Hank toured the CIA campus on Family Day. He boned up on foreign policy. He talked of law school as something she had merely deferred. Until Eric Carmichael burst out of the Tidewater and confounded them both completely.
“Caroline is no trouble,” Hank had said proudly when she was seventeen;
“Caroline follows her head, not her heart.” It was inevitable, she thought as her plane descended into German airspace, that the rebellion would come when Hank least expected it. There was something in her blood that was wholly un-Armstrong a hint of Bill Bisby and his wild contrail, a fascination for free fall.
What if she were to call Hank now, to pick up the cabin phone and say, Hank, I need you, I'm scared and I'm lost?
People had a way of betraying you. They died; they dropped off the face of the earth. Or worse, they traded their souls and came back down the chimney like vicious Christmas elves: a familiar face, a stranger's heart, and a load of baggage on his back.
The trick was not to let them see you still cared.
Four
Berlin, 8:30 a.m.
Greta Oppenheimer did not look like the sort of person who should be manning the phones in a stylish front office. Greta wore heavy shoes with thick soles and the sort of stockings that were intended to suggest a glossy tan but merely cast a brown pall over instep and leg. Her face was crinkled. She applied a heavy concealer to the dark circles under her eyes each morning, but by ten A.M. the camouflage had worn off, and the smudged sockets peered out at the world with undisguised exhaustion. Greta's clothes were sage green or charcoal gray. They conformed to the fashion of ten years previous, and might even have dated from that ancient period. Her dull blond hair was shot through with silver, unkempt, like a bird's nest abandoned high in a leafless tree. She was a woman formed by hardship; she expected to disappoint. Greta lived alone, and festered in her loneliness. She was thirty-four years old.
Fred Leicester, who worked in the new U.S. embassy on Pariser Platz and contrived to ride the number 8 U-Bahn from Wittenau every morning, although he really lived clear across the city in Dahlem, had a pretty good sense of who Greta Oppenheimer was. He knew that her parents had been poorly educated, that she had grown up in a small village in Thuringia and reported to the local factory at seventeen. He knew that her parents had died playing chicken on a single-lane highway when she was almost twenty, and that she had married and divorced before she was twenty-four. He thought she might be religious, in a private and stricken way. In another era she might have turned ecstatic and raised stigmatized hands in praise of a punishing Lord. But the latest millennium preferred the prosaic. Greta forgot to speak in tongues. She turned receptionist instead.
The convulsive end of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 had carried Greta along like a Popsicle stick in a storm drain; history bewildered and drowned her. Ten years in unified Berlin had failed to improve her lot. Greta lived with one foot on the threshold of the present and her entire body leaning back into the past; she lived in ignorance and suspicion and a moral rectitude as lifeless as dust. She scrupulously saved every spare pfennig, without the slightest notion of what she would ever spend it on.
She was, Fred thought, a perfect target for recruitment. What Greta craved was a new dream, an ambition within her reach. And he was the man to give it to her.
Like most men of his training and background, Fred Leicester believed that women who live alone and who are unhappy should be grateful for male attention. The notion of grateful women and all that they might tell was hallowed in the annals of espionage. Grateful women talk. They make room on their seat in the U-Bahn, sliding heavy buttocks toward the smoke-fogged windows. Their hearts thud painfully beneath their drab sweaters at the prospect of another commute, of Fred Leicester ducking through the train's sliding doorways, his morning newspaper in one hand and a cooling cup of coffee in the other. Grateful women sell out the last man to neglect them without a moment's hesitation, and feel better for the betrayal. It was Fred's hope that with keen eye contact, a few warm smiles, a request for assistance with his stumbling German, Greta would begin to talk. She was his developmental in the middle of Mian Krucevic's empire, his sole prospect for Sophie Payne's salvation. For Greta, Fred had taken the S-Bahn north from Dahlem that morning, switched stations twice, and waited with innumerable cups of coffee for the hour to be ripe. He stood now on the underground platform and looked toward the approaching Wittenau train. She always chose the third car from the front, always sat on the far side of the aisle. It would be easy to raise the subject of yesterday's horror: the rail lines were shattered at Pariser Platz, all the trains were running late. She might express sympathy, perhaps, in view of his nationality; if the car was quite full, they might be forced to hang by the ceiling straps together, jostled by Fate and haphazard politics. The train would go nowhere with great difficulty. Fred would suggest they get off and share a taxi. Or stop for coffee until the crowds subsided. She would agree after an instant's hesitation, an anxious look half cast over her shoulder. It was one of Gretas mannerisms. By this time, he knew them all.
Grit swirled up from the platform, and Fred narrowed his eyes. The train creaked alongside. Fred tossed his half-empty cup in the trash and threw himself into the scrum A human wall of bodies, of rigid limbs denying entry, the doors closing at last behind his back. A mad rush from the waiting commuters; an unseemly jostle at the doors. Were they so desperate for work this morning, these Berliners, for the normalcy of routine after yesterday's bloody violence?
Impossible to know whether Greta was sitting next to a window, her gaze fixed on the middle distance. Fred strained upward on tiptoe, glanced left and right, the length of the carriage. Then he made the survey again.
Greta Oppenheimer was not there.
She had gone to work early that morning, but the call she expected never came.
Greta fixed her eyes on a slight defect in the weave of the industrial carpeting — a pull in the nylon that tufted up like a human eyelash — and knew that the door to the office would not open that day. She would sit in her chair while the clock hand moved with the invisible sun. Other people, their concerns far different, might gather in corridors above and below her; they might stand clustered at their coffee stations or lavatory mirrors, chatting aimlessly.
Greta would be paralyzed with duty. Waiting for the call that meant He needed her.
Even to herself, she could not pronounce His name. It was too powerful and immense, like the Old Testament God. He knew nothing of the way he affected her, how she hoarded the few words He spoke, turning them over in the dusk of her apartment later like scavenged treasure. He did not know that she had kept a scrap of paper merely because it bore His handwriting, that she could close her eyes and bury her face in the desk chair because He had sat in it once. He did not know that she would die for Him.
He did not know she was alive.
A crackle of static from the speakerphone on the desk, and Greta jerked in her chair, the blood throbbing painfully in her temples.
What to do? What was required of her? There was no one else to answer. She must not fail. Another burst of static. Someone was buzzing for access at the street. This was unusual and thus frightening. She reached a trembling finger to the phone's bank of buttons.
“Ja?”
“I have business with VaccuGen,” said a woman's voice in German.
Greta glanced upward at the small television screen that hung in one corner. The woman turned her head. She wore a nondescript coat that looked dark gray and might, in fact, have been any color. Her black hair was shoulder length. Heavy glasses masked her features.