The Lie (42 page)

“Who are you? And what do you have to do with all this?”

Kate just stood there.

The deputy director turned to his men. “George, take whatever weapons they have and handcuff them both. Peter, see if you
and Arthur can find some chairs. We could be here for a while.”

No one else said a word, and Paulie watched as he and Kate were stripped of their automatics. The only picture in his mind
right then was of a sawed-off bat beating on his brain. Poor Kate, he thought.

Moments later he and Kate were sitting side by side with their hands cuffed together in their laps, while Harris sat facing
them.

“Explain it to me, Paul,” said the deputy director. “I knew
someone
would have to be here soon to stop the clock, but why you?”

“Who did you expect?”

“Professor Mainz or someone near to him. How did
you
get involved?”

Paulie studied his cuffed hands. “Kate is an old friend of the professor’s. He trusts her. But she was afraid she couldn’t
do it alone so she asked me to help.”

“I’ll ask you again. Why you?”

“Kate and I are close.”

“Close enough for her to have told you where Mainz is holed up?”

Paulie thought quickly on that one. “Yes. If she knew. But she doesn’t know.”

Harris looked at Kate. “How do you communicate with Mainz?”

“We’ve been using dead drops and messengers.”

“You don’t have a phone number for him?”

“No,” said Kate. “That would be as dangerous for him as a known address.”

“I don’t believe you, Miss Dinneson.”

Paulie stared at the deputy director’s three monkeys, with their smooth, expressionless faces and neat haircuts. Then, glancing
at Kate, he realized that she too knew they were going to die.

“George, I think you’d better tie their feet,” said Harris.

The man called George opened his attaché case, took out some nylon cord, and lashed Kate’s and Paulie’s ankles to the legs
of their chairs.

“All right, Miss Dinneson,” said Harris. “No more lies. I just want Professor Mainz’s telephone number.”

“How can I give you what I don’t have?”

Ken Harris turned to George. “All right. Go to the next step.”

The man reached for Kate’s blouse with both hands and ripped it open down the middle. Then he unhooked her bra, exposing her
breasts.

Two round spots of color appeared high on Kate’s cheeks. That was all.

Paulie listened to his own breathing.

Harris spoke to Kate. “Don’t be foolish. Everyone finally talks. So why not do it now and spare yourself unnecessary pain?”

“You’re disgusting,” said Kate.

The deputy director nodded as if that was the answer he had been expecting. “Show it to her, Arthur,” he said, and the man
in the jeans and zippered jacket took an electric prod out of his duffel bag and held it in front of Kate.

“Is this really what you want used on you?” asked Harris.

Paulie felt Kate’s pulse as if it were his own. “Leave her alone,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

The deputy director smiled at Paulie in a kind way. “Then you know where Professor Mainz is?”

“Mainz is dead,” said Paulie. “He died in that explosion at Wannsee. This whole idea is just something a man named Archer
dreamed up and got Kate to help him carry out.”

Harris considered it for several moments. “Why? To what end?”

“For Archer it was the hundred million in cash. For Kate, it was the professor’s human rights agenda.”

The deputy director sat completely still. “Is this true?” he asked Kate.

She nodded.

“Then where’s the hundred million?” said Harris.

Kate closed the front of her blouse with her cuffed hands. “In a safe place.”

“Who knows about it?”

“Just Paul and I. Now that Archer is probably dead.”

The deputy director rose from his chair and slowly paced the concrete floor. The three agents looked bored now that Kate’s
breasts were covered.

Paulie broke the silence. “There’s something else you’d better hear,” he told Harris.

“I’m listening.”

“The president and Tommy Cortlandt know all about you.”

Ken Harris stopped pacing. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I think you’d better hear this alone.”

Harris looked curiously at Paulie. Then he motioned to his men. “Wait in the next room.”

They started out. “Be careful,” warned George. “This fuck looks tricky.” Then they were through the door and gone.

Ken Harris turned to Paulie. “OK. Let’s hear it.”

“The president has tapes of your last two phone calls to your friend Anna in Berlin. They’re totally incriminating.”

Harris wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Then why am I still walking around?”

“This can make a lot of waves. The president wanted time to think it through.”

“And the reason you’re telling me now?”

“To keep Kate and me from dying where we sit. And you from dying in a federal prison.”

Ken Harris stood very still. “Go ahead.”

“I’ll make it simple,” said Paulie. “We have that hundred million buried in France. Fly us there and half of it is yours.
Do you have any close family?”

“No.”

“Even simpler. Just change your face, disappear, and live happily ever after in total luxury.”

“How do you know you can trust me not to shoot you both when we get to the money, and just take it all?”

“I
don’t
know,” said Paulie. “But if I don’t trust you, I do know that Kate and I are dead right now.”

The deputy director nodded. “That much is true.”

Seconds later, Ken Harris walked to the open doorway and called his men back into the room. They stood talking quietly in
a corner as the deputy director passed around a pack of cigarettes. Paulie heard mild laughter.

It was cut short by a sharp whooshing sound. Paulie saw Peter’s head snap back, part of his forehead missing.

Then there was the same sound, and this time Paulie saw the silenced automatic in Ken Harris’s hand just as George’s face
seemed to fold and collapse inward.

The third man, Arthur, was still trying to free his piece from his shoulder holster when Harris’s next two shots entered his
chest and sent him tumbling.

The deputy director bent and felt for a pulse in each of the three bodies.

Then he rose and looked at Paulie. “You knew I’d have to do that, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly where in France did you bury the money?” asked Harris.

“About thirty miles from Charles de Gaulle Airport,” Kate answered. “How will you get us there?”

“No problem. I’ll just arrange for a plane and two of my own people as escorts.”

Then, suddenly distracted, the deputy director walked over to the open wall where the bombs lay and stood considering it.
Watching from where they sat, Kate and Paulie saw him carefully reach inside and turn on the timer clock that Paulie had turned
off just ten minutes before.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Paulie.

Harris seemed not to have heard him. He was busy moving wall panels 4 and 5 back into their closed positions and settling
them in place. Then he turned. “What I’m doing,” he said, “is making sure everything goes off in a little more than five hours.
By that time, we should be about halfway to Paris.”

Kate and Paulie stared at him.

“But why in God’s name would you want to kill hundreds of people for no reason?” Kate whispered.

“It wouldn’t be for no reason. It would be to teach the world’s slow learners a lesson.”

“About what?” said Paulie.

“About exactly how dangerous bleeding-heart, humanist crackpots like Mainz and Jimmy Dunster can be.”

The deputy director, like a world-class lecturer on death for the waning days of the most deadly century in history, stared
straight into Paulie’s eyes. “Do you get my point?”

Paulie nodded and slowly turned his body a bit to the left, as if lining himself up with some invisible target.

Then just as slowly, he compressed the small rubber syringe that his Cousin Dino had insisted on taping slightly beneath
his right armpit. The syringe, in turn, triggered the tiny pistol attached to it and blew away a significant portion of Ken
Harris’s brain.

Still handcuffed, Paulie and Kate fumbled free of the cords at their feet.

“You never told me anything about a gun.” Kate whispered the words as though it were still a carefully guarded secret.

“There was nothing to tell. It was just one of Dino’s crazy James Bond gadgets that I never thought I’d need, or would even
work if I ever did need it.” Paulie stared dimly at the deputy director where he lay, his gun still in his hand, one leg drawn
up. “I guess it worked.”

They held each other in the scorched air, which smoldered with the smell of cordite. Insulated in the silence of the dead,
they allowed themselves a moment. Then there were things to do.

Paulie took the keys from George’s pocket and unlocked their handcuffs.

Again, they removed panels 4 and 5, switched off the deadly, mindless clock for what they hoped would be the last time, and
replaced the two panels.

That, at least, they had done.

They considered the best way to handle the bodies. But there really was no best way. So they decided to simply leave them
as they were and see what the experts might be able to figure out.

Paulie remembered their guns, which were still in George’s pockets. He pulled them out and packed them into the bag he had
gotten from Cousin Dino.

They took a final look around and left.

P
AULIE
W
ALTERS WALKED BACK
into the astringent air and odors of Berlin’s Holy Cross General only days after having left them, but it seemed more like
years.

So much had changed inside him.

Still, the hospital was the same, with its bustling routines still telling less about the nature of life than about the urgency
of death. And the clusters of media people hanging about were unchanged, along with the president’s security.

Paulie had flown into Tempelhof from Washington two hours earlier, kissed Kate good-bye, and put her on a connecting flight
to Naples. Then he had called Tommy Cortlandt at his hotel and arranged to meet him in the president’s room at 11:00
A.M.

He arrived in the doorway almost on the minute.

“Ah, Paulie,” said Jimmy Dunster, as he reached for his hand.

The president’s cheeks were still gaunt, his color gray, his eyes deep-set and haunted.

Tommy Cortlandt sat off to one side, silently watching. “Welcome back,” he said.

Paulie nodded, picking up something in the director’s voice and manner. A certain reserve? “How have things been here?” he
asked.

“Interesting.”

Cortlandt looked at the president where he lay propped
up in bed, and some unspoken communication passed between them.

“Actually, there’s a lot we have to talk about.” The director went to the open door, closed it, and returned. “Sit down, Paulie.”

Cortlandt looked again at Jimmy Dunster. “Would you like to take over, Mr. President?”

“No. You go right ahead.”

Sensing an unseen weight about to descend on him, Paulie just sat there.

“I’ve known you since you were eight years old, Paulie,” said Cortlandt. “And what you did, simply taking off alone the other
day, was so disturbingly unlike you, that I felt forced to do something I would never ordinarily have done. I put a man on
your back.”

The CIA director paused.

“What did he learn?” Paulie asked.

Instead of answering, the CIA director handed Paulie a stack of photographs. Arranged in chronological order, each picture
was stamped with the exact time, date, and place of origin.

Hands suddenly moist, Paulie started through them.

He saw shots of himself on the flight to Paris, shots driving to the arms dealer on the Rue de Vigney, then going on to the
big parking garage where the money drop was made.

Knowing now exactly how bad this was going to be, he glanced up and saw the president and Cortlandt watching him.

“Listen…” he began.

The president lifted a pale, veined hand. “First look at the pictures, Paulie.”

Was looking at the pictures to be part of his penance?

For Paulie, the most powerful were the shots taken through a window of the lake house with Kate and Nicko.

Kate’s choice. Shooting Nicko
.

The collection ended with Kate and Paulie boarding the 7:00
P.M.
Air France flight to Washington.

“What happened to the remaining pictures?” Paulie said tiredly. “Or didn’t your man follow us to Washington?”

“He followed you,” said Cortlandt. “He just broke his camera. But he did give us a brief report on the four bodies he found
in the basement of the Taylor Building right after you and Kate Dinneson left there.

Paulie sat clutching his stack of pictures.

“Shall we talk now?” suggested President Dunster. “There’s obviously a lot that still needs explaining.”

Paulie waited.

“Let’s start with Professor Mainz,” said the president. “Exactly where has he been through all this?”

Paulie took a long, deep breath. “Dead under Wannsee,” he said. Then something seemed to give way inside him and it all broke
loose.

When he finally finished, they sat in a kind of vacuum until Jimmy Dunster spoke.

“You must love this woman, this Kate Dinneson, very much,” he said.

It was so unexpected, so human a reaction, that Paulie felt all his defenses breached. “I’d die for her, Mr. President.”

“You very nearly did. More than once.”

Paulie said nothing.

“Where is she now?” Cortlandt asked.

“At home. In Naples.”

“And her plans?”

“That’s obviously up to you and the president.”

The CIA director considered Paulie for several moments. Then he looked at Jimmy Dunster, perhaps measuring the feeling between
them. Finally, he just shrugged.

President Dunster picked up and sipped a glass of water. “What’s your feeling about all this, Paulie?” he asked.