Blown (27 page)

Chapter 54

ROCHESTER, PENNSYLVANIA, 1:21 P.M.

When Adrienne had gone, shooting like an arrow toward the rooms at the rear of the house, Caroline opened her eyes. Though her right arm hurt like hell and she didn’t want to think about what her nose might look like, she was no longer groggy. The effects of the thiopental sodium were wearing off. Price had gone for the laptop. Adrienne had left her alone. She would have only seconds.

Wrists and ankles bound, she thrust herself painfully to a standing position, wavering drunkenly under the last dregs of sedative. She remembered the scalpel in Price’s hand, the severing of her left sleeve. There were knives somewhere. She had to find one.

. . . under the sterilizing lights.

She glanced wildly around. Voices from the hallway, a child’s flat words, adamant but emotionless. Adrienne more urgent. Thudding footsteps.

The lab.
Where was Price?

She stumbled toward the light, desperate to reach it. Saw the steel lancets and blades glinting wickedly in the heated glow. Her hands were bound behind her, the fingers wooden and bloodless; she was too clumsy. She turned her back on the tray full of instruments, scrabbling. She would have to hold whatever she caught blade-down, pray the surface was sharp enough to slice strapping tape.

Ignoring the clutch of panic at her throat, she reached for an instrument and sliced the pad of her pinkie. The bloody scalpel slithered from her hand and clattered to the floor.

Fuck.

The sound of a car door slamming. Price and the laptop. The boy’s voice rising, now, in a cry of protest; Adrienne barked an order. Caroline clutched again, uncaring whether her fingers bled. Found the handle of a lancet. Shoved it ruthlessly at her own wrists, hands straining. The upper edge of the tape, wound maybe three times around, parted slightly; she felt the tension give.
Come on.
She hacked with awkward fingers, the blade slipping, turning sideways.
Come on, come on
—

“I want you in the Jeep in three minutes,” Adrienne’s voice said harshly, nearer now; and Caroline thought:
I spooked her. She’ll kill me before she goes.

As the woman appeared in the doorway Caroline dropped soundlessly to the floor, gripping the knife, her body only partially screened by the lab table. The empty chair where she’d been sitting brutally obvious. The only sound from Adrienne was an indrawn breath, sharp as a gunshot; then a stillness more terrifying.

The tape at her wrists parted. She stabbed at the bond around her ankles.

Where’s Adrienne’s Jeep? The door to the garage?
She’d seen nothing of the place; she couldn’t navigate it. Price lay waiting somewhere beyond the only exit she knew. No help outside, anyway; no salvation. She was in the middle of the woods and miles from any neighbor. The keys to Price’s Porsche were in his back pocket.

The panic flooded her body now, but she cut through the last of the tape and soundlessly eased her ankles apart.
Where’s Adrienne?
She clutched the lancet in her left hand—the right was useless—and twisted toward the lab table. It was a solid island of wood laminate shelves, used for storing beakers and tubes, microscope slides and titrating equipment, most of it glass. Through the spacing of the shelves she could just glimpse the doorway where Adrienne had stood. It was empty.

She glanced to the left and almost fell backward.

A boy stood five feet away, staring at her curiously.

“Mama,” he called. “Who’s the lady?”

Caroline rolled toward him across the concrete floor. Adrienne shouted
Misha
and sprang, but Caroline reached him first, her arm coming up around his neck with the scalpel poised next to the little-boy skin, the vulnerable softness below the left ear and the jugular pumping steadily beneath it.

Misha began to scream, a thin high-pitched sound like the whistling of a tea kettle. He did not struggle in her grip; instead, he seemed to collapse inward, as though everything that was vital about him shrank away from her touch.
I’m so sorry,
she thought.
So sorry.

Adrienne had a gun trained on Caroline—brought from whatever hole she’d sought when she disappeared through the doorway—but it was shaking in her hand and her gaze was locked on her son.

“He can’t stand it,” she said, agonized. “He can’t stand to be touched! Let him go—”

“Drop the gun,” Caroline said. “Drop it or he dies.”

“You wouldn’t,” Adrienne whispered. “He’s just a kid.”

“He’s Mlan’s kid,” she retorted brutally, “and you know what I did to
him
.”

Adrienne’s eyes slid to something behind Caroline’s back—
searching for Price,
she thought—and then her finger snaked forward and released the gun’s safety.
Click.
The muzzle still wavered.

“You’ll kill your son with that aim,” Caroline said casually. Her ears were straining for the slightest noise of the man who should be running through the outer door. The steel scalpel felt warm and plastic in her grasp.

She tightened her hold on Misha’s fragile neck and the inhuman scream shifted a notch higher. His hands reached spasmodically toward his mother, fingers rigid.

“Drop the gun,” Caroline warned.

The muzzle jerked sideways as it fired, the bullet singing wildly. A metallic
ping!
as it ricocheted off a steel shelf, the crash of shivered glass. Caroline threw Misha to the floor, her mouth open in a guttural yell, but Adrienne sank down as though wounded herself. The gun slipped from her hand.

Caroline rocked slightly on her feet, the knife blade glued to her sweating fingers. The bullet had buried itself in a wall behind her, but she was shaking from adrenaline and torn nerves.
Where the fuck is Price?

“Slide the gun across the floor,” she barked hoarsely. “
Slide
it, you understand?”

Adrienne obeyed her. She swayed forward in a heap and thrust the cold steel object across the concrete.

Her right arm screaming, Caroline somehow managed to clutch the thing as it skittered past. Then she released the boy and rose, gun leveled.

He stood between the two of them, and Adrienne stretched out one hand to her son, hands clutching his elbows, frame rocking wildly. Adrienne stumbled to her feet, as though some cord that bound the boy’s sanity might snap if she wasn’t careful.

“Mama, who’s the lady?” he muttered.

The front door banged open.

Price,
Caroline thought.
Back to spin the truth.

She wheeled, weapon raised, steeling herself for one last effort before she died.

But it was Tom Shephard who stood in the doorway, weapon hand extended, all his rage and love in his face.

Epilogue

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

It took her two days to summon the energy to go back to the Tysons Marriott, pay her bill, and retrieve her things.

There had been duties enough in the intervening forty-eight hours. The statement she gave to Tom Shephard’s guys about Steve Price and Adrienne O’Brien; the meeting with Cory Rinehart and the presentation of Eric’s bootleg CD-ROM filled with the vital information Scottie Sorensen had chosen to destroy; the awkward three hours with a polygrapher while Rinehart checked and double-checked the accuracy of the story she had to tell. He’d preferred Scottie’s, there was no question, but the murder of the CTC chief in Berlin and Cuddy’s firm avowal of all that had led up to it, delivered in front of the Deputy Director for Operations and the staff of the Inspector General, were facts that could not be ignored by a temporary DCI hoping for permanent appointment. Rinehart caved and ordered Caroline and Cuddy to cooperate fully with the Congressional investigative panel about to be assembled by the Speaker of the House, George Enfield.

By Thanksgiving Day, however, it was clear that nothing further would be demanded of her until Monday and that she could take the long weekend to heal.
Heal.
Her wounded arm was stiff and her heart was aching, because nothing she’d done in the past week had prevented the disaster she’d been dreading.
Eric is gone.
Cuddy had watched him die, felt his blood on his fingertips, seen the ambulance arrive with its sonic two-toned beat cutting the Berlin night.
Raphael says it was an organized hit,
he’d told her.
Probably paid for by Scottie. We’ll never know.

She stopped by Bethesda Naval and kissed Jozsef’s forehead as he lay near his intravenous feed. Tom Shephard was sitting at the boy’s bedside. She had been avoiding dealing with Tom for most of the past day. She could not get the image of Tom’s face out of her mind—his face as it had looked in Adrienne O’Brien’s laboratory. Almost inhuman. He had stood over the woman and her boy, gun raised and arm shaking with the violence of what he’d done, Steve Price dead on the driveway outside and now these two in his power. For an instant Caroline had been terrified the gun would go off and blast Misha’s head to smithereens. Urgently, she’d said, “Tom.
Tom.
It’s okay. I’m
okay . . .
” and then the rest of his team had filed into the room and the moment of terror had passed.

The rage and exhaustion were gone from Shephard’s face now, but his eyes were no less haunted. When he looked at her, Caroline saw a raft of questions she had no energy to answer. He knew that Eric was gone.

She chatted instead with the boy in the hospital bed about the tradition of Thanksgiving, the origins of turkey, what it meant to be a Pilgrim—things Jozsef would rather discuss than the details of his kidnapping and the death that had found Daniel Becker on the Greyhound bus station floor. When eventually she rose to leave, she clasped the boy’s hand in hers.

“I’ll drop my phone number at the nurses’ station, okay? In case you need somebody to talk to in the middle of the night.”

He glanced up at her swiftly; the dark eyes were impossible to read. “It doesn’t help,” he told her. “Nobody wants to listen at two o’clock in the morning.”

“I do,” she replied firmly. “I’m insomniac. Call.”

He grinned at her then—the first purely kidlike expression she’d seen on his face—and watched her go out the door.

Tom Shephard followed.

“He’s okay.” He offered it as though she needed the reassurance. “I’m sure he’ll spend years in therapy once he realizes such things exist. Or maybe he’ll turn to a life of crime as the best possible use of his talents and experience.”

“Where does he go when the IV feed runs out?”

“With me,” Tom said quietly. “I’m heading back to Berlin in about ten days.”

The firmness of the words surprised her. “So soon?”

“Jozsef’s got a grandmother somewhere in the former Yugoslavia. I’m trying to locate her. I think he’d be better off with family—much better off in a culture he knows. There’s too much notoriety here. He needs to heal, not to walk the world under a camera lens.”

“And you, Tom? What’s in Berlin for you?”

“The rest of my tour. The rest of my life.” His eyes did not waver from her face. “Want to come?”

She took a step back, as though the distance might buy her time.

And when she did not reply, he said with difficulty, “I heard what happened to your . . . to Eric. I’m so sorry, Carrie—for everything that’s happened to you in the past month. You’ve been living your own kind of hell. I refused to understand that.”

Her eyes blurred with tears; sympathy from Tom had the power to undo her. “I would never have lied to you for anybody else. I had no choice.”

“You loved him that much?”

“I still do.”

“We all need to begin again, Caroline. You, me, the boy in that bed.” He nodded toward Jozsef’s door. “Couldn’t we do it together?”

A boy,
Caroline thought achingly.
A kid I could raise and love. What Eric and I always wanted—

But not Eric’s boy. Not Eric’s dream.

There was no way to tell Tom what it felt like, today, with Eric dead for good this time. How she saw the film in slow motion, over and over again, every time she closed her eyes: Eric racing toward the yellow Humvee. The staggering stride, the body crumpling to the ground. The blood pooling on wet asphalt and the shocked disbelief on Cuddy’s face. She had not been there to save him. She had not even tried. She’d chased her own wild goose; she’d never even known the exact moment when Eric stopped breathing.

Looking at Tom Shephard, she searched for the right words.

“It’s way too soon,” she said softly.

He pulled her gently toward him. She went with a sigh into his arms, shaky as a child after a bout of weeping, and felt the deep and abiding comfort there.

“You’re such a good man, Tom, and you’d spend your life trying to make me happy. I’d fail you at every turn.”

“Don’t say that,” he murmured.

“It’s true.” She listened to the steady throb of his heartbeat through the Oxford-cloth shirt. “I’d always be looking for the ghost over my shoulder. I’d always be looking for Eric.”

He held her away from him, all his pain in his eyes. “I wish I’d known the fucking bastard,” he said. “Maybe then I’d understand what it takes to inspire that kind of love.”

“I suppose,” she said slowly, “I’ve never wanted very much to be safe.”

It was the only explanation she had. All her life, men had tried to take care of her and she had thrust them away, walking purposefully toward the one who lived like a wolf, the one who understood that danger was at the very heart of what mattered . . .

“Promise me, Carrie, that if anything ever changes for you . . . that you’ll get in touch . . .”

His arms fell to his sides, and that swiftly, she was alone with her pain again.

She began to walk along the corridor. Tom fell into step beside her.

“Where will you go?” he asked.

Caroline had no idea. She’d told Rinehart she didn’t want her security clearance reinstated, she didn’t need her old cubby back in the Counterterrorism Center. She was done with the CIA. She was thinking of visiting Uncle Hank on Long Island. Spending Christmas at a beach. That the image she’d held in her mind was one of sunlight and freedom—not the frigid tundra of Montauk in December—she didn’t bother to mention. Her dreams had a habit of coming true in ways she’d never wanted.

In the echoing marble entryway of Bethesda Naval she found Cuddy waiting for her: Cuddy with his bland, impersonal exterior, his willingness to be overlooked, the essential masking of the spy. He took Shephard’s hand and refused to notice any tension between them and made it easier, as he always had, for Caroline to say good-bye.

“I’ll take you back to the Marriott,” he informed her when Shephard had walked alone through the revolving doors. “Your car’s still parked at Dulles.”

She let him steer her toward his small Toyota without the slightest protest. Sank back in his leather seats without the need for further conversation. They’d talked about the past week enough already to need only this silence. The ride, if anything, would be too brief.

Only when he pulled the car without warning sharply off the road did she open her eyes. They weren’t at the Marriott at all—weren’t even on the road there. He’d driven her straight to one of the rest areas on the George Washington Parkway. It was a lonely place at this time of year. The trees were leafless and the river thundered brownly far below.

“What are you doing?”

“Quick change of plans,” he replied briskly. “Raphael’s idea. He’s meeting us here and I think you ought to listen to what he has to say.”

“I know he tried. To help Eric. It wasn’t his fault—”

“Raphael never apologizes.” Cuddy thumbed his glasses. “Particularly when his plans go well. He’s thought of a way for us all to turn a quick buck. Raphael’s got a
vision thing,
you know? He says the future of intelligence—of security operations—is going to be private sector. He thinks we should pool our talents and form a corporation. Somewhere offshore. In the Grand Caymans, actually. Probably because Eric’s numbered bank account is there—the one where Scottie deposited his pay for the past thirty months—and though it’s only about three hundred grand right now, we figure you could get at least six hundred thou for the Tara town house whenever you decide to sell it. Call it a million. Enough to keep the four of us in scuba gear and suntan lotion for at least a year.”

She stared at him, her tired mind moving too slowly. “You call Eric’s murder a
plan gone well
?”

He shrugged. “Got him off the hook, didn’t it? No trials, no prison, no life term without parole. No Scottie breathing down his neck for the rest of his life. No FBI hunting him the world over. Yeah, I think Rafe did a damn fine job. I told him from the outset that I wanted him to end Eric’s life permanently this time. No paper trail, no physical evidence, no questions asked—”

She seized his lapel tightly between her fingers and dragged him across the armrest. “Cuddy—”

“It was Wally’s guys who pulled the trigger,” he said apologetically. “Wally’s guys who sedated him with a single shot and carted him off in a rented ambulance—”

“Are you telling me Eric’s
alive,
God damn you?”

For answer, he looked over her shoulder.

A classic 1967 Lotus, bottle green and shining, was pulling up behind them. Raphael’s blond head was behind the wheel.

The Grand Caymans,
she thought madly.
Pool our resources. A beach with nothing on it.

The winged doors lifted. A dark-haired man in wire-rimmed glasses lunged out, ignoring the cliffs of the Potomac and the distant sound of traffic and the black-feathered rooks wheeling tragically overhead.

And ran to her.