“Excuse me?”
“How are we going to get all these people to the hotel without letting anyone — especially the President — know?”
“May I infer, Madam Secretary…”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. You may want to write that down.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Damn it, Bruce, now that we’re — at least so far — unindicted co-conspirators, the least you can do is stop calling me ‘ma’am.’”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said automatically.
They laughed.
“One more uncomfortable question, Bruce. What are you going to do about the others? If they go to your hotel, they will know about your hotel.”
“They don’t want to know about the hotel. General Naylor’s the only problem I see about that.”
“In other words, everybody knows — or at least suspects — about the hotel except General Naylor, right?”
“Now that you know, he’s the only one who doesn’t.”
“So, what are you going to do about him?”
“Pray that he doesn’t want to see the rest of us go to jail. As you just said, desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“Let’s hear the plan.”
“Frank brings the attorney general, the secretary of Defense, and the FBI director with him from Washington in his Gulfstream. You pick up General Naylor in yours, and then stop here and pick me up.”
After a moment, the secretary of State said, “Okay, General, I’ll see you soon. Should I bring my golf clubs to the Greenbrier?”
PART VIII
[ONE]
“It’s over there,” Charley said to Sweaty, pointing to the Gossinger plot in the cemetery.
Sweaty headed toward the plot, which Charley had always thought was sort of a cemetery within the cemetery. The whole thing was fenced in by a waist-high barrier of bronze poles between granite posts. In the center was an enormous pillar, topped by a statue of a weeping saint.
He had no idea how many graves were within the barrier, but there were at least fifty. The one they were looking for was near the pillar, under a gnarled thirty-foot tree.
“Over there, under the tree,” Charley said, again pointing.
Sweaty followed his directions and found what they were looking for. A row of granite markers, into one of which was chiseled:
ERIKA VON UND ZU GOSSINGER
7 MAI 1952 — 13 JULI 1982
Sweaty dropped to her knees, bowed her head, and held her palms together.
Charley thought, and almost said, You can knock that off; the chauffeur can’t see you.
And then the epiphany.
Jesus Christ, she’s actually praying!
This was closely followed by the deeply shaming realization that, ever since they had arrived in Hersfeld a half hour before, he had really been a callous, unfeeling bastard, and that it had only been dumb luck that had kept Sweaty from seeing this.
Otto Göerner, the managing director of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., had met them at the Das Haus im Wald airfield, after they had flown from Budapest. At that point, Charley had been greatly concerned about what Otto’s reaction to Sweaty was going to be; they had never met.
The only reason Otto had not become Charley’s stepfather when Charley was an infant, as his grandfather, the late Oberst Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, and his late uncle Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, had desperately hoped he would was because — despite enormous pressure from her father and her brother — Charley’s mother had refused to marry Otto.
Otto still retained fatherly feelings for Charley. He had functioned as a de facto stepfather to him until, shortly before his mother’s death, Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger had been taken to the United States to become Carlos Guillermo Castillo.
And Otto didn’t like Russians generally and hated the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki with a cold passion. Charley had dropped that nugget of information — that Sweaty had been an SVR lieutenant colonel — into his announcement of his pending marriage, deciding that getting that out in the open sooner was better than later.
The term “SVR podpolkovnik” had produced in Otto’s mind the stereotype of a short-haired female with stainless steel teeth who looked like a weight lifter. When Sweaty came down the aircraft door stairs his face had shown his surprise at what he was getting — a spectacularly beautiful redhead — instead of what he had expected.
His biggest surprise, however, was to come shortly after they were loaded into Otto’s Jaguar Vanden Plas, when, with visible effort, Otto produced a smile and inquired, “My dear, now that you’re here in Hersfeld, what would you like to do?”
“Aside from going to the cemetery, which of course my Carlos wants to do before anything else, we’re completely in your hands, Herr Göerner.”
Charley was shamed to painfully remember his reaction to that had been thinking, What the hell is Sweaty talking about?
“Karl wants to go to the cemetery?” Otto had asked incredulously.
“He’s told me what a saint, a truly godly woman, his mother was,” Sweaty went on. “I want to be there when he asks her blessing on our marriage.”
“Karl’s mother was truly a saint,” Otto agreed.
Charley was even more ashamed to remember his reaction to that, his thinking: Jesus Christ, she’s amazing. She hasn’t been in his car thirty seconds and she’s put ol’ Otto in her pocket. Well, you don’t get to be an SVR podpolkovnik without being able to manipulate people.
Proof that Otto was in Sweaty’s pocket had come almost immediately. As soon as they got to the house — several minutes later — Otto turned from the front seat and announced, “There’s no sense in you two going into the house. I’ll have someone take care of your luggage and then Kurt can take you to the cemetery.”
The only reason, Charley remembered with chagrin, that he hadn’t congratulated Sweaty on her manipulation of Otto on the way to the cemetery was because the chauffeur would have heard him.
Sweaty looked up at Charley.
“Aren’t you going to pray?” she asked.
“I’m an Episcopalian,” he said. “We pray standing up.”
That’s bullshit and I know it is. What it is is yet another proof that I’m a shameless liar. I wasn’t praying.
And don’t try to wiggle out of the shameless liar business by saying that you’re a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get yourself off the hook.
Sweaty stood, took his hand, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.
“I’m glad we came here,” she said.
They started back to the car.
“What exactly did you pray for?” Charley asked.
“That’s between God, your mother, and me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Sweaty said, obviously changing her mind. “I asked God to reward your mother for being such a good mother to you, and to give her everlasting peace now that I’ve taken over for her. And I asked your mother to pray to the Holy Virgin that I will be as good a mother to our baby as she was to you. And you?”
The reflexes of a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get himself off the hook kicked in automatically.