Erin looked him dead in the eye. "Agent Kesselring, are you a crook as well?"
Kesselring studied her face a long silent moment, then said with great precision, "I am a ten-year veteran of the BND, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service. I have dozens of awards and commendations to prove it. I ask you again: How do you purport to know anything that would push someone to try to kill you?"
"I don't know anything about you, Agent Kesselring." Erin turned to look at Bowie, wincing just a bit with the movement. "I am all right, I'm not lying to you. What I am is very mad. Someone tried to kill me. That someone blew up my Hummer. Get me out of here. I want to rent a car, then I want to go home."
"May I accompany you?" Kesselring asked.
"Like I said, Agent Kesselring, I don't know you, but let me hasten to add I do understand why Agent Cliff was so pleased to drive you in from New York."
He snorted, which was really quite charming, and she had to repress a smile. "She is a woman of excellent character and taste. No one wishes to see you hurt, Ms. Pulaski, especially because you are a dance teacher who knows something you shouldn't, and that, for heaven's sake, is what exactly?"
Erin slowly swung her legs over the side of the hospital bed. "What I know is that I'm dancing out of here."
39
MERRIAM BARTLETT HOTEL
STONE BRIDGE, CONNECTICUT
Thursday evening
"I will, of course, support you in whatever you decide to do," Werner Gerlach said to Adler Dieffendorf as he hung up his favorite light blue suit with its very narrow light gray pinstripes. The wool was so soft now that it felt like a cozy old friend. He spoke in German, since no one in this impertinent uncivilized country felt the need to speak another language, and so it was safe. He stroked the material a moment and left it carefully hung on a padded hanger in the too-small closet.
Dieffendorf turned from the window. "While you were in the bathroom, I called Agent Kesselring to tell him Caskie Royal had run away. He already knew. He had to agree it seems likely our own man, the CEO we trusted, murdered poor Helmut. It's a shock, but one keeps coming back to it-why else would he have run?"
Gerlach said, his head still in the closet, "Royal killed him because Helmut must have found Royal was involved with Renard, Royal probably planned the sabotage of the Spanish plant with Renard as well." Gerlach shrugged. "They must have fought, and somehow, though it is hard to believe, Royal got the better of him, killed him. I didn't want to believe it, but now? I fear there is no other conclusion." Gerlach looked around his miserly little room which connected to Dieffendorf's one-bedroom suite in the Merriam Bartlett hotel, the only superior lodging for gamblers at the nearby Indian casino. Dieffendorf's bedroom was much larger than his. He watched Dieffendorf as he sat down in a cream-and-green-striped wing chair next to a window overlooking a vast woodland, and drummed his fingertips together. "Royal must have connected with Renard, right? I wonder if he had the spine to call him, or if Renard called Royal? There is no way Royal could have pulled off the sabotage of the Spanish plant by himself, and in any case, why would he? Without Renard, there wouldn't be a profit. It even smells like Renard, don't you think?"
Gerlach shrugged, carefully placing paddled shoe trees into another pair of shoes. "I know nothing more than you do, Adler."
"I do not know what to tell the family. They look to me to keep scandal away from the door. But now? I have failed." Gerlach knew Dieffendorf had always worshipped at the feet of the Schiffer family. They'd always insisted the managing director be a medical doctor, and Adler was, having earned his medical degree in endocrinology. What Adler really excelled at, Gerlach thought, was looking both wise and benevolent. Gerlach wondered how many people besides him knew Dieffendorf was the most ruthless man in the room. Gerlach had often wondered if Dieffendorf's precious Schiffer family knew how skilled their managing director was at subtly skewing data so the drug in question was seen as effective enough, or safe enough, to pass review. He was renowned for it, in fact, impressed even the staff writers hired to ghostwrite many of the review articles presented by physicians to the major U.S. medical journals, a longtime practice by the drug companies only recently discovered, causing much chagrin in the medical journal review boards. It was a pity. But Gerlach knew that when one door closed, another opened, like the American FDA's recent approval of drug testing conducted outside the U.S., where the pharmaceuticals would be able to do just about anything they pleased. Didn't the idiots realize this? Not only were they making it cheaper for the drug companies, it meant the bribing of local officials would increase exponentially. Who would care about illegal drug tests run on local natives in backward countries? No one cared now. Gerlach couldn't see anything changing. As long as Dieffendorf and Helmut Blauvelt kept the problems plausibly deniable, the results pleased the family more than their consciences would bother them. But now Blauvelt was dead. It didn't matter, Dieffendorf would soon sniff out another Blauvelt. There were more Blauvelts in this world than anyone imagined. Gerlach said, "Helmut's murder really bothers you, doesn't it?"
"Why do you sound so surprised? I have known and trusted Helmut for ten years. There are others, of course, and I will be forced to rely on them, but I have never trusted anyone like I trusted and depended on Helmut."
"Yes, I too am sorry for it." Gerlach looked over at his boss of more than twenty years, the one always seated on the royal throne, the bastard. But there was one area where Gerlach was the king and so he dug out his knife. He smiled at Dieffendorf, and said in a complacent voice he knew Adler hated, "I miss my wife."
"I miss Claire too," Dieffendorf said, staring out the window, swinging his foot rhythmically back and forth until Gerlach wanted to kick him. "It is a constant ache." Dieffendorf's wife had died of breast cancer six years earlier. He'd even tried two experimental drugs. Nothing had worked.
"I know," Gerlach said as he turned back to the closet to hang up one of his three Savile Row white dress shirts.
Dieffendorf looked over at Gerlach now, his voice meditative as he said, "It was such a shock when your precious Mathilde was struck by that hit-and-run motorcycle driver last year. I remember you couldn't stop crying at her funeral."
"Yes, it was very difficult. It was good to have all my friends there to support me."
Dieffendorf paused a moment, then added, a drip of acid on his tongue, "Laytha, your wife of eight months, is your son's age, Werner." Beneath the drip of acid there was a note of disapproval in his deep resonant voice, but he was masking his envy, Gerlach knew it.