was content to sit nude beneath her oversized terry-cloth robe. It enfolded her like an ermine, a second skin. It had once belonged to Eric, and that alone made it precious.
The cotton loops smelled faintly of lemons. She closed her eyes and imagined him breathing.
Lemons. The groves of Cyprus, dry hillsides crackling with rosemary. Cyprus had come well before Budapest and was thus a place that Caroline could consider without flinching. Raw red wine and merciless sunlight, the sea a cool promise through the tumbled stones. She had bought the robe in a shop in Nicosia. He had worn it maybe four times. I'm not a robe kind of guy, he'd told her when she packed for home. Take it with you. Really.
And just what, Caroline wondered, was a robe kind of guy?
When Eric emerged from the shower, his hair a tousle of spikes and the night's growth of beard a haze along the jaw, he rarely reached for a towel. The drops beading his skin evaporated in the Cyprus heat, while he stood lost in thought, eyes fixed on nothing. Caroline never asked where his mind went in such moments.
She was too well acquainted with Eric's demons — the fear that gripped him before certain meetings, the uncontrolled retching over the porcelain bowl.
Nicosia was bad. Budapest was worse.
She could have loved the craggy old city on the banks of the Danube were it not for the change in Eric. Some nights, working surveillance in the passenger seat beside him, she would lose herself in the spectacle ofBuda Castle, floodlit and austere on its manicured slope. By day she plunged into the warren of Pest's back streets, where the buildings' grimy plaster facades, untouched as yet by the mania for renovation, hovered like the backdrop to a Bogart movie. Beneath the coal dust that penetrated every crevice of every shop, she found carved chests daubed with brilliant birds, embroidered linens, spurs once owned by a Magyar horseman. She fingered the cloth, stroked the splintered wood, and imagined a vast plain swept by wild herds. Later, when the incessant rains of March fell, she retired with a book to Gerbeaud's, the city's most venerable coffeehouse. She toyed with chocolate torte and eavesdropped on young Italian tourists.
Eric refused all refuge. He grew hollow-eyed from strain and restless nights; he spoke sharply when he spoke at all. When she referred to a time beyond Buda, he lost the thread of conversation. Always a creature of discipline, he became, if anything, an ascetic-forgoing sleep, the after-embassy drinks hour, even her body in the small hours of morning. The night meetings ended increasingly at dawn, long after she had closed her book and put out her light. She would awake early and dress for the embassy in silence, her husband an insensate stranger shrouded amid the sheets.
Three months before the end of their tour, Eric accepted temporary duty in Istanbul for the summer. Caroline decided to head for the States the same day he left Budapest. She had no reason to go on to Turkey with him, no duty in Istanbul. She would work in Langley and hunt for a house. Headquarters would be glad to have her back — they never asked inconvenient questions. And perhaps absence would improve Eric's frame of mind.
Dispatch him from his present limbo, a restored creature.
The international terminal is one vast waiting room between past and future, punctuated by drooping plants and security portals and guards with electronic sensors. Terrorism haunts the Frankfurt airport, because a decade ago a boom box wired by two Libyans was loaded from the tarmac into the baggage compartment of Pan Am 103. That flight ended in fiery chaos over a small town in Scotland. And now Frankfurt is determined to shut the barn door on the horse's ass.
It takes hours to process through security. Tourists disinclined to learn from history ignore the gate queues and raise their voices in complaint. Bags are opened, or x-rayed, or swathed in yellow twine. Forms are stamped. Cameras monitor. People stand and sweat and stare blankly with ill-defined tension. And at last, the baggage dismissed, they win the freedom of this concourse. Its sterility is almost harrowing.
Caroline clutches her boarding pass in her right hand, her carryon in her left, when what she really wants is to hold Eric until the breath leaves his body.
“I'll be at the Tysons Marriott,” she says.
“I'll let you figure out the time change between Istanbul and Virginia.”
She notices with half her mind that the Americans complain the loudest. They eddy in a tide of sweatsuits around the island that is Eric, convinced they deserve some sort of dispensation. They've paid in blood for world dominion, and this German obsession with order is an outrage. It smacks of cattle cars shunted to a Polish siding, of diversion to the death camp showers. Patience is a virtue Americans distrust.
Eric touches her cheek. Kisses her forehead chastely, as though in benediction. And turns away, his mind shifting elsewhere. Caroline stretches out her hand to his retreating back. But it is already too late. It is this she will remember, years later, when people ask. She will remember that they parted in silence.
Did he suspect what would happen that frantic April morning? Or did he go ignorant as a calf to his destruction?
Caroline drank the last of her coffee, the taste of sewage in her mouth. The jay beyond her window lifted its wings and flitted away; she was very close to being late for work.
When the news breaks, she thought, it's the one thing on everybody's mind, the question we never ask aloud. We shrug off disaster, hurl obscenities at the slow car in the fast lane, skip our workouts for a long lunch. But the question remains; it hovers like a priest's profile, half glimpsed through a confessional screen.
When a plane explodes five miles above the earth, how exactly do you die?
Over the past two years, she had pinned down some specific answers. Twelve of the passengers on MedAir 901 were found seventeen miles from the plane's point of impact, dead but still strapped into their seats. Five others — first-class passengers who sat directly over the forward baggage compartment, where investigators believed the bomb exploded — were incinerated at ignition. Seven of the taller members of the coach section were decapitated when a wing sheared off. Ninety-eight others never got out of the fuselage. But the worst of it, in Carolines opinion, were the ones who were sucked from their seats, to swirl with the air currents like leaves or empty candy wrappers high above the coast of Turkey. At thirty thousand feet they would lose consciousness in seconds, suffocate in the thin air, freeze in the subzero winds. And disintegrate on impact.
Even now, when she closed her eyes at night, she saw the children. There'd been twenty-one of them on MedAir 901, some of them teenagers, some of them still in diapers. Candy wrappers, all of them, in their pastel Easter clothes.
Eric's was one of the bodies they never found at all. Two and a half years of probing the metaphoric wreckage, a thousand days of questions thrown out into the clandestine universe, and Caroline still did not know how her husband had died.
It was Eric she longed for now, in the rain of Arlington, as she tossed the dregs of her coffee in the sink and padded down the length of carpeted hall to her solitary bedroom. She longed for the tautness of a thigh, the delicate flesh above the hip. The time of sweat that lived in the crease behind his knee. All these, she thought, all these are denied me. And the pain of it stopped her short in the doorway, to take a ragged breath, to calm herself, and to move then with resolution toward the closet door.
She was halfway up the George Washington Parkway when the news from Germany broke.
The CIA's Counterterrorism Center was in the grip of its daily frenzy. Tucked away on the ground floor of the New Headquarters Building, the CTC was a windowless three thousand square feet of stale air and blue industrial carpeting, where fifty — odd terrorism experts jockeyed for space and priority among a welter of cubicle partitions. It brought together CIA case officers, Intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and Secret Service detailees in a way that no government organization had ever attempted before. Turf battles and chains of command were set aside in the Center; here, the common threat took precedence.
There were people who knew Farsi and people who knew explosives and people who knew where Moammar Qaddafi slept each night; people who dreamed in Arabic, or understood counterfeiting, or chemical precursors, or how storage centers were hidden in the hearts of mountains. Here the stuff of fiction was commonplace — the satellite images of guerilla training camps, the electronic intercepts of private conversation. In Caroline's mind, it was the most fulfilling and exciting three thousand square feet in the entire world.
She paused at the door, expecting the inevitable — the bruising flight of one of her colleagues toward the hallway connecting the New Headquarters Building with the Old — and was rewarded with a sharp jolt in the rib
