He found his own voice. “There’s still time to back out, Anna. You said yes, you can also say no. I’ll understand.”
Her tone became harsh. “I don’t like that you would understand. You should not understand. The same for me if you walked away. I would not understand.”
“I love you. I will make this work. I will.”
He thought he heard another sob escape her lips and his guilt increased.
She said, “And how you will make this all work, you can’t tell me?”
“No,” he admitted. “I can’t.”
“Where do you go after Scotland?”
“Heidelberg.”
“My parents live about an hour from there. In a small village called Wisbach, near the town of Karlsruhe. They run a bookshop, the only one in Wisbach. Go to see them. Their names are Wolfgang and Natascha. They are good people. Kind people. I wanted you to meet them before now, but you were always too busy.”
He hadn’t always been too busy, Shaw knew. He’d been too afraid.
“You want me to see them without you?”
“Yes. Ask my father for my hand in marriage. If he says yes, we will be married. If you still want to.”
This request stunned him. “Anna, I-”
She rushed on, “If you think it is worth it, you will go. I will tell them you are coming. If you do not go, then I will have my answer.”
The line went dead. Shaw slowly put down the phone and looked at the blotting paper on the desk where he had written the name Anna Fischer over and over, driving the letters hard into the thin surface. He tore the paper up, left the Balmoral, and walked down Princes Street, past all the closed shops. Two hours later he was still wandering through the ancient Scottish capital as the sun started to creep up, illuminating the aged stone bridges and casting shadows behind which Shaw could imagine every single one of his nightmares. And he had more than most.
He would go to see her parents at the bookshop in Wisbach. He would ask for their daughter’s hand in marriage.
Yes, he would do all that. If he was still alive.
“Where’s Mudder?” he whispered to the semidarkness as he walked back to the Balmoral to prepare for what might be his last few hours on earth.
CHAPTER 19
THE HIGH-RISE ALONG the dulles High-Tech Corridor was mostly dark. One firm, Pender amp; Associates, owned the entire building, having paid eight figures in cash to buy an office tower smack in the middle of some of the priciest dirt in the country. And even though it was called Pender amp; Associates, the firm was run by one man, its founder, Richard “Dick” Pender.
He possessed a face that was as chiseled, a grin that was as toothy, and hair that was as perfectly primped as any gospel-spouting televangelist. He had the silky smooth delivery of a trial lawyer in his polished prime. And he would continue to smile while the knife he held repeatedly connected with your spine.
His motto was simple: Why waste time trying to discover the truth, when you can so easily create it?
Pender’s line of work was called perception management. PM firms, as they are known, were paid to establish what was true or not, all over the globe. Some traditional lobbying firms considered themselves to be PM firms but they really weren’t. There were only a very few pure PM players and Pender amp; Associates was one of the best in the world.
Dick Pender could bury any secret, despite the attempts of the press to ferret it out. He had also, on occasion, started or enhanced wars based on certain truths. And when people started poking around, he had hidden those reasons under such bewildering layers of facts, figures, and falsehoods that no one could ever reach them. Yet mostly he was retained to create the truth.
He was paid enormous amounts of money to do this, both from government and private sources all over the world. For his clients, creating the truth was critical because real truth was too unpredictable. Created truth was controllable. And thus the difference between the real and the created was the difference between a bomb and an A-bomb in its effectiveness.
Pender had a special visitor coming tonight. The private elevator took his guest up to the top floor. A door was opened, and Nicolas Creel, wearing a black-hooded coat, was ushered into a room that was dominated by a large one-way glass window allowing the defense contracting magnate to see into the high-tech, digitized war room of Pender amp; Associates.
Pender sat down next to him. “I trust the flight was good, Mr. Creel.”
“I have no idea. I slept the whole way.”
“Someone mentioned to me that you’d cracked the top fifteen on the Forbes List.”
“That’s right,” Creel acknowledged in a clearly disinterested tone.
“Eighteen billion dollars?” Pender estimated.
“Actually twenty-one.”
“Congratulations.”
“For what? When I passed my first billion, what did it really matter? It’s not as though another twenty billion has greatly altered my lifestyle. Let’s hear the report.”
Pender pointed to the one-way glass where dozens of people were working hard. “We’ve devoted our entire war room to the effort. Thirty people, hundreds of computers, enormous databases, and an Internet pipeline that rivals anything Google has.”
“And you’re absolutely certain there can be no trace back here?”
“We took the most extraordinary security measures, including stealing the electronic identity of hundreds of Web sites and Internet portals. So if someone tries to trace it back to its origin the electronic tunnel will lead them directly to, say, the official Vatican Web site, or the Red Cross site. We also included our own site in the mix along with several of our competitors.”
“So if someone does track it back to you, you can just claim identity theft?”
“Why try to hide the needle in the haystack, when you can just make lots of needles?” Pender replied smugly.
“Your people?”
“Extremely well paid and dedicated to me. They have no idea of your, um, interest in this matter. Not that they would care, actually. We do not employ conscience here. We do not worry about the consequences of our work. That’s for the client to do.”
“Refreshing attitude. And the initial impact has been all that we hoped it would be.”
“A bit more sophisticated than stories about brutal foreign invaders tearing desert babies from incubators in order to make certain countries enter a war,” Pender said quietly, but with a superior smile. “But then you picked well, Mr. Creel. All we had to do was get the ball rolling and everyone jumped on.”
“The Bear is an easy target. Where’d you get the thousands of Russian dead?”
“Basically Photoshop stuff cranked up several levels. But we worked in some real victims that we got from old KGB files we bought years ago. You have five authentic dead bodies everyone assumes the other thirty-two thousand are legit as well.”
“Prescient of you.”
“That’s my business. I can visualize the aneurysm slowly building in President Gorshkov’s brain. Let me see, we’ve had the ‘gripper’ strategy, then the ‘Vesuvius’ tactic.” He gestured at Creel. “You’re arranging for the leak. Correct?”
“Yes. But forward to me anything that comes across your desk that looks promising. I’ll follow it up from there.”
“Not that your motivation concerns me in the least, but I did read that Ares has missed its quarterly projections four times in a row now.”
“Tip of the iceberg. We’re positively hemorrhaging money. I was convinced Iraq was the beginning of Armageddon in the Middle East and we ramped up for it. But a few months of shock and awe was followed by a years-long pissing contest using basically popguns. I didn’t build a $150 billion company to have my people sling potato salad in Anbar for soldier boys. It was a monumental cock-up and the responsibility rests with me. But I’ll get us out of it. That’s why I hired you. I have my people to take care of.”