Blown (19 page)

“He was shot in the head.”

“What kind of shit you tellin’ me? Norm’s not dead.”

“I’m afraid he is, Ms.—”

Daniel. Daniel, Daniel—how could you? A bullet in his head. Just like Dolf. Poor Norm, who’d never hurt nobody, who didn’t even see it was a crime to work for that Jew Whore what the Zoggites put in power.

“Are you Mr. Wilhelm’s sister Rebekah?” the FBI man persisted.

Oh, Norm. Now there’s none of us Wilhelms left.

She nodded once, her face set in granite. No tears. This is what it meant to live in the End Times: Survival came from the decisions you made. Daniel had done what he had to; he was a soldier, for God’s sake. He’d known Norm would blab everything that’d happened once the kid turned up missing. He’d known he owed absolute secrecy to the Leader, until the Overthrow triumphed. This terrible sacrifice. Her brother.

“Mrs. Becker. We need you to come into the Charleston field office to discuss the disposition of the body. And to answer a few questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

The girl held up her hands placatingly. “When you last saw your brother, for instance.”

Seven hours ago. Christ Almighty.

“It’s just the usual procedure in a death of this kind, Mrs. Becker. We’re all terribly sorry for your loss.”

“Cohen,” Rebekah said suddenly. “That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?”

“Would you come with us now?” the girl asked. “Or would you prefer to talk inside?”

Rebekah stared at the Federal—at her unlined face, the pale lipstick so perfectly applied to her firm mouth.
Jewish. No wonder she ain’t at home like a respectable woman. Doing Satan’s work at the dinner hour.

“Is your husband here, Mrs. Becker?”

With a blaze of understanding Rebekah saw it all, then:
The FBI was lying to her. Daniel would never hurt Norm.
They’d tried to use her sorrow to get her to break. To betray her man.

But she was tougher than that. She knew what she had to do. She’d known ever since Daniel left her standing by the abandoned bike at the side of the road. She, too, was a soldier of the End Times.

A tide of rage surged upward from Bekah’s shoes—rage mingled with a hideous joy. This time she’d seen through their lies and obscenities first. This time, there’d be no body waiting on the morgue’s cold slab for her to identify.

She released her hold on the steel gate.

“You’d better come in,” she told them all. “I’ll answer your questions right now.”

Tom Shephard took the call forty-three minutes later on his way to the Alleghenies. He swore aloud for a full two minutes, Bovian’s eager face suspended before his eyes. Then he turned the rental car around and headed back toward Charleston.

Later, when the team sent out from Bureau Headquarters picked through the debris and reconstructed the crime, they came to the conclusion Rebekah had been wearing the belt of explosives throughout the conversation at her front gate. But she’d bided her time until the Devil’s Spawn who’d come to deceive her were standing in the trailer’s small kitchen, which smelled faintly of fried pork and baked beans. She’d gathered them all in a tight knot near the kitchen table before she pulled the cord and blew herself and the trailer straight to Jesus.

Part 3

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23

Chapter 36

KALORAMA, 5:57 A.M.

“Mommy! Mommy!”

The wail from the makeshift bed on Dana’s chaise woke George Enfield at three minutes before six o’clock that Tuesday morning. Mallory, in the grip of a night terror, arms flailing among the down pillows. The child was reaching for someone who would never hold her again, for the perfect childhood swallowed in a yawning pit. It had been the same the night before: She would not sleep alone in her room, and her dreams were restless. He thrust himself out of bed and took three steps to the little girl’s side, lifted her by the shoulders, soothed her awake.
Sshhhhhh. You’re okay. You’re okay.
Which of course was the biggest lie.

Mallory’s tiger eyes—more his than Dana’s—fluttered open and she stared at him, unseeing for an instant. Then memory lurched back and her expression flattened; she turned her face into his pajamas, buried it there, as though if she shut out this day she could recapture the one she’d been dreaming. Dana striding like a racehorse down M Street, maybe? Dana tall and elegant in one of her spangled evening gowns? Yesterday he’d stood for a full eight minutes in the scented darkness of his wife’s closet, breathing in the last of her.

He smoothed Mallory’s hair and said nothing, both of them bleached in the faint light of early morning.
Another day,
he thought,
pretending to go on.

He had done this before—mourned a wife dead too soon. Mary Alice Carver she’d been, a Chicago banker’s daughter, mangled in the wreckage of a commuter plane off Sea Island, Georgia, twenty years ago. In the blackest depths of his sleepless nights he asked himself why he was cursed with this tendency to lose the people he loved most. Was it God’s way of evening the score? He’d grown up a fortunate son, privileged and sheltered, groomed for public office. He’d been either too young or too old for the major wars, sailed through college and law school, was undefeated in his bids for political seats. But here, in the heart of his home, where he’d kept the only thing that really mattered—here, he was as cursed as Job.

His grip tightened on Mallory’s thin shoulders and she curled into his embrace, half asleep again. He could not replace Dana. But he could devote himself to the child she’d left behind.

He laid her tenderly back down against the pillows and brushed his hand across her forehead. She had another bit of hell lying in wait for her: the funeral, scheduled for Friday. Her first taste of public violation. Of reporters scavenging among the bones of her grief.

George stared out at the tulip tree rising beyond the window, its branches etched against the brightening sky.
Another day without her.
The first time—in the hours after Mary Alice’s death—he’d vowed to show nothing. He was a public figure, after all. He had to instill confidence and bear up despite adversity; it was important for his constituency to see.
Strength.
George Enfield had strength. A quality people needed to believe in.

This time he didn’t care if the networks caught his fury in full frame, if his voice broke in the microphone and his careful politician’s mien shattered like a bludgeoned mirror. Dana had died for the most vicious of reasons. A random victim of the politics of hate. The world he’d polished like an apple, the bright shining lies of government he’d supported and upheld, had failed her.

He left his sleeping daughter and trudged down the stairs to retrieve the morning paper.

On the front page, he found Steve Price’s profile of Caroline Carmichael.

“Where is she?” he demanded when he’d been put through to the Oval Office. “Where is this bitch you’ve set up as a hero? She’s been canned and left town and nobody can tell me how to find her. Not even
Price
will pick up his damn phone.”

Bigelow was an old hand at managing the violent and the enraged. “George,” he soothed. “My deepest sympathy. You’ve lost the world in Dana, I know. Your pain and grief must be terrible. How’s that beautiful little girl o’ yours?”

“Fine,” Enfield said abruptly. “Devastated, naturally. But—”

“Hope you got our flowers. Adele sends her love. Our thoughts are with you.”

“Yes. Thank you. What I wanted to—”

“We’ll be with you Friday, of course, at the National Cathedral. I’ve suggested we hold a general memorial service one day soon, for all the people hurt by this vicious lunatic. I spent part of yesterday on the Mall, you know, in one of the medical tents. Blows your mind, buddy. People dyin’ in agony, and for no possible reason they or I can understand. But you know that better than anyone. Shit, I’m preachin’ to the converted.”

“Have you seen the
Post,
Mr. President?”

A fractional pause. “Yes, siree. Wouldn’t be a mornin’ without the daily dose o’ dirt those folks shovel on my plate.”

“I plan to ask for a formal Congressional investigation of the intelligence-gathering process leading up to the Marine Corps Marathon.” George said it bluntly.

“If you’ve read the paper, you know we’ve got a suspected terrorist sittin’ in jail right now in Germany.”

“I don’t live in Germany. Neither did my wife,” George retorted scathingly. “I don’t
care
what happened there last week. I want to know what’s going on right now, right in my own backyard. The questions Steve Price raises—complicity and cover-up at the highest levels—are too serious to ignore. People are dying, Jack.
Dana died.
”

“Searching for someone to blame, George?” Bigelow inquired kindly. “Don’t think it’ll help. Makes you feel better in the short term, but it just pisses people off in the end. Tragedy’s tragedy because it comes without warning. Otherwise we’d give it a different name.”

“Like politics?”

Bigelow laughed, ignoring the bitterness in George’s voice. “Glad you haven’t lost your sense of humor. Kiss that little girl for me, now.”

He hung up before George could ask again where Caroline Carmichael had gone.

Chapter 37

FREDERICK, MARYLAND, 6:31 A.M.

When the sun rose faint and acid that Tuesday morning, Caroline was already sipping coffee in Steve Price’s Boxster, which was exactly the kind of fast car she expected the reporter to drive. They were just outside of Frederick, Maryland, and heading for the Cumberland Gap; Caroline was concentrating on getting the hot restorative liquid in her mouth without melting her latex.

She’d traded Jennifer Lacey’s regulation short black skirt and high heels for a pair of close-fitting black Lycra pants and a black cashmere sweater; she could move and breathe in these without having to think about them. In deference to Raphael’s Chapel, however, she had submitted to the chest prosthesis. She’d secretly always wanted to know what it felt like to have large breasts, and now she knew: as though she’d strapped on armor. Raphael’s artwork might not stop bullets—but Caroline was willing to bet it would thwart a knife.

“Awake yet?” Price asked.

“No.” He’d insisted she get some sleep last night—the first real sleep she’d had in forty-eight hours—and it was like heroin to an addict in withdrawal: She could not get enough. “How much longer do we have?”

His eyes flicked down at the dashboard clock. “Another hour, maybe. We’ll stop for food before then.”

They were on their way toward a place called Rochester: a small town buried in western Pennsylvania. A map lay open on Caroline’s knees. The coffee was intended to help her follow it.

She’d said nothing of this strange collaboration with Price to Cuddy when he’d called her cell phone from Dulles last night. He hadn’t had time to chat.

I’m in the men’s room,
he’d said,
and I’m on my way to Berlin. I’ll call when I can.

“You’re going to see Eric? Oh, God, Cuddy . . .”

What she’d wanted to say was
Save him, save him,
but fear and longing overwhelmed her. She wanted to drop everything—the secrecy and the hunt and the urgent need to find Jozsef—and run to Eric’s prison cell. The thought that Cuddy would be with him in a matter of hours made her heart leap. Maybe the Agency could work a deal.

“Who sent you?”

“Scottie. He’s already on the plane.”

Hope died. “Then how in
hell
are you going to—”

“I’ve got to go, Caroline.”

“
Sleeper, Tool,
and
Fist,
Cud,” she urged before he could hang up. “Ask Eric what they mean.”

She thought they were on the trail of one of the three now, but it was equally possible she’d thrown Steve Price into a wild-goose chase. The journalist did not seem to mind. The fact that she’d gone black in her own city and was practically a fugitive from the law did not disturb him. He told her he could scent a great story. Waiting for them somewhere in Rochester, Pennsylvania.

They’d found the place through Gerry O’Brien, Candace’s ex-husband, when the woman’s apartment remained persistently dark and neither telephone calls nor repeated buzzing of the front door produced a response.

“My wife never travels,” O’Brien had said gently when they tracked him to the small house he owned not far from his university research laboratory. Caroline noted the refusal to speak of Candace as part of the past, the solitary trappings of the man’s minute sitting room that suggested he’d never progressed further than the decree of divorce issued nearly ten years before. “She is a retiring sort of person, despite her very public job. And I do not think she would dine out with friends on the night of her employer’s funeral . . . She loved Sophie Payne.”

They had presented themselves as old acquaintances, which was immediately unsuccessful because the professor clearly knew his ex-wife’s habits and could not place a Jennifer Lacey nearly twenty years Candace’s junior. Steve Price he understood instantly.

“You’re the
Post
reporter, aren’t you?” There was a glint in his mild blue eyes. “I don’t think Candace would wish to speak with you. Oh, no, I do
not
.”

He was on the verge of showing them the door when Caroline glimpsed the antique engraving of the Berlin Reichstag, perfect and serene as it had only been in the years before the bombings of World War II, and had said involuntarily, “Did you find that in Leipzig?”

O’Brien had stared at her with renewed interest. “Yes. Do you know Germany?”

“A little. You lived there for several years, I think?”

He shook his head. “Not long enough.”

“You returned before your teaching stint was through,” Caroline persisted, “because of Mlan Krucevic.”

After the briefest pause, O’Brien said, “Who are you, really?”

“Please forgive me when I say that I cannot tell you, Professor.”

“Is Candace in trouble?”

“I think she may be in danger.”

“Because of that man,” he concluded. “Krucevic. And his killing of her boss. Yes, I see. Perhaps you had better sit down.”

He told them, without much urging and with very little sense of tragedy, of how disaster had overcome his life.

There was the foreignness of Leipzig, its unexpected elements: an expanse of concrete housing built by the Soviets; the old university buildings falling into decay; the mix of weary economy and desperate striving; the glamour of the West.
Their
glamour—his and Candace’s and their daughter Adrienne’s—which drew the academic community of the former East Germany more than an offer of free bananas or luxury handbags or uninhibited travel could ever have done. In 1990, the O’Brien family walked abroad in Leipzig’s ancient reconstructed streets as the living embodiment of American privilege, and they paid dearly for that fact.

“I believe that Candace had certain plans,” Gerry O’Brien said judiciously as he gazed down the long tunnel of memory. “She is not a woman of considerable resources, you understand—
inner
resources, I would mean, such as might sustain a person in solitude—and when she realized we were destined for Europe she imagined a far different kind of life. She had notions of superb food and charming atmosphere, of trips to the countryside in search of antiques. Of her daughter thriving in a cultured world. Of a better time, perhaps, than we’d had at home.”

He did not explain what had impoverished their style of living in Georgetown, leaving aside that failure out of habit; but Caroline could imagine it well enough. Gerry in his laboratory, Candace struggling to be the perfect academic wife without the slightest talent for it. The lavishness and the elegance of these discreet Georgetown blocks impossible to imitate on an academic’s salary. And Adrienne—who was Adrienne? A teenager. Torn from her native city during the most tumultuous years: high school.

“Candace found Leipzig uncongenial,” O’Brien murmured. “She fell into a kind of depression. I believe I noticed it only when it was too late.”

“And your daughter?”

The biologist said nothing, studying Caroline’s face. Then he said, “I wish I knew for certain who you are.”

Her eyes flicked to Steve Price’s; she shook her head slightly. “Would it help if I told you that I am not an enemy of yours?”

“But possibly of my wife’s?”

“She has not been your wife for almost ten years,” Caroline pointed out brutally.

“That makes very little difference when it is a question of loyalty.”

True,
she thought with a sharp memory of Eric.
What do I think I have to teach this man?

“What happened?” Price asked.

“I failed her,” O’Brien said simply. “I blame myself for that.”

The reporter shifted in his chair. “A lot of marriages fail. It’s not always a question of fault.”

“Not always. But in my case? Decidedly. I had lost the art of
seeing,
you understand. When it was most critical.”

“What did you fail to see?” Caroline asked.

“How unhappy I had made my family by my inattention. I enjoyed Leipzig, you know. Enjoyed the whole moveable feast. But my family was miserable.”

“And that’s where Mlan came in?”

O’Brien shrugged. “We met Mlan at the usual faculty parties. There was the advantage that he spoke English extremely well. Candace had no German. I do not know when he first began to worm his way into the heart of my home; I only know the result.”

He fell silent, an expression of doubt flickering over his face; the old worry, again: that he might say too much.

Caroline leaned toward him in appeal. “Professor, I’ve spent most of the past decade tracking 30 April. I know more about them, probably, than anyone else in the world. Nothing you can say will shock me. Nothing will surprise me very much. Did Mlan seduce your wife?”

“Candace?” O’Brien smiled bitterly. “That man would never have looked
twice
at Candace. It was Adrienne he wanted. It was our daughter he destroyed.”

Price was checking his messages now as he drove toward the Pennsylvania border, and Caroline’s coffee was gone. He tossed the small phone into her lap and said, “Whole world’s looking for you, missy. And they’ve all read my piece this morning with their Grape-Nuts. Good thing you got out of town. There’s talk of testimony on Capitol Hill.”

She did not answer him. They were passing through the highway interchange for Wheeling, West Virginia, and she was thinking desperately of Shephard: Six people in Wheeling had been gunned down over their dinners yesterday, and the evening news buzzed with the sensational headlines that the FBI had bungled an arrest—and three agents had been blown to bits because of it. Details were closely held and she was hoping against hope that Shephard hadn’t been standing in that trailer in Hillsboro. But where else
would
he have been standing? It was the obvious choice. The white-shoe Fed’s logical conclusion. She’d jumped to it herself—and gone in the opposite direction.

I should have called him,
she thought,
even if he’d blasted me to hell and back. I should have called and said good-bye. Oh, Tom—

He had offered her something like trust all those weeks ago in Berlin, and she’d abused it unmercifully. He was honest and up-front, the kind of guy who defined that elusive word
integrity.
She’d valued his belief in her, the warmth she was terrified to call love. And failing in Tom’s eyes had shamed her.

The desire to win him back—to be somebody Shephard could talk to and rely on—was one part of her compulsion to track down 30 April. She needed desperately to redeem herself. To make good, if it could be done. But old lies and Ricin Boy and a bomb in a West Virginia trailer had changed all that. She’d probably never hear Tom’s voice again.

You could call Bureau Headquarters,
she thought.
Get somebody in Domestic Terrorism and ask for the victims’ names. Say you’re calling from Hank’s, in Long Island . . .

But Steve Price brought her thoughts sharply back to the Porsche and the road, stilled her hand as it reached for the cell phone in her purse.

“Weird, isn’t it, to think of that girl and the big bad terrorist?” Price said conversationally. “Fucking Mommy and Daddy with her rebellion while she does the criminal genius on the side. Freud would have a field day.”

It was a sordid little story Gerry O’Brien had poured out last night: how his daughter, a slight creature with enormous dark eyes behind her thick glasses and the frail, floating fingers of a poet, had fallen in love with science and destiny. She had a gift for research, Adrienne—something of her father’s native brilliance, although Gerry O’Brien simply called it intelligence when he spoke of himself. The girl had been mesmerized by Krucevic: by his message of genetic determination, of racial purity, of the refinement of the human strain to eradicate all that was mediocre. It was an old message—old as the campaigns to Sterilize the Unfit that had swept through the West at the turn of the last century, wizened as the Nazi dream—but to Adrienne it was a revelation. Genes determined eye color, femur length, the description of an earlobe; why was it incomprehensible that they should determine intelligence as well?

“She fell under his thrall,” O’Brien had said, as though the girl had been taken body and soul into the realm of the Undead. “She could talk of nothing else. How her career path was formed. The search for what she called the Intelligence Gene. I thought it was all science. I didn’t understand he’d taken her until the baby began to show.”

It was all comprehensible then: the sudden abandonment as Mlan returned to Yugoslavia and his own private war; the O’Briens’ hasty return to the United States; the disappearance of Adrienne from the divorce decree. By that time, O’Brien explained, she was living in a home for unwed mothers and had declared herself a ward of the state. She refused to recognize Candace and Gerry as her parents.

“But why the divorce?” Steve Price had asked quietly. “What did this mess have to do with the two of you?”

“I can see you’re not a parent,” the professor said simply. “If you were, that is a question you would never have to ask.”

They were driving now toward the Allegheny Mountains and Rochester, Pennsylvania, because in the last few seconds before showing them the door Gerry O’Brien had given them Adrienne’s address.

“She never gave up the child for adoption,” he told them. “I understand it was a boy. She lives in seclusion, in a sort of house attached to a laboratory; the recipient, I believe, of a MacArthur Fellowship. I suppose I ought to be proud. She has accomplished so much—”

“How did you get her address,” Caroline interrupted, “if she cut all ties to you?”

“My wife. She had it from Krucevic.” The mild blue eyes met Caroline’s bleakly. “I learned only a few months ago that the two of them had corresponded for years. I may add that it was one of the greatest shocks of my life.”