“You can't do anything about it.” Caroline's voice was urgent, her fingers straining at his coat sleeve. “Tom — you'll only make it worse.”
He shook her off.
“Do you realize what they're doing?”
“Yes.”
“They're destroying evidence!”
“Of course they are.”
The bright front-loader bent, primal as a dinosaur, to devour a lamppost. Stone, metal, dust, and a few scraps of clothing clung to its jaws. The figure inside at work on the levers appeared to be whistling, oblivious to the spectators, the rolling news cameras, the enraged Shephard.
“Holy God,” he burst out. “There could be human remains in there. What in Christ's name are they thinking?”
“Come on.” Wally steered him gently around. “Let the press deal with it. They always do.”
The Volksturm had massed near the consular section's door. There a long line of Berliners and tourists had assembled in hope of visas; most of them, Caroline noticed, were Turks. They stood in silence, eyes averted from the armed men in black; but there was an ugliness in the air, powerful as the stench of cordite.
Wally pulled her toward the embassy's main entrance. Between the two of them, Carrie and Shephard, he looked like a policeman making an arrest.
“I've got to call the Bureau,” Tom muttered as they flashed IDs at the marine guards and hurried down the main corridor. “This is un-fucking-believable. Do you realize what those bastards are doing?”
“Yes, Tom, I think we all realize,” Wally said patiently. He took the broad central staircase two steps at a time, turned left at the sec and floor, and strode down a corridor. Caroline barely had time to register a team of technicians mounted on ladders, busily rewiring the embassy ceiling, when Wally stopped in front of an office.
“Mrs. Saunders!” he said gaily to the middle-aged woman behind the desk. “Meet Caroline Carmichael, otherwise known as Mad Dog”
“Mad Dog?” muttered Shephard.
Caroline extended her hand; Mrs. Saunders clasped it.
“Mrs. Saunders is the station's nerve center,” Wally told them. “Although she has worked for an Intelligence organization for most of her life, none of us has ever learned her first name.”
“It's Gladys, if you can believe,” said the woman. “My mother was Welsh. Just call me Mrs. Saunders. Everyone does. You have an action cable from Headquarters, Wally” — she looked at him severely over her half-glasses, which were tethered to her head with a black cord — “and Vie Marinelli has been on the phone from Budapest. He wants you before COB today.”
“Station chief,” Wally told Caroline. “I put in a call to him this morning about DBTOXIN. So the cable system's up?”
“No. We used carrier pigeon. Also” — Mrs. Saunders glanced at her notes — “somebody throaty and Russian called. At least, I think he was Russian. Real hush-hush. A bad case of secret-agentitis, if ever I heard one. He hung up when I asked for his name.”
Wally stood stock — still in front of the secretary's desk, considering this.
“When?” he asked.
“Maybe ten, ten-fifteen.”
“Could it have been our developmental?”
“Old what's-his-acronym? I don't know. Heavy smokers all sound the same to me. Particularly when they're foreign.”
“Long-distance call?”
“Either that or our line's bugged. Lousy connection.”
Wally whistled tunelessly under his breath while his fingers riffled the papers in Mrs. Saunders's In box.
“Where's Fred?”
“He and Young Paul are out in the van, per your instructions.” Mrs. Saunders sat back in her desk chair and smiled nastily. “It's so nice to see Fred working again. He managed to get rid of That Girl, you know. Gone home to see her mother.”
Wally looked up.
“That Girl, Mrs. Saunders, is his wife.”
“She'll get him PNG'd one of these days,” Mrs. Saunders predicted darkly. “Absolutely no discretion. Thinks it's a hoot that her husband's a spy. Hasn't the faintest clue spying's still a crime to the host country. How's McLean, sweetie?” This to Caroline.
“Congested,” she managed. “I've got a nice little house in Arlington. Keep it rented. God help me if I ever go back.”
Wally disappeared through the office's inner door, a vaulted one, thrown open to Mrs. Saunders's view. Tom and Caroline followed him inside.
It might have been a gentleman's study — if the gentleman was a little paranoid.
There were no windows: The Agency had long ago discovered that electronic emissions, even the tapping of fingers on a computer keyboard, bounced off glass and could be picked up by anyone remotely handy. Three workstations with computers and a motley collection of files dotted the space. The floor was carpeted in crimson pile that further deadened sound; the walls were lined with bookshelves. Within the walls, multiple layers of steel prevented electronic penetration. There was a document shredder, a combination safe, a few plants dying under fluorescent light, and a silver-framed picture of Brenda on Wally's desk.
“The developmental wouldn't be your 30 April safecracker, would it?” Caroline asked.
He raised an eyebrow at her, looking for all the world like a satanic Puck.
“Do you need to know?”
“I'd like to know. If he's calling from Buda and hanging up in a hurry, maybe he's on to something.”
“Maybe he is,” Wally said smoothly. “If that was the developmental. But it's not like Anatoly to be spooked by Mrs. Saunders. We'll just have to wait until he calls back.”
“What time is it in Washington?” Shephard demanded. He was, Caroline saw, still obsessed with stopping the destruction of evidence in the street below.
“I don't think it matters, Tom.” Wally turned on his computer terminal. “You're not calling. Shut up and start thinking for once.”
To Caroline's surprise, Shephard submitted to the abuse. He slumped into a chair and fixed his eyes on his shoes.
“You need a car and a good driver.” Wally stuck his head into Mrs. Saunders's province.
“Oh, Gladys?”
“Yes, Walter?” she replied acidly. “Any of the FSNs report for duty?”
FSNs — Foreign-service nationals — were local folk who served as support staff for the U.S. embassy.
“There's Ursula.”
“Ursula would stick out like a sore thumb at a construction dump. Get me Tony.”
“Tony was killed in the bombing, dear,” said Mrs. Saunders imperturbably.
Wally was silent for a moment.
“Okay. How about Old Markus?”
“Old Markus it is.” She leaned on an intercom button and buzzed.
“Old Markus is perfect,” Wally told them.
“You're sending him out after the dump truck,” Shephard said.
“Why not? Got a better idea?”
“And then what — he sifts through the debris in the dead of night?”
“I doubt he'd know what to look for.” Wally took off his suit jacket and reached for a cable.
“You're the forensics nut, Tom. You've got all those Bureau teams twiddling their thumbs over at the Hyatt. Why not put 'em to work?”
“It might be considered against the law.”
“German or U.S.?” Wally tore the cable in half and stuck it in a burn bag. “But I see your point. Whereas if I got involved, it'd still be against the law, but you'd feel better, right?”
Shephard said nothing. Wally smirked at Caroline.
“There it is in a nutshell, Mad Dog. The Agency avoids evidence like the plague, because evidence is admissible in court, where sources and methods never go. But we love to help other people find evidence. It makes our little day. And are they grateful?”
“Once in a while,” Shephard muttered.
“Not often enough.”
“Okay, Wally,” he said in exasperation. “I'm grateful for Old Markus. Let him follow the damn truck, and we'll decide later how to deal with whatever he finds.”
And at that moment, the secure phone rang.