“Are you telling me to avoid all contact with him?”
“Have all the contact you like. Do drinks. Do dinner. Take a walk among the autumn leaves. But if our golden boy refuses to give up the goods our missing friend, in perfect condition then shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap. Understood?”
All too well.
“Now get some sleep.”
“Thanks, Scottie,” she told the dead line. Then she cradled the receiver and sank back against her pillows. Somewhere in Central Europe, Eric was stepping out of a shower. Cynic or idealist? Did the answer matter anymore?
She thrust back the covers. To find Sophie Payne, she would first have to find Eric. And if luck was with her, Mahmoud Sharif would know exactly where he was.
Two
Berlin, 7:30 a.m.
Caroline wore black knit leggings and a black tunic for the Palestinian bomb maker. A black swing coat that skimmed above her knees. Black cashmere gloves and a red beret perched on her bobbed dark hair. The hair was a wig and it went with her back stopped identity, the passport in the name of Jane Hathaway she had brought from Langley. She wore red lipstick to match the beret, and a pair of black Chanel sunglasses.
Eric's voice murmured with the sound of tap water in her ear, relentless, caressing, the voice of conscience and nightmare. All that he had said looped endlessly in her mind, a refrain she could not banish. He stood behind her as she drew on her clothes; he lifted her hair from the nape of her neck. She moved now under the glare of his gaze — and wondered briefly who had set the trap for whom.
Her fingers trembled as she applied her makeup; trembled with anger and longing.
At this rate, she'd jump sky-high when Sharif tapped on her shoulder. She briefly considered carrying her snub-nosed Walther TPH in a thigh holster concealed by the swing coat, then rejected the idea. Palestinian bomb makers might consent to meet with the anxious cousin of an underworld acquaintance, but they would be certain to search her thoroughly first. Jane Hathaway spent her days banking in London; she was unlikely to carry a piece with her on holiday.
The concierge at the front desk looked at her blankly as she passed. Caroline pushed jauntily through the revolving door, as though she had nothing more than shopping on her mind.
She purchased the Herald Tribune at a sidewalk kiosk and scanned the headlines as she walked. Sophie Payne had not been found. The LJ-Bahn in Potsdamer Platz was tempting — she could read as she rode — but the distance was short and the morning air, the Berliner luft, a gift to the sleep-deprived. She strode east along Leipzigerstrasse and then north along Grunerstrasse, marveling at the new life springing up amid the careworn avenues of the Mitte district. And rising before her as she walked, more alien with every step, was the Communist television tower's steel needle, like a hypodermic piercing the sky. A hypodermic. Everything reminded her of Sophie Payne.
Alexanderplatz, where Prussian and Russian troops had once drilled to defeat Napoleon; where the streetcar lines of the Bismarck era converged in raucous confusion; where prostitutes and lorry drivers and clerks convened in a hundred different bars, until the Allied bombs of 1943 leveled the square and, two years later, the Soviets marched in to “liberate” the city. It was a vast and chilly emptiness still, several football fields in size. Grunerstrasse plunged beneath it, to emerge on the other side as Neue Konigstrasse; there were very few approaches by car. He would have to walk up to her, or drive by to the northeast, on Karl-Marx-Allee. She took up a position at the television tower's base, facing the Allee, and proceeded to study her newspaper. It was hard on eight o'clock.
Standing there in the middle of the drab morning, Caroline fought back a persistent sense of the ridiculous. IfMahmoud Sharif could even remember the name of Michael O'Shaughnessy from a telephone call made months before, he was unlikely to risk his neck because of it. Why drive out early in the morning for the sake of a woman he had never seen? She turned over the front section of the Herald Tribune (the same edition Mian Krucevic had placed under Sophie Payne's chin the previous day) and found a picture of herself, snapped in Pariser Platz by an enterprising news photographer. The Volksturm guard she had confronted was holding his truncheon high, and Caroline's mouth was open in a scream. She stared at the image, fascinated. She had never seen herself in newsprint before. Was it this, rather than the television footage, that had triggered Eric's phone call?
At the thought of him, her mind winced and leapt away.
A dirty white Trabant — a pitiful putt-putt the size of a golf cart — drove slowly past on Karl-Marx-Allee. Caroline's eyes flicked up, considered it, then looked down at her paper. It was for Sharif to broach the question.
Eight-fourteen. More cars passed. She'd read the news that mattered, and was killing time with feature stories. The white Trabant again, traveling in the opposite direction. Only one person behind the wheel, too distant to be clearly seen.
“I think that perhaps you are Ms. Jane Hathaway,” said a quiet voice at her shoulder.
Caroline did not jump. She folded her newspaper deliberately and tucked it under her arm.
He was a compact and neat person in a black leather jacket and tweed pants. Dark skin, eyes the color of espresso, black brows and mustache.
“I am,” she said. “Are you Mahmoud Sharif?”
“Please come with me,” he said by way of answer.
When she hesitated, a second man materialized behind her. He placed a persuasive hand on her elbow.
“Very well,” she said coolly, and went without a backward glance.
They bundled her into a steel gray Mercedes, Caroline in the middle of the backseat with a man on either side. A third man drove. She felt a moment of panic, a wave of claustrophobia. She subdued it with effort. It would not do to betray a fit of nerves. She was merely a friend's cousin.
The first man who had approached her drew a length of white cloth from his pocket.
“It is not permitted to see where you are going. I must beg to cover your eyes.” If they were kidnapping her, Caroline thought, they would hardly have been so polite. They would have shoved a wad of cotton in her mouth and forced her head down to her knees if they hadn't stowed her in the trunk first.
She removed her sunglasses and placed them in her purse. Then she inclined her beret toward her escort, praying that her wig was secure. The hands came up behind her head, a ceremonial gesture. And he covered her eyes.
At first they drove at what seemed a normal pace, darting in and out of Berlin traffic with the occasional pause for a right or left turn. Then Caroline heard a few words flung back from the front seat, something brief and explosive in Arabic. The driver was swearing. Her companion's fingers tightened on her arm.
“Who should be following, Jane Hathaway?”
“Following me? No one. I know no one in Berlin.”
The Mercedes lurched forward, picking up speed, and swerved violently to the left. Caroline slid against the man beside her, and he grunted.
“There is a white Trabant behind us. My friend who is driving is certain it has been behind us some time. Who do you know with a white Trabant?”
“No one. I'm a stranger here. But if it's a Trabant, it won't be behind you long. They've got no power.”
“That is not the point,” the man said sternly. “We cannot take you to Sharif if we do not know who is following. You are with the police, perhaps?”
“Of course not! I told you. I'm from London. I don't know anybody in Germany. Maybe it's one of your friends.”
He did not reply. The car swerved again, accelerated, made a series of abrupt turns.
