Blown (11 page)

“The entire law enforcement world, probably. Did you know him?”

“I knew him.”

“You did? The whole time we were working the Payne kidnapping? You
knew
there was an Agency guy inside 30 April? And you never told me?”

She would not look at the confusion and hurt on his face. “Why do you think I resigned?”

“You said you were fired!”

“Sometimes it’s a little of both.”

“My God—I begin to see why!” He thrust himself away from his chair and stood staring down at her in disbelief. “Caroline—who
is
this guy?”

“My husband,” she said.

Chapter 23

SPRING VALLEY, 5:58 A.M.

“George,” she said clearly sometime before dawn, “don’t marry a bubblehead.
Mallory.
”

He leaned closer, stroking her cheek. It was hot, and dry as a withered leaf. “She’ll be here soon. Another few hours.”

Dana shook her head. “No sympathetic idiots. No
rebound,
you hear? Take some time.”

“Shhhhh.” He went on stroking her face, feeling the hard bone beneath the skin like the bedrock of a familiar country. Her eyes were cloudy, the irises indistinct and muddy.

“She needs someone who can answer her questions. Someone with a brain. Who knows—”

“She needs
you,
” he insisted, his vision swimming. “You.”

Dana smiled faintly and her eyes slid closed. She did not speak again.

When she died at three minutes past six that Monday morning, she was looking at something beyond George’s shoulder, beyond the acoustic tile of the emergency room’s ceiling, an ecstatic vision fueled by her failing liver and the morphine the doctors had pumped liberally into her veins. She gripped his hand, the long thin fingers loose as pickup sticks, her lips parted.

He said urgently, “
Dana.
Dana, I’m here. Darling—” but he might as well have been background static to the music in her head. She did not look at him. Her frame lifted slightly from the pillow, straining against life—and then he felt her slacken. That quickly, sense bled from her eyes.

He continued to sit in the silence she’d left, waiting for a breath that never came. If he called the nurse now and allowed someone to see her, they would say she was dead—and it would be true, then, it would be all over, his life gone without hope in the time it took to drape a sheet. They would wheel her away. There would be forms to sign.

He sat in the silence, praying for the wretched day to begin with fresh coffee steaming on his bedside table, the drumbeat of Dana’s shower from the next room.

He put his left hand to his eyes. His right still held hers.

Part 2

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22

Chapter 24

ARLINGTON, 11:00 A.M.

It was a beautiful day for national mourning.

Sharp, crisp autumn weather, Monday the twenty-second of November. All but the pin oak leaves had long since fallen in decay, and the sharp branches of bare trees reached toward the monuments on the opposite bank of the Potomac. Thousands of people lined the cavalcade’s route from the National Cathedral to Arlington National Cemetery. In their hands they held pictures of Sophie Payne, and the pale pink roses she’d reportedly loved.

Caroline Carmichael was able to see it all, panoramic as a Hollywood back lot, from her jump seat in the White House limo.

She sat between Matthew Finch, Jack Bigelow’s Chief of Staff, and Jozsef Krucevic. If word of her firing—her appalling disgrace—had reached the Situation Room in the early hours of the morning, nobody had seen fit to boot her from the funeral cavalcade. Maybe it was too late to rearrange the seating, or maybe she had Finch to thank for the privilege; he was an independent thinker and she guessed he’d not yet condemned her.

“You’ll be seated in the row directly behind the President and Mrs. Bigelow,” he was saying now, “with Jozsef next to you. If a camera focuses on your face, just gaze at the casket. Or the President.”

“I’d prefer to stand.”

“That’s a risk. You’ll be more of a target.”

He was still operating on the first script he’d been handed, then—the one in which she was a hero, not a criminal, the wife of a terrorist.

“The consignment of the body could take half an hour, including the President’s speech, and in your condition—” Finch’s gaze wandered to Caroline’s right shoulder, bandaged under her plain dark suit. She’d left the sling at home.

“I’ll stand,” she repeated. “I want a good view.”

“Carrie,” he said gently, “FBI plainclothes and Secret Service people are crawling all over Arlington. Let them do their job.”

They don’t know who to look for,
she thought.
I just might.

Jack Bigelow had considered a horse-drawn cortege for Sophie’s casket. He could have walked with her son the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, his familiar face somber above a black wool coat. But Sophie had been only a vice president, after all, and the obvious parallel to John F. Kennedy’s assassination might be considered excessive. Not that Bigelow was afraid to borrow the trappings of national myth: far from it. Sophie’s murder in the fullness of her political career was the stuff of tragedy. Unlike Jack Kennedy, however, Bigelow’s running mate had died far from home, at the hands of terrorists. Her death was a national embarrassment. Already he was being held to blame.

The Speaker of the House had announced his wife’s death from ricin poisoning at a press conference that morning. George Enfield had vowed in a voice shaking with emotion to launch a full Congressional investigation into what he was calling “the administration’s massive intelligence failure.” The statement was followed by a police sketch of the ricin killer mounted on every screen in America.

Bigelow fingered his tie in the back of the limo and glanced sidelong at his wife. Adele looked elegant and composed, her hair swept off her high forehead; but he knew the lines of strain around her mouth. Had she slept at all?

“Thirty April?” she’d repeated blankly when he’d gisted his two
A.M.
meeting for her over early coffee. “I thought we wiped them all out.”

“We
did,
” Jack muttered. “But this is some kind of copycat thing. Probably just a lone nut. They’ll get him, sweetheart. This is nothing we haven’t lived with before.”

But Adele, with thirty-one years’ experience of her husband, had known he was lying to her. One man had promised to see Jack dead. She was gazing out of the limousine window, her fingers clenched tightly in her lap, no doubt calculating which of the hundreds of faces slipping past intended to pull the trigger.

The sleek black cars crossed Memorial Bridge and slid through the cemetery’s gates. Serene on its hill, the white-pillared Custis-Lee mansion rose up before them. The chauffeur in charge of Caroline’s limo moved without hesitation through the vast park of gravestones, the broad avenues twisting sinuously upward; but then Norm Wilhelm, Payne’s personal driver, would have practiced the route before this high-profile performance. Caroline had sized Wilhelm up as she’d entered the car, her mental checklist drawn from his FBI background file. He was forty-three years old, with trim brown hair and unsmiling eyes. It was possible, Caroline thought, that he felt the pervasive sadness that overwhelmed her whenever she passed through the iron portals of Arlington.

Eric’s gravestone was here, one more blunt white square of granite lost in the swollen ranks. The grave itself was empty, of course, but Caroline would never forget that misty day in early May nearly three years before, the sound of taps haunting the air. The smell of nitrogen rising from the fertilized lawns. She had nearly swooned from the pain of that hole in the ground, the inexplicable descent of widowhood.

“What is this place?”

Jozsef, his eyes wide in a painfully pallid face, was studying the rows of glittering white headstones. The manicured hillside looked nothing, Caroline thought, like the mass graves or simple wooden crosses of Bosnia. He might be forgiven for failing to connect it to the funeral service just completed at the cathedral. The most he’d seen of Washington, D.C., was the interior of the naval hospital.

“It’s the most hallowed burial ground in America,” Matthew Finch said briskly. “Four million tourists a year visit it.”

“This is where we’ll leave Mrs. Payne,” Caroline added.

She felt, rather than saw, Norman Wilhelm glance at his rearview mirror and wondered what he made of the conversation. Whether he held her responsible—held Jozsef responsible—for his employer’s death. But when she looked at him directly his profile was steady, his hands tranquil on the wheel.
How odd,
she thought,
that all of us must follow her casket together.

“It’s a place for kings.” Jozsef’s eyes were fixed on the view. “She ought to sleep here, Lady Sophie. With flowers on her grave.”

He looked down at his empty hands and a shadow passed over his features. He was thinking, Caroline realized, that he should have brought a bouquet—but did not know how to begin to ask for one. She was suddenly angry at herself for having failed the boy, for having been so consumed by her own anxiety that she had neglected his feelings. But she’d scarcely slept in the two hours after her disastrous parting from Tom Shephard. Forgetting the flowers was the least of her problems.

Shephard had nearly thrown her bodily from the FBI building at five-thirty that morning.
I can’t trust you, Caroline. You know what that means? I can’t even
talk
to you anymore.

She closed her eyes sharply at the memory of Shephard’s face, furious and ugly. Shephard’s voice, like a slap across the mouth. He believed she’d deliberately used him. As indeed she had. Tom had shut her firmly out of his heart and mind—and it was only now that she stood on the far side of the closed door that she understood how much she’d relied on his caustic humor, his quick intelligence, his unshakable conviction of her worth. Tom’s contempt hurt. She was lonelier than she’d been in weeks—since the first hour she’d understood that Eric was alive, and had lied to her for years.

Eric.
Where was he now?

The loneliness intensified, deepened, became a pit as dark and broad as a grave.

The limo pulled to a stop on Memorial Drive, above the amphitheater where Jack Bigelow intended to make his remarks to several hundred chosen guests. Caroline watched as the vice president’s casket was carried by six uniformed men past monuments honoring the crew of the
Challenger
space shuttle and the Iran hostage rescue mission; already the dead woman had entered the public domain of grief. Matthew Finch’s door was opened by a Secret Service agent and the Chief of Staff stepped out, turning to assist Caroline. She felt for the walkie-talkie she’d placed in her suit pocket, then reached for Jozsef’s hand.

The boy’s doctors had permitted him to attend the funeral provided an ambulance stood by. Jozsef was weak enough to require Caroline’s support simply to reach his place in the amphitheater. At the moment, however, he seemed oblivious to their arrival. He was staring at a solid bit of fur three inches long: a rabbit’s foot. With a pang, Caroline understood how precious the good luck charm was to the boy. Sophie Payne had been clutching it when she died.

“Do you think . . . ?” Jozsef glanced up at Caroline. “Instead of flowers?”

“I think it’s perfect,” she assured him gently. “Exactly what Mrs. Payne would want to remember you by.”

The world’s great had turned out in force: The new chancellor of Germany had flown in as a mark of penance for the safe haven his country had granted 30 April; so, too, had Jack Bigelow’s closest ally, Tony Blair. The Speaker of the House, the Senate Minority Whip, and the president of Yale—where Sophie Payne’s son was a sophomore—were seated together in close conversation. Caroline picked out a leading man and his current wife, dressed in their very best Armani mourning; the French and Spanish ambassadors; a National League pitcher; a famous model.

She saw Jozsef safely seated in his designated row behind the First Lady, Matthew Finch at his side, then edged her way to the amphitheater’s top level and positioned herself near a stone pillar. The Secret Service detail working the funeral was familiar with her face and her role as Jozsef’s babysitter; if they knew she was already persona non grata in Washington, they didn’t betray it. Carl Rogers, chief of White House Security, had given her the transmitter that morning. He was middle-aged and gray-haired, with an athletic body and a web of laugh lines creasing his face. Rogers no doubt wanted her wired so he could track her at all times. Overnight, she’d turned from friend to suspect.

“Good to go?” he asked easily.

She adjusted the microphone clipped to her blouse and said quietly, “Nobody, but nobody, gets in to see the Wizard. No way, no how.”

He smiled at that, and flicked one finger at her in salute. As he strolled away she watched him work the upper fringe of the crowd, his eyes wary.

Was Ricin Boy lost somewhere in the sea of faces, quietly waiting?

Three stories of scaffolding built by the media giants rose from the amphitheater’s far wall, directly opposite the Memorial Drive entrance; klieg lights and technical equipment sprouted from the steel poles. Along with the news anchors established there, the Secret Service would be using the advantages of height and closed-circuit screens to monitor the crowd below. Each agent had Ricin Boy’s sketch in his pocket. And a description of the stolen police uniform the killer might be wearing. Security was beyond tight; but Caroline knew her enemy was no fool.
Where would he hit? When?
She began deliberately to study the crowd: watching, thinking.

Sophie Payne’s Episcopal priest, a woman with a sleek head of red hair and lacquered fingernails, led the mourners in passages from Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer. Her words rang out across the stillness of the chill November morning.

Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

Peter Payne, Sophie’s orphaned son, strode toward the casket with a fixed expression. He had Sophie’s dark hair and his dead father’s strong chin; and indeed, the past few days had changed him utterly, Caroline thought, so that he might never sleep again. What had the minister been thinking when she chose those words? Of a child reared by parents more dedicated to public office than to him? He placed a sealed envelope on his mother’s coffin and turned abruptly away. Two hundred fifty million people were denied a shot of his grief.

Adele Bigelow laid a fan of pale pink roses on Sophie’s bier. The First Lady’s right hand lingered for a few seconds, at about the level of the dead woman’s heart; then she made her stately way back to the gallery of seats. Jack Bigelow followed. With bowed head, he lowered himself to the kneeler carefully arranged to position him well above the casket, so that he could pay homage without disappearing from camera view. His eyes met Caroline’s for an instant, then moved on, withholding all recognition. She no longer existed for the President of the United States.

It was nearly her turn to approach the casket—to say good-bye to this woman she’d completely failed. She waited for the line of Cabinet members and dignitaries to thin. Jozsef stood taut beside her, his fingers gripping the soiled white rabbit’s foot. She reached for his hand.

They walked stiffly forward, too aware of the lights and the crowd and the filming cameras, the boy clutching his good luck charm, until the kneeler rose in front of them and they could fall gratefully at its feet. Caroline shuddered to think what was being said about them even then by the smoothly practiced talking heads:
And there’s the CIA agent who found Mrs. Payne too late, and the son of the terrorist who kidnapped her. Allegations released this morning suggest that Caroline Carmichael knew more than she admitted about 30 April, and inside sources say that the CIA fired her only last night as a result . . .

With a shaking hand, Jozsef placed the rabbit’s foot next to the fan of roses. Tears streamed down his cheeks; his lips moved in words Caroline could not understand. She bowed her head and tried to find a few of her own. Some way to beg forgiveness for failure.

“Miss Carrie? Miss
Carrie
!”

A hoarse whisper, the words laced with desperation. She glanced at the boy and saw that his eyes were agonized in his white face, his lips blue. He was going to faint.

She put her good left arm around his shoulders and helped him upright. He leaned against her heavily, stumbling. She ignored the empty seats and led him toward the amphitheater’s exit aisle, aware that she was disturbing the symmetry of the televised moment. Beside her, Jozsef retched convulsively.