossed the shards in his burn bag.

  Cuddy inhaled greedily and watched the end of his cigarette flare like hope in the darkness. What was the nature of loyalty, after all? Was it dedication to country . . . to the safety of a bunch of people who didn’t even realize they were targets . . . to an idea he’d once had of justice or integrity? Was it blind adherence to a chain of command—or did it come down to a few people you knew and loved, the few people who’d watched you bleed?

  In the end there was nothing but the ear you gave to that inner voice, the one that refused to steer you wrong. He was listening now, had been listening for hours, and with his blood singing the old familiar nicotine chant, he felt clearheaded and unequivocal. He pulled out his cell phone.

  It was the easiest kind of electronic transmission to intercept, but Cuddy trusted this palm-sized bit of circuitry more right now than all the lines running in and out of Scottie Sorensen’s Counterterrorism Center.

  “Steve Price?” he asked as the Post journalist picked up. “It’s Cuddy Wilmot out at the CIA. There’s a piece of the 30 April story I think you need to know.”

  Chapter 20

  SPRING VALLEY, 4:53 A.M.

  The harassed doctor who had been working for more than twenty sleepless hours arrived at the room where Dana Enfield lay and paused in the doorway. Two other gurneys had been moved into the space, holding a man of fifty and his son of twenty-three, lying side by side. Chuck and David Yearsley. For six months they’d trained for the Marine Corps Marathon and they’d finished the race together. Kay Wallace guessed it would be their last.

  The Speaker of the House, as the doctor could not help but think of him, sat motionless by his wife’s bed. Perhaps, Kay thought, he had finally dozed off. Or perhaps Dana was already dead. She had known people to sit like that for an hour before summoning a physician. Only the doctor had the power to make death real.

  She checked the Yearsleys’ vitals, then forced herself to walk forward. At the sound of her step George Enfield turned his head. The strangeness of coming face-to-face with someone famous—of seeing in the flesh a man known only by television—swept over her. She could not help smiling foolishly, despite the exhaustion of the hard hours and the hopeless chaos of the waiting room four stories below. He was holding his wife’s hand.

  “How is she?” Kay asked.

  “Maybe you can tell me that.”

  She bent over Dana’s fevered body and listened to her heart with a stethoscope. The beat was irregular and weak. She checked the chart and noted that insulin was being fed into the woman’s veins along with a solution of sugars; a perfectly balanced continuous stream of fluids. Dana’s levels had been checked the previous hour. She’d been given morphine for pain and acetaminophen in an effort to bring down her spiking temperature. “Any vomiting lately?”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing left inside.”

  Kay gently palpated Dana’s abdomen. It was stretched taut over the rib cage, but the feel of the major organs troubled her. They were distended with fluid; Kay guessed it was probably blood. Dana’s gut was slowly dying. And there was nothing Kay could do.

  “How many people are there?” Enfield asked.

  She knew instantly what he was asking. “One hundred thirty-two in this facility,” Kay said, “and some seven hundred others in places around the city.”

  “Has anyone died yet?”

  She studied his lined face, seeing the anguish behind the famous façade, then shook her head. “No one has died here. I don’t know about the rest.”

  “Then maybe we’re wrong. I mean, it’s early days yet. It could be ricin—but even if it is, maybe the dose wasn’t strong enough to kill. Maybe the worst of it’s over, you know?”

  “Maybe.”

  Like the others on staff and all the volunteers who’d shown up to help, she’d read the case histories the Centers for Disease Control were sending out electronically to every hospital in the nation. The most brutal story was that of Georgi Markov, an exiled Bulgarian journalist. An assassin had stabbed Markov with the tip of an umbrella while he stood in a queue for a London bus. The umbrella tip injected a tiny metal sphere holding an infinitesimal amount of ricin—estimated, Kay recalled, at 0.28 mm3—into Markov’s leg. The journalist had died three days later of severe gastroenteritis. Murdered by a fellow commuter.

  Every person who’d drunk ricin-laced water at the marathon, the young doctor suspected, had ingested a hundred to a thousand times more poison than Markov.

  Enfield’s eyes strayed back to his wife. “What do you think? About Dana? Has she improved at all?”

  Kay’s throat tightened. This was the part she hated most about medicine: the desperate need for hope. They all wanted it in these rooms tonight—some reason to believe. To hang on. The mothers and husbands and best friends looked at her with such pain and hope in their eyes—asking her to reassure them. To pretend that she could save the people they loved. The weight of it was killing her.

  “While there’s life, there’s hope,” she stuttered, her hands clenched in her pockets; and when she smiled at George this time, there was nothing foolish in her eyes.

  Chapter 21

  BERLIN, 8:51 A.M.<
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  Eric lay sprawled on the bed that had once belonged to Wally’s son, a dish towel pressed to his left cheekbone. Wally had filled the towel with crushed ice and fed him four ibuprofen tablets with some bottled water; he’d found an old stretch bandage in a cupboard and wound it with unexpected tenderness around Eric’s cracked ribs. The purple bruising on his abdomen made Wally grin savagely, but he listened without comment to what Eric told him. If he had his own thoughts about the healing wound on Eric’s neck or the possible use his old friend had made of the past three years, he did not offer them up for consideration. He was already late for work and he’d recovered enough from his initial shock to say frankly, “No, buddy, I don’t think I want to know what you’ve been doing while you’ve been dead. From the look of you, it isn’t healthy to know. Sit tight and stare at the ceiling for a while. I’ll be back at lunch.”

  As he lay with his eyes fixed on the room’s pale shadows, listening to the creak and stir of the old building and the unknown lives around him, Eric considered Ernst and Klaus. They should have put a bullet in his brain. Instead, they’d dumped him in an alley near Tegel Airport. Ernst had pocketed the five thousand dollars he’d found in Eric’s money belt and Klaus had kept the fake passport. Eric had nothing now. His bugout kit was shit.

  When his screaming frame hit the concrete sidewalk near dawn he’d hunched himself into a doorway and sat, for an hour or longer, while the cold hardened his bruised muscles. When sunlight crept into the doorway he began to walk, forcing his battered mind to concentrate. To find someone. A friend who could help. Wally.

  He’d made no contact with the CIA for the past three years, but he’d kept tabs on the stations operating in every city 30 April called home. He knew Wally Aronson was COS, Berlin. He’d tailed Wally only once—to find out where he lived. Wally’d never noticed him.