Blown (22 page)

Chapter 42

BERLIN, 2:15 P.M.

While Cuddy had stood in miserable silence on the periphery of Scottie’s charmed circle that afternoon, Raphael Alighieri, Master Deceiver and Compacter with the Devil, spent two hours and twelve minutes dialing his way through a list of Berlin hotels. In passable German he asked each person who answered whether he could speak to a guest named Mary Devlin. At the first seventy-three attempts he came up short. Mary was a tough old bitch to find, and he was almost ready to believe she wasn’t in Berlin at all, though the tickets Scottie had procured for his contractor had dropped her at Tegel that morning just like themselves.

Maybe she’s staying with friends,
he thought,
the cocksucking old ass-wipe.

Raphael had tracked Scottie’s spoor through his trusted proxies, Betty and Alice, and he knew a great deal about Mary Devlin. He had a copy of her picture and the cover job Scottie had chosen. He had the itinerary the woman had followed, landing first in Frankfurt and connecting to Berlin. Only the hotel was a blank. That and the reason Scottie had recruited her.

Mary Devlin worried Raphael. She was part of a pattern, ill-defined but recognizable, of Scottie’s maverick ops—the ones he held close to his chest and kept off the Agency books as he always had, the most deadly kinds of deceptions, shared with none but their victims. Raphael was fascinated by Mary, with her broad Irish face and her coarse skin and the lank red hair that she obviously struggled to control in an elegant manner. Her photograph showed her as common as a Dublin fishwife, and as enduring.

“Get me her real name,” he’d snapped at Betty when she’d reached him at the Adlon. “Get me her background, for fuck’s sake. She’s got to be somebody he knows. Scottie wanders, but he never wanders far off the Farm. There have
got
to be records on this woman.”

Betty had hemmed and hawed and promised to resurrect Christ if he’d give her half an hour; and Raphael had gone back to his steady Germanic dialing.

On the ninety-sixth call, to a little hotel called the Kurfürstendammer Hof, the receptionist paused when he stated the name, then said: “I’ll put you through.”

Raphael hung up before the first buzz sounded, rubbing his hands in satisfaction. Mary Devlin, Kurfürstendammer Hof, was his for the taking. He had a compelling desire to sniff inside her drawers.

When writers of spy fiction dreamed up lethal assassins, they inevitably portrayed them as ruthless loners. Men who lived in isolated chalets in glamorous Swiss resorts, whose vast sums of blood money paid for frequent plastic surgery. Men who hid out in private coves along the Maltese coast or who moved their yachts from port to port. Men who used sex as a safety valve and who killed without remorse. Men who were damaged.

Men.
Never the local fishmonger with grandsons and a numbered account. Never Josie O’Halloran of South Boston and Beirut and Manhattanville ’64.

It’s our little joke, Patrick me love,
Josie thought as she made her deliberate way toward the St.-Elisabeth Stift on Eberswalderstrasse.
Our little joke and six million in the bank over the past twelve years. That’s one thing you left me—the wit and the balls to earn my bread.

There had been a time when Bill Harvey, who’d run the cryptanalysts of Staff D and a motley agglomeration of Second-Story Men on the side, had been called in to help with a smattering of assassinations. These were the Company’s glory days, the late fifties and early sixties, when Camelot was ascendant and the dictators of left and right were so many pieces on the post–World War II chessboard, waiting to be taken. Patrice Lumumba, butcher of the Congo. Rafael Trujillo, who threw his enemies to the sharks or hung them by meat hooks in the Dominican Republic. Fidel Castro, who had the audacity to kick big business out of Cuba and alienated half the Miami mob in the process. They had all been in the CIA’s sights during the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, back when Khrushchev was a threat and the deadly flower of Vietnam was only half blown.

The attempts at murder were ineffectual and slapdash. Unwilling to get its hands dirty, the Agency recruited the underworld as proxy killers. All the fumbling half-assed mistakes were exposed a decade later, when Josie’s Patrick was long dead and the conversations he’d held over casual barbecues, the murderous quid pro quos, seemed ludicrously naÏve. Nobody had been hurt except the Great White Fathers of American Intelligence, who stood before the Church Commission with their pants puddled around their ankles. Josie was living in Athens then, buying Scottie’s Number Two her extravagant Christmas and anniversary presents, hustling little Sheila to the American school each morning. She hadn’t given a damn what Congress thought of assassination. It was all a question of deniability. Of getting the baddies before they got us first. She was bored by the semantics and the pussyfooting around. Sometimes a gun to the head was a blessing in disguise.

You could write your own ticket, Josie darling,
Scottie had said after her retirement lunch in 1988.
Just be discreet. Use your cover. Use your tradecraft. You’re an independent contractor with a lifetime of training. It works for all the old friends shoved out the door.

She’d bought a Bushmaster first, then a Czech CZ, and most recently the Austrian Steyr, which was light and easy to manipulate in a woman’s hands. She could carry it, broken down, in a capacious kilim-covered carpetbag that suited her shambling form. She was carrying that bag now, tucked next to a box of chocolates and a basket of fruit and a couple of paperbacks, as she turned into the medical clinic. Her nap had refreshed her. She was blithe as a spring chicken. It was possible she would spend a few well-earned days in Paris after the job was done. All that remained was to scout out the proper killing ground, then head back to Ku’damm for a hearty meal.

“Did I tell you the Prick tried to hit on me in the first-class bar on the flight over?” Raphael inquired as Cuddy sank into the luxurious sofa that dominated one end of the Adlon’s Room 419. “God’s truth. Bought me a Cosmopolitan—which naturally Bambi loves but I had to
choke
down—and ran his fingertips along my thigh while he talked of his world travels. Told me he was an executive flying in to do a deal with Siemens. Pathetic old fart. That wife of his is hardly thirty, and already he’s searching for Number Four.”

“No, no,” Cuddy corrected as he rolled his sleeves to the elbow. His jet lag was becoming manageable now. “Bambi’s good for a quick fuck in the lav, but never a candidate for Number Four. Number Four is going to bring millions. She’ll have to.”

“Bambi’s
very
expensive,” Raphael protested, hurt.

“So is Scottie.”

The Prince of Darkness was back in form, black-clad and blasé as he lounged with a glass of Grey Goose. The drapes were drawn against the gray wet afternoon and a CD was playing softly; Cecilia Bartoli, Cuddy thought, singing something that sounded like Vivaldi. He caught the word
sangue
repeated with violence in her liquid throat:
blood
. Raphael’s equivalent of a fight song.

Cuddy reached for a minibar beer and struggled with the bottle opener. The blood looked like being Eric’s and Cuddy’s and all the good guys’ and he wanted very much to get drunk.

Raphael’s hair was tied at the nape this afternoon and he was wearing a pair of narrow, boxy spectacles that lent him an instant Euro cachet. He looked, Cuddy thought, positively German. Tomorrow he’d probably be French.

“Did you see him?” he asked Cuddy.

“Yes. They keep him cuffed—ankles manacled—and run two prison guards outside the door. Scottie puts the questions and Eric avoids the answers. Scottie offered twenty-to-life for a complete confession and state’s evidence. Eric went for Scottie’s throat.”

Raphael sipped the Grey Goose, his gaze that of a twelfth-century contemplative. “So he hasn’t given up.”

“Not yet. Scottie’s got the scratches to prove it.”

“Good. Did the Prick bite back?”

“He slapped Eric’s wrist and left in a huff. We’re supposed to revisit the whole thing tonight—Scottie can’t go home empty-handed. His future depends on polishing Rinehart’s butt.”

Raphael reached for a folded map of Berlin and spread it open on the coffee table. He had highlighted several roads in different Day-Glo colors: blue, pink, and yellow.

“Here’s the secret cell block where our boy’s being held,” he said, “and here’s the location of the safe house. Correct?”

“You knew that?”

“Talked to Wally. Wally’s a bud from way back. Here are the three main routes one could take from the Grunewald to Eberswalderstrasse. Notice they all converge right here.”

He laid one almond-shaped fingernail on an intersection where blue, pink, and yellow paths met. “At the Pankow U-Bahn station,” Cuddy said. “And? Your point is?”

“This is where we’ll stage our rescue.” Raphael sat back and smiled triumphantly. “The prison van carrying Eric
has
to take one of these routes back to St.-Elisabeth’s tomorrow. It doesn’t matter which. They all debouch at the same point, a block from the hospital. That’s where we’ll magic him out of the van.”

“How?”

Raphael reached for a graphite-colored pen lying innocently on the hotel desk next to his laptop. The music, Cuddy realized suddenly, was coming from the computer. The Vivaldi had given way to Mozart; fanciful and childlike after the bitter dregs of revenge.

“I’ve told Wally to visit Eric before he’s taken from his cell tonight. Urge him to sign the Prick’s confession. When he reaches for a pen in that safe house, give the boy
this
.”

Cuddy held it before his weak eyes. An unexceptionable gray barrel, a medium blue plastic clip for securing the thing to a pocket flap. But Raphael’s toys were never unexceptionable. “What’s it do?”

“Click it once, you sign your name. Click it twice, it’s a high-powered laser capable of cutting through steel.”

Cuddy had an image of Eric confined in his rolling van, waiting for the doors to open on freedom. The pen in his cupped fingers slowly burning through metal.

“And if the truck hits a pothole?”

“He loses a finger.” Raphael shrugged indolently. “He’s got steady hands. Or did. The best lock-picker I’ve ever schooled.” He reached for his vodka bottle. “Cheers.”

Chapter 43

ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA, 9:53 A.M.

He was down to the fundamentals now, down to the echoing tile in the public bathroom and the humid scent of the boy’s unwashed skin as he slumped against Daniel’s shoulder. Down to the last hundred bucks and the dry mouth and the constant thrum of his pulse in his own ears; down to the cramped certainty of the gun lying potent against his chest. Down to the last leg of the journey.

They’d hopped the 9:40
P
.
M
. bus to Cleveland last night, sitting way in the back as darkness and peace enfolded them. Few people talked on this graveyard run toward the Great Lakes, and the words they shared were muffled by the high-backed seats. Daniel had kept his fingers locked on the boy’s wrist but it hadn’t really mattered in the end; Jozsef had fallen heavily asleep, his cheeks flushed, before the bus even stopped at Akron.

That’d been a bad time for Daniel, when the buffering ranks of passengers ranged between himself and the hunting world shifted like wheat under a spring wind, some filing off, new bodies taking their places. A situation in flux was a dangerous situation: He’d felt his fingers twitch, longing to pull his gun and freeze them all to silence. The bus driver had looked hard at Daniel, the only man who’d spurned this chance to stretch his legs and use the facilities, the clock ticking close to midnight; but bus drivers were used to eccentricity and a rampant desire for privacy and he’d probably figured Daniel was unwilling to disturb the sleeping kid. When the bus at last drove on to Cleveland, his insomniac brain was jumping.

Northern Ohio at two o’clock in the morning, the Rust Belt rain harsh and without pity. The next bus to Erie would not board for four and a half hours. He’d kept Jozsef hunkered at his feet in the claustrophobic night, the two of them outside in the raw darkness, Daniel alert as a sentry with his legs straddling the boy’s drooping head. Jozsef grew hotter as the night grew colder and the breath in his throat rattled painfully. He slipped in and out of dreams or fever. There’d been something about the boy being sick, Daniel remembered, and the doctors at Bethesda Naval trying hard to crack his disease; but Daniel had been certain that was behind them when he put his gun to Norm Wilhelm’s head. The idea that maybe Jozsef needed medicine—needed a hospital bed and a nurse—had never struck him before. It was out of the question anyway.

All tuckered out,
he told the driver as he lifted the boy onto the Erie bus.
Shame to make him travel this time of the morning.

But now as they waited for the ride to Pittsburgh Daniel’s anxiety was spiking. The boy’s eyes would not stay open and his head lolled like a drunk’s. Daniel kept a paper cup of tap water trained against Jozsef’s lips and forced him to drink, the water dribbling down his shirt like a baby’s. Ten o’clock in the morning. The next bus maybe twenty minutes away.
Jesus Christ kid don’t fail me now. We got to keep goin’, keep serpentining under the crossfire, if yer movin’ the bullets just sing over yer head, know what I mean?
When he pulled the cup away at last, a pink ribbon of bloody spit clung to the boy’s lip.

He put his arm around Jozsef, propping him up, and kept his eyes stonily on the clock. The station’s ticket window had opened three minutes before, and the gray-haired black woman behind the counter fingered her dangling spectacles where they lay on her broad chest. Her lips were moving slightly and she held a piece of fax paper in her hand. A line was forming for tickets and people were shifting restlessly as the woman scanned her painful way through the text. Then she looked up sharply and studied the faces assembled before her, one by one. Leaned forward to stare into the waiting room.

Daniel’s eyes met hers without intending it, a failure caused in part by the clinging weight of the sick boy and the mesmeric ticking of the clock’s second hand and the exhaustion that welled like floodwater through his brain. He saw the woman’s eyes widen as she looked and saw her turn hastily away, as though searching for help or a phone or a button she could push, and that quickly he’d risen to his feet and screamed,
“Don’t move you hear me?”

The cry cut the morning in half. Nothing routine, now, from the startled gape of the waiting passengers—were there ten? fifteen?—to the gun gleaming dully in his reaching hand. He could not remember whether he’d reloaded after Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite. Six bullets then. Nothing since. Had he left the extra magazine in the cab of the stolen truck, all the way back through the nightmare hours of Cambridge? Or was it sitting in the duffel bag at his feet?

A toddler started to wail—red hair dangling to her shoulders, thighs sweet as sausages in her dirty white tights—and the mother, an obese young woman with acne and a pierced navel, slapped a hand over the little girl’s mouth. What was the black bitch with her finger on the button fixin’ to do?

“Everybody down!” Daniel barked. “Everybody down with your hands out flat on the floor where I can see ’em.
Move it.
”

They fell like dominoes, heads plastered to the stained linoleum. He skirted their bodies and fired without aiming through the glass window, shattering it completely. There was a cry but he ignored it as he ran to the station entrance, throwing the bolts to lock the doors.
Nobody leaves,
he thought frantically,
nobody in or out. Choke points. Command and control.

One of the people lying on the floor—a guy in jeans and a leather jacket with a redneck beard scraggling all the way to his belt—shifted and turned his head to stare at Daniel. His hands were thrust against the linoleum like he was doing push-ups or thinking about a spring for Daniel’s neck, and that quickly Daniel pointed the gun and fired again. The man sagged and flattened.

“Anybody else moves,” Daniel said calmly, “they die like Rambo there. Understand?”

A sob came from somewhere. He kicked open one restroom door and snaked his gun inside.
Nothing.
Nobody. He did the same to the other one. All quiet on the Western Front. The ticket seller was lying flat on her back, eyes on the ceiling, a can of Mace clutched in her hand.

He knew now that he’d remembered to reload, that the gun was potent and hot and victory just a few hours away. He glanced at Jozsef. The kid was sprawled on his hard plastic bench, not as dead to the world as the two Daniel had just shot. They would wait for a bus and driver to pull in to the terminal and then make their getaway. He had the situation, Daniel thought, well in hand.

“Erie,” Tom Shephard told Mackie Sterne as he cut off the call from Headquarters. “Gunshots fired in the Greyhound terminal and hostages inside. Police in a cordon and talk of a S.W.A.T. team. Can you find me a helicopter, Mackie?”

“I s’pose I could,” the police captain said grudgingly. “Told you there’d be a bloodbath.”

“That was always true,” Shephard replied. “A few bodies today instead of hundreds tomorrow. Somebody had to make the choice.”