Blown (5 page)

Chapter 9

GEORGETOWN, 12:03 A.M.

“Ever been to the DCI’s house?” Cuddy asked as Caroline negotiated the narrow cobbled streets of Georgetown.

“Once. Years ago. She had a party when she became division chief.” Caroline spotted a single empty space among the cars lining O Street and pulled the Volkswagen neatly into it. “She came to my wedding. And to Eric’s funeral.”

Cuddy unbuckled his seat belt. “Doesn’t mean she’s going to like your idea.”

“No. But she’ll listen to it.”

The ancient maple trees lining the brick sidewalk had thrust their roots well under the paving, heaving the surface as efficiently as a family of moles. Caroline stepped carefully over the curb and glanced up at Dare’s house. A classic three-story Federal with black shutters and a historic plaque; lights burned behind the curtained windows to the left of the door. A few dead leaves skittered down the street; from the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a man slouching along the sidewalk with a duffel over his back.
Homeless,
she thought.
Vietnam vet.
And mounted the three marble steps, waiting for the bellow of Dare’s dog from within.

The bark came right on cue as she lifted the door knocker, followed by a brisk patter of high heels. Dare would be fully dressed, although it was nearly midnight. She’d been on her way to the Agency when they called.

“Caroline,” the DCI said as she swung wide the door. “Cuddy. Come in, won’t you? Don’t mind Alistair—he’s a big lap puppy.”

The Airedale was as tall as Dare’s thigh; he grinned at them hugely and thrust his nose into Caroline’s palm. The distinctive terrier smell of wet lambs’ wool rose comfortingly from his coat. She followed the DCI down the hall’s checkerboard of black and white marble and into the sage green living room.

Daniel had parked his motorcycle three blocks away on O Street, near the entrance gates of Georgetown University, where the welter of locked student bicycles and secondhand cars offered useful cover. He’d stored his rifle in a duffel bag he’d strapped to the motorcycle’s rear, and it was easy now to sling it over his shoulder and head toward the lights of Wisconsin Avenue. He knew exactly where he was going. He’d cased the place before. He intended to take his time getting there, and make certain he wasn’t being followed.

He’d done his recon well. He’d followed the DCI’s chauffeur-driven navy blue Town Car on his motorcycle several times over the past two weeks, from the CIA’s back entrance to this street in the heart of Georgetown. Once, the Town Car had led him to the gates of the White House and he’d been tempted, there and then, to weave through the concrete security pylons and straight up to the guardhouse, shooting as he went; but Daniel was no hothead. He was too smart to throw away his chance at glory in the End Times with some kickass assault on the Zoggite Seat of Power. He’d cut past the Town Car as it turned off Pennsylvania. And kept going toward Georgetown and the door that he knew was left unguarded.

Darien Atwood’s house sat halfway between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-fifth Streets. It had no garage, but a narrow brick walk fronted by an arched door separated the house from its neighbor. The path led around the side of the old structure to the walled garden behind. It had taken Daniel only minutes to learn that the lock was just a simple Colonial latch.

“You’re telling me there’s a 30 April cell in Washington?”

“We think so. With at least one member in the vice president’s residence,” Caroline said.

She and Cuddy were seated uncomfortably on a camelback sofa. The living room ran the length of the row house, with an area for dining set out in front of a pair of French doors. Beyond these lay the walled garden, a well of darkness Caroline kept at her back. Her eyes stayed fixed on the DCI.

Dare Atwood turned restlessly before the fire. She was a tall, angular woman with iron gray hair and a face as lined as crumpled tissue paper. Tonight, in deference to Sunday, she’d worn gray flannel trousers instead of correct executive suiting; a cashmere sweater gripped her throat. “Why didn’t we get this information out of Budapest?”

It was her oblique reference to Eric Carmichael, and the CD-ROM full of data he’d downloaded from 30 April’s computer. Terrorist networks and financial backing worldwide. Names, dates, and places of hits ample enough to roll up cells in half a dozen European countries. Nothing that suggested a terrorist presence in the United States.

“We don’t know,” Cuddy answered. “Maybe because Eric never had it.”

“—Or deliberately held it back.” The DCI’s cool gray eyes flicked remorselessly over Caroline’s face. “This could be his bargaining chip. The most essential piece of the puzzle. The one piece he knew we’d need.”

“Maybe,” Cuddy agreed cautiously. “Or maybe he never knew there were 30 April cells in the U.S. Maybe that truth died with Krucevic. We can’t say.”

“Tell that to the President,” Dare retorted bitterly. “Hundreds of people are showing up at hospitals, all of them poisoned, eight days after he declared victory on 30 April. He looks clueless. Worse—he looks weak. We’ll be the first people Jack Bigelow blames, of course. This is our blunder. The hit we didn’t see coming. Even though we’ve got no jurisdiction in this country—”

“What if we tried to find him?” Caroline interrupted.

“Eric?” The DCI stopped pacing, hands on her hips. “Are you
nuts
? Do you think I want to see Eric Carmichael’s face
anywhere
this side of hell, Caroline, with the vice president’s blood on his hands?”

“He could help. He may know something.”

Dare laughed harshly. “Too late. It’s absolutely out of the question. Eric screwed the deadliest terror organization on the face of the earth—
and
the President of the United States. I’m not going to let him screw me, too.”

Daniel was lying on his stomach as he’d been taught to do by the army overlords who’d driven him like a steer through that Bosnian winter, years ago. His fingers were steady on the M16’s barrel as he focused his telescopic sight. He hardly needed it, here in the November garden, motionless beneath the bare twigs of a dogwood tree. He was only thirty feet away from the three people talking around the fire.

He could smell the wet clay of the Potomac riverbank, the sickly sweetness of decaying leaves. Woodsmoke from the chimney of this three-hundred-year-old house. It was strange, how often he’d found himself outside in the dark like this—watching the perfect life of another human being unfold before his eyes. The richness of the silk damask on that sofa, copper red; the black and tan dog sprawled with its muzzle reaching toward Atwood’s feet. The younger blond woman, thin and tense as she gestured with her hands. The faded pattern of the Oriental rug and the dark gleam of mahogany throwing back the flames. Order. Beauty. And the chaos he alone could bring.

He fixed her head in the crosshairs, and fired.

Chapter 10

BERLIN, 10:03 P.M.

It was not the first time he had wandered one of the world’s great cities without a place to call home. As he hoisted himself out of the trunk of Dagmar’s sedan and kissed her on both cheeks, the two solemn little boys watching from the backseat, Eric had already decided where he would go. The Mitte District of Berlin—where Sharif’s wife had bolted with him to an underground parking garage—was too chic, a decade after unification, for flophouse hotels. Dossing in one of the parks would get him arrested. He’d double back toward the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, the gloomy old train station that had once been the main portal to East Germany, and catch one of the all-night elevateds to the western part of town. There he could wait for the first fast train of the morning. Frankfurt, maybe. Munich. Even Paris was only fourteen hours away.

His blood quickened at the thought of Paris. Border security might ask for his passport as he approached the edge of France—but in unified Europe, they usually did not. Somehow he felt he could be safe in Paris. It was a city 30 April had never hurt.

He mounted the concrete steps leading out of the garage into the chill drizzle of a persistent rain, and glanced casually in both directions as he reached the street. It was dark and empty of life. Better to run surveillance detection regardless, he thought. Sharif had been followed.

He turned right, allowing himself a few seconds to get his bearings, locate this street corner on the map of Berlin he carried in his mind, and drop into one of the pretimed and perfectly cased routes he’d perfected over months of wandering black in the German capital. Surveillance detection was a simple technique, though hard to master: A man walking a route he knew at a briskly maintained pace would always outstrip his more tentative followers, and the distance between them would lengthen inexorably as the agent covered more known ground. Eventually he could enter The Gap—the brief period of time when he would actually be out of sight of his pursuers—and get his real business done. Service a dead drop. Leave film in a letter box. Hand off a document in a brush pass with an apparent stranger. Or simply vanish. Without the surveillance team ever realizing he’d known they were there.

Tonight, Eric intended The Gap to fall squarely near one of the entrances to the Friedrichstrasse train station. But at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, as he waited for a light with the rain beading his black leather jacket, he felt rather than saw the black Mercedes slide alongside him. Nosing at the curb as two men got out.

They aren’t on foot,
he thought,
and they came out of nowhere.

And then the automatic pistol in his ribs. The hands, firm and insistent, gripping his arms. They thrust him headfirst into the backseat without a word.

It was Scottie Sorensen’s habit to rise before five-thirty, an hour of darkness in the fall of the year, but on this night he had no intention of sleeping. He sat in his oak-paneled library with a glass of vintage rum close at hand, and listened to the news bulletins on public radio. By the time Cuddy called from the DCI’s house in Georgetown at 1:13
A.M
., Scottie was already tearing down Langley Pike alone.

He’d left his wife sprawled facedown in the king-size bed, her slim brown arms flung out like an angel’s and her fan of blond hair lying like a discarded wig on the pillow. Now that he was nearly sixty, insomnia spiked Scottie’s sleep at least four times a week—and he would wake, mind churning, to creep through the vast spaces of the house, a shadow amid other shadows. How many surreptitious entries had he made, over the long spiral of years? All the Soviet consulates in remote corners of the world, plundered by night through a faulty window or a coded lock whose secrets he’d bought with his faultless charm; the voice-activated transmitters stashed in such ordinary objects as ashtrays and chair legs and even, once, the stuffed heart of a child’s teddy bear. All the rooms of women, too, with marriages and secrets to betray—some of them seduced for the greater good of America, others for the greater good of Scottie Sorensen.

Spying had been his proxy for deeper motives: the desire to penetrate, to thieve, to take something for nothing. Now that he was lapped in his final posting, the morbidity of Headquarters, insomnia was his passport to memory. His dark kingdom.

Lola never even knew at what hour he left her bed on these midnight excursions. Would she, he wondered, really care?

She was his third wife and the current source of his wealth: a twenty-six-year-old studio executive’s daughter born and bred in L.A. She’d married Scottie two years before, after a whirlwind romance in which he’d managed to figure as James Bond, Sean Connery, and the daddy she’d always yearned to please. They met during a period of uncharacteristic earnestness on Lola’s part: an internship on Capitol Hill wangled by her father, who’d contributed heavily to the last Republican campaign. She was twenty-three then, blond and sinuous and fresh as a newly opened daisy. Scottie had noticed her during one of his routine pilgrimages to the Senate Intelligence Committee; he’d invited her for drinks. Beguiled her with delicious allusions to episodes of daring and danger. Fucked her senseless, later that month, on Bermuda’s pink sand.

With little in the way of education and nothing in the nature of history, she’d lapped up his legend like a series pilot. They were married in London, where his two little granddaughters lived, and spent their honeymoon among the breweries and golf courses of Scotland.

Even then Lola had been growing bored—her notion of a honeymoon being to rent out the entire city of Cannes and fly in her three hundred closest friends—but she’d put up with his tiresomeness rather bravely. She had the prospect of furnishing the Great Falls house, bought with her father’s money, awaiting her at home.

It had been a riotous two years, Scottie thought as he flashed his badge at the security police officer manning the Agency’s back gate, but he knew Lola was restless. She’d expected more glamour: sudden trips to Europe and Asia on private Agency planes; exclusive Washington parties where his odor of power and her long legs were noted and envied; invitations to the White House; perhaps even a thigh holster. He’d suggested they might be posted abroad—to Greece, maybe, or London. She’d been agog with fantasy.

And now, because Eric Carmichael was alive, Scottie would probably be fired.

He composed the cable he’d come here to send while he was still crossing the empty parking lot.

IMMEDIATE BERLIN BUDAPEST WARSAW PRAGUE PARIS LONDON ISTANBUL SECRET/NOFORN/WNINTEL HEADQUARTERS 3455

1. C/CTC ADVISES THAT CASE OFFICER MICHAEL O’SHAUGHNESSY ALIAS NIGEL BENNING DECLARED DEAD APRIL 1997 IS ALIVE AND MEMBER OF 30
APRIL TERRORIST GROUP. HE IS BELIEVED TO HAVE SURVIVED RECENT RAID ON SARAJEVO HEADQUARTERS.

2. INTERPOL CURRENTLY SEEKING O’SHAUGHNESSY/BENNING IN KIDNAPPING AND MURDER OF U.S. VICE PRESIDENT. O’SHAUGHNESSY/BENNING ALSO WANTED BY FBI. HEADQUARTERS REQUESTS ALL CONTROLLED TERRORIST ASSETS IN EUROPE BE TASKED FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO O’SHAUGHNESSY/BENNING’S ARREST.

3. O’SHAUGHNESSY/BENNING BELIEVED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. ALL PERSONAL CONTACT AND/OR AID TO FUGITIVE WILL BE CONSTRUED AS CRIMINAL. PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION TO FOLLOW.

O’Shaughnessy was Eric’s official cover name within the CIA; Nigel Benning was the alias Scottie alone had known Eric used. It was unfortunate to have to sacrifice him so ruthlessly—but Scottie could not imagine Lola settling happily into retirement at his side, content to dig among the marigolds while he perfected his golf game. She was far more likely to skip town for good, her bank account in tow. He would have to arrange his future differently. While it was still his to arrange.