The Lie (32 page)

But at least I’ve kept him alive
. He directed his thoughts to Jimmy Dunster, encouraging him to just keep breathing, desperately willing it. Tommy Cortlandt
had begun describing it as an apparently growing compulsion to enter into some sort of psychic pact with the besieged soul
and struggling life forces of Jimmy Dunster.

“What the devil has gotten into you?” the CIA director had asked after Paulie demanded special permission to remain inside
the intensive care unit with the still unconscious president. “Why are you carrying on so obsessively with this?”

Paulie had looked at Cortlandt for a long time. “All I know is that I don’t want this man to die.”

“You’re not making sense, Paulie.”

“I want to be here when he wakes up. I want to be the one to let him know about his wife. But even more than that,” Paulie
had told him, “I’ve gotten to believe that this is a very special man because of what he tried to do in coming here, what
it’s cost him, and just for trying to fly so beautifully close to the sun. Let me stay with him, Tommy. You can do it.”

The CIA director had leaned on a few people and did indeed do it.

Now, wearing a pale-green sterile mask, Paulie sat in a solitary chair in the ICU, listening to Jimmy Dunster’s breathing
and waiting for his body to decide whether it was going to live or die.

None of the doctors and nurses entering and leaving the room paid particular attention to him. Because they were told Paulie
was to be left alone, he became invisible.

He thought very little about the outside world until a few questions intruded harshly enough to force him to seek answers.

He learned that since no part of Professor Mainz’s body had been discovered, it was generally assumed that he was alive and
at large somewhere.

He learned, too, that the previously announced conference recess had been extended to a full month. Too bad, thought Paulie,
who had the depressing sense that the temporary break in the meeting might well turn out to be permanent.

As for Kate, he suddenly found it impossible to remember his last sight of her, until he recalled catching her eyes on him
as he stood in the conference room, listening to the momentum build in favor of Klaus Logefeld’s grand plan and feeling disgusted
by his own pathetically selfish reaction.

Now he just wished he could get that feeling back.

“It’s just the two of us now,” he thought once more, but this time aloud, looking at the unconscious president.

“F
EELING A BIT BETTER
about things, Mr. Archer?” asked Nicko Vorelli.

Daniel Archer looked at him, looked at the bright pastel interior of Nicko’s Lear jet, carrying them through the morning sky.
He looked at Kate Dinneson’s exceptional face and body, and looked, finally, at the graceful crystal from which he was sipping
what had to be the best champagne he had ever tasted.

“Better than I felt back in the tunnel,” he said.

The ex-paratrooper’s gaze was wary. He had been brought here at gunpoint and Kate Dinneson was still holding an automatic
loosely in her lap.

“From what you told us earlier, Mr. Archer,” said Nicko, “you haven’t got much of a future if your code-name Sam’s people
ever catch up with you. Or am I wrong?”

“No, sir. You’re not wrong.”

“Then exactly what did you plan on doing if Kate and I hadn’t come along when we did?”

“Change my name and face and disappear. But we don’t have to play games,” Archer said. “Since you didn’t finish me back there
in the tunnel, I guess you decided I can do you more good alive than dead after all. So why don’t you just tell me what it
is.”

“Suppose we talk a little first, Mr. Archer.”

“About what?”

“For one thing, about how you ever got involved with this whole lethal undercover crowd to begin with,” said Nicko.

“I soldiered with a few of them way back in ‘Nam.”

“That long ago?” asked Kate. “You must have been a child.”

“I lied about my age to get in, ma’am.”

Nicko looked at him. “You were that much of a patriot?”

“Hell, I was fifteen goddamn years old. I was sure we were the good guys.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m not sure of anything.”

The plane hit a patch of turbulence and they sat quietly through it. Nicko watched the champagne tilt and sway in his glass.
When it had steadied, he turned to Archer.

“We’re going to be landing in Naples in about an hour and a half,” he said. “If I were to wish you luck, and set you loose
there, what would you do?”

“Probably what I said before. Just try to take off somewhere and disappear.”

“How are you fixed for money?” Nicko asked.

“A few thousand in cash and some credit cards that could be traced.”

“Considering your line of work,” said Nicko, “I must say you haven’t prepared very practically for this kind of emergency.”

“If I were a practical man, sir, do you really think I’d have been in this line of work?”

Nicko laughed. “Probably not. But I must admit I’m delighted to find you this hard up. It’s going to make it that much easier
for us to get along.”

“How do you figure that?” asked Archer.

“Because for any partnership to be successful, it has to be based on mutual need. You’re alive this minute because of mutual
need, Mr. Archer. Let me explain,” he said. “I have an idea that will take someone with your expertise to help carry out.
But I have to be able to trust you. So I plan to guarantee at least half of that trust with the promise of ten million dollars
in cash, a new identity and surgically altered face, and the prospect of a long, comfortable life wherever you decide to live
it.”

Daniel Archer gave it time to settle over him. “And how do you plan to guarantee the other half of my trust?”

“With a few carefully placed audiotapes of our conversation in that Wannsee bunker. The whole idea is still new, so bear with
me.” Nicko glanced at Kate to include her. “It actually came to me down there in that tunnel, when Professor Mainz died and
we three were the only ones alive who knew about it. I realized that as long as the rest of the world believe Mainz has escaped,
we’d been gifted with an extraordinary opportunity to do things we would otherwise be unable to do.”

“Like what?” asked Kate.

“Like whatever we decide,” said Nicko.

Kate and Archer just stared at him.

“Remember whom we’re talking about,” Nicko continued. “A man who was close to having seven of the most powerful nations on
earth about to follow his orders. And now, by a fortuitous act of fate, we’re in a position to take over much of that same
capability.”

“How do we do that?” asked Archer.

“By pretending to be Professor Mainz.”

“I’m afraid we’d only be paper tigers, sir,” said Archer.

“Why?”

“Because we don’t have the professor’s leverage. We don’t have any guns at the head of the president of the United States.
And we certainly don’t have Mainz’s seven major buildings set to blow at the press of a switch.” Archer paused. “Or do you
think he was just bluffing about that?”

“No. He wasn’t bluffing.”

“How do you know?”

“The same way I knew he had those explosives cached near yours at Wannsee. I had him followed when he was placing the charges.”

“And they’re all still in place?” said Archer.

“I can’t see why they wouldn’t be. So all you would have to do would be to go in there and synchronize your own detonator
with the explosives in each of the seven buildings, and we would be more than just paper tigers.”

Nicko waited a full thirty seconds while he drank his champagne. “Do you think you might be interested in such a possibility,
Mr. Archer?”

For the first time, Daniel Archer smiled.

A
T FIRST
J
IMMY
D
UNSTER
thought he might simply be drifting in and out of sleep.

He floated on a soft, dark cloud, unable to move and not really caring. At times in the past he had felt himself stretched
out under a sheet, a nameless oppression clogging his throat, and the illusion of strange faces hovering. So maybe this, too,
was a partial dream, and he would wake and get on with his life.

But increasingly, he began to sense that this had nothing to do with dreams, and that the tubes he suddenly found connected
to his arms and body were real, and the blinking lights of the monitoring equipment were real, along with a strange man in
a sterile mask who appeared to be sitting in a chair and dozing.

All were real.

Perhaps most real of all was the fear of regaining clear awareness and knowing exactly where he was and what had happened
to him.

For a while he just let himself drift in and out of consciousness. Once, through slitted eyes, he saw that the dozing man
in the sterile mask was awake and staring at him. A young, lean-faced man, with the darkest, saddest eyes he had ever seen.

Who is he and why is he so sad?

Jimmy Dunster kept his eyes closed and his breathing regular. Feeling very sly and superior, he took several moments to orient
himself.

He had a vision of the four of them in the surveillance room at Wannsee.

As a college student, he had once tried LSD, and those sensations were not too different from those he was experiencing now.
When he was high everything had quivered with a brilliant light, rainbows curved across the ceiling, and a fine mist had fallen.
In the surveillance room, Professor Mainz and the old man were at the closed-circuit television monitors, he and Maggie had
been quietly talking against a far wall.

And after that?

Nothing. Not until now.

Where was Maggie?

Jimmy Dunster lay squinting through heavy-lidded slits, silently considering the young man’s sad eyes. Then the president
fully opened his own.

For several moments they just looked at each other. Then Paulie Walters took a long, slow breath, rose from his chair, and
approached the bed.

“Mr. President,” he said softly through his pale-green sterile mask.

Dunster opened his mouth and tried to speak. But there was only a low, rasping sound. He licked his lips and tried again.

“Where… where’s my wife?” he whispered.

Paulie’s eyes blinked above the mask.

Dunster reached for and gripped Paulie’s hand. He held it without strength.

“Where’s my… Maggie?”

“There was an explosion, sir. No one seems to know more than that.” Paulie hesitated. “Your wife is still breathing, still
alive.”

It sounded better than “comatose and all but dead.” But the implication of the worst was still there.

Jimmy Dunster swallowed dryly. Then he moistened his lips with his tongue. “And the others?”

“The old man is dead. Professor Mainz simply disappeared.”

Dunster stared blankly.

“There was just no sign of him afterward, Mr. President.”

The pressure on Paulie’s hand eased as Dunster drifted off.

* * *

It was a while before the doctors finished with the president and he was asleep again. Nurses moved in and out of the room,
checking on his tubes and vital signs. Everyone appeared hopeful. Paulie simply sat there in his chair, waiting.

“Who… who are you?”

The president’s voice was barely audible.

Paulie went over to the bed, and Jimmy Dunster took his hand again.

“I’m one of Tommy Cortlandt’s people, Mr. President.”

“Have we ever… met?”

“No, sir. But we did speak once on the phone. You were in the car with Tommy Cortlandt on the way to Wannsee. You wanted to
know what I thought about Chancellor Eisner’s opening remarks.”

Dunster closed his eyes to focus his thoughts. “I remember. More diplomatic… and spiritual platitudes.”

Dunster’s eyes remained closed, and for a moment Paulie thought he might be drifting off in a morphine haze again. Then he
saw the glistening on his cheeks and knew better.

“Dear God,” the president whispered, “I’ve killed… my wife.”

“Don’t say that, sir. What you did in coming here, what you said when you spoke, moved everyone. Besides, your wife is
not
dead. Everyone is praying for her.”

Jimmy Dunster’s mouth trembled and his pale face seemed on the edge of breaking apart. Whatever force was left in him appeared
to fade. Then just as visibly, Paulie saw him rally.

“Maggie never wanted me… to come.”

The monitors hummed and bleeped.

“What about after she heard you speak?” Paulie asked. “After she saw how things were going in the conference room. What did
she say then?”

“She thought maybe… I was…” Dunster’s voice faded.

Paulie leaned closer. “She thought maybe you were what, Mr. President?”

“Jesus… Christ,” Jimmy Dunster whispered.

A
BOUT AN HOUR AND A HALF
after Deputy Director Harris’s call to Anna in Berlin, she drove past an old Lutheran church on the Liebling Strasse and
parked a short distance down the street. She left her car and walked back toward the church.

She was a shapely, fair-haired woman with a face most men looked at twice, and the easy, swinging walk of an athlete. When
she was younger, she had been a promising world class tennis player until she became bored with the discipline and training
required. Most things bored her. Her work, however, was
not
boring, nor were the sums of money she received for doing it.

The church was dark, cool, and all but empty as she entered it. Anna slid into a rear pew, knelt, and genuflected toward the
altar.

Kneeling there, head bent, she groped for and found a loose board at the base of the row of benches directly in front of her.
She pulled the board open, reached into the space behind it, and felt her hand touch a bulging shopping bag.

She didn’t look inside the bag until she was back in the car and driving away. Then she gave it only a brief glance to be
sure the bills were in United States currency.