The Lie (17 page)

Strolling through the manicured grass, Cortlandt steered Maggie Dunster away from several approaching guests. When one of
them called to her, she smiled and waved and kept walking.

“Knowing our president,” said Cortlandt dryly, “I’m surprised he agreed to let you go with him. How did you manage it?”

“By swearing that if he tried to stop me, I’d call a news conference and plaster his secret angina and plans for Wannsee over
every newspaper in the country.”

“Would you really have done that?”

“You probably know me as well as anyone, Tommy. What do
you
think?”

“I don’t think you’d have done it,” Cortlandt said. “If for no other reason than that you know how much Jimmy distrusts his
vice president.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” Maggie stopped walking and leaned closer to Cortlandt. “And I’ll tell you something else. I’m getting
worried enough to be thinking about blowing everything wide open anyway. I might do it within the next day or two.”

Tommy Cortlandt stared at her. “Do you know what something like that could do to the man?”

“Certainly. It could keep him away from Wannsee. It could force him to go to the hospital and have his bypass. And God willing,
it could keep him alive for another twenty years.”

“Or it could just finish him as president and break his heart. You can’t fool with stuff like this, Maggie. A lot more is
at stake here than saving Jimmy from a possible coronary.”

“Not to me.”

“Whatever your motives,” said the CIA director, “you can’t do this to him, Maggie.”

“Who could stop me?”

“I could. And you know it.”

Maggie’s long, deep sigh seemed to ease the worst of her tension out.

“In any case,” said Cortlandt, “I think you’re way over the top in your reaction to Wannsee. You’re making too much of the
whole thing.”

“I’m not the one. That’s Jimmy. He’s suddenly Christ on a mountain with his arms open to the world. When the world spits in
his face, I’m afraid of what it could do to him.”

“Come on, Maggie, you’re not performing grand opera. Don’t sell the guy short. Angina or not, he won’t be doing any dying
at Wannsee. We’re all a lot stronger than anyone ever expects. With a little nitro here and there, we’ve even been known to
rise above occasional chest pains.”

“Do you honestly believe that, Tommy?”

“I guarantee it,” said the CIA director.

There are times, he thought, when a man can get his mouth to say just about anything.

Fifty yards from where Tommy Cortlandt and the First Lady were talking, Vice President Fleming left a small group that included
his wife, the secretary of state, and the French ambassador, took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, and drifted
over to where Ken Harris sat alone with his double bourbon.

“Have you been watching them?” he asked the deputy director.

Harris nodded.

“They’ve been going on like that for more than twenty minutes,” said Fleming. “They’re definitely not happy.”

“Probably a lovers’ quarrel.”

The vice president failed to smile. “Did you know Maggie’s going to Brussels with Dunster?”

“Who told you that?”

“Amy. She had lunch with her yesterday.”

Ken Harris just sipped his bourbon.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” said Fleming.

“No. Explain it to me.”

The vice president wiped a few beads of sweat from his upper lip. “It doesn’t bother you that Maggie dies too?”

“I’m not overjoyed at the prospect. But neither will it keep me from sleeping tonight.” Ken Harris took a long moment. “Why?
Do you want to cancel out?”

Fleming stared off at the First Lady and said nothing. He watched the hold she had on Tommy Cortlandt’s arm, saw the way her
fingers dug into and worked the fabric of his jacket sleeve.
Well, Maggie
…

After a while he said, “Have you heard from your man?”

“Yes. It’s moving along.”

“Meaning?”

“He’s contacted someone.”

“Who is it?”

“A Palestinian. A known American hater who’ll claim full credit for himself and his movement. Exactly what we want.’

Fleming nodded slowly.

He had just spotted the president working the crowd a short distance away. It was one of Jimmy Dunster’s strong points. A
handshake here, an amusing anecdote there, a light personal comment somewhere else, never at a loss. All artifice, of course,
but the coin of the realm for any public figure.
I have more substance and brains
, Jayson Fleming thought bitterly,
but I’m also too intense, sweaty-palmed, and humorless. Like poor Nixon
.

Perhaps he could change once he was in the Oval Office. Perhaps he could develop a kind of soulful wit, learn to relax more
with people, talk to them about what he thought and felt. Fleming bargained with himself. He would work night and day for
the country, be apolitical, ignore all party lines and act only for the common good.

He was even able to feel a deep, unspeakable sorrow for Maggie and Jimmy Dunster, pressing at the limits of composure he desperately
needed to maintain.

I’m sorry, he told them. That alone came near to making him feel at peace.

K
LAUS
L
OGEFELD FINISHED
his final lecture of the week late Friday afternoon and drove away from the university with only a small bag in the car.

Klaus had been especially careful about watching his back since Nicko Vorelli had surprised him in that unsettling midnight
dark, and he was careful now as he headed out of Rome and along a series of thinly traveled country roads. When he was certain
beyond any doubt that he was not being followed, he picked up the road leading to the airport.

At 7:10
P.M.
Klaus drove into the airport parking lot. He had bought his ticket in advance, so he sat in the car for twenty minutes, waiting
until it was near boarding time. Then he entered the terminal and arrived at his flight’s departure gate just as the passengers
were lining up to board.

His grandfather was halfway down the line.

The former Wehrmacht officer stood tall and erect, his flowing gray hair silvered by the lights, his empty jacket sleeve carried
like a special badge of courage. He had on a pair of oversized dark glasses, and a large surgical bandage was taped over the
more frightful areas of his face. People glanced at him, then were careful to look elsewhere, except for two young boys, who
appeared fascinated until they were spoken to by their mother.

Aboard the plane, Klaus sat seven rows behind his grandfather. The old man did not once turn to look at him.
When they finally took off, his head was bent forward and he seemed to be asleep.

They landed at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport at 10:15
P.M.
Klaus started the engine of the rented pale gray BMW and sat there until his grandfather opened the passenger door and slid
in beside him. Moments later he drove out of the airport and headed south on Kleist Strasse. Only then did he speak. “So,
Grandfather? How does it feel to be home?”

“Germany isn’t my home. I have no home. But at least I’m here doing something.”

They rode without speaking, and Klaus lowered a window and felt the coolness of the night against his face. About ten kilometers
later, he turned off the main highway and onto a two-lane country road that soon ended in a dirt track. Then he swung to one
side, parked next to a cluster of heavy brush, and cut the headlights.

“Where are we?” asked the old man.

“A few kilometers from where I used to live. I played here when I was a boy. It was my secret place.”

Klaus took a flashlight out of his bag and circled around behind the brush. His grandfather followed. Klaus aimed his flashlight
at a high outcropping of rock. Then he put the light in the old man’s hand.

“Hold it steady right here,” he told him.

Klaus scraped away a pattern of embedded dirt and leaves in the rockface, revealing a deep, irregularly circular crack. He
dug a crowbar out of the soil, jammed the pronged edge into the crack, and kept prying until a large boulder was drawn far
enough out of position to expose the opening to a cave.

“I’ll be damned,” said the major.

Klaus Logefeld took back his flashlight.

“Wait here,” he told his grandfather, and he crawled into the cave with the beam lighting his way. Inside, it was as cold
as an old icehouse, and Klaus felt the chill enter his bones.

He shifted his light until it picked up a large, olive-drab barracks bag lying deep in a far corner. The canvas was
stretched tight with everything he would need at Wannsee. It was wrapped in two layers of heavy plastic to keep out the dampness.
It had all been there, waiting, for almost three weeks.

Klaus unwrapped the plastic, then tugged the bag out of the cave.

The old man stared at it without comment. When Klaus began shoving the boulder back into the hole, the major put his full
weight behind his one arm to help. Then he helped his grandson carry the bag to the BMW and lay it in the trunk.

“What are we going to do?” he asked. “Blow up Berlin?”

Klaus laughed. “Only if we have to.”

He took out two cigars, handed one to his grandfather, and they lit up.

“Tell me how you feel about all this, boy.” The old man’s voice was quiet, easy, free of his usual emotion.

“Excited… nervous… frightened… angry… depressed.”

“Not blissfully happy?”

Klaus smiled. “If you mean am I jumping with joy, the answer is no.”

“You do know they’re never going to let us out of Wannsee alive, don’t you?”

Klaus Logefeld shrugged. “That’s not how I’m planning it, but it’s possible.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me. I’m not crazy. But we both know it’s not going to stop me.”

At 12:47
A.M.
Klaus parked the BMW in the same patch of woods adjoining Wannsee that he had used on his previous visit.

Leaving his grandfather with the car, he checked security and found there was still just a single guard on duty at the gatehouse.
When he returned, he eased the old man over the perimeter wall in slow, careful stages. Then he followed him over with the
barracks bag.

The two men walked slowly, the weight of the bag shared between them. Klaus glanced at his grandfather and felt a little less
lonely than in all the years since he had been a child.
Imagine him actually ending up with me in this
.

At one of the larger outbuildings Klaus unlocked the door and they carried the bag inside, where the air was rich with the
smell of fertilizer and oiled equipment.

Klaus had explained to his grandfather everything that would have to be done at Wannsee this night, and they began in the
outbuilding with the old man helping as best he could. Mostly, his job was to keep the light focused and hand Klaus things
as he worked with the
plastique
, packing good, solid charges of the powerful explosive into two separate locations in the storage building, setting their
electronically controlled detonators, and finally making certain that both units were completely hidden from sight.

When that was finished, they moved to the museum and conference center itself.

Like a man following an old trail, Klaus led his grandfather across the same stretch of sweet-smelling grass he had traveled
on his practice run, neutralized the museum’s alarm system, and entered the building though the cellar door.

Once inside, his breath labored heavily through his lungs and his hands tingled as they did their work in the four sections
of the basement ceiling he had selected on his last visit. When the
plastique
charges were set in the cellar and the acoustic ceiling panels replaced, Klaus and the old man carried their half-empty bag
up the interior steps to the first floor. Klaus continued his work there.

In the men’s washroom off the main lobby, he removed the ventilator grill from the ceiling of a toilet stall and taped two
small automatics and the remote for his detonators to some hidden studs.

His grandfather watched every move closely.

“Good,” he said at one point.

It was the only word he spoke throughout.

Finally, they unlocked and went into the surveillance
room with its banks of closed-circuit television screens and audio and video controls.

Explaining everything to his grandfather, Klaus was struck again by the same sense of uncertainty about the area that he had
experienced on his last visit. Would all this hightech surveillance equipment be good or bad for them when the time came?
Despite his careful planning, key elements still remained unpredictable.

Man plans and God laughs
.

Nevertheless, Klaus Logefeld felt remarkably calm.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
since his parents were killed, Paul Walters was at home in Ravello, working in his studio.

Mostly, he stood and shuffled about in front of the same half-finished canvas that had been on his easel for weeks, and wondered
what he was doing there in the first place. Paulie knew, of course. He was a painter, and painters were supposed to paint.
He was trying to go through the motions, but the effort was worthless.

After a couple of hours Paulie put down his palette and brushes and just sat fighting his private darkness. A knock at the
front door of the house roused him.

With relief, Paulie opened the door and looked at Kate Dinneson.

She stood uncertainly with the sun lighting her hair.

In the approximately twenty-four hours since Paulie had seen her, he had forgotten how the bones in her face seemed laced
together rather than joined. Her eyes found and held his, lightly, ready to fly away if what she saw there remained as hard,
dark, and unforgiving as her last sight of them.

Paulie stood there numbly.

“May I come in?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Because I can’t just leave it like this.”