Blown (12 page)

“Mad Dog to Code Central,” she muttered into her microphone. “We need an ambulance,
over
.”

“Roger that,” a distorted voice replied.

Jozsef bent double, hands clutching his stomach, and vomited all over her shoes.

She waited, one hand smoothing his thin back, until the gasping stopped. They were almost free of the crowds. A few more steps might do it, so that the boy didn’t have to be taken on a stretcher from the graveside ceremony and focus all the media attention once more on himself.

“What’s going on?” asked a quiet voice at her elbow.

Carl Rogers.

“He needs help,” she told the security chief. “The ambulance.”

He lifted Jozsef in his arms and strode swiftly toward Memorial Drive. Caroline followed.

Quiet fell like a closing-night curtain beyond the amphitheater’s walls. Here, the air was broken only by the staccato bursts of amplified speech and a sudden rush of applause as President Bigelow stood before the podium. He was supposed to close the ceremony now with his eulogy. The moment of greatest peril, though he would be standing behind the bulletproof screen.

Caroline glanced over her shoulder, sharply uneasy, her view of the amphitheater blocked. She couldn’t believe Ricin Boy would miss this kind of show. It was too perfect. Too available.

She halted, undecided.

The ambulance sat thirty feet ahead: large-bodied and square, its lights flashing silently. At the sight of them, the passenger door opened and a female EMT stepped to the curb.

Rogers called out, “Hey. We need your help. The kid’s sick.”

It was Caroline who noticed the gray car.

It was nondescript and rather old, idling slowly to a stop in front of the ambulance. Chrysler maybe, or Chevrolet. The back window slid open a few inches and a narrow cylinder—the shaft of a gun—snaked through it. Before Caroline could draw breath to shout, it fired.

With a startled expression the EMT catapulted to the ground.

Rogers swore aloud and dropped to one knee, Jozsef huddled in the circle of his body. He’d been trained to protect and it was what he did instinctively, even as he struggled to reach his weapon. Caroline heard him grunt as a bullet plowed into his right arm. She began to run, shouting into her microphone, “Mayday on Memorial Drive! Mayday on Memorial Drive! Armed gunman firing!”

She had no idea what she intended to do—hurl herself in front of Jozsef, maybe. She had no gun, and her wounded arm would never aim right anyway. Rogers had raised his left hand. The gray car’s back window shattered like spring ice on a pond and the driver—a
woman,
Caroline saw clearly, wearing an Arlington police officer’s uniform—pulled out onto Memorial Drive with a screech of tires. A parting shot sang directly over Caroline’s head as she crouched at Carl Rogers’s side.

“You’re hit,” she said.

“I’m all right, God damn it.” His teeth were clenched on the pain. “It’s just a flesh wound. But that
girl—
”

The ambulance driver had vaulted out of the cab and was bent over the fallen EMT, searching for vital signs.

Jozsef had made no sound—no cry for help or scream of terror—and for an instant Caroline was afraid he was dead. She reached for him. He’d passed out cold.

“Get the limo driver,” Rogers gasped. “Wilhelm. He can take the boy back to Bethesda Naval. But you stay, Caroline. Understand? You
stay
.”

Of course,
she thought heavily.
I’m the one who walked out just in time for a murder. I’m the one they’ll blame.

A world away in Berlin, Germany, Eric Carmichael thrust himself out of sleep. The sound of a door closing: quiet as the cocking of a gun.

He sat up and stared wildly around, no idea where he was, reaching automatically for the weapon he no longer carried as the door to the hallway swung open.

Wally.
The bureaucrat’s face, gentle and mournful as a priest’s.

He remembered, then. Sophienstrasse and the shadows beneath the high ceiling. He tried to stand but the bandages tight around his rib cage brought the pain to his lips.

Wally, walking slowly toward him, hands outstretched in a plea for calm. And behind him, Ernst and Klaus, with their guns trained on his head.

Chapter 25

THE BELTWAY, 1:13 P.M.

As he crossed the Potomac and headed north into Maryland, Norman Wilhelm allowed himself one swift glance into the backseat of the limousine. The boy lay sleeping quietly. The rescue squad had offered him a blanket and Wilhelm had accepted it with his usual economy of speech, anxious to get away from the cemetery as quickly as possible. Now that he’d left Virginia he felt easier, as though in crossing the river he’d burned a greater bridge in his mind.

He had submitted no resignation but he knew, now, that he would never work in the capital again. He had enjoyed the six years in Sophie Payne’s employment—first as the driver of a senator’s wife, on those sporadic occasions when her husband’s popularity demanded the protection of an ostentatious car and unofficial bodyguard; and later, through the funeral rites following the senator’s death from cancer, and Mrs. Payne’s campaign

to succeed him. They had been, he reflected, the most important years of his life.

He had met Sophie in a soup kitchen off Adams-Morgan on a frigid morning in January: she the politician’s spouse embarked on a high-profile bit of do-gooding; he the drunk who’d rolled in off a heating grate for a cup of hot soup. He could not remember now why she had looked at him, or why he’d managed to make eye contact with the tiny figure in the vintage Chanel suit; he only knew that he went back for soup a second time, and that she took the trouble to talk to him. A few gentle questions, piercing in their accuracy. He had warmed to conversation as though it were heat from a flame. Maybe because the truth was easier to tell to a complete stranger.

He’d talked about driving his own rig for a national transport line. About the years he’d spent roaming the country with complete freedom and a wide-open future. And then about the loss of brakes on the downslope of Interstate 70, coming into Salt Lake, the stink of burning rubber and the panic of being unable to slow the eighteen-wheeler on the icy road, the runaway truck ramp too far to reach, the twelve cars in the lane ahead.

He’d injured twenty people that afternoon and lost his license to drive. Lost his savings in lawsuits and his reputation as a trucker. Lost his livelihood and his future. At the age of thirty-five lost his reason to hope.

Sophie Payne had finished serving soup and smiled her thanks to the charity executives who’d steered her through the ordeal. She shook hands with a varied cast of homeless as she made her exit, pressing her business card into Norm Wilhelm’s palm with the strict instruction that he must call her the following day.

He had shoved the card in his pocket, his face burning, and roamed the streets for a week and a half before he found the courage to pick up a pay phone. He could admit now that Sophie Payne had saved his life.

When she’d been named Jack Bigelow’s running mate two years before, he thought he’d be replaced with a driver from the White House pool—somebody trained by the Secret Service and accustomed to shepherding the VIPs of politics through the minefield of the people they served. But Mrs. Payne had demanded he stay, and had seen that he got the security training he needed.

The next six months are going to be weird enough, Norm, without losing the best friend I’ve got. Don’t tell me you’re leaving. You can’t, understand?

She had trusted him, he thought with a painful constriction of the throat; trusted him as the one familiar, constant face at the end of the day. The man who would never ask invasive questions. The man who was content to respond whenever she called and get her safely where she needed to go. He’d always picked up her favorite takeout—Thai soft-shell crabs—and dropped off her dry cleaning. He’d ferried her from tennis dates with Alan Greenspan to cocktail parties on California Street and unmentionable assignations with the married politician she’d briefly enjoyed. He knew what her public profile cost her and how lonely she was. He’d watched the age lines mounting in her face, the endless demands of position and responsibility that eroded her personal life. Sophie lived by herself in the huge house assigned to her at the Naval Observatory, missing her Georgetown garden—and the time she’d once had to cultivate it—intensely. Only the two of them truly understood how much of a hostage she’d become. Even before the kidnapping.

The newspapers said the terrorists had locked her in the trunk of a car. When he’d first heard the details—the story was all over the media, impossible to avoid—he had felt the sort of horrified fascination he’d experienced in flipping through a lesbian porn magazine at a newsstand. The details were too lurid, so impossible to accept in relation to the blunt, birdlike woman he’d worshipped for years that he’d wanted to puke—and yet was unable to tear his eyes away. Sophie Payne, bound and gagged in the trunk of a car. Violated. Diseased. Choking on her own blood. He could not get the images out of his mind.

And so that glance into the backseat, the quick look at the boy who wandered in drugged and peaceful sleep. The ambulance driver had shot him full of tranquilizers for the trip to Bethesda, as though he actually cared how the kid arrived. The son of a murderer! The reason Mrs. Payne was dead! For an instant, Norm considered stopping the car and stuffing the kid in his own trunk. It would do the little shit some good to understand what terror was really like.

But instead he slowed his foot on the accelerator and slid smoothly into the right-hand lane. The exit for Bethesda loomed ahead, the curve of the highway lapping a belt of ancient trees, a few scattered high-rises visible through their dark trunks.

He had to be careful now. He had a job to do. He only wished it might repay half his debt to Sophie Payne.

They had told him they’d be waiting in the Linden Hill parking lot, just off the Beltway ramp; and so he turned right as he’d been instructed and took the gradual incline of the side street at a cautious twenty-five miles per hour. It was important, he knew, that the car attract as little attention as possible; but somebody would surely notice a limousine on a Monday afternoon in a residential neighborhood.

Nobody’ll think twice about a shiny black car in that high-class suburb,
Rebekah had told him stubbornly.
If you just keep your shirt on, everything’ll go smooth as pie.

Most of the linden leaves lay in deep brown piles against the curb. It was only lunchtime now, but the early November light was turning milky as weak tea. Norm shivered, his eyes searching the street ahead. Where was she? Where was the car? Had they been caught after all?

He never thought of Rebekah without wanting to save her. For Rebekah he had betrayed Sophie Payne’s trust and his own sanity repeatedly over the past year. He did not believe the things she insisted were true, the worldwide conspiracies and sellouts, the hateful screed of Daniel’s warped mind; but for her, Norm had committed crimes his own conscience would never forgive. He had told Daniel what he knew because the information might keep Rebekah safe.

Norm Wilhelm had been raised to believe that blood was thicker than water, and even after the kidnapping—even after Sophie Payne’s horrible public death and his own knowledge of exactly how he’d contributed to it—he’d had no choice but to go on helping Daniel. Rebekah was his kid sister, the only relative left, the sole tie to his West Virginia childhood. He understood nothing about her life and very little about the man who held her in such thrall—had held her like a slave since she was seventeen.
Daniel Becker.
Norm’s childhood friend. Rebekah’s husband. The dangerous and deadly true believer.

It was Daniel he glimpsed first, sitting in the driver’s seat of his battered white pickup. They must have ditched the gray K-car, then, Norm thought with relief. Daniel’s sharp-featured face with its hook nose looked too placid for a guy who’d just fled the scene of a murder. Norm hoped it was Daniel who’d pulled the trigger and snuffed out the EMT’s life, that Rebekah had been driving, and not the other way around. It had come to this: After months of fear and threats and the unrelenting loss of everything Norm Wilhelm valued, he was reduced to hoping his sister was just an accessory to murder.

The truck’s passenger door opened a crack and Rebekah slid to the leaf-strewn sidewalk, her face expressionless as she stared at Norm’s approaching car. She wore no makeup. Her hair, the mouse brown shot through with gray, was pulled dully back behind her ears in a ragged ponytail. Her jeans were torn and her sweatshirt was the same one she’d had on last Christmas, bulky and sexless. She might have been thirteen or forty-five for all her clothes said about her. The deep lines running from her nose to the corners of her mouth, however, told their own story. Those, and the flat gray listless eyes. She had gone into the grave with her son, Norm thought; she had no intention of coming out anytime soon.

He pulled up behind her truck and killed the engine. She had her hand on his door before he had time to undo his seat belt.

“Is he okay?” she demanded.

“Guess so. They gave him something so’s he’d sleep.”

She dived for the limo’s rear door and hauled it open. “You’re late, you know that?”

“Wasn’t easy to get through Arlington after what you pulled. There’re cars all over, press and cops and whatnot.”

“We had to shoot that girl. Otherwise, he’d have been sent back in the ambulance.” She shoved an arm under Jozsef’s shoulders and lifted his frail form. The boy’s mouth fell open, his arm lolled, but he slept on. “Anybody follow you?”

Norm shook his head. That was one thing he could be certain of: He’d had enough security training to detect hostile surveillance.

“Good. You go with Daniel now.”

Her husband was standing there suddenly, his deep blue eyes fixed unblinkingly on Norm. Daniel had one hand on the frame of the driver’s door and his right foot resting on the running board. “Shove over.”

“What?” Norm glanced at Rebekah. “I thought I was coming with you-all.”

“Plans’ve changed. I’m driving.” Daniel forced him back into the limo and slid behind the wheel. Before Norm could object, he had turned the key in the ignition and thrown the car into reverse.

Norm tried to get a last glimpse of Bekah as they were leaving, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was too busy lifting the sleeping boy into the back of the truck, a terrible maternity in her face.