Blown

by Francine Mathews

  They’d found the place through Gerry O’Brien, Candace’s ex-husband, when the woman’s apartment remained persistently dark and neither telephone calls nor repeated buzzing of the front door produced a response.

  “My wife never travels,” O’Brien had said gently when they tracked him to the small house he owned not far from his university research laboratory. Caroline noted the refusal to speak of Candace as part of the past, the solitary trappings of the man’s minute sitting room that suggested he’d never progressed further than the decree of divorce issued nearly ten years before. “She is a retiring sort of person, despite her very public job. And I do not think she would dine out with friends on the night of her employer’s funeral . . . She loved Sophie Payne.”

  They had presented themselves as old acquaintances, which was immediately unsuccessful because the professor clearly knew his ex-wife’s habits and could not place a Jennifer Lacey nearly twenty years Candace’s junior. Steve Price he understood instantly.

  “You’re the Post reporter, aren’t you?” There was a glint in his mild blue eyes. “I don’t think Candace would wish to speak with you. Oh, no, I do not.”

  He was on the verge of showing them the door when Caroline glimpsed the antique engraving of the Berlin Reichstag, perfect and serene as it had only been in the years before the bombings of World War II, and had said involuntarily, “Did you find that in Leipzig?”

  O’Brien had stared at her with renewed interest. “Yes. Do you know Germany?”

  “A little. You lived there for several years, I think?”

  He shook his head. “Not long enough.”

  “You returned before your teaching stint was through,” Caroline persisted, “because of Mlan Krucevic.”

  After the briefest pause, O’Brien said, “Who are you, really?”

  “Please forgive me when I say that I cannot tell you, Professor.”

  “Is Candace in trouble?”

  “I think she may be in danger.”

  “Because of that man,” he concluded. “Krucevic. And his killing of her boss. Yes, I see. Perhaps you had better sit down.”

  He told them, without much urging and with very little sense of tragedy, of how disaster had overcome his life.

  There was the foreignness of Leipzig, its unexpected elements: an expanse of concrete housing built by the Soviets; the old university buildings falling into decay; the mix of weary economy and desperate striving; the glamour of the West. Their glamour—his and Candace’s and their daughter Adrienne’s—which drew the academic community of the former East Germany more than an offer of free bananas or luxury handbags or uninhibited travel could ever have done. In 1990, the O’Brien family walked abroad in Leipzig’s ancient reconstructed streets as the living embodiment of American privilege, and they paid dearly for that fact.

  “I believe that Candace had certain plans,” Gerry O’Brien said judiciously as he gazed down the long tunnel of memory. “She is not a woman of considerable resources, you understand—inner resources, I would mean, such as might sustain a person in solitude—and when she realized we were destined for Europe she imagined a far different kind of life. She had notions of superb food and charming atmosphere, of trips to the countryside in search of antiques. Of her daughter thriving in a cultured world. Of a better time, perhaps, than we’d had at home.”

  He did not explain what had impoverished their style of living in Georgetown, leaving aside that failure out of habit; but Caroline could imagine it well enough. Gerry in his laboratory, Candace struggling to be the perfect academic wife without the slightest talent for it. The lavishness and the elegance of these discreet Georgetown blocks impossible to imitate on an academic’s salary. And Adrienne—who was Adrienne? A teenager. Torn from her native city during the most tumultuous years: high school.

  “Candace found Leipzig uncongenial,” O’Brien murmured. “She fell into a kind of depression. I believe I noticed it only when it was too late.”

  “And your daughter?”

  The biologist said nothing, studying Caroline’s face. Then he said, “I wish I knew for certain who you are.”

  Her eyes flicked to Steve Price’s; she shook her head slightly. “Would it help if I told you that I am not an enemy of yours?”

  “But possibly of my wife’s?”

  “She has not been your wife for almost ten years,” Caroline pointed out brutally.

  “That makes very little difference when it is a question of loyalty.”

  True, she thought with a sharp memory of Eric. What do I think I have to teach this man?

  “What happened?” Price asked.

  “I failed her,” O’Brien said simply. “I blame myself for that.”

  The reporter shifted in his chair. “A lot of marriages fail. It’s not always a question of fault.”

  “Not always. But in my case? Decidedly. I had lost the art of seeing, you understand. When it was most critical.”

  “What did you fail to see?” Caroline asked.

  “How unhappy I had made my family by my inattention. I enjoyed Leipzig, you know. Enjoyed the whole moveable feast. But my family was miserable.”

  “And that’s where Mlan came in?”

  O’Brien shrugged. “We met Mlan at the usual faculty parties. There was the advantage that he spoke English extremely well. Candace had no German. I do not know when he first began to worm his way into the heart of my home; I only know the result.”

  He fell silent, an expression of doubt flickering over his face; the old worry, again: that he might say too much.

  Caroline leaned toward him in appeal. “Professor, I’ve spent most of the past decade tracking 30 April. I know more about them, probably, than anyone else in the world. Nothing you can say will shock me. Nothing will surprise me very much. Did Mlan seduce your wife?”

  “Candace?” O’Brien smiled bitterly. “That man would never have looked twice at Candace. It was Adrienne he wanted. It was our daughter he destroyed.”

  Price was checking his messages now as he drove toward the Pennsylvania border, and Caroline’s coffee was gone. He tossed the small phone into her lap and said, “Whole world’s looking for you, missy. And they’ve all read my piece this morning with their Grape-Nuts. Good thing you got out of town. There’s talk of testimony on Capitol Hill.”

  She did not answer him. They were passing through the highway interchange for Wheeling, West Virginia, and she was thinking desperately of Shephard: Six people in Wheeling had been gunned down over their dinners yesterday, and the evening news buzzed with the sensational headlines that the FBI had bungled an arrest—and three agents had been blown to bits because of it. Details were closely held and she was hoping against hope that Shephard hadn’t been standing in that trailer in Hillsboro. But where else would he have been standing? It was the obvious choice. The white-shoe Fed’s logical conclusion. She’d jumped to it herself—and gone in the opposite direction.

  I should have called him, she thought, even if he’d blasted me to hell and back. I should have called and said good-bye. Oh, Tom—

  He had offered her something like trust all those weeks ago in Berlin, and she’d abused it unmercifully. He was honest and up-front, the kind of guy who defined that elusive word integrity. She’d valued his belief in her, the warmth she was terrified to call love. And failing in Tom’s eyes had shamed her.

  The desire to win him back—to be somebody Shephard could talk to and rely on—was one part of her compulsion to track down 30 April. She needed desperately to redeem herself. To make good, if it could be done. But old lies and Ricin Boy and a bomb in a West Virginia trailer had changed all that. She’d probably never hear Tom’s voice again.

  You could call Bureau Headquarters, she thought. Get somebody in Domestic Terrorism and ask for the victims’ names. Say you’re calling from Hank’s, in Long Island . . .

  But Steve Price brought her thoughts sharply back to the Porsche and the road, stilled her hand as it reached for the cell pho
ne in her purse.

  “Weird, isn’t it, to think of that girl and the big bad terrorist?” Price said conversationally. “Fucking Mommy and Daddy with her rebellion while she does the criminal genius on the side. Freud would have a field day.”

  It was a sordid little story Gerry O’Brien had poured out last night: how his daughter, a slight creature with enormous dark eyes behind her thick glasses and the frail, floating fingers of a poet, had fallen in love with science and destiny. She had a gift for research, Adrienne—something of her father’s native brilliance, although Gerry O’Brien simply called it intelligence when he spoke of himself. The girl had been mesmerized by Krucevic: by his message of genetic determination, of racial purity, of the refinement of the human strain to eradicate all that was mediocre. It was an old message—old as the campaigns to Sterilize the Unfit that had swept through the West at the turn of the last century, wizened as the Nazi dream—but to Adrienne it was a revelation. Genes determined eye color, femur length, the description of an earlobe; why was it incomprehensible that they should determine intelligence as well?

  “She fell under his thrall,” O’Brien had said, as though the girl had been taken body and soul into the realm of the Undead. “She could talk of nothing else. How her career path was formed. The search for what she called the Intelligence Gene. I thought it was all science. I didn’t understand he’d taken her until the baby began to show.”

  It was all comprehensible then: the sudden abandonment as Mlan returned to Yugoslavia and his own private war; the O’Briens’ hasty return to the United States; the disappearance of Adrienne from the divorce decree. By that time, O’Brien explained, she was living in a home for unwed mothers and had declared herself a ward of the state. She refused to recognize Candace and Gerry as her parents.

  “But why the divorce?” Steve Price had asked quietly. “What did this mess have to do with the two of you?”

  “I can see you’re not a parent,” the professor said simply. “If you were, that is a question you would never have to ask.”

  They were driving now toward the Allegheny Mountains and Rochester, Pennsylvania, because in the last few seconds before showing them the door Gerry O’Brien had given them Adrienne’s address.

  “She never gave up the child for adoption,” he told them. “I understand it was a boy. She lives in seclusion, in a sort of house attached to a laboratory; the recipient, I believe, of a MacArthur Fellowship. I suppose I ought to be proud. She has accomplished so much—”

  “How did you get her address,” Caroline interrupted, “if she cut all ties to you?”

  “My wife. She had it from Krucevic.” The mild blue eyes met Caroline’s bleakly. “I learned only a few months ago that the two of them had corresponded for years. I may add that it was one of the greatest shocks of my life.”

  Chapter 38

  CAMBRIDGE, OHIO, 8:05 A.M.

  Tom Shephard was only a few exits away from Caroline Carmichael as she swept past in Price’s fast car; but he was in no mood for spies or journalists and it was a good thing they missed each other. He’d spent the better part of the previous night watching Kaylie Marks pick body parts out of the blasted trailer with tweezers and trash bags while Julie Cohen’s husband, David, stood bent-backed under the klieg lights. Clutching his stomach as though it would not stop cramping. The stench of burnt flesh and sodden charred wood and plastique everywhere. Television vans filming the carnage. Demands for Tom to comment.

  He’d called in roadblocks all over the state and ordered surveillance at the Pennsylvania and Ohio borders, repeating the stolen Rac Transport truck’s vitals to every law enforcement body he could reach. He was convinced Daniel Becker had not been in the trailer when it blew sky-high; convinced it was Becker who’d shot up six people in Wheeling that same night. Kaylie Marks had told him the markings on the bullet taken from Norm Wilhelm’s limo door matched the one that had killed the medical technician at Arlington; it remained to be seen if the same gun had killed all the others.

  Just before three o’clock in the morning, Tom left the ravaged clearing that had once been the heart of a farm, kicking at stray pieces of play structure all the way to the flattened security fence. It was clear by then that Rebekah Becker had detonated the bomb, that Julie and Stan had been with her, and that Jason Bovian had been right behind them. Shephard had only known the kid a few days, but he’d liked him. Bovian was bright and dedicated; he had the endearing habit of bringing Tom the entire Hundred-Acre Wood whenever he asked for a twig.

  All those years in school, he thought now, remembering the kid’s Stanford MBA. His parents taking out loans. Proud of him. Shit.

  The parents lived on Staten Island; it was impossible for Tom to make the visit himself, walk up the pathetic concrete path to the storm door and wait while the sleep-fuddled father adjusted his glasses. Tom had called the head of the New York field office at home and told him to break the news. Then he’d slept for two hours in his car, setting the alarm on his sports watch. Waking every fifteen minutes in case one of the roadblocks had found the fucking bastard.

  The call came at 5:34 A.M.

  The truck was parked on a Cambridge, Ohio, backstreet, shit out of luck and empty.

  Tom threw his car into gear and raced for the state line.

  “So how’d the sonofabitch roar past all our people?” he demanded as he stood in the light rain two hours later. “How’d he drive this sucker till it was bone-dry and nobody—nobody—pulled him over?”

  “They’d have gotten a gun in the mouth if they had,” his companion answered laconically. “Stands to reason he slipped through the net. Doesn’t take more’n an hour to get here from Wheeling, where the truck was stolen. By the time you got the word and the heat out, guy was long gone.”

  Mackie Sterne was a captain in the Cambridge police force, a twenty-year veteran of the streets and a man who clearly had nothing but contempt for the federal agent who stood before him now. “You want us to take evidence outta the cab? Send it straight to the Bureau? Happy to help.”

  Tom shook his head. “I’ve already asked for a forensic team. I’m impounding the vehicle. Leave your yellow tape and a uniformed officer to guard it and I’ll guarantee we’ll take it off your hands in under two hours.”

  “Doesn’t solve your problem,” Sterne pointed out shrewdly. “Problem being, which way to head next. You got any idea where this creep with the sick kid has gone?”

  “Mackie, have any vehicles—car, motorcycle, ATV, baby carriage—been reported missing in Cambridge during the past eight hours?”

  “Thought of that,” the policeman replied with satisfaction. “Figured the truck was ripped off around dinnertime yesterday, gave it maybe two hours to hit Cambridge what with hugging the back roads, and started checking missing car reports as of eight P.M. last night. There’re only two. A little old lady’s low-mileage Buick, which she discovered gone at the crack of dawn. Turns out she’d left it parked in front of the house with the keys inside and the motor running and one of her neighbors very kindly moved the car up the drive and into the woman’s garage. End of story. Second car was reported twenty minutes later—snatched from the opposite end of town from where we’re standing, by the way. Found that one completely stripped and abandoned in the Wal-Mart parking lot.”

  So maybe Ricin Boy hadn’t stolen a car. Tom didn’t have to ask if any bodies had turned up with a single bullet to the brain; Sterne would’ve told him. He glanced around the quiet block of warehouses—all of them fronted with loading docks—where the killer he now thought of as Daniel Becker had chosen to abandon his Rac Transport. The district was perfect cover for a stray eighteen-wheeler. Tom was surprised anybody had noticed it.

  He didn’t walk, Shephard thought furiously, dragging the sick kid behind him. Is there a railroad track nearby? A freight they could have jumped?

  He began to pace down the alley, scanning the buildings on either side.

  “We’ve searched those warehouses,
” Sterne said impatiently.

  Eight or nine o’clock at night. He knows the roads are watched. Maybe he’s even seen a roadblock. Or heard some kind of bulletin on the truck’s radio. Dark. Rain coming down. Jozsef on his last legs. Where would he go? When all the world knows his face?

  At this hour—just after eight A.M.—the loading docks were finally coming to life, metal doors rocketing skyward and the first delivery van looming at the far end of the alley. A belch of smoke from a diesel exhaust pipe, somehow more pungent and acrid in the rain. Beyond it, nearly two blocks distant and behind a vacant lot that separated the warehouses from a busy freeway, a bus was heaving its cumbersome way into a turn.

  “There’s nothing down here,” Sterne insisted. “We need to go back to the station and check the computers.”

  “That’s it,” Tom said. He’d stopped short, his eyes narrowed. “That’s it, Mackie. Our boy’s gone Greyhound.”

  It was important to get to Pittsburgh because there was somebody Daniel knew near that city, somebody he could call if things got tough, but he refused to take the bus directly toward Pennsylvania because that meant a route through Wheeling again and Wheeling was a bad place for Daniel now. He’d kept the radio humming during that wretched hour and forty minutes of coaxing the big truck along roads never made for it, heading by sense and luck toward the farthest point his gas would take him. Buying more was out of the question.

  He’d had a lot of plans for what he’d do once the boy was riding shotgun—circle back toward Washington and pick off the head of the FBI at his house in Potomac, which Daniel had already cased; or drop some ricin in the D.C. water supply off Reservoir Road. Send a few more faxes claiming responsibility. There was even the plan for explosives in the Metro system, which he’d intended to detonate on an Orange line train while it traveled under the river from Foggy Bottom to Rosslyn; he figured it would be the toughest place to stage a rescue and casualties would be nice and high. Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite had changed all that. Daniel knew now that his picture was circulating, and he was spooked. It was Christmas Eve 1995 all over again, and a party with guns was waiting in the trees.