Caroline was pacing like a leopard on a short leash, five feet in one direction, five feet in the other. She wanted to run out of the Center, run madly down the hall, run to wherever Eric was at that moment. He's alive, he's alive. The bastard is alive.
“Sit down, Caroline,” Cuddy told her.
“Someone will notice. We don't want that to happen.”
She started to speak, started to hurl the anger of wasted years in his face — then sat down abruptly.
“You didn't know,” he said.
She looked up.
“Did you?”
“I wasn't married to him.”
His bitterness was like a sharp blow.
“Do you think I could pretend that he was dead? For two years? Or that Eric would trust me to do it?”
“Eric loved you, Mad Dog.” Cuddy studied a brown stain — coffee, probably — on the carpet at his feet. Unable, now, to meet her eyes.
“He trusted you with a lot.”
“Not with his life,” she retorted.
“Eric trusted nobody with that.” They were both silent a moment, the thought of Eric like another person in the room.
“It'd be one hell of a way for a terrorist to get information,” Cuddy said distantly.
“To have a wife in the middle of the most sensitive counterterrorism network in the world.”
“You know me better than that.”
“I thought I knew Eric.”
“Stand in line,” she whispered.
“Don't cry, Mad Dog. It doesn't suit you.”
He was wrong; she wasn't going to cry.
“Who else knows?” she asked.
Cuddy shrugged.
“Can't say. He looks different. There's the sunglasses, the longer hair.”
And most of the CTC personnel were fairly new. Their rotations through the Center were at the most two years old. They thought of Eric as a dead hero, one of the stars chiseled sharply on the Agency memorial. There was a good chance he had gone unrecognized.
“Scottie?” she asked.
“We'd have to tell Scottie in any case.”
“He'll go to Atwood. He'll have to.”
Cuddy shoved at his glasses impatiently.
“What do you want, Caroline? Your husband screwed the entire U.S. government this morning, okay?”
She tore open the door and sped toward the CTC directors office. Stumbled once on her high heels and swore out loud. It was a testament to the madness of the day that nobody even looked at her.
Scottie's door was open, but he'd turned off the fluorescent lights. He sat behind his desk in the unnatural gloom — white-haired, hollow-eyed, host to more parasites than medical science had isolated. His face bore a look that Caroline recognized. The look of a case officer alone in the field who knows he has been betrayed.
He was a private man who kept most people at a distance. He had graduated from Yale at a time when Intelligence was still glamorous, and he wore the code of silence like a good English suit — unobtrusive, yet tailored to the man. A string of ex-wives would argue that he was charming too charming for his own good and charm had made his career. Scottie's recruitments were like an exercise in seduction, and the rush of it all of taking a soul into the dark side of Intelligence kept him hungry for the field. He loved running agents, loved the dead drops in the deserted parking lots, the midnight surveillance, the unexpected take downs
Caroline thought that he had loved Eric.
It was Scottie who had pulled her husband off his first tour in Kabul, in the middle of the Soviet-Afghan war and sent him to Beirut. After Beirut it was Athens, where Scottie was Chief of Station. Then Nicosia. Then back to the CTC, where Scottie got the director's slot and made Eric his deputy. Only to send him to Budapest twenty months later, a decision that Caroline could barely forgive.
Scottie would not be deceived by long hair and sunglasses.
She tapped twice and waited.
His eyes slid over to hers, slid away.
“Come in and shut the door.”
She positioned herself squarely between the chief and the vague middle distance he was studying and said, “What are you going to do?”
“You've seen the tape?”
“I've seen Eric.”
He smiled grimly. Unlike Cuddy, Scottie didn't bother to question her loyalties.
Thirty years in the butt holes of the world, Scottie would have said, had taught him all he needed to know about loyalty. Either Caroline Carmichael was a terrorist mole or she was a victim like the rest of them. That was a question for the Agency polygraphers to answer.
“How fortunate that you never remarried. Any idea, Mrs. Carmichael, what our fair-haired boy is up to?”
“None whatsoever. Did you set this up, Scottie?”
A faint smile.
“Now that would have been magnificent. But even I cannot come up with a good reason to snatch Sophie Payne. She's too short and too intelligent for my taste.”
“Never mind that. Let's talk about Eric. Why pretend to be dead for more than two years? Why lie to all of us?”
“I don't know.” He pushed himself away from his desk and stood up. “Only Eric can answer those questions, Caroline, and unfortunately he's incommunicado at the moment. Our first duty is to find the Vice President. Everything else is homework.”
He was right, of course; Payne's life hung in the balance. The small matter of a dead man's resurrection would have to be ignored for a time.
“It seems fairly obvious that she's not in a German hospital,” Caroline said.
Scottie shrugged himself into his suit jacket. He favored glen plaid, like a latter-day Duke of Windsor; he must own twenty variations on the theme.
“The White House is beginning to realize that, too. None of the Berlin facilities has admitted her. President Bigelow is screaming for information, and the Germans are giving him squat.”
“Did you hear Payne's speech?”
“I imagine we'll hear it ad nauseam before the day is out. It was impolitic, under the circumstances, but hardly enough to spark a kidnapping. I've watched the footage over and over, Caroline. The bombing, the confusion, the medevac chopper it all took about nine minutes. That argues a fair amount of sophistication and planning. We're dealing with professionals.”
“Of course,” she replied.
“But which ones?”
He held her gaze.
“If you don't know, then I'm certainly not going to guess.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Well, Caroline, you were married to him. You tell me. Of all the terrorist groups Eric worked, whom did he want to screw the most? Because he's obviously jumped into bed with somebody.”
“Christ,” she muttered.
“I hope to God it's not 30 April.”
“I doubt he'd still be alive if it were.” The statement was hard.
“Krucevic and his kind taste betrayal in their mothers milk. They'd have blown Eric's cover inside of three minutes and killed him in three and a half.”
“He's our only lead, Scottie. To the Vice President. You realize what that means?”
“He's a killer, Caroline, and he's out in the cold. Dare Atwood has asked for a briefing. I'm due right now on the seventh floor.”
“You have to tell her about Eric.” It was half statement, half question; Caroline dreaded the answer.
“I was hoping you might do that,” Scottie said.
Four
Langley, 8:40 a.m.
So what am i supposed to believe, Eric? Tell me that.
Caroline follows Scottie's elegant back through the broad corridors connecting New Headquarters with Old. The walls here are mostly glass. The space is arranged as a museum. She inventories pieces of the Berlin Wall and OSS radio transmitters without seeing them. What am I supposed to think? That you're a hero, or a traitor to the cause? A madman or a savior? What's the story this time, Eric?
She has been here before. She knows this tight place between reason and heartache as well as she knows the contours of her bed. Words of caution clamor in her brain, and once — for Eric — she would have flung them to the four winds.