“I'm sure you've seen his personnel file.”
“Mmmm.” Noncommittal.
“He was a foster child,” she elaborated.
“You must know that.”
“I see. And his foster parents were .. . less than ideal?”
“Much less.” She attempted neutrality, as though she were conducting a high-level briefing. Nothing in her voice of the violence that had shaped him.
“The father was eventually imprisoned on a charge of manslaughter, I understand.”
“Yes” Agnelli waited, eyes steady. Caroline stared back. If he knew about the prison time, he knew what it was for.
“And did that .. . episode .. . affect your husband, Mrs. Carmichael?”
“It must have. In some way.” She folded her arms over her chest. “What exactly are you looking for, Doctor? My husband's been gone for years.”
Gone. The word she would use henceforth, conveniently inexact. On the television screen, Monica and her brother were arguing about breast size.
Commercials interceded. Caroline finished her gin and tonic. And then, suddenly, Jack Bigelow's face filled the screen.
“We have confirmed beyond a doubt that terrorists abducted Vice President Sophie Payne from the site of the Berlin bombing this morning.” Bigelow's suit jacket was on, the bags under his eyes accentuated by the press room's glare of lights.
He looked cold and rather deadly, Caroline thought. As though the scripted lines were processed by one part of his brain, while the other the more calculating had Sophie Payne's captors pinned against the wall. She wondered if, somewhere, Eric was watching.
“Everything that can be done to locate the Vice President will be done,” Bigelow continued, “and her kidnappers will be punished to the full extent of the law. But the United States will never be held hostage to the goals or threats of a band of thugs, regardless of the cost. Mrs. Payne knows that. When she consented to serve this country, she accepted that burden of sacrifice. Our hearts and thoughts are with you, Sophie.”
In the split second of silence that fell between the Presidents final word and the storm of questions hurled at him from the assembled reporters, Caroline distinctly saw his fingers tremble. It was a slight movement that came as he gripped the sides of his podium and focused on the TelePrompTer, but it was betrayal of something, all the same. Fear? The rush of crisis? Or simple exhaustion?
Agnelli would have loved it.
“Gone, but hardly forgotten,” the psychiatrist had said this afternoon. “It must have been extremely difficult for you to come to terms with your husband's... loss.”
“I'm not sure that I really have,” Caroline had replied, with the suggestion of frankness. “But you know the old saying, Doctor. “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” Eric understood that Intelligence work posed some risks.”
“You were married .. . how long?”
“Ten years.” Here she was on safer ground. “Is that what this is all about? My grief? How well I'll handle another terrorist bombing?”
Agnelli thumbed the manila file balanced on his knee.
“It says here that Eric knew the man his father killed. Clarence Jackson.” Back to that. The interest in her a blind.
“He was a history teacher at Eric's high school.”
“A teacher. I see.” The pen was slipped into a breast pocket, the fingertips steepled. Agnelli was warming to his subject. “Would you describe Mr. Jackson as a mentor?”
Caroline shrugged.
“I don't know whether Eric would have used that word or not. He liked the guy.”
“And yet his father murdered him.”
“Foster father, Doctor. Eric never knew his own.”
The psychiatrist twitched impatiently, as though her objection were trivial.
“Clarence Jackson was of African-American extraction?”
Caroline gazed at him wearily.
“You're the one with the file.”
“Killed in what amounted to a mob lynching?”
“It was 1972 in South Boston, Doctor. The level of violence was rather high.”
“Mmmm.” He glanced down at his neat pages, no longer feigning indifference. Who had put him on to this?
“I see that your husband was also sentenced in juvenile court, Mrs. Carmichael, and spent several months in a detention center.”
“For vandalism. Not murder.”
“That sort of thing is probably a prerequisite for the Green Berets.” He smiled thinly.
“Not to mention the DO,” she shot back.
“I hear they're recruiting in the JDC's these days.”
Agnelli hadn't enjoyed her little joke.
She supposed there was a picture, for anyone who cared to paint it, of Eric as a trained survivor a man who from birth had learned to trust no one. Eric was too intelligent, of course, for the casual brutality of the foster home; he was charming, he drew people to him even as a boy people like Clarence Jackson, who saw something in the scrappy white kid with the obnoxious parents and had been beaten to death for his trouble. Eric could win hearts, he could manipulate and exploit. It was a different kind of violence.
It was possible to see that particular Eric, the one who lived only in his statistics and files, hovering over Pariser Platz in a stolen helicopter. That Eric had absorbed the viciousness of his childhood. That Eric was fascinated by the people he had been trained to destroy. It was something no analyst worth her paycheck would fail to consider; Dare Atwood certainly had. Caroline had no choice but to consider it herself. The Eric she had loved must be a mirage. Why shouldn't Agnelli's be real?
She asked for another lime and received a second tiny bottle of gin to go with it. The butterflies in her stomach were settling down to sleep, the tension that had knit her joints relaxing inexorably. Takeoff, at this rate, might be nothing more than falling off a log.
There was her boarding call, at last. She rose and felt the blood pound suddenly into her temples. She would regret the gin in what passed for morning.
She gathered up her magazines and paperbacks, her laptop computer and her briefcase. She gave one last glance at the television screen. Chancellor Voekl filled it, his arm around the shoulders of the Czech prime minister. An announcement of German technical assistance and antiterrorism aid, the CNN newscaster said, following the explosion of three pipe bombs in historic areas of Prague.
Bombs in Prague. Where 30 April certainly had been only hours ago. She walked slowly toward the screen, straining for the sound of Voekl's voice above the babble of departure.
He was speaking in German, his words sonorous and deliberate before the translator's text took over. The transfer of Volksturm militia to the Czech Republic underlined the common cultural past and mutual security concerns of the two Central European countries; it heralded a joint commitment to combating the destabilizing influence of outside forces in their societies, and gave notice to those who would threaten peace...
Caroline fought down her frustration. What time had the bombs exploded? And where exactly had they been? Did the Prague police have any idea who was responsible?
The image shifted suddenly from Fritz Voekl's face to that of a suffering child.
Enormous eyes, dark with pain. A hectic flush in the cheeks. With her wispy red hair and her tattered party dress, she was nonetheless an angel. The child thrust her thumb in her mouth and turned her face weakly toward her mothers shoulder. Caroline's heart surged upward in her chest, a prick of unexpected tears under her lids. To hold a child like that the soft floss of her hair, the warm weight “Sixty-three more children died of mumps today in the ethnic Albanian squatters' village on the outskirts of Pristina, in Kosovo,” the newscaster said implacably.
“Thousands of former refugees, who returned to find their villages and housing destroyed by Serb forces during the 1998 Kosovo war, have taken up residence in the makeshift housing constructed from the remnants of bombed buildings. But World Health Organization officials say the strain of mumps virus that struck last week is unlike any on record. Producing severe glandular swelling and excessively high fever, the disease has already claimed the lives of two hundred and thirteen children, a mortality rate that is both unusual and alarming. More ethnic Albanians are sickening daily. Thus far, the deadly mumps virus appears to be confined to the squatter area, but local leaders warn the infection could spread despite stringent efforts at quarantine.”