Blown (24 page)

Chapter 46

BERLIN, 6:12 P.M.

They left him manacled even in solitary confinement. A deliberate effort to turn him into an animal, fumbling at his unshaved face and at the fly of his prison suit when he had to pee. He was a man who’d been trained in the psychology of interrogation, both as a Green Beret and a CIA case officer. He had been beaten by experts hired to break him. Had his mind probed by drugs and sadism until he’d raved. Had been confined, once, in a cement box small as a coffin for a month at a time. There had been days when he’d wished he was dead, and if offered the slightest implement of destruction would gladly have killed himself. Eric had explored his own vulnerabilities so intimately over the course of the past two decades that he knew exactly what he could not tolerate, and when it was coming.

Denied food, he turned vicious. Denied sleep, he spiraled rapidly into depression, which was far more dangerous. He had a high threshold for pain and feared physical torture less than mind-fucks. He could not endure the sight of pain inflicted on someone he loved.

Caroline,
he thought.
They’ll try to use Caroline to get to me.
She was the only person left in his world.

He gritted his teeth and strained once more at the chain connecting his handcuffs, although the effort was useless.
German steel,
he thought mordantly.
The best.
He had two doors out of the present situation: Succumb to Scottie’s threats or fight him.

Live like you’re going to die anyway and the choices get easier.
Scottie’s a shit and I will not give him the satisfaction of answers to a single question. I will not. No matter how they use Caroline. It’s all a game and she and I are just pieces now.

He heard the entry door to the cell block clang open and the approaching thud of footsteps on concrete. More than one man, and no conversation among them. His skin prickled and he sat up on the cot, wrists clanking uselessly. If it was Scottie he would lunge for him and drive him screaming out of this hole with teeth marks in his neck.
This hole is mine, God damn it—

A command in German: He was to stand away from the door. He waited, tensed to spring. But when the steel panel slid back, it was Wally he saw. Wally with the faint expression of a satyr above his good cloth coat, a diversion from the morning’s trench. Wally with a small bag of peanuts in his hand.

Beware of spies bearing gifts,
Eric thought.
As though I give a fuck for peanuts.

“Eric,” Wally said genially. “How’re you keeping?”

Eric did not reply.

Wally stepped forward into the cell. They met in the exact center of the eight-by-five-foot room, a bare ten inches between them. Wally reached thoughtfully for a peanut and began to crush the shells between his fingertips, the casings dry as old paper as they sifted to Eric’s floor.

“He’s coming for you again,” he said bluntly. “I thought you should be prepared. He thinks if he keeps questioning you into the night you’ll reconsider your level of cooperation. He says you’re the kind of guy who needs his sleep.”

“He’s wrong.”

“Peanut?”

Eric shook his head tautly. The cell was wired for sound and his image would already be broadcast to the small screens in the main office, possibly for Scottie’s viewing pleasure, but he was angry at every one of these people he’d loved—Wally and Cuddy and Scottie himself, all of them possessed of Boy Scouts’ names and the morality to match. “What’s in this for you, Wally? Did he promise you another good posting? Or just a payoff to your retirement account? Is he screwing Brenda? Or one of your kids?”

A flicker in Wally’s mild eyes at that: Part of Eric’s interrogation training was the mastery of fighting back; he’d just used it on his old friend.

“Scottie likes threats,” Wally answered. “I prefer to beg. We need your help, Eric, and I’m here to ask for it. We need your help to save innocent lives.”

“The innocent die every day. People like Scottie live forever. I want his blood and anybody who stands in my way won’t go home again. Understand?”

Wally broke open another peanut. The smooth brown seeds slid easily between his pink lips; his jaws worked rhythmically. “The drama’s getting old,” he said. “It’s not the Eric I knew.”

“That Eric was knifed to death.”

Wally set the bag of peanuts on Eric’s cot. “Do what Scottie asks. I’m telling you, it’s for the best. And eat those nuts. They’ll do you a world of good.”

The station chief nodded once, a benevolent doctor who’d offered his spot of healing, and backed out of the cell. The waiting guard slid the door closed without a word.

Eric lifted his chained hands and swept the bag of nuts off the bed with a roar of anguish. They scattered like candy from a birthday piñata. He beat the shells to sawdust, the concrete floor of the cell thrusting back, reverberating through the flesh of his hands. The cuffs bit into his wrists and he welcomed the pain, welcomed an enemy he could face. And then, abruptly, he stopped. Hands poised in midair.

A fragment of paper with minuscule writing on it stared back at him from one of the shells.

Beware of spies bearing gifts.

He sank down and began to frantically piece together the shreds of Wally’s message.

“
Sleeper, Tool,
and
Fist,
” Cuddy said as the mellow lights of the safe house glowed around them and Scottie paced indifferently across the room. “Thirty April code names. What do they mean?”

Eric frowned. “I sent you all that on a disc. The one Caroline brought home.”

“Caroline brought nothing home,” Scottie interrupted, “but the habit of posing as a hero. We learned about
Sleeper, Tool,
and
Fist
from . . . other sources. What can you add?”

“Do you mean to tell me you’ve done
nothing
about them?” Eric demanded, his voice rising. “
Christ
—I send you the key to the American cell—names, dates, operations—and you sit around diddling yourselves?”

The red ink on the polygraph printout jumped violently, a knife-peak of emotion scrawled the width of the page. Wally had slipped the rubber cap with the branching wires over Eric’s finger himself before he’d been booted, along with Berlin station’s polygrapher, out of the room. Scottie would allow no one but himself to interpret the truth. Only Cuddy remained.

“In the time-honored tradition of intelligence,” he said now, “yes, we sat around diddling ourselves. You’ve said you’re willing to cooperate, Eric, and though I’m surprised, I’d like you to pick up the pace. What do you
know
?”

Eric half rose from his seat. The movement was instinctively one of violence. The conference table was gone tonight; Scottie had intentionally given his victim a wide berth.

“Three years of my life were on that disc, asshole.”

“Your wife’s fault it never arrived, not mine.” Scottie drew his gun from its holster. He leveled it at Eric’s head. “
Sleeper, Tool,
and
Fist,
or I’ll blow you out the back door.”

The two men stared at each other. Neither moved except for the faint tremor of Scottie’s hand on the butt of the gun, and for an instant Cuddy saw the willingness to die in Eric’s eyes, the seductive power of refusal, and was terrified that all their planning and hope would be for nothing.

“They’re the names of three network heads in the United States,” Eric said. “The idea was to mount a multipronged attack against the U.S. infrastructure and demolish it from within.
Sleeper
is Adrienne O’Brien, a biologist Mlan Krucevic knew for years and left buried until now. She’s the linchpin of a small group of influential people, well placed throughout the American academic and research community, who believe in better living through science and are willing to overthrow governments to achieve it. She was supposed to raise funds from like-minded members of the financial world and infiltrate the corporate and pharmaceutical nexus. Mlan communicated with her on a private basis, and much of her intelligence was never stored in his computers. He kept it locked in the safe of his own mind. Which suggests she’s profoundly important.”

“Bullshit,” Scottie tossed off, his eye on the polygraph box. “You’re making this up. For the sake of the tapes, I categorically state:
The source is fabricating.
Next?”

Tonight’s conversation, like the one a few hours earlier, was being recorded, but Cuddy had been ordered to take notes. He was typing swiftly with a stylus into a palm-sized computer. “O’Brien. Any relation to Sophie Payne’s staffer?”

“Daughter.”

“Pure
shit,
” Scottie interpreted succinctly. “Utter caca. Tell us who Fist is, Eric. The folks back home need a laugh.”

“
Fist
is a killer by the name of Daniel Becker. Ex-soldier looking for another mission and willing to die for Mlan.”

“Sniper?” Cuddy suggested.

“Could be. But not Special Forces; too wacked. Why?”

“Lucky guess,” Scottie purred, “given that Dare Atwood had her head shot off. But please don’t let the
facts
interrupt your narrative, Eric.”

“Becker ran into 30 April in the woods a few years ago, before my time. He’s a Tim McVeigh in the making: trained by the army and then thwarted in his career. Hates government in all its forms. The list of operations Mlan gave him is long. Suicide bombers dispatched to malls; the destruction of the northeast power grid and the Port of Long Beach. His job is to recruit martyrs and spread panic.”

The memory of Dare Atwood’s shattered skull, the glass and blood scattered over the Oriental carpet, and the dog’s lacerated paws—Cuddy punched in Daniel Becker’s name and thought:
He took aim over my shoulder while he crouched in the garden.

“Fist’s role is terror,” Eric said quietly, “but
Tool
is a more subtle animal altogether. Mlan understood something fundamental about Americans: If we read something in the paper or see it on TV, we tend to believe it’s true. We rarely question our sources, so their power is absolute.”

“Tool’s a journalist?” Cuddy asked quickly.

Eric’s eyes flicked toward his. “He covered the war in Bosnia and was embedded with a militia leader for a good while. Thirteen months ago he flew from D.C. to Prague and interviewed Mlan at a 30 April safe house. No cameras permitted; just a pad and pen. He printed his profile in the
Post
and probably received a Pulitzer. But Mlan’s real orders weren’t in the newspaper. Tool’s job is to undermine public faith in government by questioning political motives and methods at every opportunity. Particularly once Fist’s panic hits.”

Personally,
Cuddy heard himself advising Caroline,
I’d use the power of the pen for all it’s worth.

“Fucking hell,” he said out loud. “You aren’t talking about Steve Price?”

Chapter 47

ROCHESTER, PENNSYLVANIA, 10:30 A.M.

It was the look in his eyes that made her tumble to the truth: the flat, alien, inchoate hatred she hadn’t glimpsed while they’d chased leads together. The hatred was direct and personal, as shocking as a flood of icy water. Caroline had seen that kind of look before: in the eyes of Mlan Krucevic. Price meant to kill her.

His right hand snaked out and tore the latex from her cheekbone. She flung her left arm over the seat, scrabbling for her purse and the Walther she’d tucked inside.

But the man beside her grabbed her wrist in the vise of his fingers and jammed on the brakes. The car screeched to a halt on the lonely mountain road.

“You think you’re so goddamn tough,”
he was shouting.
“You think you can kill a man and call it justice.”

With her free hand she tried to open the car door. He’d locked it automatically.

And if she ran into the woods?

He’d hunt her down and leave her body for some lost hiker to find, in another decade.

Tom,
she thought despairingly. Why hadn’t she told him the truth about where she was? She brought her left knee up and kicked out hard at Price’s groin. He grunted, took the blow, and smashed his fist into her face.

Her nose shattered. She cried out at the pain. He was bending her left wrist backward—the fingers that had reached for her gun—and the pressure was unbearable, force applied to a frail twig.

Her wrist would snap.

She hurled herself forward, her teeth sinking into his forearm; and with a guttural howl his grip relaxed.

She scrabbled for the handle, desperate to get away from him, her breath coming in tearing gasps.

His fist fell like a mallet on the bullet wound in her right shoulder.

Once, twice, three times—

There was nowhere for her to go. The agony was a cloud, blotting out all light from her brain. She struggled and saw his fist raised again.

Her shoulder exploded. She felt the shock ripple through her body.

Then nothing more.

The Greyhound bus station in Erie, Pennsylvania, sits on Route 19 between Davis and Beibel Avenues. It is neither a new nor particularly attractive building. Not far to the west is a shopping center bound by the interstate. The parking lot of the Millcreek Mall had become the FBI’s staging ground for hostage rescue, a good five hundred yards across the street from Daniel Becker’s fortified position. They had to assume he was armed with his sniper’s rifle and scope. They had to keep a proper distance.

A rolling carnival,
Tom thought as his chopper set down in the wide grass median wedged between the interstate and the shopping mall,
with a roving band of players.
Maybe an hour had passed since he’d taken the Bureau’s call and heard the name of Erie, yet the parking lot was filled with vehicles and people. He picked out the field agents first, in their black bomber jackets with
FBI
emblazoned on the back; local uniformed cops and sheriffs; squad cars pulled up with lights flashing and sirens muted; law enforcement RVs; portable water tanks for the Pennsylvania National Guardsmen; paramedics in jumpsuits. Television crews. Vans with satellite dishes. Victims’ Assistance reps. Public relations people. Photographers. Reporters with ring-bound notebooks and laptop computers. There would be snipers working for the Good Guys, too, taking up position in a cordon around the bus station with their walkie-talkies and their tripods and their lethal slugs. Professionally trained hostage negotiators employed by the Bureau and the local police jockeying for positions at the mike. Religious chaplains of various orders, in case Daniel Becker asked to be absolved of his sins in his final moments. A S.W.A.T. team suiting up in Kevlar somewhere offstage, just in case. Hundreds of people.

And none of them was Caroline.

At the thought of her—which sprang, unbidden, into his tired mind—Shephard winced. He’d done his best to distance the woman who’d haunted him across two continents, tried not to dwell on the fact that she was walking a Long Island beach right now, happily beyond the fray, while he was single-handedly trying to keep all hell from breaking loose. He was hurt and betrayed and furious at Caroline Carmichael but he missed her acutely: missed the swift cut of her mind, her deep knowledge of the enemy. Missed her courage. She was the strongest woman he’d ever known. And the most vulnerable. Was it the combination of the two that had bewitched him?

What if there was more to her story than deliberate deceit and criminal misconduct and possible collusion with the worst terrorist group operating on U.S. soil? What if, God forbid, he’d misjudged her?

Fuck Caroline,
he thought savagely.
She’s married anyway.
He jumped out of the chopper.

He moved crablike in his rotor-crouch toward the edge of the lot. A clutch of bodies detached themselves from the general mass and started sprinting toward him.
Reporters. Didn’t I just see these guys in Wheeling? Or was that in D.C.? I don’t remember.

“Tom Shephard,” he said as the first body reached him—a woman in a black jumpsuit. “Thirty April Task Force.”

“Good to see you.” She extended her hand. “Lindy Asbill. Special Agent in Charge, Pittsburgh. Becker’s been positively identified by local police—caught his face in a scope not ten minutes ago. He’s got maybe fifteen people in there, we can’t be sure, and there are reports of casualties.”

“How many?”

“At least one dead in the main station area and more shots fired. We have no specifics; Becker refuses to answer the negotiator’s hail.”

They were walking toward the tight knot of technical equipment and figures ranged near a mobile police support unit set up opposite the bus station.

“He won’t answer the hail?” Tom repeated. “Let me try.”

It’d been nearly two hours since he’d killed the woman behind the ticket window and Daniel was running out of ideas. He’d hoped the bus for Pittsburgh would pull in before the news got out but no buses came, no behemoth rolled with a belch and a squeal of air brakes under the great outdoor portico behind the station. He’d been close to making it, but now the Zionist Occupation Government was closing in.
I have faith, Lord, and I am Your Instrument and if You intend to gather me up I will take the Unclean with me.

He had forced his hostages against the plate glass windows facing the circus across the street so they could be seen and counted. He’d offered each a chance to join the Overthrow, to take the only stand with honor in the End Times, but one of the guys had hawked and spat and the fat mother of the little girl started to scream. Now they slumped, faces pressed against the glass, while he trained his scope over their heads.

I’m only one man, Lord,
he thought as he swept the vehicles and enforcement personnel with that curious intimacy of the high-powered lens,
and yet see how they fear me.

“Daniel,” a voice croaked behind him. “Daniel, where are we?”

Without moving the barrel of his gun he glanced over his shoulder and saw the boy—saw Mlan’s son, sitting up in the hard waiting-room seat. His face was dead white against the orange plastic and his eyes stared blankly from hollow sockets.

“Erie,” he said. “Greyhound. We’re not goin’ anywheres much for a piece.”

The boy surveyed the gun and the dozen terrified souls pressed against the station window, and a furrow of puzzlement cut his brow. “I don’t feel very well.”

“DANIEL BECKER!”

The amplified voice split the air of the bus station like the trumpet of God.

“DANIEL, THIS IS TOM SHEPHARD, FBI. THIS IS THE END OF THE LINE, DANIEL. THERE’S NO WALKING OUT OF THAT PLACE ALIVE, BUDDY, UNLESS YOU TALK TO US FIRST. IF YOU’VE GOT A PHONE OR CAN REACH ONE INSIDE, I’D LIKE YOU TO CALL THIS NUMBER.”

A stream of meaningless digits followed. Daniel ignored them. The megaphone paused to give him time to react, to reach out and touch someone. Jozsef stood up and took a hesitant step toward the window.

“I SAW YOUR PLACE IN HILLSBORO, DANIEL, OR WHAT’S LEFT OF IT. YOU MUST BE IN CONSIDERABLE PAIN. FIRST DOLF KILLED, NOW BEKAH. YOU CAN MAKE THE KILLING STOP, DANIEL. YOU CAN MAKE THAT CHOICE. NOBODY ELSE CAN.”

He stared coolly down his rifle.
Motherfucking Fed trying to get all friendly. Only one’s gonna die is him.

One of the hostages let out a sob.

“Daniel.” Jozsef tugged on the seat of his pants. “I need a doctor.”

“WE’D LIKE TO SEND A MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN RED CROSS OVER TO THE DOOR TO TALK TO YOU, DANIEL. WE NEED TO VERIFY THE STATUS OF THE INDIVIDUALS PINNED DOWN INSIDE THE BUILDING. WILL YOU TALK TO THE RED CROSS? CALL THAT NUMBER AND LET US KNOW.”

Again, the stream of digits.

“Kid,” Daniel hissed, “take this and keep it trained on the sheep.” He pulled his automatic pistol from inside his jacket and handed it to the boy. Trusting him like he’d trust Dolf to back up his daddy when times got tough. He didn’t have to ask if Jozsef knew how to shoot. He’d been raised by the Leader, for Chrissake.

“DANIEL, WE’RE ASKING YOU TO LET THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN GO WITH THE RED CROSS. YOU LET THEM GO, DANIEL, AND WE’LL TAKE THAT AS A SIGN OF GOOD FAITH. YOU LET THEM GO, AND WE’LL HAVE A BASIS FOR TALKING TO YOU. UNDERSTAND?”

He watched a guy with slick blond hair and an apprehensive expression step forward beyond the mass of people and megaphones, waving a white flag bisected by a red cross. In the crosshairs of the scope, Daniel saw him swallow hard.
Nervous as shit,
he thought.
Let’s give him somethin’ to worry about.

“
DANIEL
,” said the voice of God, “
WE’RE SENDING MARK TARNOW OF THE RED CROSS TO TALK TO YOU. WE’LL HOLD OUR FIRE.”

You can hold whatever the fuck you like,
Daniel thought as he chambered his round.
Why don’tcha hold it between your knees.
He followed the chicken-shit named Mark as he waved his silly little flag all the way across the street. He remembered Red Cross types from Bosnia. Always crying in their beer about atrocities and whatnot. Mourning the deaths of civilians. The quality of the drinking water, for Pete’s sake. He hated the namby-pamby bleeding-heart liberals who couldn’t hold a gun to save their lives but could lecture a man about the Geneva Conventions until he was ready to scream.

“DANIEL, WE’RE ASKING YOU TO CALL US NOW.”

He let Mark cross Route 19 and set his foot on the curb before he caught the dick right between the eyes.