Blown (25 page)

Chapter 48

BERLIN, 7:08 P.M.

Josie had chosen the Austrian Steyr because it was ideal for a woman. Empty and without its scope, it weighed only eight pounds. The cheek piece and butt plate were adjustable and could fit almost any size shooter; the stock was synthetic with an integrated bipod. It took a .223 Remington magazine of five rounds. She didn’t expect to need more than one.

She was oiling the gun now, although it had been clean when she stowed it in her luggage the day before. The rhythm of preparation was important; routine calmed the nerves. And Josie’s nerves were jumping.

When she’d reached beneath the low-lying mattress in the Kurfürstendammer Hof two hours ago, the touch of the heavy contour barrel lying undisturbed had sent a wave of relief crashing through her gut. The sneak thief had tracked her down and entered her room and felt among her panties, but he hadn’t discovered the gun. She’d drawn it out into the light muttering a prayer of thanks to Patrick and all his saints; and then she’d sat down abruptly on the floor. A second slip of paper, wrapped around the scope. She’d read it immediately, hating him—whoever he was.

Your man was set up. He never saw it coming. Ask Scottie what he needed to hide.

It was this second note that sent her packing, sent her off on foot with the carpetbag and her suitcase in the persistent German rain, spooked to the core. Two underground trains and a taxi later she’d fetched up in Kreuzberg, on the outskirts of the old East German airport, in a dingy hotel she figured nobody could find. Except her former employer, who was hunting her now.

Nobody but a Company guy could connect Mary Devlin to Josie O’Halloran. Nobody but a Company guy would have access to all the right files and the history to make sense of them. For most people at the CIA those twilight days in Bogotá, before the drug cartels and the unaccompanied tours and the safe zones inside the embassy, were a different century. She was being hunted by someone who knew her as intimately as Scottie did; and for the life of her, Josie had no idea who it was.

If they know who I am and they know about the gun, then they know why I’m here. I’m being set up, too. Just like Patrick.

As she rubbed the oily rag, smelling comfortingly of gun ranges and certainty and .5 groupings, she asked herself one question.
Why had they telegraphed the punch?
If she was being sent out like a lamb to Scottie’s slaughter, why let her know that fact? Why attempt to save her? She had lived in the black world too long to believe in the kindness of strangers.

They don’t want me to reach the target,
she thought suddenly, and set down the rag.
They’re trying to scare me away.
This was indeed possible but the idea was also somewhat pathetic: her last attempt to put Scottie back up on his pedestal. To trust and believe in his good faith. The truth was, she was blown. She’d been offered a warning to leave before she died just like Patrick.

Sheila and the boys would be just fine. She’d taken care of them all in her will, and there was enough money to make certain they never had to worry. But Josie wasn’t ready to die. She loved the small things of her existence too much: the sharp fresh smell of brine in the mornings, the cheerful sight of Mike and his delivery truck. The tinkle of the customer bell over her shop door. The possibility of a plane flight and a different adventure just around the corner.

Ask Scottie what happened in Bogotá that night.

She folded the oiled rag in neat squares and stored it in a plastic Baggie. The Steyr was beautiful, resting across the arms of the hotel room’s occasional chair; she resisted the impulse to stroke it. She had a decision to make.

“You turned Caroline over to 30 April?”

Eric was staring at him, appalled, and Cuddy felt panic rise in his throat.

“I didn’t know,” he faltered. “The files in the disc you sent were blank. Encrypted somehow. Or designed to erase whenever the wrong person opened them. We had no idea—”

“So you
did
get the disc,” Eric insisted, his face bone-white. “How many other lies have you told me tonight?”

“I’ll call the FBI.” Cuddy reached for his cell. “There’s a guy who’ll help her—”

“It’s too late for that! She’s been in Tool’s hands for twenty-four hours! You really think she’s still alive?”

“There’s always a chance.”

“Wait, Wilmot.” Scottie stepped forward, his hand suddenly on Cuddy’s wrist. “Don’t make that call. Not
yet
.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Scottie,” Eric said warningly. “I told you what you wanted to know.”

“But you didn’t sign your confession,” he returned genially. “And I’m afraid that’s more important right now than the . . .
fate
. . . of your wife.”

Cuddy stared at his boss. “Are you nuts? This is Caroline we’re talking about, Scottie.”

He shrugged. “She’s probably already dead. Whereas my future is very much at issue. The confession, Wilmot, if you please.”

Eric brought his cuffed hands to his face. “I’ll kill you, Scottie. With my bare hands.
Nobody uses Caroline to get to me.
”

“But, Eric,” Scottie reminded him gently, “we always have. From the very beginning. Wilmot?”

Cuddy set down the cell phone and reached woodenly into his briefcase.
It’s a simple thing. A way to pass him the pen. For God’s sake Eric don’t blow it now.

He passed the single sheet of paper to his boss. Scottie scanned the words he knew by heart—for effect, for the theater of the thing. He might have been a masterful tragedian, Cuddy thought, had he never gone black.

“ ‘I, Eric Carmichael, deliberately and without the knowledge of my superiors betrayed the government and the people of the United States by voluntarily joining the terrorist organization known as 30 April, dedicating my life to the late Mlan Krucevic . . . did willingly and knowingly execute the kidnapping and murder of Sophie Payne . . . atrocities and criminal activity throughout Europe designed to undermine democratic order . . .’ That seems to be about right. Sign it, Eric. The sooner you do, the sooner Wilmot makes his rescue call.”

There was a pause. Eric at bay, all the hatred and pain of the past three years blazing in his eyes.

Then he shuffled backward two steps and sank into his chair.

Cuddy placed Raphael’s unexceptionable pen between his aching fingers. And watched while he wrote his life away.

Chapter 49

ROCHESTER, PENNSYLVANIA, 11:14 A.M.

“Misha, I’m going to be busy for a while,” Adrienne said as she stood in the doorway of her son’s room. “I’ve left your snack on the table. You can listen to your music or play on the computer. I’ll check on you later.”

He neither looked at her nor replied, his dark head bowed intently over the notebook in his lap. It would be numbers, Adrienne thought; a logical sequence mounting into the millions. He’d been building it for days, the figures etched neatly over page after page of lined paper, a staircase in his mind that mounted to infinity.

She pulled the door gently closed and threw the bolt. Only Misha’s room could be locked from the outside—and his windows, large panes that flooded the room with light, were similarly sealed. Adrienne could not allow him certain freedoms. Lost in the ordered labyrinth of thought, Misha might wander while she worked. Require outside help to find his way back. And then the perfect isolation would be broken. Questions asked. Government people tramping through the underbrush.
Her son taken from her.

She smoothed her hair, caught back in elastic, and turned away from the silence beyond the closed door.

“I didn’t expect you,” she said to Steve Price as she walked into the room that served as both sitting area and laboratory. He was still standing with a hot wet towel pressed against the bite marks in his arm; the woman lay in a heap where he’d dragged her across the threshold. “I don’t want this kind of thing in my house. I have a child. You shouldn’t have come.”

He dabbed at the ugly punctures in his forearm, scowling. “She was going to find you. I did the best I could to contain the damage.”

“You led her here.”

“Your father sent her here. He told her everything he knew last night.”

She took a step backward, unbalanced for a second.
Daddy? He doesn’t have the slightest idea where I live.

Her professor father with the kindly, distant smile, the mind always lost in research. Her father’s hand smoothing her hair.

How does he know where I am?

“Have you got any rope? Some kind of tape?” Price demanded. “She’ll come around in a sec and I don’t want her moving.”

She didn’t ask what he intended to do with the woman. She simply turned on her heel and went into her bedroom, which sat near Misha’s off the back hallway. They shared the bath. That and a galley kitchen running along one side of the lab were the sum total of the house. The strapping tape lay on a shelf in her closet where she kept the necessary things she carted once a month from Rochester, twenty-nine miles down the winding mountain road. She had never used it.

She watched while Price wound the sticky plastic stuff over the woman’s mouth. The blond hair was trapped in the adhesive and the skin below the smashed nose was puffed and bruised. As Price worked, the woman’s eyes fluttered open and a faint sound of protest came from deep in her throat. He moved on to the wrists, pulling them behind the back and taping them tightly together so that the flesh below the bond immediately went dead white from lack of circulation.

“Someone will be looking for her,” Adrienne said.

“I’m telling you, they won’t.” He slid the tape expertly under the woman’s ankles, trussing her like a Christmas turkey. “I’m the only one who knows where she is. Her guardian angel.”

“Who is she?”

He looked up, surprised, a satiric glint in his eye. He had expected her to know.

“Caroline Carmichael. The CIA agent who killed Mlan.”

While Adrienne prepared the hypodermic, Price talked quickly, filling in the details of the past three days. She never watched television and she relied on her electronic sources for relevant information: the e-mails and text messages relayed from around the world. Price was one of those sources. He communicated with her once a week. Only eight days ago, it was he who’d broken the news of Mlan’s murder to her.

It was the first time he’d tracked Adrienne to her lab, however, and the presumption nettled her. His presence was a threat, a bludgeoning reminder of how much he knew. How much damage he could do.

“Fist is blown,” he said as she punctured the seal on the glass vial, “and he’s got Jozsef with him. The two of them have left a string of bodies up and down the East Coast and the entire world is hunting them down. We have to consider them lost.”

She frowned as she watched the yellow liquid swirl into the hypodermic chamber, then depressed the needle until drops spurted from the tip. “And you want to know what else is lost.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I think that’s vital, don’t you? If we’re to go on?”

The image of a sand castle sitting high on a beach came into Adrienne’s mind. The waves advancing, the water licking at the base, the fragile sand eroding.
Fist and Jozsef given up.
Misha’s brother. Mlan’s son. But there was the castle, the towers she had built: and the tide advancing. This woman—the contents of her head—could turn back disaster.

“You
do
want to go on?”

“There is no other choice,” she answered.

He had no power to touch her, Steve Price—she would never again be the soul or body of a man—but she found she could appreciate the fact that he remained calm. Adrienne was the picture of cerebral science in her white coat and latex gloves; but behind her impassive face her mind was seething.
This woman. Killed Mlan. Cut him down like a beast in the dirt, fed him to the mob. This woman will destroy everything that matters.

“Give me her arm.”

Caroline Carmichael was conscious now, her eyes wary as they approached. She lay on the floor, the right shoulder of her black sweater soaked with what might be blood.
She’ll soon,
Adrienne thought,
pass out again.
She would be growing weak.

Price rolled her over without mercy onto the reopened wound. Again the guttural animal noises came from behind the suffocating tape.

“You’ll have to cut the sleeve off,” Adrienne told him. “There’s a lab scalpel under the sterilizing lights.”

He found what he needed and sawed deftly at the cashmere. She supposed his handiness came from surviving in war zones, the natural efficiency of the foreign correspondent; but it had been years since Price had left Washington, and she doubted he could handle a gun. Mlan had trained Adrienne as he’d trained his son Jozsef: to survive. She had no religion other than science, but like Daniel Becker she lived for the End Times. She intended to build whatever lay beyond them.

She tied a rubber strip around the woman’s bicep, found the vein, and slid the needle in. The drug pumped almost instantly to the heart and then to the brain. Thiopental sodium: in high doses, a general anesthetic that depressed the central nervous system, slowed the heart rate, and lowered blood pressure. In smaller doses, truth serum. Weakened by blood loss as she was, Caroline Carmichael would find it impossible to fight.

“In a few seconds she should start to talk,” Adrienne told Steve Price. “And when she’s done, we kill her.”

Chapter 50

ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA, 11:20 A.M.

“All right,” Tom Shephard said as he stared across the lifeless body of Mark Tarnow, “if he won’t come out, we’ll have to go in and get him. How many people we got in position, Lindy?”

“Four police snipers set up in a three-sixty radius around the station ready to cover any team we can send. The Erie chief has offered his S.W.A.T. personnel, but I’m inclined to use our guys. It’s a question of time.”

Our guys,
Tom thought, would be a full-scale HRT deployment—the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. That meant roughly fifty snipers and attack personnel, field tents, an MD-530 Little Bird for overhead surveillance, and pilots to fly it. Remote control surveillance robots. Day guns and night guns. The potential for a standoff to spiral out of control exactly as it had at Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Shephard knew and liked at least three of the highly trained members of HRT, and there was nobody he’d rather have at his back if
he
were the one trying to walk toward Daniel Becker across five hundred yards of naked firing range. But Becker didn’t care who he killed and he didn’t have much to live for. He’d know the odds he was facing—know he was surrounded—know it was just a matter of time.

“He’ll take everybody in that building with him,” Shephard said.

“We can’t know that.”

“We can. And it’s HRT the world will blame.” He looked steadily at Lindy, at the soft blond hair and the hard blue eyes. They were roughly equal in grade and experience, he guessed, but he had the clout of Headquarters behind him.

“Are you playing politics, Tom?” she demanded. “There’s a toddler in there!”

“I’m
considering
politics. Absolutely. The Bureau’s already taking heat for the massacre at the Marine Corps. We’ve got an assassination of the country’s highest intelligence official and at least six murders along the way. Becker’s a dead man, Lindy. We all know that. It’s just a matter of how he dies: alone or in a bloodbath. Nothing we do should contribute to the human cost.”

“And you think turning this mess over to local police is going to
save
somebody?”

“I think the sooner we move, the better.” His cell phone was jangling “The Star Spangled Banner.” “It’ll take HRT twelve hours to load gear and get over here. We don’t have twelve hours. Shephard!”

Lindy opened her mouth, hesitated, shut it again.

“Shit!”
Tom exploded into the phone. “Why can’t Caroline fucking Carmichael stay
out
of this?”

Inside the bus station, blood was beginning to pool on the tiles from the corpses Daniel had left there, and Jozsef was slumped on the waiting-room bench, his cheeks flushed with fever and the automatic pistol dangling from his hand. The toddler was wailing steadily and her mother kept asking if she could use the bathroom. Daniel shook his head. “Won’t be long now. Just sit tight.”

The woman’s face crinkled like a punctured balloon; she was crying without a sound.

Some of the men were whispering among themselves and Daniel didn’t like it. He knew they were talking about things and trying to figure out whether they had the balls or the brawn to take him, but they’d seen what the M16 could do and there weren’t enough heroes in the world to go up against that rifle alone.

Two of the hostages, a kid of maybe twenty and a pregnant black girl who clung to his hand, were still staring out at the body of the Red Cross weenie sprawled at the edge of the parking lot. Nobody from the other side had had the guts to brave Daniel’s crossfire to retrieve the corpse. It figured, Daniel thought. No honor among thieves.

He was feeling bone-shakingly tired and he had only two spare magazines in his backpack. That and the remaining bullets in the gun meant he had just enough ammo to finish off the people in front of him and head out the door with Jozsef, gun raised. The death would be quick and he’d die knowing they hadn’t taken him in this hole. He hated being trapped, cornered and gunned down like a rat in a drain; and the sick air of the bus station—diesel, urine, sweat, and fear—was sapping his ability to think. Now he’d shot their messenger, they’d know what kind of man they were dealing with. They would be coming for him soon. He intended to beat them to the punch.

He was trained enough in tracking and surveillance to know where the guns and the scopes would be. Even the roof was just another place to die.

Dolf, son, I’m coming now,
he thought. And barked out the last order.

“Everybody up against those windows. Right now, you hear?”

Jozsef had slumped down in his seat, the coolness of the plastic little relief against the raging heat of his body. He had lived through the cycles of his father’s disease—a genetically altered form of anthrax—often enough to know that he didn’t have much conscious time left. He was trying to hold on to the thoughts that skittered through his brain, because Daniel was dangerous now; the boy could feel violence coming off the man in waves. If only his vision were not swimming, if only he could focus better on what Daniel was doing. There had been the gunfire out in the street, and the screams from those stuck in front of them like cattle; and then a strange lull. Daniel doing what passed for thinking, Jozsef decided.

He could not keep his eyes open. He wanted nothing so much as the clean hospital sheets and the quivering cubes of green Jell-O.

Everybody up against those windows.

He mentally translated the barked words and the finality in them, heard the whimpering sobs of the woman and her little girl. It was all a part of the recurring nightmare he had lived since he could walk, the guns and the bloodshed and the ideals. He was so very tired of men and guns.

But he forced himself upright from the chair, his body wavering on his feet.

Daniel had raised his rifle and leveled it at the pregnant young woman, who cringed against her boyfriend’s arm. Closing her eyes on the trigger finger.

I never asked to be rescued,
Jozsef thought.
But my father believed in this man. Trusted him with his life.

Both hands on the butt to steady it before his swimming eyes, slowly and deliberately Jozsef raised the automatic pistol.