The Lie (30 page)

Archer began.

He gathered everything he needed into his bag and pressed the wooden panel in the bunker closet. Then he went through the
cellar storeroom into the utility area that his blueprints showed to be lying directly under the surveillance room.

Archer measured off the imagined spaces above him in relation to his own position. He pinpointed the south wall of the surveillance
room that held the banks of monitors where he had seen Professor Mainz and the old man sitting. Marking what he estimated
to be the most effective spot, he taped his prepared charge to the basement ceiling, checked his calculations once more for
possible errors, and carried his bag back into the concrete chamber.

He looked at the split-screen monitor. In the conference hall, the delegates’ discussion appeared to be going on as before.
In the surveillance room, there had been a slight change in one of the occupants’ positions. Professor Mainz was standing
behind his chair and saying something to the president. But they were still separated by about fifteen feet, which seemed
well within Archer’s estimated safety margin.

Still, wanting to take no unnecessary chances, he waited another moment until he saw Mainz sit down.

Then Archer took a deep breath and pressed the bright red button on his detonator.

The big shock was the enormity of the explosion, a roll of thunder that echoed through the bunker and pounded the air with
concussion. Along with his heart. And his brain.

It should not have been that strong.

Not with the amount of C-4 he had taped to the ceiling.

Not with all his careful figuring.

Unless his charge had touched off other explosives stored in the same area.

“Fucking God!” he said, and felt an old sickness enter him with the rush of dust and fouled air.

Then, with a flashlight in his hand, he began groping through the closet, the storeroom, and back into the utility area.

The power was out, and with all the soot and floating grime, Archer’s light could cut through only a few feet at a stretch.
His ears were still drained of sound; he heard nothing. When he was under the place where he had taped the charge, his flash
picked out a jagged hole in the ceiling and the flooring immediately above it.

A body hung halfway through, arms down. It was Professor Mainz’s grandfather, and he was dead.

Archer stood there, beginning to hear sounds as his ears cleared. There were distant voices and banging as people tried to
get into the locked surveillance room. Needing to know the worst, Archer scrambled up some broken beams and poked and rooted
about for whatever remained.

His light picked out three more bodies, and none of them were moving. He felt for pulses and signs of heartbeats.

The president was alive.

Maggie Dunster was terribly bloodied but had a heart-beat.

Mainz was still breathing. But barely.

Daniel Archer knelt there in his personal charnel house. Three alive and one dead. How long before the president, his wife,
and Mainz would be dead as well?

It was impossible for Archer to tell from what he could see of their wounds, especially since so many blast injuries were
internal and from concussion.

He heard the banging on the surveillance room’s heavy fire door grow louder as axes came into play, and he started to leave
the way he had entered.

Until a thought occurred.

And a moment later he was dragging Mainz to the opening in the floor and sliding him down one of the broken beams to the utility
area below.

Then, lifting him as if he were a sleeping child, Daniel Archer carried the professor into the concrete bunker and closed
the secret panel and the steel door behind them.

T
HE CONFERENCE ROOM LIGHTS
were knocked out by the explosion, but several battery-powered emergency floods came on and helped cut some of the chaos.

Still, shouting and screaming, people groped for exits without knowing what had happened or what might happen next.

Paulie Walters made his way toward the surveillance room. It was pure instinct. There was no telling exactly where the blast
had taken place, but since the surveillance room was where the president was, that was where Paulie wanted to be.

He passed into the corridor, into thickening layers of smoke and dust. Bits of plaster were still falling from walls and ceilings.
Two gray-uniformed Wannsee guards were hammering with their fists at the locked door of the surveillance room. There was no
longer any doubt. This was where the explosion had taken place.

Paulie saw one of the guards draw his pistol and aim at the lock, and he dived for the gun before the guard could fire. “You
want to goddamn shoot the president?”

The man stared at him.

“Anyone in there hear me?” Paulie yelled.

There was no response.

Paulie and the two guards slammed their shoulders into the door together, but it was made of metal and never budged.

“Get some damn axes!” Paulie shouted, envisioning only the worst on the far side of the door.

When entry finally was made, it was Paulie who shoved in first. But the room was totally dark and he had to wait for flashlights
to be brought in.

Then he saw a big, jagged hole in the floor, a lot of debris, and three bodies. The bodies all looked like the usual bundles
of old clothes that the newly and violently deceased seemed to turn into.

On closer examination, they became the old man, Maggie Dunster, and the president of the United States, and there appeared
to be little doubt that they were dead. Paulie did not see what, if anything, remained of Klaus Logefeld.

Then nearing the president, he heard the small whistling sound of breathing made by a sucking chest wound and felt a sympathetic
stirring inside his own chest. Maggie Dunster, too, turned out to be alive.

“Stretchers!” he called hoarsely.

They were there in moments, and Paulie lifted the president onto one of them himself. Then Paulie pushed into the ambulance
with Maggie and Jimmy Dunster because he knew he had to personally insure their being alive when the ambulance reached the
hospital.

Army medics had put tubes in the president’s nose and arms and plugged the hole in his chest, so the sucking sound had stopped.
There were bloody bandages on Maggie Dunster’s head now and an oxygen mask covered her nose and mouth.

“Are they going to make it?” Paulie asked one of the medics, a sergeant.

“I couldn’t tell you that, sir. There could be internal injuries and hemorrhaging.”

A siren screamed as the ambulance picked up speed.

“Let’s just be thankful they’re breathing,” said Tommy Cortlandt. “I was sure they were as dead as Mainz and the old man.”

Paulie had not even noticed the director sitting there.

“What the hell happened in that room?” he asked.

“No one knows for sure. But did you see that big hole in the floor where the old man’s body was lying?”

“Yeah.”

“That was where they must have had the charge planted. I think either Mainz or his grandfather accidentally hit the remote
and set it off.”

Paulie gazed out of the back of the speeding ambulance. Behind them trailed a small convoy of American Secret Service agents
and German police. In front of the ambulance was a line of motorcycles.

“I never did spot Mainz’s body,” Paulie said coldly. “Or wasn’t there enough left to identify?”

“I don’t know. The Dunsters were all I had on my mind when I was in there, so I never really looked. But if Mainz was at ground
zero of the blast, his remains must have fallen through the hole and into the basement.”

Paulie was silent.

He looked at the pale, unconscious face of the president.

I’m sorry about how things worked out for you and your wife
, he told him, feeling intensely weary and a trifle mad.
But for God’s sake, please don’t quit on us now
.

T
HE
L
ORD
G
IVETH
and the Lord taketh away
, thought Nicko Vorelli. But he thought it wryly, without believing a word.

More to his own taste, of course, would have been
God helps those who help themselves
. Although he was hard put at the moment to see how he was ever going to help himself out of this one.

Avoiding the general panic that immediately followed the blast, he quietly drifted through the ebb and flow of confusion and
picked up what little information was available.

Apparently the old man was dead, and the president and his wife were barely alive and on their way to the nearest hospital.

As for Klaus Logefeld, he seemed to have simply disappeared. There was no sign of him in either the surveillance room where
the explosion had taken place or in the basement immediately below it. Both areas had been searched without turning up a clue.
Nor had any of the guards posted around the building seen a trace of the curiously absent Professor Mainz.

The consensus on the blast itself was that it had been an accidental detonation of a charge previously set by Mainz and his
grandfather. Considering how well everything had been going for them, any thought of their having deliberately set off the
explosion made no sense.

Obviously something was missing. Since the absent piece had to lie somewhere inside the basement level, Nicko decided to do
some quiet prowling of his own.

The central power system was still out, but Nicko had his own penlight to guide him. Voices and footsteps carried faintly
through the flooring.

When he reached the rear section of the storeroom everything suddenly coalesced. He could only wonder why it had not come
to him sooner.

Still, it was only a feeling, not a certainty. Nicko went straight to the perfectly matched tongue-in-groove paneling on the
far wall that he had seen only once, placed his ear against it, and listened.

Not a sound came through.

He examined the surface for bloodstains but there were none.

Then Nicko switched off his light and pressed a hand against the place on the wall that Bruno had showed him.

There was not the slightest give.

He lowered his hand about twelve inches and pressed again.

This time he felt movement. Keeping the pressure on, Nicko eased the panel inward until he had a wide enough opening to see
through.

Pitch blackness greeted him. He remembered that he was looking into an empty closet with its own steel door opening into the
concrete bunker.

Then Nicko looked down toward the floor and saw a hairline of light where the door met it.

He stood staring for a moment, then he eased the panel back into place and left the basement.

Upstairs, everyone appeared to be milling about as chaotically as before. Chancellor Eisner had officially recessed the conference
for two weeks to allow for emergency repairs and the clarification of events and agendas, but few seemed in any hurry to leave
the building.

In the conference room, Nicko saw Kate with a group of delegates and correspondents. He waited until he was able to catch
her eye, then he went out onto the front lawn.

Kate joined him a moment later and he led her into the shadow of a towering linden.

“I believe I know where our friend Klaus is,” he said.

“You mean he’s in one piece?”

“I haven’t actually seen him, but I can’t imagine his being in any too great a condition.”

Kate stared at Nicko. “I don’t understand.”

“At this point neither do I. But I’m going after him and I need your help.”

Kate was silent.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t enjoy having to put you in this position again. So if you turn me down, it will be all right.”

“No. It won’t be all right. After all you’ve done for me, I could never feel easy with you again if I turned you down.”

“Well, things do have a way of changing, don’t they?” Nicko lit a cigarette and the tip flared in the darkness. “But then
there’s always your mercurial Paul Walters to take up some of the slack. Isn’t there?”

Kate stood absolutely still. “How long have you known?”

“Only about twelve hours,” said Nicko, who went on to describe how he had made the connection.

Kate said nothing.

“Does he know about your killing his parents?” Nicko asked.

Kate nodded.

“And, I assume, about me?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like a match made in heaven.”

“Don’t you mean hell?”

Nicko Vorelli’s shrug was eloquent. “We don’t really know that.”

They stood staring at each other. The sky was turning lighter in the east but the night remained dark under the linden.

Kate broke the silence. “So what do you need me to do?”

They picked up the limousine where the chauffeur had left it hours before, and Nicko explained as much as he chose to tell
Kate as he drove.

He made his first left turn about a kilometer past the main security checkpoint. He remembered the heavy woods closing in
from both sides and began watching for the rough dirt trail where he would take the second left. Reaching that, he swung onto
the next right-hand track and kept going straight.

He handed Kate a key. “There are two automatics and two silencers in the glove compartment. Would you please put them together
for me?”

Kate did as he asked.

“Just a precaution,” he said. “You needn’t worry.”

Kate put one automatic in her purse and gave the other to Nicko.

Moments later they spotted a black station wagon parked in the woods just off the trail. Nicko braked to a stop and cut the
lights.

“Damn,” he said softly.

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing I expected. Cover me.”

Nicko drew his pistol and approached the station wagon. He was back in a moment. “It’s empty,” he said. “But it probably means
someone is down there with Logefeld.”

“Couldn’t there be more than one?”

“That, too.”

Nicko drove for another fifty yards, parked behind some brush, and got out of the car. “The entrance is only a short walk
from here. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, leave fast.”