“The Brazilian consulate isn’t there anymore,” Lowen said. She disconnected the PDA, used it to take pictures of the wreckage on and above Sixth Avenue and then, as a doctor, started to tend to the injured on the street.
“Amazonian separatists,” Prescott said. He’d caught the shuttle up from Washington an hour after the bombing. “That’s who they’re blaming it on.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Lowen said. She and Prescott were in a staff lounge of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions. She’d already given her statement to the New York Police Department and the FBI and given copies of her pictures to each. Now she was taking a break before she did the whole thing over again with State.
“I didn’t expect you to believe it,” Prescott said. “I’m just telling you what the Brazilians are saying. They maintain someone from the group called in and took responsibility. I think we’re supposed to overlook that the specific group they’re pinning it on has never once perpetrated a violent act, much less traveled to another country and planted a bomb in a secure location.”
“They’re crafty, those Amazonian separatists,” Lowen said.
“You have to admit it’s overkill, though,” Prescott said. “Blowing up their consulate to avoid talking to you.”
“I know you’re joking, but I’m going to say it anyway, just to hear myself say it: The Brazilians didn’t blow up their own consulate,” Lowen said. “Whoever our friend Luiza Carvalho was in bed with did it.”
“Yes,” Prescott said. “It’s still overkill. Especially since the Brazilian ambassador is now down at Foggy Bottom giving your father everything they know about Carvalho’s life and associations. If their plan was to intimidate the Brazilian government into silence, it’s gone spectacularly wrong.”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t their plan,” Lowen said.
“If you have any idea what the plan is, I’ll be happy to hear it,” Prescott said. “I have to go back down tonight to meet with Lowen senior.”
“I have no idea, Jim,” Lowen said. “I’m a doctor, not a private investigator.”
“Rampant speculation would be fine,” Prescott said.
“Maybe distraction?” Lowen said. “If you blow up a Brazilian consulate on American soil, you focus two governments’ attention on one thing: the consulate exploding. We’re going to be dealing with that for a few months. Meanwhile, whatever else these people are doing-like what the plan was behind Carvalho’s killing Liu Cong-gets put on the back burner.”
“We’re still getting the information about Carvalho,” Prescott said.
“Yes, but what are we going to do about it?” Lowen said. “You’re the U.S. government. You have the choice between focusing on a case of a foreign national killing another foreign national on a Colonial Union ship, on which you have no jurisdiction whatsoever and only a tangential concern with, or you can focus your time and energy on whoever just killed thirty-two people on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Which do you choose?”
“They might be the same people,” Prescott said.
“They might be,” Lowen said. “But my guess is that if they are, they’ve kept themselves far enough away from events that there’s someone else the direct line points to. And you know how that is. If we have an obvious suspect with an obvious motive, that’s where we go.”
“Like Amazonian separatists,” Prescott said, archly.
“Exactly,” Lowen said.
“The timing is still a little bit too perfect,” Prescott said. “You stepping out and the consulate going up.”
“I think that was coincidence,” Lowen said. “If they were timing it, they would have waited until Nascimento was back in the office.”
“Which would have meant you would have died, too,” Prescott said.
“Which would have suited their purposes of distraction even more,” Lowen said. “Blowing up the daughter of the secretary of state would definitely have drawn the focus of the United States. Another reason to assume the bomb was set in motion a long time ago.”
“When I present your theory to the secretary, I’m going to leave that last part out,” Prescott said. He pulled out his PDA to take notes. “I’m sure you’ll understand why.”
“That’s perfectly fine,” Lowen said.
“Huh,” Prescott said, looking at his PDA.
“What?” Lowen asked.
“I’m sending you a news link that was just forwarded to me,” Prescott said.
Lowen pulled out her PDA and opened the link; it was a news story on her tending to the injured on Sixth Avenue after the explosion. There was video of her kneeling over a prone woman.
“Oh, come on,” Lowen said. “She wasn’t even hurt. She just freaked out and collapsed when the bomb went off.”
“Check your message queue,” Prescott said.
Lowen did. There were several dozen media requests for interviews. “Gaaah,” she said, throwing her PDA onto the table, away from her. “I’ve become part of the distraction.”
“I take it this means the State Department should say you’re unavailable for interviews at this time,” Prescott said.
“Or ever,” Lowen said. She went to get some coffee to self-medicate for her quickly approaching headache.
Lowen ended up doing six interviews: one for The New York Times, one for The Washington Post, two morning news shows and two audio programs. In each she smiled and explained that she was just doing her job, which was not strictly true, as she had given up the daily practice of medicine to work for the U.S. State Department, and anyway her specialty had been hematology. But no one called her on it, because the story of the daughter of the secretary of state arriving like a healing angel at the scene of a terrorist act was too feel-good to mess with.
Lowen cringed as her picture was splashed across screens all over the planet for two whole news cycles, the second news cycle prompted when she received a call from the president, who thanked her for her service to the nation. Lowen thanked the president for the call and made a note to yell at her father, who had undoubtedly set up the media op for his boss, who had to contend with midterm elections and could use a spot of positive public relations.
Lowen didn’t want to deal with any more interviews or congratulatory calls or messages or even the offer by the Brazilian Ministry of Tourism to come for a visit. What she really wanted was to get her hands on the file concerning Luiza Carvalho. She pestered both Prescott and her father until it showed up, along with a State Department functionary whose job it was not to let the file out of her sight. Lowen gave her a soda and let her sit down with her at the kitchen table while she read.
After a few minutes, she looked over to the State Department courier. “Seriously, this is it?” she said.
“I didn’t read the file, ma’am,” the courier said.
The file had nothing of note about Luiza Carvalho. She was born in Belo Horizonte; her parents were both physicians; no brothers or sisters. She attended Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, earning degrees in economics and law before joining the Brazilian diplomatic corps. Postings in Vietnam, the Siberian States, Ecuador and Mexico before being called up to be part of Brazil’s United Nations mission, which was where she had been serving for six years before she took on the Clarke mission, where she murdered Liu Cong.
Like all Brazilian foreign service workers, Carvalho was questioned annually by her superiors about her associations and activities and also consented to be randomly “examined” (that is, followed and bugged) by the Brazilian intelligence services to make sure she wasn’t doing anything untoward. Aside from some questionable sexual liaisons-“questionable” in terms of taste in partners, not in terms of national security-there was nothing out of the usual.
Carvalho had no associations or friends outside of the foreign service community. The only trips she took were Christmastime visits to Belo Horizonte to spend the holidays with her parents. She took almost no time off except for two years prior to her death, when she was hospitalized for a case of viral meningitis; she spent four days in the hospital and then another two weeks at home recovering. And then it was back to work for her.