Spavac, Caroline read, and clicked in frustration on the icon that led nowhere.
She had found three of these Croatian file names buried in the data Eric had sent home on his pirated computer disc. Spavac, Alat, and Saka. Someone—Cuddy?—had translated the words as Sleeper, Tool, and Fist. Each had the symbol of a folder next to its name, and each listed between thirty-five and forty kilobytes of information stored. But when she tried to open them, she got a completely blank screen.
Encrypted, she thought, or the data failed to transfer when Cuddy copied the disc. He would have suspected encryption and put one of CTC’s techies onto the problem. Or would he? Cuddy had been wary of the secret of Eric’s operation leaking throughout the Counterterrorism Center. Maybe he’d been afraid of asking for help—or had simply given up on these. He’d already gone through most of Eric’s intelligence in the week since Caroline had returned home.
She could follow her branch chief’s trail by the havoc he’d wreaked in 30 April’s interests worldwide. Five front companies in the Netherlands, Germany, and Slovakia had already seen their assets seized by Interpol; a network of embedded operatives in Poland had been arrested four days before. Krucevic’s primary financial backers—a charismatic Catholic politician in the south of France and the head of a private relief organization operating throughout North Africa—had resigned abruptly from their posts. Both were facing criminal investigations. The FBI had formally requested the freezing of nearly one hundred million euros held in Swiss banks. It had been a good week for counterterrorism—until Ricin Boy struck.
Sleeper, Tool, and Fist. What did they mean? Bits of undigested data that Eric had copied by mistake? Names of genetically engineered bugs that 30 April had intended to unleash upon the world? Operational tags for hits that had never taken place—murders, kidnappings, bomb sites yet to explode?
But to Caroline, they sounded like names.
A rattle of keys in the front door’s bolts brought her head up swiftly. She clicked out of the CD and closed the laptop’s cover. From her position on the living room floor—back pressed against Steve Price’s dark blue sofa—she had a perfect view of the entryway. Her snub-nosed Walther TPK was already leveled at the door.
“Caroline!” Price’s head curved around the jamb and he shot her a smile. “Guess what? That kid you saved just broke out of jail.”
She gleaned two things immediately from the reporter’s glib account of Jozsef’s disappearance: Norm Wilhelm hadn’t fought his killer—indeed, he seemed to have gone placidly to his death by prearranged appointment—and Jozsef’s kidnapping might just be Eric’s salvation. With the boy missing, Eric was the last hope the government had of learning where the next terrorist blow would fall.
Her gut instincts were right: Jozsef had told the truth. One of Sophie Payne’s trusted staffers knew 30 April intimately.
Beneath her sick worry for the boy, Caroline’s mind leaped with hope. Tom Shephard would finally understand. He would know that she and Jozsef hadn’t steered him wrong. His quick wits would travel from the place of execution to the heart of West Virginia, and to the spider’s web of connections Norm Wilhelm had left behind. Within hours, Tom would jump on the next of kin. It was a waste of time for her to head in the same direction. Instead, she made Steve Price repeat every detail he knew, spent a few moments in careful thought, then called Dr. Bill Lewis at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Lewis was the head of Jozsef’s medical team. It was he who’d released the boy into Caroline’s safekeeping only that morning; he wouldn’t hesitate to talk to her.
“Do we log telephone calls from patients’ rooms?” he repeated blankly after she commiserated about Jozsef’s apparent kidnapping. “Sure we do. You wouldn’t believe the places some people call. Tibet. New South Wales. We’ve got to be able to pin them for charges.”
He put an administrator on the problem and buzzed Caroline’s cell phone a bare twelve minutes later. Jozsef had made only one call during his week-long stay: two hours after Dare Atwood’s murder the previous morning. The number was local.
“We have tracing capability at the Post,” Price told her. “But why do you want to know? You think the kid arranged to be picked up at White Flint Mall?”
“It’s a possibility,” Caroline said heavily. “His timing—pulling me out of the funeral just as a drive-by shooting occurred—was far too perfect. Yeah, I think he made contact.”
“I’ll get the name and address,” the reporter returned, as though raising her bet in poker, “if you’ll give me the story first. Your story. No bullshit, just the straight poop. Deal?”
She hesitated only a second. “Deal.”
Chapter 30
LANGLEY, 5:17 P.M.
“Carmichael’s been arrested already?” Cory Rinehart frowned. “I’m surprised. The BKA is usually less . . . resourceful.”
“Wally Aronson turned his old friend in,” Scottie replied dryly; he planned on kicking Wally the length of Europe for having done so. “Apparently Eric showed up on his doorstep begging for help.”
Rinehart glanced up from the cable he was reading. He’d had the good taste to remain in his own office down the hall from the DCI’s, which he’d rather ostentatiously locked before such witnesses as Dare Atwood’s weeping secretary and the Deputy Director for Operations, pending the arrival of Dare’s next of kin. A daughter, he’d told Scottie disbelievingly. Lives somewhere in Miami. I didn’t know Dare was ever married.
“This thug sought out our COS Berlin?” he demanded now. “That’s interesting. Very.” Rinehart ran one of his small and rather delicate hands over his beautifully trimmed black hair. He was a spare man, compact and athletic, his clothes almost obsessively pressed; a former navy pilot, Scottie remembered. A tactical thinker trained to take out the incoming. Appearances mattered to Cory Rinehart; even his shoes were expensive and perfect.
“I’ve been thinking about this whole goddamn rigmarole. The idea that Atwood was running Carmichael alone—it doesn’t make sense. I can’t find a trace of any financial arrangements in her records. No suggestion that the two of them even communicated.”
The late DCI’s office door might be locked, Scottie reflected approvingly, but Rinehart had already used his key. “You think it’s possible . . . Wally Aronson was involved?”
“Not with Headquarters sanction,” Rinehart said quickly. “But if Carmichael knew him well enough to find his doorstep . . . it does suggest . . .”
“. . . a rogue operator,” Scottie finished. “Yes, I see your point. You want Aronson recalled?”
“That’s a job for the DDO.” The Deputy Director for Operations. In this case, Hal Rickler, spymaster to the nation’s spooks and one more person who’d demand admittance to Scottie’s dangerous circle of conspiracy. He could not have it.
Scottie sighed. “Remember who you are, Cory. Acting Director. You don’t have to explain a single one of your decisions to anybody now but the President.”
The casual reference to Jack Bigelow served as a reminder of exactly how delicate a business they were tossing like a football around the room.
“Will the BKA let us talk to him?” Rinehart demanded abruptly.
“Wally?”
“Carmichael.”
Scottie shrugged, uncertain how this might serve his ends. “It’s early days yet. We’re still negotiating jurisdiction. The Germans want to try him on murder charges. I think we ought to let them.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Rinehart demanded softly. “If the connection to the Agency’s Berlin station came up . . . the CIA would be held accountable for the destruction of half of downtown Berlin and the murder of Sophie Payne. We are not going to let that happen.”
“If you say so.” Scottie’s eyes were hooded. “What alternative would you suggest?”
“Extradite the bastard as soon as possible. Film his arrival in handcuffs on every major news channel nationwide. Hand the President a terrorist he can prosecute—and say fuck-all
about where he came from.”
“But Eric will talk. On every major news channel.” Scottie eased back in his chair as though the prospect of his enemy babbling in a sort of political reality show held no terrors for him. “He’ll embarrass not only the CIA but the entire Administration. Jack Bigelow won’t thank you for that, Cory. He certainly won’t appoint you to fill Dare’s shoes on a permanent basis.”
“I never hoped for that,” Rinehart said.
Liar, Scottie retorted silently. You’ve wanted this job since you picked up your badge from Security thirteen years ago. I know your kind. I’ve recruited better men than you.
But when he spoke it was in a measured tone entirely free of the rancor flooding his veins.
“Aronson reports that Eric’s been roughed up. Somebody worked him over with a cleaver. It’d be a gift if he never survived his holding cell.”
Rinehart’s eyes—a clear and remorseless blue—betrayed no shock. “Could that be arranged?”
Was it possible, Scottie wondered with a vague uneasiness, that the A/DCI was willing to hand him so simple an avenue to power? Would Rinehart submit to lifelong blackmail, purely for a snatch at Dare Atwood’s private suite?
“Why don’t you send me to Berlin, Cory?” he suggested gently. “We need eyes on the ground. I know the key people at the BKA—and I can get access to Eric without leaving a trail.”
A smile flickered briefly over Cory Rinehart’s face. “Eric was one of yours, wasn’t he? Almost a son, people used to say.”
“I have two daughters. They’re all grown up now.”
Rinehart reached for a personnel file and hoisted it meaningfully. “I’ve been reading up on Carmichael. He was quite a CO. You gave him his last three postings, I think. Plums, all of them, Scottie. Strange that he’d betray you so completely. And you in the dark the whole time.”
The drift of the conversation was clear. If Wally Aronson’s friendship for the doomed man was suspect, then Scottie’s was career ending.
Very well, he thought with distaste. You scratch my back, Cory, and I’ll scratch out your eyes.
He rose. “Have you told Bigelow we’ve got Eric?”
“Yes. And also that you fired his wife.” Rinehart’s gaze locked with Scottie’s. “The President wasn’t happy about that. She’s his perfect hero.”
“And more compromised than anybody in the building.”
“Except yourself.”
Scottie raised one eyebrow. “Are you requesting my resignation, sir?”
“Not yet.” Rinehart dropped Eric’s folder back on his desk. “I want to see how you solve our problem in Berlin. Why don’t you leave tonight, Scottie?”
Chapter 31
MCLEAN, 6:37 P.M.
Josie O’Halloran lifted two twenty-five-pound bags of ice from the flatbed of Mike’s truck and carried the slippery weight, frigid against her breasts, into the service entrance of the store. Rainwater had pooled on the concrete floor and the glitter of a fish scale winked from the rusted drain at her feet, but the November chill flooding through the two narrow rooms cut the stench like a knife. The odor this afternoon was a stew of seawater and diesel fumes and good fresh fish, reminding Josie of the Boston docks and her father’s trawler heading for dawn on the Georges Bank. Forty-five years ago, maybe fifty, when she’d been a kid with dirty knees and corduroy pants her mother deplored. A different lifetime; and what would her mother think now if she saw Josie’s hardened hands, encased in plastic gloves as transparent as a proctologist’s, shoving the ice around the chars’ gills? Waste of a good education, she’d say bitterly. For this we sent you to Manhattanville?
But her mother was dead eighteen years and Josie had learned in her refined Catholic women’s college exactly what it meant to be a child of the working class, a girl who got A’s but still smelled of the docks, no debutante with an MRS degree, Josie O’Halloran. The boys from Holy Cross and Villanova and Georgetown had figured it out, too: One look at her broad Irish face and red hair and blunt hands and they’d moved on to what Josie called the Kennedy Irish—the kind whose money and dark good looks made up for an entry stamp at Ellis Island. She’d left Manhattanville without the requisite diamond ring or the postgraduate tour of Europe but with the highest marks in her class. Josie, Sister Regina Mary had said a month before graduation, there is a gentleman I’d like you to meet. You’re a good girl and a hard worker and I think it just possible he might offer you employment.
“That’s all of it, Jo,” Mike sang out from the open doorway. “Need anything else?”
“Nothin’ you can give me, sweetheart.” His young cheeks were flushed above the demonic goatee and for an instant she wanted to pinch them lovingly. Instead, she smiled and waved him back into his belching truck, wondering at what point men had become her sons and not her lovers. She was fifty-eight years old, she’d never lost her figure, she kept her hair styled and dyed; but maybe it was the men who’d changed, slipping back like a point in a riverbank her current had left behind forever. She saw most of them now as little boys, never much older than the two grandsons whose picture she kept on the ledge near the lobster tank, grinning out at her with all the wit and malice of the devil’s own.
She sighed and looked over Mike’s delivery: fresh bluepoints and Wellfleets, although who would buy them on a Monday was questionable—oysters on the half were a weekend commodity. Harpooned swordfish steaks, always a good seller. Your Dover sole. Your catfish and farm-raised salmon for the types who liked fish but refused to pay steak prices. Wild king fillets. Chesapeake Bay blue crab. Sea scallops and the tiny succulent rock shrimp that were never frozen before they arrived at O’Halloran’s Seafood, the kind Scottie Sorensen liked to buy.
The bell over the door jangled and Josie hurriedly reached for her heavy rubber apron. Sasha, her counter girl, had called in sick for the eighth time this month. “Just a sec,” she shouted. “I’ll be right with you.”
He was standing there when she appeared as though she’d conjured him, silver head bent toward the chilled glass of the lobster tank, completely absorbed by the antennae probing the slick surface. Scottie in his Bond Street raincoat. The one man she could never see as just a little boy.
He came almost weekly, but the sight of him still had the power to shift her heart up a gear. He might offer you employment, Sister Regina had said; and so he had. Employment in Beirut as his personal secretary, the job other women had drawn blood to win. Beirut in the mid-sixties, its last golden hours of pleasure before Eden’s fall, Beirut of the secret gardens and the ripe blushing fruit and the sex on the couches in the middle of the day. She had been Scottie’s secretary, his confidante, his bodyguard and muse. Occasional bedfellow. All-purpose dinner partner when cover required it. Chief shopper for whatever wife was currently in power. She had served Scottie Sorensen in a number of ways over the past thirty years and knew exactly what was essential: the things he wanted and the ways he got them. Even how he preferred his bluefish cooked.
“Hello, Jo,” he said without turning around. “How’re you keeping?”
“Well enough. And you?”
She did not have to ask whether the work was interesting. She listened to the radio and watched her TV. A man with a gun had killed the Director last night and nobody could say where he’d got to. She had never been one to beg for privileged information. He’d tell her soon enough.
“You realize,” he said casually, “that three of these monsters are eating a fourth alive.”
She couldn’t see the lethal drama played out in the tank—his head was blocking her view—but she’d caught the scene often enough. One lobster on its back, skinny legs flailing, while the others tore at its entrails.
“I flew those in from Bar Harbor on Saturday,” she said calmly. “Does the Latest like lobster?”
The Latest was what she’d always called Scottie’s wife; it had been too tiring to keep track of all their names.
“Loves it,” he replied, “but not tonight, Jo.
I’m flying to Berlin in a few hours.”
“So you didn’t come to buy fish.”
His eyes met hers. “Are you alone?”
“Completely.”
“Then take off your apron and sit down. I have a job for you to do.”
Chapter 32
LANGLEY, 7:03 P.M.
When the buzzer sounded at the door of the vault, Raphael waited coolly for one of his acolytes to press the security release button. He remained on his barstool before the drafting table, his fine-boned left hand working with the metal stylus under the magnifying lens. No visitor was worth disturbing his concentration. It was essential that the pattern of wear on the forged Burmese chop replicate the hidden flaws deliberately placed on the original document by the immigration authorities in Rangoon. Raphael was legendary for his ability to ignore everything that was not essential to his trade.
Cuddy Wilmot, with whom Raphael had worked for the past three years on delicate and unspeakable business, was standing a few feet away from him. He felt the air change behind his back but did not glance in Cuddy’s direction.
Raphael was the Master. He resembled a charcoal figure touched out on canvas by the hand of Leonardo: the lithe curve of his form, the sweeping arc of his golden head. Only the wings, furled in silence, were missing.
He set down the stylus and pushed aside the lens. Flexed his fingers and sighed. Then he turned at last and looked at the man waiting quietly in the doorway.
Cuddy dipped his bespectacled face slightly; in supplication, Raphael liked to think. “Raphael. Would you have time to speak to me?”
He reviewed his mental log. Nearly ten hours of painstaking work lay ahead of him; the fact that it was late on a Monday was irrelevant. There was the voice-activated microphone his subordinates had embedded in the frame of a personal photograph the President would present to a Middle Eastern dictator, bound to be hung in the man’s office: The quality of the disguised wood grain would have to be checked by Raphael alone before it was delivered to the White House that night. The infrared landing lights for the unmarked airstrip in the Andes should be tested. The tiny camera he was supposed to plant in a female case officer’s lipstick was still waiting on a shelf, and the woman was due to fly out to Paris in three days. None of the objets d’art produced by the Office of Technical Services left Raphael’s shop without his personal approval. In less than seven years, he had gained an empire.
Blown Page 15
