Blown (20 page)

Chapter 38

CAMBRIDGE, OHIO, 8:05 A.M.

Tom Shephard was only a few exits away from Caroline Carmichael as she swept past in Price’s fast car; but he was in no mood for spies or journalists and it was a good thing they missed each other. He’d spent the better part of the previous night watching Kaylie Marks pick body parts out of the blasted trailer with tweezers and trash bags while Julie Cohen’s husband, David, stood bent-backed under the klieg lights. Clutching his stomach as though it would not stop cramping. The stench of burnt flesh and sodden charred wood and plastique everywhere. Television vans filming the carnage. Demands for Tom to comment.

He’d called in roadblocks all over the state and ordered surveillance at the Pennsylvania and Ohio borders, repeating the stolen Rac Transport truck’s vitals to every law enforcement body he could reach. He was convinced Daniel Becker had not been in the trailer when it blew sky-high; convinced it was Becker who’d shot up six people in Wheeling that same night. Kaylie Marks had told him the markings on the bullet taken from Norm Wilhelm’s limo door matched the one that had killed the medical technician at Arlington; it remained to be seen if the same gun had killed all the others.

Just before three o’clock in the morning, Tom left the ravaged clearing that had once been the heart of a farm, kicking at stray pieces of play structure all the way to the flattened security fence. It was clear by then that Rebekah Becker had detonated the bomb, that Julie and Stan had been with her, and that Jason Bovian had been right behind them. Shephard had only known the kid a few days, but he’d liked him. Bovian was bright and dedicated; he had the endearing habit of bringing Tom the entire Hundred-Acre Wood whenever he asked for a twig.

All those years in school,
he thought now, remembering the kid’s Stanford MBA.
His parents taking out loans. Proud of him. Shit.

The parents lived on Staten Island; it was impossible for Tom to make the visit himself, walk up the pathetic concrete path to the storm door and wait while the sleep-fuddled father adjusted his glasses. Tom had called the head of the New York field office at home and told him to break the news. Then he’d slept for two hours in his car, setting the alarm on his sports watch. Waking every fifteen minutes in case one of the roadblocks had found the fucking bastard.

The call came at 5:34
A.M.

The truck was parked on a Cambridge, Ohio, backstreet, shit out of luck and empty.

Tom threw his car into gear and raced for the state line.

“So how’d the sonofabitch roar past all our people?” he demanded as he stood in the light rain two hours later. “How’d he drive this sucker till it was bone-dry and nobody—
nobody
—pulled him over?”

“They’d have gotten a gun in the mouth if they had,” his companion answered laconically. “Stands to reason he slipped through the net. Doesn’t take more’n an hour to get here from Wheeling, where the truck was stolen. By the time you got the word and the heat out, guy was long gone.”

Mackie Sterne was a captain in the Cambridge police force, a twenty-year veteran of the streets and a man who clearly had nothing but contempt for the federal agent who stood before him now. “You want us to take evidence outta the cab? Send it straight to the Bureau? Happy to help.”

Tom shook his head. “I’ve already asked for a forensic team. I’m impounding the vehicle. Leave your yellow tape and a uniformed officer to guard it and I’ll guarantee we’ll take it off your hands in under two hours.”

“Doesn’t solve your problem,” Sterne pointed out shrewdly. “Problem being, which way to head next. You got any idea where this creep with the sick kid has gone?”

“Mackie, have any vehicles—car, motorcycle, ATV, baby carriage—been reported missing in Cambridge during the past eight hours?”

“Thought of that,” the policeman replied with satisfaction. “Figured the truck was ripped off around dinnertime yesterday, gave it maybe two hours to hit Cambridge what with hugging the back roads, and started checking missing car reports as of eight
P.M
. last night. There’re only two. A little old lady’s low-mileage Buick, which she discovered gone at the crack of dawn. Turns out she’d left it parked in front of the house with the keys inside and the motor running and one of her neighbors very kindly moved the car up the drive and into the woman’s garage. End of story. Second car was reported twenty minutes later—snatched from the opposite end of town from where we’re standing, by the way. Found that one completely stripped and abandoned in the Wal-Mart parking lot.”

So maybe Ricin Boy hadn’t stolen a car. Tom didn’t have to ask if any bodies had turned up with a single bullet to the brain; Sterne would’ve told him. He glanced around the quiet block of warehouses—all of them fronted with loading docks—where the killer he now thought of as Daniel Becker had chosen to abandon his Rac Transport. The district was perfect cover for a stray eighteen-wheeler. Tom was surprised anybody had noticed it.

He didn’t walk,
Shephard thought furiously,
dragging the sick kid behind him. Is there a railroad track nearby? A freight they could have jumped?

He began to pace down the alley, scanning the buildings on either side.

“We’ve searched those warehouses,” Sterne said impatiently.

Eight or nine o’clock at night. He knows the roads are watched. Maybe he’s even seen a roadblock. Or heard some kind of bulletin on the truck’s radio. Dark. Rain coming down. Jozsef on his last legs. Where would he go? When all the world knows his face?

At this hour—just after eight
A.M.—
the loading docks were finally coming to life, metal doors rocketing skyward and the first delivery van looming at the far end of the alley. A belch of smoke from a diesel exhaust pipe, somehow more pungent and acrid in the rain. Beyond it, nearly two blocks distant and behind a vacant lot that separated the warehouses from a busy freeway, a bus was heaving its cumbersome way into a turn.

“There’s nothing down here,” Sterne insisted. “We need to go back to the station and check the computers.”

“That’s it,” Tom said. He’d stopped short, his eyes narrowed. “That’s it, Mackie. Our boy’s gone Greyhound.”

It was important to get to Pittsburgh because there was somebody Daniel knew near that city, somebody he could call if things got tough, but he refused to take the bus directly toward Pennsylvania because that meant a route through Wheeling again and Wheeling was a bad place for Daniel now. He’d kept the radio humming during that wretched hour and forty minutes of coaxing the big truck along roads never made for it, heading by sense and luck toward the farthest point his gas would take him. Buying more was out of the question.

He’d had a lot of plans for what he’d do once the boy was riding shotgun—circle back toward Washington and pick off the head of the FBI at his house in Potomac, which Daniel had already cased; or drop some ricin in the D.C. water supply off Reservoir Road. Send a few more faxes claiming responsibility. There was even the plan for explosives in the Metro system, which he’d intended to detonate on an Orange line train while it traveled under the river from Foggy Bottom to Rosslyn; he figured it would be the toughest place to stage a rescue and casualties would be nice and high. Sunny’s Truck Stop Delite had changed all that. Daniel knew now that his picture was circulating, and he was spooked. It was Christmas Eve 1995 all over again, and a party with guns was waiting in the trees.

Near Cambridge he knew he was rolling on fumes and he was about to tell the boy they’d have to hoof it when the bulletin came across the dash.
Explosion in remote West Virginia trailer, casualties uncertain, FBI involved, possible suicide bomber.
He’d known. Known instantly. He’d taught Bekah how to pack the plastique in the makeshift belt, how to set the circuit and keep it broken until the last second. They’d practiced belting trees they didn’t need on the farm, an old Army Ranger trick, circle the trunk and detonate from a safe distance. Bekah’s sorry eyes, the deep rifts running from nostril to chin, the pain cut into her wrists over and over—all flashed before his vision like a stigmata and he cried out, unconscious of the boy beside him, a knife gone straight into the gut.

After that he didn’t care about the truck or exactly where they landed. He was hurting, and the edges of his mind had curled where the exhaustion etched them like acid. When the engine sputtered and died he grabbed the boy by the shoulder and shoved him hard down the alleyway, straight toward the neon bus station sign. Consigning Bekah to her Maker. They’d taught him about this in Basic, how it was hard to lose a buddy in the field, somebody you’d trusted with your back.
Dolf, son,
his thoughts raged.
Your mama’s coming. I’ll be along soon.

He’d told Jozsef he’d shoot him dead if he put a hair out of line and then sent him straight up to the Greyhound window with some of the last cash Daniel had. Enough to buy two tickets to Erie, heading north first to Cleveland and then east along the lake. Four, maybe five hours, the bus pulling out at nine-fifteen, and enough change to send the boy a second time to the fast-food counter with an order for hot dogs and soda. Daniel ate the tasteless food standing outside the bus station in the cloudless dark, his body shoved up against the building’s brick wall and his eyes constantly moving. Night patrol. He’d done it a hundred times. Only this time he had the Son of the Leader by his side. Jozsef shivering like a stray dog, food untouched, hands clenched in his pockets.

“I don’t think you really knew my father,” he said once, in a voice so low Daniel barely heard it. “If you did, you’d have managed this better. You’re making it up as you go along, aren’t you? Papa always said that was the first sign of panic.”

Chapter 39

FRANKFURT, 9:12 A.M.

It was Josie’s job to handle the details of her operations, and after nearly twelve years in semiretirement, calling her own shots, she’d grown to expect complete autonomy in the field. It was annoying, then, to have Scottie acting like she was a three-year-old. Telling her where and when to set up, what the constraints might be. As though she couldn’t research the situation for herself, case the area, analyze the opportunities.
This jerk has him jumping,
she thought as she deplaned in Frankfurt and reembarked for the short hop to Berlin.
A serious threat to national security,
he’d said
. Pack your bags, Josie.

She’d gone about it like the professional she was. Called her daughter and told her to cover for her at the fish store. Called Mike and cut her deliveries in half.
But Mom,
Sheila had protested,
you can’t just take a vacation at the drop of a hat. You’ve got to plan for these things. It’s Thanksgiving week. We expected you Thursday.

Josie pleaded doctor’s orders and overwork and the sudden need for a holiday in the sun. By ten that evening she was sitting at the Lufthansa gate with the tickets and passport Scottie had given her, a passable photo and name. Mary Devlin. Fair, fat, and fifty. With the separate components of a Steyr rifle worth nearly three thousand dollars in her checked baggage.

Some women worried about their jewelry when they traveled; Josie worried about her scope. She’d wrapped it carefully as a baby in her pashmina scarves.

At the last minute, almost as an afterthought, she’d tossed the bleached-out photograph of Patrick in her suitcase and shut the lid firmly on his grin. Patrick was always with her on these jobs, his chipped front tooth hovering somewhere beyond her peripheral vision. Patrick the Second-Story Man, Patrick the charming drinker, Patrick who could dance her off her feet and make her feel more gorgeous than Miss America. He’d worked for years cracking safes and burgling embassies for the CIA; hence the nickname. They were all Second-Story Men, the guys who could climb like cats into any room, no matter how secure or how high off the ground. Like Patrick, they’d grown up in the Boston mafia or the Chicago mob or somewhere off the Vegas strip and were trying to earn the gratitude of the Feds when they weren’t selling guns or whiskey. Bill Harvey, their ostensible superior, used to let the FBI know when one of his boys was traveling official; nobody arrested a Second-Story Man.

Josie had met Patrick on one of his flying visits to Bogotá, back when it was still a glamorous Latin town and Scottie was cooling his heels there before a stint in Embassy Athens. Patrick had recognized the last trace of her Southie accent, knew immediately everything she’d tried to hide for years, and loved her for it. No Georgetown or Holy Cross stuck-up, he.

Patrick taught her how to pick locks and how to hide contraband and how to smuggle her best friend across any border. Taught her how to bug a phone and clean a rifle, how to nail her five-shot groupings from three hundred meters, how to uncap a beer with her teeth. He left her pregnant, unmarried, and thirty years old on the night of his last job, when the Second-Story Man was shot off a window ledge and fell forty feet to his death.

If I cannot be safe, Patrick me darling,
she thought as her plane took off from Frankfurt,
then for Chrissake let me be brave.

She ignored the fancy place where Scottie was staying and checked into one of the no-longer-fashionable small hotels in the western half of the city, just off Ku’damm. It was possibly a three-star, probably a two, and the bathroom was smaller than Lufthansa’s. No minibar, the mattress nearly on the floor, a nice down quilt in the German fashion. She’d been to Berlin only once before, and though the jet lag was fuddling her brain she forced herself to take a long hot shower and then study her city map over coffee. She could sleep when her work was done.

There were maybe ten prisons strung out around the inner suburbs and districts of Berlin, two of them juvenile detention centers, one specifically for women. She concentrated on finding the other seven, ignoring those that did not tally with Scottie’s instructions. It was a small place, unofficial, near the St.-Elisabeth Stift—a medical clinic. A scattering of buildings around an inner courtyard off Eberswalderstrasse. Scottie had suggested she rent a room in a building next door or get access to a stairwell—as though stairwells had windows—and wait for the armored van with the prisoner to return from its daily jaunt. Josie had other ideas. There was the clinic, for crying out loud—and why couldn’t she, Mary Devlin, have a relative waiting inside?
I’ll get over there in an hour,
she thought as she leaned back against the inadequate bedstead and stared thoughtfully at the leaden Berlin sky.
But now I’m going to nap a little.

We aren’t as young as we used to be, Patrick, and that’s a fact.

It’s no use,
Cuddy thought wearily as he waited for the next question to fall in the room’s thickening silence.
He’ll never leave me alone with Eric, and I’ve got no way of reaching him. I might as well have stayed in Langley.

He had gone to Dulles at the appointed hour and waited in a bar for Raphael. Contact had come in the form of a drink sent to his table by a leggy blonde, who smiled at him cheerily from the corner. He’d nearly choked on the Scotch as he read the note on the back of her business card—
Bambi Trixx, Room 419, Hotel Adlon, Berlin
—and had adjusted his glasses twice before he believed it.
Raphael in drag.
He wore a chamois-colored suede skirt and a black leather jacket. His platinum hair was entirely his own, loose and curled in a smooth bob. The angelic features transmuted perfectly, the makeup applied by an artist’s hand. Unlike Cuddy, Bambi traveled first-class, sipping champagne over the Atlantic. Cuddy had no idea where Raphael was now, but thought it was a good bet that Room 419, the Adlon, was one of the best suites in the house.

Sleeper. Tool. Fist.
Like Caroline, Cuddy had seen the empty folders with the Croatian names, and like her he’d translated them for himself. How to ask Eric what they meant in this room with the wolf at the door?

They had landed in Berlin at noon local time. Wally Aronson was waiting for them in a khaki trench coat, looking for all the world like a collaborator out of
Casablanca
. November in that part of Germany was wet and harsh, and the vaguely sinister outline of mustard-colored cranes suited the atmosphere. More than a decade after unification, but construction pits still yawned throughout the city. The prevalence of skeletal buildings made the burned-out hulk of the Brandenburg Gate, destroyed by 30 April two weeks before, almost easier to bear.

Scottie carried himself like a spymaster of old that morning. He barked orders and refused lunch and did not stop at the Adlon, where Wally had reserved rooms, demanding to be taken immediately to Eric.
You would think,
Cuddy commented inwardly,
that he’d missed his wayward child. Eric—his prodigal.
Scottie’s air was one of bewildered sorrow, a man grievously betrayed.

He was lounging now in his chair as though overcome with boredom or perhaps the effects of jet lag, long legs outstretched idly in their perfect British suiting. A few imperious words to his German goons, Ernst and Klaus, had succeeded in winning the suspect’s temporary removal from solitary confinement to a CIA safe house, though Eric still wore shackles on his legs and wrists. The safe house was in the Grunewald, west of Berlin, down a cobbled lane hard by the lakes and forest that made the area a sporting mecca for city residents; but nobody within the tidy cottage was enjoying the view. The curtains were drawn.

It was the obvious course. Any BKA interrogation room would be penetrated, and Scottie could never allow Eric’s confession to be recorded. He’d promised Ernst something—a public trial in a German court?—in exchange for exclusive debriefing rights; and the German agent had insisted he come along for the ride. Scottie and Ernst in the hunting grounds of the vanished Hohenzollerns, two survivors of a century of blood sport.

Once at the door of the safe house, however, Scottie had nodded to Wally Aronson and the station chief had taken the BKA agent gently by the arm. Preventing him from following Scottie and Eric over the threshold. Ernst was smoking quietly outside now while Wally chatted in his amiable, nonsensical way; two prison guards wandered about the grounds, fingering the guns concealed in their pockets and blowing on chapped fingers.

“You fucking piece of shit.” Eric said it quietly. “I went through hell for you, Scottie. I’d have died for you if you’d asked. And you sold me out. You know how stupid I feel? How unbelievably fucking
stupid
? You were like a father to me. Only I wasn’t your son—I was just somebody you could use.”

“Here’s the deal,” Scottie mused to no one in particular. “Dare’s been murdered by one of your friends, Eric, and Rinehart’s taken over as DCI. Remember Rinehart? No? A nice young man. Obsessed with power. He’ll do whatever I tell him to keep it.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck who’s running the CIA, Scottie. Who’s running you?”

“I’ve told Rinehart that Dare single-handedly shoved you deep into 30 April and successfully destroyed the evidence before her untimely death. Rinehart wants you brought to book. In the U.S. That’s what the President has ordered, too. If you don’t get the death penalty for Sophie Payne’s murder, Eric, you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail.”

Eric grinned. All his teeth bared. The white cut through the mass of bruises was painful to look at. “I’ll be tried first, before a jury of my peers. Or a panel of German judges here in Berlin. I’ll tell them the truth about your brutal little games, Scottie.”

“Which will get you exactly nothing.” Scottie’s gaze was still fixed on the curtained window, as though his eyes somehow saw the lake through it. “You and I used to play poker, Eric. Don’t you remember? Don’t you
remember
how I’d call your bluff, over and over again, and you’d come up short? I can read your death in your eyes. You’ve got dogs in that hand right now. Threes and sevens.
I’m holding aces, asshole.
Rinehart’s my ace. Jack Bigelow’s my ace. The
American people,
who are scared shitless and running for any hole they can hide in, are my aces. They want a terrorist’s head and I’m in a position to give it to them. I’ll be crowned king of the universe before I’m done.”

“Cuddy knows the truth,” Eric said steadily. But he did not look at him, and Cuddy felt his face flush with shame. “Caroline knows.”

“Caroline’s out on the street. The FBI’s tailing her under suspicion of collusion with her killer husband. Cuddy is working for me—and the day he stops is the day I turn him over to the law, burned from head to toe.”

Eric’s eyes drifted toward Cuddy, found his face where it leaned wearily against his hand. Cuddy managed to shake his head slightly, once. A profession of faith. Eric’s expression remained impassive. The wound in his neck resembled a garrote.

“Did you come to Berlin to gloat?”

The CTC chief sighed with impatience. “I came to offer you a deal. The best I can do. The
only
thing I can do. With Rinehart’s okay.”

“What deal?”

“Your confession—your promise to enter a guilty plea—and your willingness to work with us, Eric. In exchange for twenty years to life. No trial, no risk of the death penalty. You’ve heard of turning state’s evidence, right? Thirty April’s rapidly making a charnel house of the District and we need whatever facts you store in that animal brain.”

With sudden violence Eric thrust himself out of his chair. “
Guilty
plea?” he spat out, his manacled hands clanking against the conference table. “Guilty of
what
? Protecting your ass?”

Scottie stood up and reached for his suit jacket. “I’ll tell Ernst you’re not cooperating. He can take you back to your cell.”

With his fingertips, Eric lifted the edge of the table and tossed it at Scottie. It flipped once, and though Scottie stepped instinctively backward, one of the metal legs caught his cheek high on the bone, cutting instantly to blood.

“Wilmot,” Scottie said calmly as he drew a gun and pointed it steadily at Eric, “get the prison guards. This boy’s beyond saving.”