They drove swiftly through the empty streets, a yellow nimbus of rain in the predawn streetlights. Anatoly's hands were sweating. Tonio chattered nervously, high-pitched and annoying, until Otto reached out and cuffed him, hard, across the face.
Otto drove to the rear of the central bank, to the electronically controlled entrance reserved for employees and armored trucks. The massive steel gate was a system beautiful in its impregnability, and Anatoly would have approached the problem with delicacy and reverence had Krucevic not been sitting silently in the rear. Anatoly struggled to control his breathing, to defuse the set of rear doors and then Lajta's office itself with an economy of movement. By that time they had pulled Lajta out of the trunk of the car, his hands bound and his mouth gagged, and shuffled him upstairs through the dimly lit halls.
Where were the security guards? Had Krucevic bribed them all? The important thing, Anatoly decided, was not to show fear. Krucevic scented fear like a dog, and Anatoly knew that he reeked of it now.
He wanted no part of what they were planning. He would have liked to leave then, with the doors wide open and the deed still undone. But Krucevic expected him there to the finish, so that the security devices could be reinstalled. By that time it was five A.M.” still dark, and Tonio was bent over the keyboard of the personal computer in the finance minister's office, his concentration focused on the monitor like a beam of light. Lajta huddled on the floor, bewildered and malevolent. Slumped in a chair, Otto yawned with boredom.
Whatever Tonio was doing took very little time — less than fifteen minutes — but the tension in the room sang through their veins like a pitch just beyond the range of hearing. Anatoly's fingers were ice cold. And then Tonio stopped clicking the keys and glanced at Krucevic with a grin.
“Cazzofottuto, boss, we're in.”
“Good,” Mian said easily, as though Tonio had mentioned the weather.
“Now get back out and let's go.”
The clicking of the keys recommenced. Anatoly expelled a breath. He avoided the eyes of the man on the floor.
Then Tonio stood up and Krucevic nodded at Otto.
Lajta was hauled to his feet. At gunpoint, Otto led him to the desk. The Minister of Finance was forced to sit down, and then his bonds were loosened.
The gun was pressed in his right hand, and raised, with cruel precision, to his right temple. Otto waited an instant before he pulled the trigger — he looked directly into Lajta's eyes as they widened with terror, and smiled — and at that point, Anatoly could no longer watch.
He restored the security devices, praying he would not vomit. They drove him back to his hotel and left him on the sidewalk.
“I know you will say nothing,” Krucevic told him, “because you are a man who loves his wife. And those little girls — beautiful, the pair of them. I would not want Otto to know where such lovely girls live.” The rain would give way quite soon to snow, Anatoly thought as he stared through the train window; it was probably snowing in Moscow now, had been snowing already for weeks. The women would be shuffling through the Arbat in ill-fitting boots, their faces muffled to the eyebrows.
He lit his eighth cigarette. The woman opposite closed her paperback, and with it, her eyes. Smoke had placed a scrim between them that softened the deep weariness of her expression. He felt for her suddenly an abyss of tenderness, a desire to keep her safe. To do what he could no longer do for Marya and their children.
In Washington, it hardly snowed at all. But to get there —
Where, in God's name, could he go?
Seven
Berlin, 1:19 p.m.
“A connection between Fritz Voekl and 30 April,” Tom Shephard repeated. “Do you realize what you're suggesting, Caroline? That the chancellor of Germany organized a terrorist hit in his own capital. A hit that killed twenty-eight people, seventeen of them Germans.”
“You think I'm nuts,” Caroline observed.
Shephard shook his head.
“I think you're dangerous. I think if you said that in public, you'd get a Volksturm bullet right between the eyes.”
“That doesn't mean it isn't true.”
“If we can prove it,” Wally said, “we'd bring down the government.”
A look akin to joy — if joy could ever be so vicious — suffused Tom Shephard's face. What was incredible in Caroline's mouth was gospel in Wally's, apparently.
That quickly, Tom was sold.
“So what's the link? Where do we look for it? Not in the bomb. It was made of Semtex.”
“The terrorist's material of choice. You assume that means it came from Slovakia.” Not for nothing had Caroline followed a bombing investigation for thirty months. She knew more than she'd ever cataloged about explosives. “But what if it's a Semtex-like material from a different source?”
“Forensics could pinpoint exactly where it came from, given some time and a bit more residue.”
“Or maybe it's a problem with the device itself,” she added. “A piece of broadcast equipment left in the bomber's van that carries incriminating fingerprints. Prints belonging to somebody the Voekl regime doesn't want connected to the Brandenburg Gate.”
“Or maybe it's the bomb's timer,” Wally threw in. “That's how we nailed the perps in Pan Am 103. The timer they used to trigger the bomb was one of only twelve made by a single Swiss firm for a single client — Moammar Qaddafis brother-in-law.”
“Or maybe it's a body.” Tom Shephard sounded morose. “The famous extra leg, from Oklahoma City. Or maybe Mian Krucevic himself was blown up in the van, with a love letter from Fritz Voekl in his breast pocket. But it doesn't matter, does it, if we can't get to the fucking crater.”
“You give up too damn easily,” Caroline said.
The scarred embassy on Pariser Platz was once again open for business. A mere two days after the bombing, the marine guards were back at the entrance, black armbands prominent on their biceps. Windows were boarded over where they had not already been replaced. A tattered flag flew at half mast, and concrete blast posts linked with chain blocked the building's exterior — or had they been hidden before, Caroline thought, by the ceremonial platform erected for the dedication?
The posts were designed to keep a vehicle filled with explosive from parking near the door; they had been powerless against commandos on the roof and shock waves traveling across the street. But perhaps they offered the illusion of safety to the people inside — people who knew, as she did, that if someone wanted to kill them enough, he would probably succeed.
Volksturm guards patrolled the streets leading into Pariser Platz, and barricades were everywhere. Wally abandoned his car on a side street and led them through a series of alleys to the embassy. The pavements were slick with the first flakes of snow.
As they turned into the square, Tom Shephard stopped short. Uniformed Volksturm surrounded the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate like a cordon of honor; but behind them, bright mustard against the blackened stone, reared the shovel of a front-loader. As the three of them watched, it swiveled and disgorged a twisted load of metal into the body of a truck.
“Fucking shit!”
Shephard took off at a run. Wally and Caroline tore after him. A few feet from the Volksturm cordon, they caught him and pulled him back.
“Fucking idiots!” He was struggling to break free and hurl himself at the nearest black shirt. “Get that fucking truck out of there!”