The Lie (9 page)

The president shrugged, suddenly impatient with himself. “Anyway, the point of all this is that I’ve decided I want to be
at Wannsee myself.”

“Whom have you told about this?”

“Only you.”

“Just one point,” said Cortlandt. “Since Wannsee’s been set up at the State Department and foreign minister level, do you
really want to turn it into a summit conference?”

“Not at all. That would destroy my purpose. Other than for Chancellor Eisner’s appearance as host, I intend to be the only
head of state present.”

“And what’s your purpose?”

“To make a statement that’ll be heard.”

“By whom?”

“The oppressed.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere. But especially in Liberia, Angola, Burundi, and Rwanda, where the suffering is fearsome and must be stopped at
once. So I’m going to make some noise.”

“You make me want to stand up and cheer, Mr. President. But it’s not going to be that simple.”

“I don’t expect it to be simple, Tommy. That’s why you’re here.”

“Frankly, I can see only one way to handle this, and that’s with total secrecy and surprise.”

“Which means?”

“You would just appear at Wannsee on the thirteenth, shake hands with Eisner, make your noise… as you call it… and leave.

“There’ll be a trade meeting going on in Brussels at about that time,” said Cortlandt. “Could you arrange to put in a brief,
ceremonial appearance?”

“No problem. I was sending the vice president, but I’ll go myself.”

“That would be perfect cover for your whole trip. You could fly into Brussels on the twelfth, stay overnight, and make the
short hop to Berlin early the next morning.”

“Who would have to know in advance?”

“No one. The change in your overall schedule would come to less than four hours. You could tell your pilot just before takeoff
from Brussels.”

“And security?”

“I’d have that arranged for both at the NATO air base near Eberswalde, and Wannsee. In fact the secrecy itself would be your
best possible insurance. What assassins need most is knowing a time and place in advance. And in this, you’d be giving them
neither.”

The president weighed Cortlandt’s plan. “You actually make it sound feasible.”

“It can be done. What I can’t help you with is the flak you’ll have to take afterward from every possible side.”

“If all goes well, it’ll be worth it.”

Cortlandt said nothing.

Dunster’s smile was cool. “Evidently not to you. Right?”

“Everyone has his own appointment with life, Mr. President.”

I
F
V
ICE
P
RESIDENT
J
AYSON
F
LEMING
had not arrived early for his briefing with the president, he would have missed running into Tommy Cortlandt as the CIA director
was leaving the Oval Office.

“Tommy!” he said, and looked to see who accompanied Cortlandt out of the president’s office. The glance represented years
of political conditioning, not just curiosity. The fact that Cortlandt appeared to have been alone with the president doubled
Jayson Fleming’s interest.

The two men shook hands.

“How are things, Jay?” said the CIA director.

“Until I saw you, I thought great. With our top spook coming out of a one-on-one with the Chief, I’m suddenly not so sure.
Should I send my wife to the country?”

“Not yet. You’ll be the second to know when I hit the panic button.”

Fleming and Cortlandt had been friends for more than twenty years. In fact, they had actually worked together at Langley.

“How about tennis one of these days?” the vice president asked.

“As long as it’s doubles and you give me a few decent line calls.”

“You mean I can’t cheat?”

“Only on your wife.”

Fleming laughed. “Thank God for small favors. I’ll call you.

Cortlandt left and Jayson Fleming went in for his meeting with Jimmy Dunster.

The president was on the telephone. He waved Fleming into his usual chair.

The VP listened to Jimmy Dunster’s all-too-familiar voice pumping out its usual assortment of platitudes.
Just once
, Fleming thought,
I’d like to hear him say something that might actually surprise me
.

President Dunster put down the phone, scribbled some notes on a pad, and turned to Fleming. “Sorry to hold you up, Jay.”

“No problem, Mr. President. What’s on the agenda?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. First I have a change to make in our schedules.”

Fleming took a leather-bound day journal out of his briefcase and flipped it open. “When is that?”

“The twelfth and thirteenth of this coming month. September. It’s that trade meeting you were going to be covering in Brussels.
I’ve decided I’d better handle it myself.”

“Anything wrong?”

“More of our usual worsening trade figures. I may have to throw some weight around this time.”

The vice president made the necessary adjustments on his calendar. “There goes Amy’s shopping trip, which should save me a
bundle.”

James Dunster smiled. “She’ll make up for it next year.”

“I suppose Tommy Cortlandt will be going with you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I just ran into him as he was leaving. I figure that may have been why he was here.”

‘Yes,” said Dunster. “Tommy is going with me.”

“I ran into your boss this morning.”

So said the vice president to Ken Harris, the deputy director of the CIA, over drinks at their Georgetown club early that
evening.

Harris, who was Jayson Fleming’s oldest and closest friend, responded, “Where was that?”

“Coming out of the Oval Office.”

“Who was with him?”

Fleming grinned at the inevitable question. “Nobody. It was a one-on-one.”

Harris, a tough-faced man with the still-lean body of an aging middleweight, sipped his bourbon in silence.

“Tommy didn’t tell you?” said the VP.

“I’m afraid there are still a few small things the guy can’t quite get himself to share with me.”

It had become a wry, inside joke. All three men had started their careers with the Agency at about the same time, and Harris
and Cortlandt were still in an unending, often scratchy contention with each other.

“Do you know what the meeting was about?” said the deputy director.

“I think so,” said Fleming, and he repeated the Brussels story.

Ken Harris stared into his drink. “Sounds like a bit of high-level chess.”

“How?”

“A couple of things. I can’t see any substantive reason for Dunster going to that Mickey Mouse meeting in the first place.
That’s strictly
vice
presidential posturing. But if he
is
going, he’d never be dragging along his director of intelligence. Not unless he was planning something else along the way.”

“Like what?”

The deputy director shrugged. “Who knows with him? He picks up Brownie points wherever he can. I think he started campaigning
for his second term exactly two minutes after his inauguration speech.”

Fleming laughed.

“It’s not funny. The man holds the most powerful office on earth, and he hasn’t a true core position on anything but the latest
poll swing.”

“So what else is new?”

Ken Harris took a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voce had dropped so low it was actually conspiratorial. “What’s
new is that you’ve just told me he’s going to be in Brussels on the twelfth and thirteen of next month.”

“So?”

“So that’s probably the exact time and place we’ve been waiting for.”

Jayson Fleming looked into his friend’s cool gray eyes and detected a shimmer of madness. He wanted to shake his head. He
wanted to shout
No!
He wanted to tell this controlled, always-calculating man that all those secret, Machiavellian discussions they’d been having
over the past months had been purely hypothetical, nothing more. All he could do was sit mute and paralyzed.

“Easy,” said Harris.

Fleming saw that his hands had started to tremble so violently that his drink was splashing onto the table. He put down his
glass and a waiter quickly appeared, wiped up the small puddle of gin, and left.

‘You OK?” asked Ken Harris.

The vice president nodded and swallowed what remained of his martini. “You just caught me by surprise.”

“By now it shouldn’t be a surprise.”

“I guess I never believed it was real.”

“It’s as real as you want it to be, Jay.”

Fleming breathed deeply. “Why Brussels?”

“Because Brussels has it all. It’s a foreign city on another continent. It’s home to a dozen terrorist groups eager to claim
credit for any hit on a high-profile Western leader. The local security is about as lax as you’ll find in any European capital.
And I have some very dependable connections there.

“What’s suddenly spooking you?” said the deputy director. “The morality or the fear?”

“To be honest, a fair amount of each.”

“We’ve gone over every part of this a hundred times. If you’re serious, we’ll probably never get a better shot at it than
now. If you’re not serious, than just relax and accept the fact
that you’ll never be president of the United States. Hey, it’s an impossible, egomaniacal job at best.”

Fleming’s smile was dismal. “There’s still always the outside chance of my being elected after Jimmy’s second term.”

“Forget it,” said Ken Harris. “After close to another seven years of being Jimmy Dunster’s grinning errand boy, who the hell’s
going to want to nominate you?”

The vice president nodded slowly.

K
ATE WAS AT HOME
, reworking some of the material on her Walters article, when the telephone rang. It was 8:17
P.M.

“Do you have any memory of me at all?” said Paulie’s voice.

Kate breathed deeply. “Oh, Lordy,” she whispered. “Does that mean you remember who I am?”

“What are you trying to do to me? It’s been two and a half days.”

“You’ve been counting.”

“Every terrible second,” Kate said. “Where
are
you?”

“Positano. My folks’ house. I can’t seem to cut the cord and go home to my own place.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.” Then a trifle uncertainly, “Is that all right?”

“I just hope I’ll be able to last that long,” said Paulie.

Kate drove into Positano, parked in front of the Walterses’ house, and with a pounding heart climbed the curving stone steps
through the garden. The door opened and they held each other with an urgency like none Kate could remember. She felt weak,
frightened, foolish, a thirteen-year-old wanting without knowing what.

“I guess you do remember me,” Paulie said when he could speak.

Inside, they went for each other again and Kate saw the gauze taped to his forehead.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

She grasped his arm to turn him toward a light and Paulie winced.

“What happened?” she asked again.

Kate took his hand, pulled up his sleeve, and stared at the bandage. Blood stained its front and back.

“Knife or gunshot?” she said.

“Gunshot.”

“Are you still carrying the bullet?”

He shook his head.

“Has a doctor seen it?”

“I don’t need a doctor. It’s clean.”

“Was the head wound from a bullet too?”

Paulie grinned.

“Very funny,” Kate said. “Do you know what another fraction of an inch could have meant?”

“No. Tell me.”

“What are you? Some kind of closet Mafioso?”

Paulie leaned over and kissed her. “Aren’t all Italians?”

“You’re American.”

“Oh. Sometimes I forget.”

Kate looked at him. “I suppose that’s all you’re going to tell me.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Kate took him upstairs and uncovered his wounds. “They don’t look too bad. Where did you pick them up?”

“Rome.”

Paulie watched as she cleaned, treated, and redressed the injured areas. “You handle this stuff well, like you’ve done it
before.”

“I used to live in Rome.”

They went into his childhood bedroom, sat beside each other on the edge of his bed, and touched fingertips. That alone made
Kate feel better.

“You could have died,” she said. “And I’d never have seen you again or even known what had happened.”

“Yes. But I didn’t die and you’re seeing me just fine.”

“Still, it’s frightening.”

Paulie nibbled a soft ear.

“What it does,” Kate said, “is just make me aware of how little I know about you.”

“Maybe it’s better that way,” he said. “Because we still know the important things, and whatever came before is just history
anyway.”

“What are the important things?”

“How we feel when we’re together. Everything I sensed and wanted when I first saw you.”

Her eyes looked vaguely wistful. “How I’d love to believe that.”

“Try. It’s easy.”

Maybe for you
, thought Kate Dinneson.

Then they reached and touched and were all over each other.

After a while, somewhere nearer the finish than the start, emerging from the strain and unease and the nest of lies she was
slowly smothering in, like a prize she did not deserve, a fresh breath of hope entered her along with him. It was so sweet
and appealing that she let herself be carried away, knowing exactly what it could lead to but not caring. She was willing
to take as much as possible for as long as she was able and the devil take what came after.

P
ROFESSOR
A
LFRED
M
AINZ
was addressing a packed crowd in the University of Rome’s largest lecture hall. One of the university’s most popular speakers,
Mainz seemed to attract almost as many faculty members and outsiders as he did students. In the often obscure realm of political
science, no one knew how to grab and hold on to an audience like Professor Mainz.

He was more than just a good pitchman. The professor brought the intellect of a scholar, the passion of a zealot, and the
world view of a prophet to the lectern. Because Alfred Mainz could make any audience feel he truly believed every word he
was saying, he had a better than fair chance of making believers of those listening to him.