Budapest; now he was Chief of Station, Berlin. It was a plum he'd pulled relatively early in his career — but then, Wally had been born with the soul of a spy. He had probably rifled his mother's love letters as soon as he could read, Caroline suspected, and worn gloves to do it.
He led her past a formal drawing room hung with miles of gray-blue silk, its atmosphere thick with the suspended breath of public spaces. Caroline looked at the purposeful chairs, all elegant line and backache, and imagined the parties — a crush of black velvet and white satin, the haze of cigarette smoke that always amazed Americans and was inescapable in Europe. Wally crossed the wide hall — here there were ceiling frescoes of Venus rising, an abandon of putti — to a set of double doors. The ambassador's study.
But the room, when Wally threw open the doors, was empty.
He crossed the worn Aubusson carpet to the French windows. Beyond them was an expanse of browning grass, lime trees bereft of leaves. A smudge of afternoon sky. A white-haired man lounged in a canvas chair below the terrace, one elbow resting on a card table, thin legs extended before him. He wore a navy blue windbreaker, khaki pants, Top-Siders without socks. A faint breeze stirred a sparse lock of hair, and as he reached back to smooth it, the veins on his hand pulsed blue. Two men, strangers to Caroline, sat at his right and left. In their wool suits and trimmed hair, they resembled models imported for a photo shoot.
“Ah, there you are, Wally.” The ambassador spoke with relish, as though the COS had just brought round the drinks cart. “Good man.”
“Our guest from Washington, Mr. Ambassador. Caroline Carmichael of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Ambassador Dalton.”
Ambrose Dalton stood up. His hand, when Caroline shook it, was dry as vellum. He was a member of an old Connecticut family, a political appointee who had made a fortune in merchant banking. His wife's name was Sunny. She had found her life mission after the Daltons' son broke his neck in a rugby game; now she educated the insensitive about the rights of the physically challenged. The Daltons gave generously to a variety of causes, some of them political. As a couple, they were two of President Bigelow's oldest friends. They were quite well acquainted with Sophie Payne.
“I'm so very sorry, Mr. Ambassador, about the damage to the embassy,” Caroline told him. “You and your staff are well, I hope?”
Dalton took her hand between both of his and patted it, more in sympathy than salutation.
“We lost two of our marine guards. Mere boys. But you know that, I expect.”
She nodded wordlessly.
He studied her face, a calculation flickering in his eyes.
“I understand you're an expert, Ms. Carmichael, on this Krucevic character. Any expertise is, of course, a comfort, but I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Sophie cannot be anywhere in Berlin.”
“Is that what the German police are saying, sir?”
“They say that no Turks could possibly have slipped past their borders, and that the extremists, when identified, will be summarily shot.” Dalton's voice was as dry as his hand.
“Never mind that none of the men filmed with the helicopter was even remotely Turkish,” Wally added, “or that the video dropped in Prague identifies the kidnappers as the 30 April Organization.”
“Our German friends have not been privileged to view the terrorist video,” the ambassador reminded him.
“For that matter, neither have I. I merely read the gisted transcript we received in the diplomatic pouch this morning. You may assume, Ms. Carmichael, that everyone at this table has also read that summary.May I introduce my Chief of Mission?”
“T. Hunter Price.” One of the imported models half rose and nodded, then sank languidly into his seat. Caroline put him down immediately as a cookie-pusher with an attitude. Price would regard the embassy bombing as a State Department affair: He would resent the Agency's involvement.
“And this is Paul Dougherty,” Wally said, his hand on Carolines elbow. “Paul's in the consular section. You owe him your hotel room.”
“Hey, Caroline,” Dougherty said, jumping up and smiling broadly, “I read your stuff last night. Really cool.”
A first-tour Agency officer, no doubt, fresh from the University of Kansas or Georgetown's foreign-service program. Dougherty looked about thirteen. She wondered where Wally's more experienced people were, and then answered the question herself. They were meeting with counterparts in German Intelligence. Or were dressed in white overalls and canvas caps, trolling the streets in plumber's vans, with listening equipment trained on a variety of buildings. Hoping against hope for a sound that might lead them to Sophie Payne.
“There's Tom!” Dougherty chirped, his gaze going beyond Caroline. She turned and saw a rangy man in tweeds loping across the terrace, his hands shoved into his pockets. The newcomer had abandoned the government-issue trench coat for a rumpled oxford cloth shirt, suede bucks, and an old rep tie. One of his shoelaces had broken and been summarily knotted into place. His nose appeared to have suffered a similar fate. And from the appearance of his right cheek which bore a red crease from eye to lip he had recently fallen asleep on someone's sofa with a copy of the newspaper folded under him. Der Zeitung, perhaps. It was shoved into his pocket along with his hands.
“LegAtt,” Wally Aronson muttered under his breath, and then, more audibly, “Caroline, meet Tom Shephard, the FBI's Legal Attache in Berlin. Tom's coordinating our investigation on the ground.”
“We've met,” Shephard said. “At the crater.”
“I walked over to the Brandenburg to take a look around,” she explained to Wally.
“You took more than that.” Shephard continued to study her, as though she were a rare form of plant life he had only just discovered. The hazel eyes were still sharp, but the earlier simmering anger had vanished. “Do you always put your foot in it like that?”
“No,” she replied tersely. “And I usually don't have to be reminded of it, either.”
“Was there some problem?” Hunter Price was the sort, Caroline suspected, who loved to recycle his neighbors' affairs each morning over embassy coffee.
“Mud,” she replied. “Mud was the problem. The Tiergarten is churned to mush, and I definitely put my foot in it. See, Mr. Shephard? I even changed my shoes before this meeting.”
“Let's get started, shall we?” The ambassador slid back into his seat. Caroline set her laptop on the ground unopened; she had brought it with the intention of typing her meeting notes, but the computer's battery had run down and there did not appear to be an electrical outlet in the embassy garden. She drew out a yellow legal pad instead.
“I think we've all read Ms. Cannichael's material and found it quite compelling,” Dalton observed. “Should we ever locate the Vice President and her attendant thugs, we shall be in the proverbial clover with Ms. Carmichael here on board. I hope you will excuse our impromptu picnic, my dear. We cannot entirely trust the acoustics within the residence.”
Caroline frowned.
“You think you're being bugged? In Germany?”
“We sweep the place every week,” Wally broke in, “and we haven't actually found anything. But there have been .. . incidents. Or should I say coincidences?”
“Within six weeks of taking up my post, Ms. Carmichael, I discovered to my astonishment that whenever I presented my objectives to Mr. Voekl's late, unfortunate foreign minister you were familiar with Grafvon Orbsdorff, I presume? he invariably knew what to expect. Either Orbsdorff was a clairvoyant, or he was cheating at the international game. Personally, I plump for the notion of cheating.” Dalton scowled, an honorable schoolboy. “And so I adopted the habit of taking my conferences en plein air. A fresh breeze focuses the mind wonderfully, don't you agree?”
She smiled at him.
“Can anyone summarize for me what we know of the bombing to date?”
“For that, I defer to Wally and Mr. Shephard,” Dalton said briskly.
“Gentlemen?”
“We know that the embassy blueprints were sold to the highest bidder,” Wally began, “probably by the project architect long before construction was completed. Worse, we know that 30 April knew precisely where to hit the internal surveillance equipment. Agency techs have already gone through the building.
