“Hafeza?” he said in heavily accented French. “Where are you?”
Randi slipped up behind him and pressed her pistol against the back of his head. “She’s indisposed.”
Smith stepped out of hiding and the man froze. He didn’t look like much of a threat — more like a composite of every aging professor he’d ever had in college and medical school.
“Gerhard Eichmann?”
“Who are you?” he said, the confusion on his face deepening. Home invasions weren’t unheard of in Marrakech but camera-toting tourists and women in traditional dress generally weren’t the perpetrators. “What do you want?”
“Just to talk,” Smith said, taking him by the arm and leading him toward the office they’d broken into.
“Where is Hafeza? What have you done with her?”
“She’s fine,” Randi answered, still covering him from behind.
He stopped short when he saw the open door, but Smith dragged him through. Once inside, Eichmann broke free and ran to the obviously rifled-through papers on the table. “You have no right to look at these! They are of no interest to you!”
“Don’t rush to judgment,” Smith said. “My field is microbiology but I read my share of behavioral studies in school. Children from all over the world, primarily poor countries that don’t keep very good records and are amenable to bribes. Identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings, all split up, often adopted by foreigners with very different backgrounds. And all completely ignorant that you were pulling the strings.”
“They…they weren’t harmed,” Eichmann stammered.
“Please, Doctor. You stole these children. You separated them from their families, you shipped them all over the world through bogus adoption agencies—”
“They had better lives! Girls taken from rural China where they aren’t valued were given to parents in Europe and—”
“But you’re a better scientist than that, aren’t you?” Smith said, snatching a stack of papers off the table and holding them up. “If you’re going to do that, you’d also need to take the children from wealthy people in industrialized countries and ship them off to third-world orphanages. You’d want to see if the effects on behavior and intelligence go both ways — you’d want to do brain scans to see what effects things like starvation and abuse have…”
“No,” the man said, but then he didn’t seem to know how to continue. “I—”
“Just like the old days in East Germany, right, Doctor? How do you build a perfect athlete? You test the limits of pain. You experiment with dangerous drugs. You see how hard someone can train before they drop dead. No point in letting morality and human decency get in the way of science.”
“Enough!” Randi interjected. “Can’t we just shoot him in the knee and make him give us the password to his computer? If I wanted to hear about the thousandth study on why Johnny can’t read, I’d watch the Discovery Channel.”
Smith ignored Eichmann’s terrified reaction. “You’re right, Randi. There are a lot of studies. But most aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Most researchers wouldn’t be willing to do what it would take to control all the variables. And even if they were, they wouldn’t have the resources. Which brings me to an interesting question. Who would be willing to spend tens of millions of dollars on a study that can never be published?”
Randi perked up at that. “Dresner.”
“Christian?” Eichmann said, a little too quickly. “That’s insane. Why would he—”
The old man fell silent and began to back away when Randi aimed her pistol at his leg. “Don’t insult our intelligence.”
Smith was taken by surprise when the old man made a break for the door. He was forced to dive, just missing the back of the German’s shirt before landing hard on the marble floor.
“Stop!” Randi shouted, her foot landing firmly in the small of Smith’s back as she started to chase. Just as she came even with the doorjamb, though, the crack of a shot from above echoed off the stone walls. Eichmann went down, sliding uncontrolled across the smooth tile as Randi started firing at the rooftop.
49
James Whitfield snatched the phone off his nightstand and silenced it before glancing at his wife in bed next to him. She’d never slept particularly well and it was something that had gotten worse as she aged. Bad luck that she’d spent the last thirty-five years married to a man whose job never ended.
Instead of bolting awake and scowling at him by the glow of the alarm clock, she kept breathing in the same relaxed rhythm. She’d initially been reluctant to get the head studs but now told anyone who would listen that it was the smartest thing she’d ever done. Dresner’s Merge really was a miracle.
The encrypted text displayed in the phone’s window was typically brief and ambiguous: “At your convenience.”
Whitfield slipped on a bathrobe and navigated the dark hallway by memory, entering his small office and closing the door behind him. A gentle tap on his keyboard woke the computer and he put on a headset before bringing up a heavily secured link to the man who had contacted him.
“Sorry to bother you at this hour, sir.”
Unlike his wife, Whitfield had spent the night staring at the ceiling, running through endless — and pointless — worst-case scenarios relating to the Smith-Russell situation. If there was relevant information to be had, this would be a very welcome interruption.
“Do you have something on the helicopter, Captain?”
“Yes sir. If you hadn’t called in the surveillance planes, we would have lost it. And even so we were the beneficiaries of a lot of luck.”
“You were able to track it then?”
“We were. It landed on a vacant farm in West Virginia.”
“Owned by whom?”
“A maze of offshore corporations that I can almost guarantee you will lead nowhere.”
“A CIA safe house?”
“Not according to our sources, sir.”
Whitfield didn’t immediately respond. It wasn’t military intelligence and it wasn’t the Agency. Who else would have a property like this available for an army physician and a CIA operative normally stationed overseas?
“Go on, Captain.”
“The helicopter left the farm and landed in a clearing in the mountains, where it was met by a single four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was on the ground for a short period of time before it took off again and returned to the farmhouse.”
“What was the purpose of the flight to the mountains?”
“To unload cargo.”
“What cargo?”
“Our men. They were buried in extremely well-camouflaged sites. Two were shot and one died of a knife wound to the back of the neck. We’ve extracted their bodies and transported them to the crematorium.”
Whitfield took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When dedicated, talented men died in the field, it wasn’t their failure. It was a failure of leadership. In this case, his leadership.
“I assume provisions are being made for their families?”
“Yes sir. Through the normal charities.”
“Cover stories?”
“In process. There won’t be any problems.”
There won’t be any problems, Whitfield repeated in his mind. More and more, it seemed that’s all there were.
“What happened at the farmhouse in West Virginia?”
“Three people got out of the chopper and went inside. The helicopter returned just before dawn and picked up a single passenger. It flew to the end of a dirt road about a hundred and thirty miles southwest of DC. One man disembarked and got into a Yukon XL. We didn’t have capacity to follow both, so we chose the car.”