The Devil's Breath (21 page)

She said nothing for a moment, sipping the coffee. Then she
got up, putting the cup on a small occasional table, reaching for an imaginary petrol pump, miming what she’d seen. ‘You did this …’ she said. ‘And then this … and then you turned towards the car … so …’ She paused, looking down at him. ‘And then your face …’

‘What about my face?’

‘You started blinking. You shook your head. You looked—’ she hesitated, searching for the word ‘—very surprised … as if …’

‘Yes?’

She hesitated again, then shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you were tired. Confused. I don’t know. You looked—’ she shrugged ‘—drunk.’

‘
Drunk
?’

‘Sure. Crazy. I know. You’re not drunk. You weren’t drunk. You couldn’t have been drunk. So …’ She shrugged again. ‘You don’t remember it?’

‘Sure. I remember the gas. All over me. And you getting out pretty damn fast. I remember that, sure.’

Inge gazed down at him, nodding, saying nothing. Then she reached for a cigarette from a pack on the floor. Telemann watched the flame of the lighter, still thinking about the garage, the fuel pooling at his feet. Inge sat down beside him and Telemann shivered, knowing how lucky he’d been, the speed of the girl’s reactions, the way she’d taken charge.

‘Has it happened before?’

‘This? At a gas station?’ Telemann shook his head. ‘Never.’

‘Anywhere else?’

Telemann said nothing for a moment, then emptied his cup and returned it to the low table beside the sofa. The table was topped with glass, and the cup and saucer danced briefly on the surface before he withdrew his hand. Telemann nodded slowly, staring at the cup. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘In the States.’

‘When?’

‘Six months back. I’d been working out a lot, weights, repetitions. There’d been some silly episodes, clumsiness I
guess, falling over, that kind of stuff, just stumbles. Then—’ he shrugged, remembering the feel of the gymnasium mat beneath his body, his arms locked, straight up, the big 20-kg weights either end of the bar. ‘—I had an accident.’

‘Serious?’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Could have been.’

‘What happened?’

‘One minute I was pushing weights. The next—’ he shrugged ‘—I guess I dropped them.’

‘You hurt yourself?’

‘Yeah. But I was lucky. Couple of broken ribs. Had to give up laughing for a while. Nothing permanent.’

Inge nodded, thoughtful, and Telemann got up, pulling the dressing-gown around him, embarrassed by the direction the conversation had taken. After the accident, at Laura’s insistence, he’d undergone a series of tests. The tests had been exhaustive. They’d measured his reflexes, shone lights in his eyes, taken samples of fluid from a lumbar puncture at the base of his spine. The second day he’d spent at a specialist clinic at Georgetown University, climbing painfully on to a motorized bed and succumbing to the attentions of a whole-body scan. The machine had provided metres of print-out information, though nobody subsequently had bothered to explain the outcome of $3000 of hi-tech diagnosis. Twice he’d pushed his own physician for some kind of result, but on both occasions he’d gotten no further than a shrug and a smile. You’re in great shape, went the message, so don’t worry about it.

He hadn’t, letting the intervening months dim the memory of the weights, and the pain, and the odd stumble on the sidewalk. Lately, though, the symptoms had returned. A blur of cities on an airport departures board. Momentary bewilderment at how to access a particular blade on his pocket-knife, the brain quite certain, the fingers temporarily stalled. And now this, several litres of gasoline, liberally applied, all his own work.

Teleman gazed around the room, ready for a change of subject. ‘Your boy,’ he said. ‘Nikki.’

‘
Ja
?’

‘Where is he?’

Inge smiled up at him, expelling cigarette smoke in a long blue plume. ‘In Halle. He lives with my mother. He lived with me for a while, when he was younger, but—’ she shrugged, gesturing round the apartment, a neat, well-ordered working life ‘—it just wasn’t possible any more.’

‘You miss him?’

‘Of course.’

‘Wulf ever see him?’

‘Never.’

‘His choice or yours?’

‘His.’

‘
You
ever see him?’

‘Who?’

‘Wulf.’

‘No.’

She shook her head, emphatic, grinding the half-smoked cigarette into an ashtray on the table. It lay there for a moment, still smouldering, and Telemann wondered about the logistics of the affair, Wulf with his storybook marriage and his busy schedule, fitting in a relationship or two between meetings.

‘Five years is a long time,’ Telemann mused. ‘Long enough to miss him.’

Inge smiled, saying nothing, and Telemann was still wondering where to take the conversation next when she got up and extended a hand. Outside, in the hall, there were two doors. The first opened into a large, sunny bedroom. A double bed faced the window. There were heavy drapes either side of the window and a small television in the corner. One wall was occupied by a built-in wardrobe, and there were tall mirrors, floor to ceiling, on the sliding doors. Beside the bed was a framed photograph. Telemann picked it up and looked at it. A child of perhaps four was kneeling on a towel beside a half-completed sandcastle. In the background there were pedalos and a circling speedboat on a flawless blue sea. The child was grinning at the camera. He had short blond hair and large dark mischievous eyes. There were traces of Inge in the way he held his head, the chin tilted slightly up. He looked amused and
sceptical, as if someone had told him something he didn’t quite believe. He was very brown.

‘Nikki?’

‘Yes. It’s very recent. Only two months ago.’ She smiled. ‘We went to Spain. On holiday.’

‘We?’

‘My mother. And Nikki.’ She smiled again. ‘And me.’

Telemann nodded, replacing the photograph beside the bed. Inge looked at it for a moment longer, thoughtful. ‘You’re married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Children?’

‘Three.’

‘Then you understand,’ she said.

Telemann looked at her for a moment, thinking of Laura. ‘About what?’ he said. ‘Betrayal?’

Inge glanced up at him, frowning. ‘Betrayal?’ she said blankly.

Telemann nodded, suddenly exhausted, no longer seeing the point of it all: the shadow-play, the hints and guesses, the careful professional etiquette that had shaped their relationship for two brief days.

At noon, from the US Consulate, he’d at last been able to speak to Emery. He’d told him about Littman and Wulf, and Emery had confirmed that Mahmood Assali was a known player in at least one of the Palestinian terror groups. The Israelis wanted him for a series of outrages in the Occupied Territories, and there was evidence that he’d been responsible for a bus attack in Israel itself. Telemann had noted the details, making no comment, and afterwards he’d enquired about Laura, listening woodenly as Emery had described last night’s electrical storms, hours of thunder and lightning sweeping up from the south, a wild twirl from the skirts of Hurricane Dora. Laura had evidently called at midnight from the little house on Dixie Street. She had water coming in through the shingles, buckets of it. The stuff was driving horizontally across the street. Bree was in tears. The cat had disappeared beneath the fridge. She just needed someone to tell her that the end of the world hadn’t
quite arrived. That dawn would come. That the rain would stop. That it would all be OK. Emery said that he’d done his best, calmed her down, offered to drive over, promised to call by as soon as the next day’s schedule permitted, but he knew all along that what she really needed, what they all really needed, was a word or two from the Boss. Telemann was the Boss. A phone call would reach her now. A word or two of comfort might ease her day.

Telemann, listening to Emery’s slow drawl, had marvelled yet again at his brazenness, his openly intimate knowledge of Laura’s every movement, every fear. That’s what they taught you at Langley, he thought grimly. That’s what had taken him to the upper reaches of the Analytical Directorate. That, and a nerveless determination to play every scene to the limit.

Telemann had ended the conversation with a non-committal grunt, hearing the noises in his head again, hammer-blows that made him, quite literally, see double. Last time round, they’d spent thousands of dollars looking for a cause. This time round, he’d save them the time and the expense. He knew the cause. The cause was his wife. The cause was Laura.

Now Telemann looked up. He was sitting on the bed. He couldn’t remember getting there. Grief, he finally realized, smelled faintly of gasoline.

‘Madness,’ he said quietly. ‘Fantasy. All of it. A crock of shit. Believe me. Twenty years and three kids says I’m right.’ He shook his head, looking at his hands, the fingers intertwined, flexing back and forth, whitened with rage. ‘Madness,’ he said again. ‘You think you’re in control. You think you’re on top of it. You think you
know
, for Chrissakes. Then what happens?’ He looked up at Inge, still standing by the bed. ‘You find out it ain’t that way at all. Probably never was. Not one year of it. One day of it. One second. Shit …’ He reached up for her, feeling blindly for her hand, finding it. ‘You know …’ He bit his lip for a moment, and took a breath. ‘I got a daughter. Bree. She’s eleven. She’s mad. She can’t even spell her own name. Deranged. Always has been. But you know what I think? What I think now? I think she knew all along. I think she knew the
secret. About the madness. How mad it all is. Insane. I think she was smarter than we ever were. I think she won. I think she got there first …’ He buried his head in his hands, his whole body shaking now, under the thin dressing-gown. ‘Funny,’ he whispered, ‘I never figured that before.’ He looked up, Inge’s face a blur. ‘So what does that make me? Even dumber than fucking usual?’

He turned his head away, not wanting her to see the tears, trying to hide them. Then she was beside him, kneeling on the floor, cradling his head in her hands, saying something in German, her voice soft and low, anointing him. She wiped his eyes with a corner of the sheet. Her face slipped back into focus.

‘This guy Wulf. He mean anything to you?’

‘Everything.’

‘And he left you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he didn’t need me any more.’

Telemann looked at her, sniffing, digesting the phrase, the simple logic, acquisition, abuse, betrayal, the full circle. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he said quietly. ‘That any use?’

Inge smiled, kissing him lightly on the forehead, squeezing his hand.

‘I’m serious. Tell me where he is. Where he lives. I’ll add him to the list. First the Arab. Then him. Compliments of Uncle Sam.’ He made a gun with two fingers and lifted it, arm out straight, aiming for the middle distance. ‘Bang, bang,’ he said softly. ‘Otto’s dead.’

Inge looked at him for a moment longer, then got to her feet. She crossed the room to the big fitted wardrobe and opened it. Inside, the wardrobe was full of men’s clothing. She sifted quickly through the hangers and produced a pair of slacks, eyeing Telemann for size. Telemann, still on the bed, gazed at the contents of the wardrobe. Many of the jackets were in eyecatching beach colours, blues and lemons and pinks. One was an acid shade of lime.

‘Wulf’s?’ he asked tonelessly.

Inge smiled again and shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Otto had excellent taste.’

*

Against his better judgement, Emery took the overnight flight to Los Angeles.

The telex from the West Coast had come in during the late afternoon. Juanita, still negotiating with her insurance company about structural damage to her roof from last night’s storm, had left the three-line message on his desk. The first two sentences were the ones that mattered. ‘Gold inquiry continues,’ they went. ‘Imperative you attend.’

The message was signed ‘A. F.’, and Emery had checked the initials with a contact he trusted at IRS headquarters across town. From Los Angeles, he’d so far heard nothing. Two separate inquiries had gone unanswered, a source of some irritation because the body in the morgue at Bellevue was – to date – one of the few tangible leads in an otherwise comfortless picture. When he’d explained this on the phone, the contact over at IRS had volunteered nothing but a chuckle, and a name, and a cryptic aside. ‘Andy Fischer,’ he’d said. ‘Hates to bother folks unduly. Enjoy the man. He’s worth the journey.’

Now, five miles above Kentucky, Emery sat at the back of the executive cabin, a tumbler of bourbon at his elbow, wondering how best to trick his body into sleep. Three weeks without meaningful rest had begun to take its toll. Every day had brought more intelligence into the big, shadowed office on ‘F’ Street, boxes of analysis, raw data, Agency reports, decrypts, ELINT transcriptions, satellite intercepts, top-level stuff sourced from both sides of the Atlantic. Sifting through this material, page by page, he’d sought to detect a pattern, a sequence of events, that would begin to explain the curt ultimata tightening the noose around New York.

The obvious explanation was the best: that a new terror group spawned from the political swamp that had once been Palestine was acting as an agent for Saddam Hussein, carrying the impending war to the enemy’s heartlands. That made perfect sense. That was the way the President saw it. That was the
theory that Emery had to garnish with names and faces – the key coordinates that would safeguard New York. But it wasn’t working. As hard as he looked, there was nothing there. No real evidence of a new terror group. No quiet confirmations from Baghdad. Not a single word from sources which – under normal circumstances – would have been queueing up for a discreet word in some far-flung bar. Only the sign-off on the original note from Amman. The Martyrs of 7th June. Hardly the firmest of leads.

Sullivan, with whom he now met daily, was getting impatient. He could see it in the man’s face, in his body-language. He was a politician. His was the currency of means and ends, initiatives and results. He trod the corridor to the Oval Office more often than most Presidential aides, and the message he brought back was no less plain for being unvoiced. We have a problem here, a city we can’t afford to lose, damage we can’t afford to sustain. We’re big players, the biggest. We have a position to protect, a coalition to keep together, a war to fight. The problem’s getting outa hand. Solve it.