seditionists and strippers — to the shabbiness of memory. The Wall had left places like Potsdamer Platz, once the bustling heart of Berlin, to silence and weeds, its paving stones aching for a footfall.
But Berliners, over time, had grown used to the change. New life had sprung up along the internal border like ground cover after fire. And then the cranes had come, in soaring ranks of red and blue and gold, their arms outstretched to the east.
Caroline drew wide the curtains of her window. The plane full of technicians from Washington had flown into the bomb site so quickly that the embassy, its communications arrays shattered, had received no cable of their coming. The Secretary of State had phoned the ambassador's residence; a harried first-tour officer had spent most of the night finding accommodation for nearly forty people in a frightened city already inundated with visitors. Caroline had drawn the Hyatt, a spanking-new hotel in the middle of the reborn Potsdamer Platz, where the towers of the Sorry Center jostled for position and waves of raw mud still lapped at the foundations. It was rather, she thought, like being the first resident of a space station, one of civilization's outriders. She would have preferred a converted old palace off Kurfurstendamm, where the whoosh of tires on the rain-wet streets was as soporific as surf; but the Hyatt probably offered a good government rate. Even in crisis, economy ranked high among a first-tour officers considerations.
And if she leaned forward now and glanced left, her nose pressed against the window, she could just make out the shattered glass dome of the Reichstag. An ill-fated building, she thought — burned by Hitler, and now racked by damage from his neo-Nazi followers in the blast that had swept Sophie Payne away. Politics had a way of turning violent in Berlin. Whole streets were obliterated, then recast with a different face. This was something Berliners understood:
She kicked off her shoes and fell back on the bed. Solid polyester beneath her hair, nothing like the eiderdown smelling faintly of the farmyard in a small hotel off Kurfurstendamm. She felt a sharp pang of nostalgia for old Berlin.
Here at the Hyatt, she might have been anywhere, the trappings of Central Europe consigned to the last century. Except that Eric was within range. He breathed the same coal laden air. Caroline closed her eyes and for an instant felt terrified. She wanted to draw the pillow over her head and smother in darkness. It was unlikely that even a single member of 30 April was still in Germany. Eric must be miles away by now. But she felt the force of his presence play over her like a tracking beam.
Was she mad even to try to draw him in?
That was what Dare Atwood wanted. A trap for Eric, and ultimately for his master.
Caroline, the lure.
Dare had no fucking idea what a marriage was like. How you could love a person without even knowing him. How he could own a piece of you, despite nearly three years of absence and betrayal how he could command some shred of loyalty and give nothing in return. Was it something about the marriage vow? That glancing blow of the sacred?
And in her heart of hearts, Caroline knew that she couldn't summon Eric anymore.
He had no desire to see her. He had chosen, after all, to leave. A trap was not a trap without a lure.
She felt relief flood over her like a kind of peace. Eric might betray her abominably, but she would not be required to betray him.
Absurd.
She was too tired to resolve the questions of love and loyalty, the war between reason and heart. She had a job to do. A Vice President to find, the Agency to protect that vast, imperfect sum of too many parts, that humming hive of secrets, most of them not worth knowing. What did she owe Eric Carmichael, anyway? She had paid enough debts during a decade of marriage.
What would she say if they actually came face-to-face? What would he say if he knew that she was hunting him?
The oldest joke in the Intelligence book.
He would have to be hunted, all the same.
She glanced at her watch. Wally Aronson, the Berlin station chief, expected her at the ambassador's residence in an hour. But the Brandenburg Gate lay straight down Ebertstrasse from her hotel in Potsdamer Platz, a brisk walk in the cold afternoon air. She just had time. A police barrier wrapped Pariser Platz like a package, turning the chaos into an apparition of order, the reflexive German impulse. Caroline stood in her jeans and sweater, a bright plaid blazer open to the raw wind, and snapped pictures from the edge of Strasse des 17 Juni, the broad boulevard running straight through the heart of the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond Pariser Platz, 17 Juni became Unter den Linden, the most beautiful boulevard in all of Berlin, with its royal palaces and museums and meandering river Spree. A decade ago, Unter den Linden was closed to the West and Strasse des 17 Juni led only to the Wall — a dead end rather than a gate.
The Brandenburg had been a neoclassical dream, modeled on the Acropolis's Propylaea: six Doric columns surmounted by a plinth and frieze, the figure of Peace drawn by a chariot. Ironic, Caroline thought as she photographed the torso of a shattered horse in the rubble of the Gate. In Berlin, Peace was driven by the engine of war, Peace came at the cost of constant bloodshed. Napoleon had marched his Grande Armee beneath the Gate not long after it was built; Prussia had trained her cavalry in the square; Hitler's Ubermenschen had goose-stepped down Unter den Linden; and East German guards had patrolled within spitting distance of the prancing horses. But it had taken terrorists to topple the chariot to the ground.
She ignored the barriers and the cones and the police and walked insouciantly forward, to the very edge of the bomb crater. The FBI technicians were already there, some of them kneeling on plastic sheets at the edge of the torn earth, others in conversation with what Caroline supposed were German investigators.
One man stood apart, arms folded over a creased tan raincoat. Its very ordinariness screamed Government Official. He was stony-faced and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, but there was something arresting in the stillness of his pose. If he had not been standing inside the official barriers, Caroline would have taken him for a mourner. His face had the self-absorbed potency of grief.
As she looked at him, he turned his head and stared straight at her. No hint of friendliness or curiosity; the look was frankly hostile. He took her for a disaster junkie. She raised her camera and ignored him.
There were television crews, too — an embarrassment of television crews, from every major American network, from the Berlin and Frankfurt and Hamburg stations, from Italy and France and the U.K. and Poland.
This was going to be easy.
Caroline took pictures of chaos: chunks of macadam, twisted cables, the intestines of the city thrown obscenely outward. The construction of the square's new LJ-Bahn station had taken years; now its subterranean walls caved inward. Broken glass shimmered everywhere.
She panned across the square to the embassy door. The shattered platform on which Sophie Payne had stood twenty-four hours ago was still there, one end pitched skyward. Yesterday, pennants had snapped in the breeze. Then bullets, screaming and blood, a gurney wheeled madly to the platform's edge. Eric.
She lowered her camera and studied the building. It was a large embassy, and most of the windows in the facade were smashed, but the walls themselves had held. The blast, then, had been strong enough to destroy the Brandenburg Gate while leaving much of the surrounding structures intact. A surgical bomb, if such a thing could truly be said to exist. A diversion, while the real victim disappeared into the blue.
“Ausgehen She, bitte.”
A police guard, voice harsh with contempt, was advancing upon her, his face obscured by a riot helmet. The federal eagle screamed red and gold across his black shirt — he was one of Fritz Voekl's special troops, the Volksturm. Caroline raised her camera, focused on his face, and snapped.
Taking office on the heels of assassination, the new chancellor had made fighting crime a priority of his first year. Crime, Voekl declared, sprang from the conflict between Western European values and Eastern ones, between Christian and Muslim ways of life. Crime was the product of the Turkish population, in fact; until the Turks were sent back to their own country, all that decent Germans could do was to stand firm against their demands. And the Turks were just the tip of the Muslim iceberg: The trickle of Albanians and Montenegrins, of Kurds and Kazakhs and Georgians and Uzbeks from the east, was alarming in the extreme. Tolerance was a mistake. Acceptance was insanity. Germans, even liberal Germans such as Voekl's murdered predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, were dying in
