guilty if she should ever desert him.
Yet the new Carver was sweet, and this was the strangest of all. Alix had to remind herself sometimes that the man she missed, even mourned, had been a killer whose capacity for calculated brutality was only one step away from making him a sociopath. The childlike creature he’d become was entirely without malice, incapable of doing harm. Even his smile had swapped wickedness for innocence.
But what was to become of him? In her right hand, Alix held a crumpled envelope. It contained a letter from Marchand, the clinic’s financial director. He acknowledged receipt of a little over five thousand Swiss francs, paid over the previous few weeks, but regretted that it was not nearly enough to cover M. Carver’s bills. Sadly, he was left with no option but to issue a deadline. The outstanding sum had to be paid within the next seven days. After that point, the patient would be asked to leave and legal proceedings would begin, with the aim of recovering the debt.
21
Kurt Vermulen came away from his meeting with Waylon McCabe asking himself what he was getting into. He knew he was in no position to be choosy. After all those months of being ignored, he could hardly say no to an influential supporter with billions in the bank. But he wasn’t naive. He presumed McCabe had an agenda of his own, motivated by religion. For Vermulen, the problem of Islamist terrorism was first and foremost a security issue: He’d emphasized the Christian element in his speech because he knew it would play with the Commission for National Values. McCabe, however, had precisely the opposite priorities and sooner or later would want to go public with his views.
Still, Vermulen had to admit McCabe was right about one thing. It wasn’t enough just to tell people about the threat of Islamist terrorism; he somehow had to show it, too. McCabe was proposing what the military called a false-flag operation, designed to provoke a response by means of deception. Vermulen didn’t feel too comfortable about that. Even if the ends could justify the means, he had no idea what form those means would take. For a fortnight he tried to find a solution. And then, quite by chance, it fell right into his lap.
An old acquaintance, Pavel Novak, came into town and insisted on going to a hockey game, the Caps against the Blackhawks. So Vermulen found himself watching what to him just looked like psychos on skates beating the crap out of one another, while Novak punched him on the upper arm and yelled in his ear, “This, my friend, this is real sport!”
Vermulen wasn’t too sure about that. Football was his game, and the Steelers his team. But then Novak was a Czech. He had grown up in the years when hockey was a symbol of national pride, one way the Czechs could defeat their Russian oppressors. In 1968, when Red Army tanks had rumbled into Prague to crush the Czech government’s faltering steps toward democracy and free speech, Novak had been a junior officer in the VZS, the Czech military intelligence service. When he became a double agent, passing secret information to the Americans, he did not for one moment see it as an act of betrayal against his country. It was an act of defiance against Communist dictatorship, just like the hockey.
The first period ended and the two teams skated from the rink. Novak relaxed in his seat and his face took on a more contemplative air. He had short gray hair, gold-framed glasses, and a full gray mustache that drooped around the sides of his mouth, giving him a permanently downcast expression.
“You know,” he said, “life is simpler when it is like a hockey game. There are two sides. They both want to defeat the other. Sometimes they fight. But always they accept that there are rules. Everyone knows where they stand. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Vermulen shrugged. “I guess.”
“What I mean is, when you were on one side of the Wall, and I was on the other, both sides knew the rules. They had weapons that could destroy the whole planet. Many people thought it was crazy, but it was not so crazy. After all, none of those warheads went off. But now there are no rules. Now there are not two sides, but many sides. Now the game is falling apart and now I start to get worried.”
Vermulen’s eyes narrowed in concentration. He had spent several years attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. military equivalent to the CIA. Back then he’d been Novak’s handler. A dozen years on, they were both retired, both operating in the private sector. Vermulen was a military lobbyist, a consultant to governments and corporations, an adviser in multinational arms deals. Novak worked out of Prague, a middleman between military, scientific, and intelligence interests in the former Soviet Bloc and the various clients around the world to whom they wanted to sell their respective skills or information.
“Many sides means many clients, Pavel. I’d say that was good for your business.”
“Most of the time, yes,” the Czech agreed. “But sometimes… You know all those stories that the Russians have lost one hundred nuclear weapons. Suppose I told you that those stories are accurate…”
“So Lebed was telling the truth?”
Novak was about to reply when an earsplitting blast of rock music suddenly pounded from the arena’s public- address system. He gave a grimace of discomfort and distaste, shook his head, as if in sorrow at the sullying of his sport, and leaned toward Vermulen.
“Yes, but he was wrong in one respect.” Novak was practically shouting now, but was still inaudible to anyone more than a few inches away. Even Vermulen had to strain to hear him over the music. “He said that no one knew where the bombs were. That is not completely accurate. The information will soon be available, on the open market. There is a printout. It has locations, codes, everything.”
That got Vermulen’s attention.
“Do you have it?”
Novak frowned and cupped a hand to his ear.
“Do… you… have… it?” Vermulen repeated.
The music faded away as suddenly as it had arrived.
“Not yet,” said Novak, with a sigh of relief. “But I have been approached by someone wishing to sell it, someone who knows of my reputation as, you might say, an honest broker.”
“But this printout, if it’s accurate, and it fell into the wrong hands…”
