“That's strange,” he muttered.
“Even the polygraphers recognize a case officer's right to pillow talk. They've practically canonized it.”
Pillow talk. From a man who had walked the streets at night, while she tossed alone and restless?
“Maybe he wanted to protect me “ She bit off the words. A more credulous woman could go on believing that Eric was protecting her that the whole elaborate lie of the past thirty months had been designed to shield her from terror. But Caroline refused to be credulous any longer. The credulous impaled themselves on swords of their own making.
“Scottie tells me Atwood wants you polygraphed”
She laughed at the abrupt change of subject.
“I suppose it's inevitable. She has to know whether I'm telling the truth about believing Eric was dead. Lets hope the polygraphers keep their questions confined to MedAir 901.”
“I think we can assume they will. Atwood is unlikely to share the fact of Eric's existence with Security. Just keep your mind on the plane crash and forget about Sophie Payne. You'll be fine.”
“Scottie likes to add a column of numbers when he's hooked up to the machine.” Caroline spoke with an effort at lightheartedness she was far from feeling. “He swears it keeps him from reacting to the questions. But I'm lousy at math.”
“Then try spelling. Anything is preferable to nerves. Nerves can look like guilt to the box, and guilt might register as deception.”
“Thanks. You've no idea how comforting that is.”
He studied her, then said, “I wish I could go with you.”
“But some things, as my grandma told me during potty training, we are forced to do alone.” Caroline undipped the clandestine report from Krucevic's file and slid it across the desk.
“Take a look at this, Cuddy. There's a DO asset who's close to 30 April.”
“Hungarian desk.” Cuddy nipped to the second page, brows knit, instantly absorbed. “This guy could be in Buda. Hell, by this time Sophie Payne could be in Buda.”
“Exactly. We've got to send out a tasking cable.”
“And how do we phrase that cable, Carrie?”
“Hey, guys, the official Task Force line is that the Palestinians are responsible for the Berlin bombing, but chat up your 30 April asset and ask whether he's ever heard of Sophie Payne'?”
Caroline frowned.
“I've read weirder tasking cables, thank you very much. Case officers are used to working blind. And with the Veep snatched, Scottie will have every terrorist expert the Agency owns sniffing the ground — the reports will come flooding in. This is a lead, Cuddy—”
Cuddy tossed her the DO report.
“We don't know diddly about this guy, Mad Dog. He's untested. What if he's one of Eric's recruits?”
He was closer to penetrating 30 April than ever before.
“I wouldn't be surprised if he was,” she replied.
“Then think about that. The source would be tainted, wouldn't he?”
“Tainted,” she repeated. “Because he knew Eric?”
“For Christ's sake, Carrie! As of this morning Eric's whole career is suspect. We don't know when he betrayed us or how completely. We don't know what's true and what's crap. Every report, every recruitment they're compromised. And that goes for everybody Eric ever handled.”
“We could find out who recruited this one,” she shot back, tapping the TD.
“The Hungarian desk could tell us.”
“If I called in some favors, maybe. But I'm not sure that'd be a good idea.”
“The TD is barely six months old,” she argued. “This source is still out there, Cud still on our payroll.”
“And you think he could lead us to Eric and, by extension, Payne. Forget it. It's a nonstarter. Don't let Eric screw you again, Carrie, just because you want to believe.”
There was a short and painful silence.
“I think you ought to see something,” Cuddy said. He walked out of the office.
After a second, she followed.
He led her to a computer terminal that Scottie kept reserved for one use only the terrorism database, DESIST.
It was the pride of the CTC, a compilation of over a thousand terrorist groups and organizations. Raw data phone numbers, bank accounts, airline manifests, business cards could be fed into the computer and analyzed for patterns too slight and seemingly random to attract attention. When DESIST went to work, the most amazing connections between utter strangers appeared as if by magic. DESIST could tell you when one man in Belgrade carried the address of another in Zurich, or whose phone number rang in which safe house. It could match passports to false pictures, bring up a myriad of aliases, connect the dots between terrorist groups that the world believed to be enemies: members of the IRA who were friendly with Hizballah; bankers who laundered money for both the Kurdish PKK and the Algerian Jihad. An entire world of uneasy relationships existed in the DESIST data banks, a labyrinth of obligations and mortal mistrust.
“Sit down,” Cuddy said, “and plug in Eric's alias.”
“Which one?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow.
“I only knew one.”
“In Budapest, he was using 'Michael O'Shaughnessy.'”
“Try it.”
“But you know there are no Americans listed in this database,” she protested.
“It's illegal for the CIA to track U.S. citizens.” Cuddy shrugged. “Does a dead man have citizenship? Try it, Mad Dog.”
She typed in the name. The computer thought about it for a split second. And then it spat out two words, Mahmoud Sharif, and a phone number. She wrote down the number and plugged it into the database. Nothing. She glanced at Cuddy.
“Try just 'Sharif'.”
Obediently, she ran the name through the system. An extensive file reeled out. “'Hizballah bomb maker,'” she read, “ 'legally resident in Berlin.'”
“Sharif is believed responsible for that series of bombs the BKA found last March,” Cuddy told her. The BKA — the Bundesknminalamt — was the German equivalent of the FBI. “He'd wired them into electronics — television sets, stereo components, laptop computers — and stored them in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt.”
“I remember that,” Caroline said. The BKA had confiscated seven of the bombs safely; an eighth had exploded in the act of being defused. Two men had died.
“Why didn't he go down for it?”
“Sympathetic judge. Circumstantial evidence.”
“I see.”
“German Intelligence is convinced Sharif made twelve bombs. So where are the other four?”
“Underneath the Brandenburg?”
Cuddy shrugged.
“Ask Sharif, he'll say he knows nothing about electronics. He's just a carpenter with a German wife and a kid named Moammar.”
“Aren't they all. I guess the phone number wasn't his, or it'd be in the file.”
“The phone is disconnected. I walked down to the Exxon station on Chain Bridge Road twenty minutes ago and dialed it.”
“So if it's not Sharif's .. .”
“It's Michael O'Shaughnessy's. Got it in one.” He pulled up a chair next to her.
“Last August, Sharif was shaken down by Israeli airport security when he tried to fly from Frankfurt to Malta. They pulled his address book, Xeroxed it, and sent the contents here. Somebody — a Career Trainee, probably, who
