Blown (23 page)

Chapter 44

BERLIN, 5:00 P.M.

The styptic pencil Scottie kept in his shaving kit hurt like the devil when he pressed it against the edge of the cut. He took the pain unflinchingly, his gray eyes fixed on his reflection, hard and flat as lake ice in January. The table leg had been capped with metal and the cut was a clean one, high on the cheekbone. Without stitches it would undoubtedly scar.

He did not bother to curse Eric under his breath or hunt out a German doctor through the hotel switchboard. He merely plied the styptic pencil, watching it turn pink with blood. He did not expect Eric to break. The hatred in his face had offered no room for negotiation. Scottie would not have respected him if it had. He had never trained Eric for compromise.

We’ve got to try one more time,
Cuddy had urged in the confines of the elevator as they parted on their separate floors.
You can’t just turn your back on the only source we’ve got. People are dying at home, Scottie. We need what Eric knows.

Cuddy had been careful not to plead his friend’s case—not to wheedle or suggest plausible alternatives, parallel deals. He had been a model of deference and submission, Scottie thought with contempt; Cuddy would do anything he asked, and thank him for the indignity. It was unfortunate it was men like Cuddy who survived. And men like Eric who fell to the knife.

He turned the hot water faucet to a gush and soaked a washcloth. The Adlon’s linens were superb. He wrung out the cushy white square and pressed it against his face. The laceration sang out wildly under his fingers. He clenched his teeth. The entire atmosphere of the Adlon—the cultivated grace, the ancient lineaments of the historic building rising like a phoenix from its Cold War ashes—was a testament to an American triumph. The defeat of Communism and the rise of capitalist democracy. Liberty and justice for all. Scottie had dedicated his life to that proposition, and the luxurious toweling he now held in his hand was confirmation of its worth.

Of course I’ll try one more time,
he’d muttered to Cuddy as he left him in the hall.
I’ll try a dozen times if I have to. You think I’d let that bastard screw me?

Cuddy had no reason to know that Eric’s time was very short.

He left the marble-lined bath and walked to the phone. He’d forced Josie to tell him every last detail of her preparations, though he’d read the annoyance in her voice. She hated his impulse to ride her, but he’d been her boss too long and the habit of control was hard to break. She was staying in a hole-in-the-wall off Ku’damm, lying low until he called. It was, he decided, high time.

“Ms. Devlin?” the receptionist repeated coolly in his ear. “I’m sorry. Ms. Devlin has checked out.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I’m afraid it is, sir.”

“But—” He hesitated, struggling to regroup. “Is there an O’Halloran staying with you?”

He was forced to spell the name. Still he turned up nothing. The receptionist was growing impatient and he had no choice but to disconnect.

Josie had gone AWOL.
A slow smile curled his lips. She was trying to teach him a lesson. By this time he ought to trust her.

Josie’s flight had taken her no farther than an airport hotel in the Tegel district, but she was deeply afraid as she sat in the comfortless bar, the remains of a vodka tonic before her. Someone had entered her room at the Kurfürstendammer Hof. She’d known it immediately upon her return from casing the target.

Whoever it was had made no effort to disguise his presence. There was the fragment of paper she’d left in the doorjamb, lying unnoticed on the carpet; the three hairs she’d arranged in the wardrobe, disarranged completely; the in-room safe where she’d stored her passport standing wide open. Nothing had been taken.
A tour d’horizon,
she thought as she surveyed the sifted room.
A scenting of the enemy.
On her bed was a piece of complimentary notepaper with a few words written in neat print.

Ask Scottie what happened in Bogotá that night.

She did not have to ask which night. Three years and seven months in Bogotá had come down, in the end, to a few hours of error and loss.

Three
A.M.
and she’d still been up, waiting for the phone call from Patrick, for the lilt in his voice that told her he had never been more alive, for the rush of relief heady as sex. But it had not been Patrick who’d called. Scottie’s voice over the wire, hard and dry.
He was blown. I’m sorry, Josie. You can fly out with the body on Friday.

She had vomited in the plane’s lavatory all the way back to Washington and watched as the casket was released to a man she’d never met, a man who looked through her and had no interest in her name; one of Patrick’s relatives from Boston, maybe, she’d never been sure. Most of that spring she was lost in a daze of morning sickness and misery. Home leave, compassionate leave, baby Sheila born in August and her next posting a Headquarters one, buried in biographic files.

It had been Scottie who’d rescued her three years later. He’d demanded she accompany him to Athens and get danger pay to boot. There was no end to the miracles he’d pulled on her behalf.

Ask Scottie what happened in Bogotá that night.

Her hands had trembled at the implications of that sentence. One, because the writer knew who she really was—not Mary Devlin but Josie O’Halloran—and her cover docs were blown. Two, because if he knew all that, he probably knew why she was in Berlin. Three, because he’d hinted at something terrible in the past she’d tried to bury. And four, because a seed of doubt was inevitably sown.
Had Scottie kept something from her? Lied to her? God preserve us, killed Patrick himself?

She ordered another vodka and drank it neat.

Her first duty was to get out of the Kurfürstendammer Hof; her second was probably to get out of Berlin. But for now, she was attempting to plan her next step. There was the job to consider. The past and all its wrongs to think of. Scottie, and whatever he knew.

She picked up her carpetbag and headed for the elevator.

Chapter 45

WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:23 A.M.

“Do you know anything about the sacrament of penance?” Candace O’Brien sank into one of the Speaker’s conference chairs. “Have you ever submitted to it at all?”

“I’m a southern Baptist,” George Enfield replied, “by policy if not conviction. In Tennessee we scream our sins out loud and the world applauds. How can I help you, Ms. O’Brien?”

“Be my priest, Mr. Speaker.”

He’d agreed to see her because she’d mentioned Sophie Payne, and he vaguely remembered a factotum hovering in the vice president’s background. The middle-aged woman looked like a social worker come to inspect his premises, he thought, with her knees locked primly together and her neat black purse suspended from her hands.

“Let’s backtrack a little. You were Sophie Payne’s social secretary, I think? We met once or twice at the residence. Are you looking for a job?”

“No. May I say first how desperately sorry I am, Mr. Speaker, for the loss of your beautiful wife?”

He ducked his head as though to avoid a blow. He had heard similar things all day, offered apologetically or diffidently or in the timid fashion of a subordinate who fears to invade; but somehow Candace’s words were more heartfelt and they pierced the wall he’d thrown up in self-defense.

“I remember her,” she said, “in silk that beautifully suited her hair; and I remember her sitting before a group of your colleagues and telling them exactly why they ought to support stem-cell research. She had poise and character, Mr. Speaker, and we cannot spare either.”

“Thank you,” he said with difficulty. “I don’t mean to rush you, but I’m afraid I have a great deal to do. If you could explain why you came, perhaps . . .”

“I saw your press conference.” Deliberately, she unsnapped her purse and withdrew a single sheet of paper. “You want to find 30 April. My daughter can tell you exactly where they are and what kind of horror they’re planning next. But you will have to find her quickly.”

He was staring at her bleak expression rather than at what she offered. “I don’t understand.”

“My daughter Adrienne is one of 30 April’s agents in America. I’ve known that for the past three years. In a foolish attempt to protect her, I’ve betrayed everything and everyone important in my life. Mlan Krucevic demanded information about Sophie Payne, a woman I loved and admired and who believed I was her friend. I told him all I knew, on a regular basis, because I thought it would keep him from destroying my child.”

Her fingers fluttered slightly on the hasp of her bag.

“You have a daughter yourself, Mr. Speaker. I hope that some small part of you can understand why I acted as I did.”

“You gave 30 April Payne’s schedule?” Enfield’s voice was harsh.

Candace nodded. “Every last detail, from the moment she took office. I told myself that nothing really bad could happen to her—she had a crackerjack Secret Service detail, and Krucevic could never hope to enter this country with the kind of indictment he carried—but there was the foreign travel as well. The less-protected exposure. From the day of the Berlin kidnapping I’ve been unable to live with myself.”

“Jesus
Christ,
” Enfield whispered. A dull throb of rage was mounting in his gut, shattering the careful box he’d built around his pain.
Sophie. Dana. All those bodies on the Mall. And this prim lump of a woman telling him calmly how she’d done her bit for disaster.
“You deserve to burn in hell.”

“I am,” she said, rising. “I will. You can send your investigators to find me. I won’t run away. I’ll talk on the record. But use what I’ve given you, Mr. Speaker. I still don’t have the courage.”

She was gesturing toward the piece of paper. He glanced down at it, disbelieving.

Adrienne O’Brien,
it read,
39 Fern Gulch Road, Rochester, Pennsylvania.

“In the end that’s my true sin,” Candace said. “Cowardice.”

She’d been up since dawn, sitting on the stool in her jeans and an old sweater, a glass of orange juice near at hand. Misha was playing in an adjoining room with the blocks he loved to set out in patterns across the wide expanse of oak floor, and his music was humming softly in the background. No other sound but the rain on the tin roof and the enfolding leaves, the secret comforts of a tree house. Adrienne’s attention was completely focused on the sticklike array of human DNA she had captured in electron micrographs minutes earlier; she was barely conscious of the passage of time, or the distant sound of an approaching car.

She was looking for a few specific genes that she knew must work in concert: genes that dictated the quality of human intelligence. She had been hunting her quarry for five years, and although she had isolated several likely candidates, there were gaps in the array. Adrienne was confident she would fill them; she knew the genes were out there. The human brain was formed according to the imperious logic of deoxyribonucleic acid; therefore, the limits and possibilities of the entire sea of thought must be genetically determined as well.

She glanced up from the ghostly images and reached for her juice.

It was a pleasant place to build a laboratory: isolated, shade-enshrouded, with the haunting call of owls at midnight and the scurry of hidden things in the undergrowth. She had never needed the stimulation of colleagues. Of a university campus. Not since she’d left Johns Hopkins with her doctorate three years ago, at the extraordinary age of twenty-two. Adrienne thrived on solitude and the uninterrupted world of thought; and Mlan’s money—Mlan’s limitless fund of gray cash from unknown sources and unquestioned motives, flooding electronically through front companies and numbered accounts—had made her world possible.

Now Mlan was dead.

She winced and thrust the thought away. She mourned him, of course—he was one of the few people in the world who could talk to her. They shared a common tongue. But Mlan had died the way he’d lived and he’d protected her to the last. No matter how many accounts the FBI froze, how many front companies Interpol unmasked, Mlan had given her the most marketable commodity of all: her career. He’d paid for the years of schooling, the internships in Switzerland, the breathlessly expensive equipment in this lab. Now she had her MacArthur Genius award. Her reputation. Her work.

If she ran out of funding she’d abandon Rochester and get a conventional researcher’s job. But it would be a tug, for Misha as much as herself. Misha had never been suited to what was termed the real world.

“Mama,” he called fretfully as though in answer to her thoughts, “I need turquoise. This blue is too red.”

She jumped off the stool and walked swiftly across the floor he’d turned into a block mosaic, the delicate gradations of color so infinitely subtle they defied the eye’s attempt to make sense of their transition. The movement of shades was like a shoal’s path through a tropic sea.
Brilliant,
she thought.
So brilliant. None of them will ever know.

They had told her when her son was four that he was a high-functioning autistic. He possessed a remarkable intelligence, certainly, but his obsessive absorption in minute patterns, in the daily assembly of a perfectly ordered world, was akin to a record needle caught in a groove. Playing and replaying the same phrase of sound. Arranging his blocks. Getting the order right. He was adept with objects and numbers and facts, but the world of emotion—the
human
world of love or pain or laughter—was difficult for Misha to interpret or understand. He could put his arms around Adrienne’s waist and squeeze them together perfunctorily; but if he drew comfort or sustenance from the contact it was impossible to say.
Therapy,
the experts had suggested.
Intervention.
Adrienne had listened and nodded and raged in her mind:
My son defies your petty conventions.

She’d said nothing of it to the boy’s father. She’d told Mlan the good things: small glittering moments that captured Misha’s essence, dispatched in a variety of e-mails around the world. If her son intended to create and live in a closed universe only he could understand, she would give him that right. That freedom. She despised all the categories the world could devise, except the ones she invented herself.

Where, she thought, would she go when the money dried up? Stony Brook? CalTech? The Institute for Advanced Studies? Falling over themselves to claim her. No one had yet isolated “the smart genes,” as she called them; there was one team working desperately in France and another in Japan conducting parallel research; but Adrienne was certain the map she was drawing had only one name on it.
Hers.
She’d been born for this. Her research would revolutionize world culture. Not since the research of Watson and Crick had science held such potential to redirect the course of human history.

“I’ll find you turquoise,” she said, and touched Misha briefly on the shoulder. He did not respond, did not look up, his entire soul focused on the small wooden chips he turned in his fingers.

When the truth breaks,
she thought as she rummaged among the cans of oddments she kept stacked in the kitchen for just this purpose—
the truth that intelligence is programmed before birth like the color of your skin or your sex or the texture of your hair—the truth will change life as we know it.
Ostracize some people and elevate others. Spur genetic screening of fetuses for intellectual ability. These were the obvious consequences, of course, but she saw beyond that first wave to the far more destructive second: With the potential of genetic engineering and the will to pursue it, the possibilities were limitless. There would be selective breeding of smart-gene bearers. The systematic marketing of a race of genius. She could envision a world in which those who lacked smart genes would eventually be barred from bearing children—or eased naturally out of the reproductive process by their lack of attractive genetic material. The human race would finally control its own evolution: honing the powers of the brain in conscious ways to craft something far superior to the familiar biped animal.

It was for this that Mlan Krucevic had paid, time out of mind, until death do us part. For the right to be present at the creation. That the super race would come from a country that prided itself on individual freedom was ironic; that it would destroy those freedoms, and the government that enshrined them, was inevitable.

The car she’d heard a few moments ago was coming nearer. Aware of it suddenly, she raised her head from Misha’s blocks and listened. The engine was neither tentative nor slow. The driver knew exactly where he was going and how to find her. Secretly, to herself, Adrienne smiled.