Blown (17 page)

Chapter 33

WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA, 7:00 P.M.

Cy Phillips had spent his weekday afternoons on the battered stool behind the counter of Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite for more years than he could remember. The big rigs that rumbled through Wheeling, West Virginia, on their way to the rest of the continent—chuffing off one mammoth interstate before diving into another—had always fascinated Cy, even when he was a boy growing up under Eisenhower, long before the octopus-tentacle roads had reached out to strangle his quiet town in noise and exhaust. He had a picture of himself in overalls, standing proudly on the step of his grandpappy’s cab, back when such rigs were called tractors. Grandpappy’s was bright red with an eagle taking wing across the hood; its sloping fenders reminded Cy of the curving hips of the bombers his dad had flown in the war. The colors of that photograph, his gap-toothed smile and Dennis the Menace grin, were bleached and almost indiscernible now, and his heart no longer beat faster when an eighteen-wheeler pulled into the asphalt lot beyond the door. He was sixty-one years old and the smell of fry-cookers and cigarette smoke was permanently embedded in his clothes and hair. He spent hours staring at the screen of a minuscule black-and-white television set he kept plugged in near the register.

Only three people were sitting in Sunny’s when Daniel Becker walked in out of the rain at seven o’clock that evening. This was unusual, because most of the haulers who made Wheeling their first stop on a transcontinental run had a fondness in their stomachs for Sunny’s. Cy’s cooking was old-fashioned and comforting. Beef pot pie and meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy. Deep-batter-fried chicken. Lemon meringue and chocolate silk pie. Sunny’s prided itself on its pie. It offered thirteen varieties on any given day. Some of the truckers rolling in from the west at five
A.M
. ate nothing but pie and coffee for breakfast, and it was Sunny’s they thought of during the long downhill run off the Appalachians. Maybe the empty seats around the curved counter could be chalked up to the new industry regulations the government had imposed—telling the most seasoned of drivers when and how they could break their runs. Or maybe it was Monday night football: haulers pushing through to Ohio so they could pull off at eight o’clock and catch at least part of the game in their sleeping lofts.

Regardless, Cy had already sent his Maureen out to fill Tab Lowar’s cup a third time with coffee and Minnie and Mort Jacobs were plowing steadily through their pies. Tab was flirting with Maureen outrageously—he had an eye for a pretty girl, and despite the fact she’d never quite lost the fat from the third kid, she had a nice head of hair on her and a good pair of pipes. Cy had already turned back to the news broadcast when the rusting bell over the door jangled.

Daniel didn’t speak to the boy during the first part of their drive. The kid was still groggy and confused by the sensation of the pickup truck wallowing through the rutted back roads of Hillsboro. Daniel was feeling groggy himself; the long two days of sleeplessness and tension—the chemical surge of death in his blood—had finally taken their toll. His eyes were red-rimmed and he had a permanent hack in his throat. There was a pain between his shoulder blades that felt like a slowly tightening wire, but the luck had held so far—the luck had held. He had to seize the singing current of this luck, the Leader sitting at his elbow, and drive on. He had to stay alert. He drummed his fingers restlessly on the steering wheel, and hummed a tuneless tune.

He had wound deliberately through the rolling farmland and isolated hillsides, familiar from endless days of childhood boredom, and stopped only once before the highway junction in Wheeling, just as the rainy dusk came down. The small plot of ground where he pulled up outside Charleston was shabby and painful in its ordinariness, the plastic nosegays from a convenience store stabbed into the damp sod.
ADOLF H. BECKER
, the carved letters read,
1990–1998
. He had stopped to whisper his love over this muddy hump in the ground not because he needed to remember the reasons for vengeance but because the boy in the backseat was ungrateful, and this failure troubled him.

“Who are you?” Jozsef had asked suddenly in a clear and undrugged voice from just behind his left ear. “Where are you taking me?”

He had tried to tell him, then, about his dedication to the Leader and the greatness of the Army the Leader’s Son was destined to rally—about the Glory of the End Times and the power of a blow struck against the Devil’s Spawn—but the boy had stared at him blankly from fathomless black eyes. Daniel had no idea whether Jozsef understood what he was saying. Some kind of intelligence moved in that fragile head, of this Daniel was certain, and the boy’s mastery of English seemed broad enough. But no comprehension—no joy at the liberation—came through the boy’s expression. Daniel almost thought he saw fear in Jozsef’s face.

“Why did you take me?” Jozsef repeated.

“We delivered you from that nest of godless Zoggites they call the Federal Government because we knew your daddy woulda sooner died than seen you paraded for the cameras at that Jew whore’s funeral,” Daniel shot back. “Seems to me you ought to be down on your knees thanking us, boy, for everything we done. That place was crawling with police and federal agents. We
all
coulda been killed.”

“Like the woman you shot in the ambulance.”

Daniel did not reply.

“What happened to my driver?”

It was a natural question—but at the memory of Norm, at the raw terror that flickered briefly from his brother-in-law’s kindly eyes as Daniel pressed the .32’s muzzle against his skull, a small fire blazed in Daniel’s brain. Norm had died a soldier’s death. A patriot’s sacrifice. Daniel had merely been the Instrument.

“What we did, we did for your father,” he told the Accuser in the backseat. “I can tell you one thing, boy: He’d have shot you himself rather than seen the fool you made, sitting up there next to the President.”

When he stopped at Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite, it was in the hope that this faceless parking space off the thundering highway would temporarily shield him, absorb him as it did all the hapless wanderers in need of coffee and a warm meal. Jozsef had said nothing directly to him in the past half hour, but from the pallor of the boy’s face Daniel guessed he was hungry. The last bite he’d taken himself was from a packet of five-year-old military rations, desiccated and foul-tasting, just before dawn. More than twelve hours ago.

He would have liked to be able to trust Jozsef, but that was impossible. The boy had no faith, no gratitude for what Daniel had risked to save him. Daniel could hardly walk him into the truck stop, where anybody at all might hear what the boy had to say, so he left Jozsef bound and gagged in the pickup’s cab while he fetched the grub.

He stopped short just inside the heavy glass door, the bell still jangling, and glanced around the restaurant. Three people finishing up, a waitress with a good bit of flesh on her bones, the old man behind the counter.

“Evenin’,” he said curtly. “I’d like some food to go.”

The old guy handed him a menu without even glancing at his face, eyes fixed on the television in front of him. “What is this world coming to?” he asked of nobody in particular. “Those police in Washington just
sleeping
? All those folks sick and dying, and now this joker’s snatched some kid. Makes you sick, dudn’t it?”

Daniel’s fingers felt like wood as he opened the menu and the typeface—luridly orange—wavered before his eyes. He could feel the dull thud of anger surge in his blood—
Who is this fucker dumb as a stump with a gut big as Christmas to talk so loud about what he don’t understand? Sweet Jesus the trials I been through and all for the love of You—

“Fried chicken’s good,” the man suggested helpfully, eyes still on the screen.

“Cy, them two want a slice each to go,” the waitress chirped as she bounced up to the register with a twenty-dollar bill flapping between her long crimson fingernails. “They said as how I could keep the change. Man oh man, is that an evil-lookin’ sonofabitch or what?”

They were staring at the television screen, mouths open and avid, and in that instant Daniel understood. He dropped the menu to the floor and reached for the gun cradled in his shoulder holster, drawing it so quietly and so swiftly that by the time Cy and his waitress glanced up, directly into the face of the killer they’d just imprinted on their brains, there was only a second’s fraction of appalled recognition before he let both of them have it full in the chest.

After that it was like shooting trout in a barrel to round up the other three.

He took the twenty bucks from the fat girl’s hand and a whole cherry pie he found in the refrigerated case.

Chapter 34

WASHINGTON, D.C., 7:12 P.M.

Candace O’Brien had lived since her divorce in that leafy section of town that falls somewhere between the eastern half of Georgetown and the western edge of Dupont Circle and that is called, depending upon the taste of the resident, by either name. It is bounded to the north by Embassy Row; but Candace had turned her back on Massachusetts Avenue tonight. She had no desire to walk anywhere in the direction of the Naval Observatory, the white-porched and turreted confection that had briefly been Sophie Payne’s home. Candace had passed some very pleasant and hectic months in the mellow paneled library that served as her office, with its gentle view of sloping lawns and distant traffic. But she’d quit her job as Sophie Payne’s appointments secretary the day the news broke that the vice president had been murdered. She had already collected her few things from her borrowed desk.

The great house would be floodlit tonight like the crime scene it was; she did not wish to see it again.

She was killing time this evening, walking despite the wet night and the fall of darkness, her solitude drawing her to the end-of-workday bustle on Connecticut Avenue. She considered browsing among the new offerings at her favorite bookshop or searching for a fast and dirty dinner at the local gourmet caterer. But she had no appetite, and fictional escapes couldn’t help her. So she wandered aimlessly, her face damp and her hands plunged into her pockets, avoiding the gaze of passersby with that perfect fixation on the middle distance that is an art among urban dwellers.

For days Candace had been gripped by indecision. Should she remain here in Washington, where life was extinct? It was the town she’d always chosen for other people’s reasons—first Gerry, who’d set her up as an academic’s wife in those long-ago years of the 1970s—and then Sophie, who’d become her friend despite her best efforts to remain at a careful distance, and whose consuming life of constant exposure and glittering celebrity had seemed, for a while, like Candace’s own. As keeper of the social books, she’d walked in spirit with Sophie to those state dinners, those cocktail parties on P Street, those meetings with Italian prime ministers and heads of international agencies. But Sophie was dead. All the elegant clothes she had amassed in private fittings with Candace’s help hung like cast skins in her darkened closet. Poor Peter, Sophie’s son, had not known what to do with all those clothes; he’d asked Candace for help, but she turned him over to Conchita the maid; she’d refused to watch while they packed the boxes for homeless shelters.

She ought to go away—find a house in a remote corner or establish herself on a prolonged vacation in the south of France. Such things sounded reasonable for women as lonely as herself who attempted, among the pages of Anita Brookner, to conduct lives of meaning; but Candace could not summon their kind of resignation. She was waiting for the conclusion of the disaster. She had been waiting ever since the day Sophie disappeared from Berlin.

I was told to call you if I needed help.

Jozsef’s words over the telephone line in the wee hours of the morning had seemed, for all their youth and faintness, like the voice of Judgment.

They’re letting me go to the funeral. Will you be there, Mrs. O’Brien?

Candace had lied and said she’d look for him—would introduce herself—but she’d been unable to face the high Episcopal rites in the National Cathedral, the words of tribute and sadness that could never encompass Sophie Payne’s life. She’d been unable to look this son of Mlan Krucevic in the eye. Instead, she’d sat at home while all the hours of mourning and interment sped away. Only twenty-three minutes ago did she learn that the boy had never made it back to his hospital bed.

Had she failed him as completely as she’d failed Sophie?

Candace saw now with surprise that her footsteps had carried her in a great circle, past the Phillips Collection and the Metro stops and the diagonal thrust of New Hampshire Avenue. She turned reluctantly down her own brief block and reached for the keys she kept in her pocket.

There was someone waiting in the rain at the top of her town house steps—an absurd figure in high heels, with overly protuberant breasts, a mop of auburn hair swinging pertly around the chin.
Obvious,
she thought wearily.
Screaming her sex from the rooftops. Can men really be so stupid?

The woman would be the latest acquisition of the attorney who owned the town house’s ground floor. Candace braced herself to slide past as the visitor stabbed aggressively at the front buzzer; but to her surprise, the figure turned to study her intently as she approached.

In sudden apprehension, her breath caught in her throat, Candace kept walking down the street.

“Something happened in Leipzig,” Caroline muttered in frustration. “Something that gave 30 April a hold over her.”

For the past hour, she’d paced the floor of Price’s living room spilling her guts while he worked his magic. By six o’clock that evening, he had enough copy to fill the front page of the
Washington Post—
and a name to go with the phone number Jozsef had dialed at two o’clock Monday morning.

Candace O’Brien. The dead vice president’s friend and appointments secretary.

Caroline was tracking a whisper and a doubt now through a labyrinth of years, searching for the moment when Candace O’Brien turned traitor. She’d made considerable progress, mostly because she’d seized whatever help Steve Price offered: calls to Georgetown University and off-the-record access to Gerry O’Brien’s professional files; unofficial soundings of the social elite who’d observed Candace in action under Sophie Payne; an after-hours chat with the chairwoman of a local Smith College alumnae group, where Candace was respected but not well known.
Never well known.
The woman was visible and invisible at once: a surface calm hiding a turbulent depth.

“You’re convinced it wasn’t just a social call?” Price asked. “You really think this broad’s tied to Jozsef Krucevic?”

“Social calls don’t happen at two
A.M.
”

“He’s a kid. Maybe he couldn’t sleep.”

“Then he’d have rung the nurse down the hall,” Caroline retorted. “Come on, Steve! The kid’s never set foot in the U.S.—and he has this woman’s number memorized? His father gave it to him. Made sure he could recite it down to the last digit. It was Jozsef’s safety net. In case Mlan couldn’t be there to help him.”

“Sounds far-fetched to me. Maybe the kid dialed a random number and came up with Candace.”

“Nothing about 30 April is random,” Caroline countered tersely. “Ask Norm Wilhelm.” She went back to scrolling through Eric’s bootlegged files.

There was a time when Candace O’Brien and Mlan Krucevic—Jozsef’s father—lived within a mile of each other. Leipzig, Germany, 1990 to 1991. Gerry O’Brien had served as a visiting professor of molecular biology to this distinguished institution of the fallen German Democratic Republic, only ten months removed from its status as a satellite Soviet power and falling over itself to embrace the capitalist intelligentsia.

Mlan Krucevic was a holdover of the past: a Yugoslav scientist, brilliant, to be sure, and good enough for the Communist era, but possibly eclipsed by the dazzle from the West. Gerry O’Brien emerged from Price’s hurried notes as a likeable fellow: charming, less introverted than one might imagine of a laboratory researcher, glad to undertake the role of academic ambassador in this Brave New World.

Krucevic, Caroline decided, would have gravitated to Gerry and his wife. They represented what he most coveted: superpower status, an easy assumption of world dominion, and the despicably egalitarian approach to culture and education Krucevic despised. He would have learned from the O’Briens, cultivated their interest, used them in any way possible. And then, without warning, the connection was severed.

In March of 1991, Gerry O’Brien and his wife returned home to Georgetown. A year and two months before the end of their funded stint in Leipzig, Krucevic had abruptly disappeared.

“The breakup of Yugoslavia,” Caroline muttered, scanning her laptop’s screen. “The beginning of war between the Serbs and the Croatians. Mlan heads home and takes command of a bunch of guerrillas. Two years later he’s running a prison camp in Bosnia. By the end of the decade he’s indicted for war crimes, and 30 April is born.”

“The O’Briens left when he did?” Price asked.

“Six weeks later.”

“Maybe it was an affair,” he suggested in the voice of experience. “Candace and the lady-killer. Mlan carved a wide swath among the women, didn’t he? Husband finds out, decides to run home, and divorces her . . . a bare eight months later. You notice the dates?”

Caroline had noticed the dates. A decree granted by the District of Columbia in November 1991.

“So she did it for love?” she murmured skeptically.

“Violence can be very seductive. It’s a power thing.”

“If you say so. Who got the kid?”

“Jozsef? He’d have been a toddler in ’91.”

Caroline shook her head. “Krucevic was still married then, and Jozsef was with his mother. I’m talking about the O’Brien girl—a daughter. Fifteen when they lived in Germany. I don’t see any custody provisions here.”

Price frowned. “Nobody I’ve talked to has mentioned her. She can’t have lived with Candace for
years
. And besides—she’d be all grown up now.”

“Yes,” Caroline mused thoughtfully, “if she survived. I think we should visit Ms. O’Brien, don’t you?”