Blown (13 page)

Chapter 26

MCLEAN, VIRGINIA, 2:28 P.M.

She picked out the tail as her car dove into Spout Run, heading south toward Tysons Corner: a navy blue Chevrolet as broad and blunt as a Third World roadblock, two guys in shades holding down the front seat. They’d been able to blend with the hordes of traffic exiting the National Cemetery for a while, and she’d been too lost in her own thoughts to bother checking for surveillance; but here, on the single-lane ramp winding past a woodland stream, there was nowhere for an unmarked government car to hide. Just a lemon-colored Beetle perched like a bird of passage between Caroline and the Feds as she sped uphill, thinking:
They want me to know they’re here. They’re hoping I’ll be terrified, and talk.

It didn’t matter, really, whether they were FBI or Secret Service. Carl Rogers’s deputy, a guy with the improbable name of DiMaggio, had questioned her for an hour and a half before allowing her to leave Arlington. Jozsef and Jack Bigelow and most of the funeral guests were long gone by that time; just Caroline and the human shields and the people hired to pick up discarded paper programs remained.

Why did you walk out of the amphitheater, Caroline? Did you receive a signal of any kind? Did you recognize the woman who drove the shooter’s car?
The FBI hadn’t charged her with a crime—what could they possibly charge her with?—but of course she was someone to follow. Someone to watch.

She ignored the turnoff for Chain Bridge Road, as though she just might be going somewhere else—Dulles Airport, maybe, to catch a jet out of the country—and then, at the last minute, veered sharply to the right.

The tail jammed on his brakes with a suddenness that brought the car behind him screeching to a halt, fist on the horn. Caroline glanced in her rearview mirror, a smile flickering over her face; the driver behind her was swearing viciously as he made the turn. These weren’t the “Gs,” then—the Bureau’s top watchers, the only ones who could keep up with the CIA’s operatives head-to-head on the street. They’d wanted her to know she was under surveillance, and she’d just explained that she’d gotten the message. Now the real games could begin.

Cuddy was waiting for her in the lobby of the Tysons Marriott when Caroline pushed through the hotel’s doors that afternoon. She nearly looked right past him: He had the essential spook’s ability to blend in with the crowd, brown head bent over a magazine, elbows resting on his khaki knees. Swathed in the carefully neutral upholstery of a national chain, he managed to suggest a computer programmer or an accountant or a man who floundered pathetically in sales, and none of the dozen people wandering through the public space of the hotel gave him a second glance. Eric had a similar quality, she remembered, something he and Cuddy shared regardless of their differences. They were the mutant drifters, always overlooked, always at the edge of the frame. That kind of tradecraft was a gift—more Moneypenny than Bond.

Caroline glanced deliberately at him, face expressionless, and the look he returned was bored and impersonal. Screaming
no contact
. Cuddy knew, then, she’d been marked.

She walked past, making for the bank of elevators. Five people were waiting in the alcove—three men and a teenaged girl staring sullenly at her shoes while her mother whispered urgently in her ear. If the Feds had tailed her to Tysons, Caroline thought, they’d probably already deployed people in the lobby. One or all of these men, waiting silently to accompany her to her room. Her hotel phone would be bugged. She swayed slightly as she stood before the blinking lights that signaled the descending steel cage, and tried to quell a finger of panic.
I’m trapped.
Her purse was dangling from her clasped hands, her suit jacket slung over it.
How can I be trapped already?

Cuddy eased into place beside her. He was holding a section of the
Washington Post,
the newsprint folded in quarters, whistling slightly under his breath. Completely abstracted. Lost in his own world.

The bell clanged; the doors opened; all seven of them squeezed on. The trap closed. Began to rise upward.

“Could you hit twelve, please?” Caroline asked no one in particular. Her voice was steady and low. One of the silent men stabbed the button.

“Nine for me.” Cuddy was standing uncomfortably close to her at the very back of the elevator car. She resisted the impulse to lean against him.

The mother and daughter got off at eight. None of the three men moved.

Cuddy raised his head as the ninth floor approached, his hand with the newspaper sliding easily down to brush against Caroline’s leg. Her fingers reached for his. The newspaper slipped deliberately under her draped suit jacket, wedged between the cloth of the coat and the leather of her purse. She clutched it with her fingernails as he nodded vaguely at her companions and swung off the car, a creased section of the
Post
still clutched in his hand.

The three watchers tried not to make eye contact with Caroline or each other. She studied their profiles in turn, trying to memorize the features. One was Eurasian—Filipino and Spanish, perhaps—with jet-black hair and broad cheekbones. A powerful figure, broad-shouldered, not above middle height. The second had the loose-limbed grace of a cricket player, a sharp prow of a nose, fair hair that would not stay where it was combed. His hands rode easily in his pockets and, as Caroline’s eyes roamed over his face, he glanced at her quickly and smiled. She smiled back.

The third man wore an inexpensive suit of a polyester blend; his tie was perfunctory; his brown hair cut without the slightest imagination. His fingers, like the features of his face, were square and thick, the eyes he refused to fix on Caroline were of a muddy brown. He was the obvious choice—everything about him suggested a government functionary just one step removed from security guard—but Caroline’s instincts screamed otherwise.

The elevator doors opened on twelve and they all pressed back against the walls to let her leave first. She walked quickly away, head down and card-key in her hand. At the threshold of Room 1223, she jammed it into the door’s slot, aware of the measured footsteps behind her. They would not follow her into her room—but she was determined they should see her enter it. She thrust open the door calmly and slammed it shut as they passed.

Cuddy’s newspaper carefully hid a flat plastic bag the size of a sandwich. Stuffed within were a few square inches of plastic and something that resembled a dead animal. She lifted them wordlessly, her spirits rising. A prosthetic chin, a pair of cheekbones, a pert little turned-up nose. The dead animal was a head of auburn hair. On a scrap of paper tucked inside the bag a few words were written.
Back parking lot, 15 minutes.
Cuddy had just given her freedom.

“Scottie’ll have your ass in a sling,” she said as he turned the wheel easily and drove toward the parking lot’s exit. Cuddy handled his small Japanese car with the precision and speed of an F-16 pilot; she tightened her seat belt.

“I wasn’t followed.”

Of course Cuddy had checked for surveillance. He knew how Scottie’s mind worked. If the CTC chief kept Cuddy employed, it was purely to track where he led.

“I didn’t pay my bill,” she attempted.

“I’ll take care of it. They’ve got your imprint, right?”

“And most of my luggage.” She closed her eyes and leaned her red head against the leather seat.

She’d found the Eurasian on the point of quitting his room as she walked out her door, Cuddy’s disguise hidden in her gym bag. Beneath the pert nose and the red wig she’d placed her laptop and Walther TPK, wrapped in a change of underwear. She took the elevator to the fitness center, and though the Eurasian went along for the ride and slipped a cell phone from his pocket as she left, he made no attempt to follow her onto the aerobic machines. She hadn’t used them.

The women’s locker room was empty. In a cubicle, she’d straddled a toilet and quickly applied the latex facial features Cuddy had given her. These were the pride and joy of OTS—the Office of Technical Services—whose masters could change a Caucasian woman to a turbaned Sikh in a matter of minutes. The techniques had been learned at the feet of Hollywood’s king of special effects, and the latex pieces were so well crafted as to be indistinguishable from skin.

In a matter of seconds her oval, narrow features became catlike and vaguely Slavic. The auburn wig, bobbed at the chin, turned her into a coquette. She was several inches shorter and light-years more relaxed in running shoes and loose-fitting yoga pants. Nobody—not even FBI surveillance—would connect her with the woman who’d crossed the Marriott lobby a quarter-hour before. She sailed out the front door without turning a head.

“Thanks, Cud,” she said brusquely. “How in God’s name did you know I needed you?”

“I heard what happened at the funeral. Is Carl Rogers okay?”

“He’ll live. At least Jozsef’s safe.”

“Don’t you think it’s a
little
weird,” he demanded as he breezed through a yellow light and headed toward the river, “that the kid pulled you out of that funeral at exactly the moment our shooter drove by? Doesn’t that make you
think
at all?”

“He was sick, Cuddy. He puked all over my shoes.”

“I
told
you. He wanted to go to Arlington too much. He
pulled
something, Caroline. It didn’t work—but the timing’s there. Too fucking good, if you ask me. Did anybody question him? FBI? Secret Service?”

“They sent him back to the hospital,” she retorted tiredly. “I’m the one they wanted to screw to the wall.”

He laughed. “Yeah.
Your
timing, by the way, left a shitload to be desired.”

Was he right? Had Jozsef staged that white face, that choking vomit and the terrible helpless weight dragging on her arm? Did he know exactly who his father had recruited to kill?

Cuddy glanced at her. “Shephard was spitting nails. All that security and his guys missed the car. Missed the gun. Missed the uniformed woman cop in the unmarked car. Hell, they probably waved her right through multiple checkpoints. He’ll be lucky if he has a job tomorrow.”

She could imagine Shephard’s face: impatient, strained from lack of sleep, furious at himself and the wanton killing he should somehow have prevented. She wanted to find him, wanted to say that he was
not responsible,
not for this. Nobody was guilty but Ricin Boy himself and the woman who’d driven his car. But Tom turned his back on her and walked away without a word. He didn’t have time for Caroline and her half-truths, her protective gaps that left people dead on the ground. “You talked to him?” she asked Cuddy.

“He called to tell me that as far as he was concerned, you were completely compromised and off-limits. End of story.” Cuddy downshifted and careened onto the bridge. He did not look at Caroline to see how she took the news.

I can’t trust you, Caroline. You know what that means? I can’t even
talk
to you anymore.

“The Detail asked for my contact information,” she managed. “Burning out of the hotel immediately after I gave it to them might not have been the best idea.”

“Eric’s been arrested,” he said quietly. “That’s why I came for you. You can’t sit twiddling your thumbs in a climate-controlled box while Scottie runs a backhoe over your life.”

“Oh,
Jesus,
” she burst out. “Do you have a gun I could just put to my head right now, Cud? Do you? Because I can’t take much more of this. You know?”

“Don’t flip out on me, Caroline.
Please.
”

“Sure. Fine. Who the
fuck
arrested him? FBI? Interpol?”

“The BKA. He’s in Germany.”

“Germany! Why the hell is he still in
Germany
? That’s the last place on earth he should be.
Christ—
of all the
stupid
. . .” She slapped the armrest in frustration. “It’s like the man wants to die, Cud.
Stupid, stupid—
”

“You’re flipping out, Caroline.”

“I think I’m allowed.”

Cuddy did not argue. A red light changed to green. Somewhere on this Monday afternoon people were working at desks and thinking about simple things like what to have for dinner. What time was it in Germany? Five or six hours ahead of D.C.? Evening, anyway. Eric being systematically interrogated in a concrete-floored cell.

At the thought of him—trapped, alone, desperate—she was filled with a fear and longing for him sharper than she had ever known.
Eric. My love. Fight them. I’m fighting, too.

“What happened?” she demanded. “How’d the Germans find him?”

“Your old friend Wally turned him in,” Cuddy said.

She stared at him, aghast.

“Don’t look like that,” he muttered. “I
told
Wally to do it.”

He took her straight into Washington at two-thirty in the afternoon, when the traffic was at something like an ebb. He drove her to a small apartment off MacArthur Boulevard just past Reservoir Road, with a galley kitchen and a racing bike suspended from the triangular space beneath the staircase. A bachelor’s pad, one bedroom and two baths with a home office-cum-den and a pullout couch for unexpected guests. The living room was square and sparsely furnished but you could climb through the front window with your coffee mug in the morning and stand on the roof of the bay window below. The place took up the top two floors of a hundred-year-old row house facing the canal.

He had talked while he drove, in a voice so low she had to strain to catch the words, a voice that compelled her to listen.

“Eric alone and hunted the length of Europe is exactly what Scottie wants, Caroline. Eric alone is an invitation to murder, you understand what I’m saying?”

“But—”

“Think of the headline.
Terrorist Gunned Down in Standoff with Berlin Police.
Or Madrid. Or Istanbul. You can’t tell me the FBI hasn’t issued orders to shoot to kill. That’s Scottie’s dream scenario. The one he’s always had in his pocket.”