appreciate some candor.”
“Candor,” he repeated. The gleam of amusement had vanished. “And would your appointment happen to be with the CIA?”
“If I thought they knew where Michael was, I wouldn't be here” “I, too, had hoped for candor, Miss Hathaway. But you have not even trusted me with your true name. I have no inclination to help you. Indeed, I waste my time here.” He got to his feet.
She decided to take a risk.
“I don't think you even know where Michael is, Sharif.”
“Michael O'Shaughnessy does not exist, Miss Hathaway. We both know that. Therefore he can never have possessed a cousin. Now tell me why I should help you.”
“I'm here because Michael's father has died!” she burst out. “Someone has to tell him. I'm the only one in the family he still trusts.”
“I detest this sort of subterfuge. Miss Hathaway. It is demeaning to us both.”
She was suddenly at a standstill. When you don't know what to say, Eric whispered in her ear, don't say anything at all. Impulsively, she decided to ignore him.
“He's in trouble, Sharif.”
The man actually laughed.
“Aren't we all?”
“This time he could die.”
“But then, he's done that before.” Sharif's dark eyes flicked shrewdly up to her own. He took a small silver knife from his pocket and began to pare his fingernails. “Are you in love with him?”
Contempt in the words.
“Not anymore.”
He set the knife down.
“I know the man you are looking for. I even know his real name. I also know that he was once employed by the CIA and that they fabricated the papers he is presently using. Your papers, Miss Hathaway, are remarkably similar.” The eyes raked over her.
“So if you are not in love with him — if that is not why you wish to see him — then I am forced to conclude that Michael is in difficulties with his government. And that you have been sent to me in the hope of finding him.”
“Now I think it is I who waste my time.” Caroline reached for the handbag he had left on the table.
Sharif gripped her wrist.
“I have not the least intention of delivering him up to you.”
She stared at him implacably.
“In fact, in other circumstances I might be moved to interrogate you more harshly, and for a longer period.”
“I don't scare easily.”
His fingers — the delicate, sensitive fingers — were suddenly around Caroline's throat.
She gasped, gulping for air, fighting the impulse to battle back. You must not show fear. And yet fear flooded her like a wash of warm water, moist between her thighs, rising hotly to her rib cage; a dull thud of heartbeat, the blood panicking inside her.
“I could ask you any number of questions.” The Hammerl'i's muzzle kissed her temple. “Over the course of a week, or a year. I could find out whatever I needed to know, Jane Hathaway, if I wished to spend the time. Whether you scare easily or not is a matter of indifference. What is important is how much pain is required to break you.”
Her breathing now was nothing but a hiss. She kept her hands clenched tightly in her lap, a pathetic attempt at dignity. He watched her with the appearance of detachment, as chough he were watching TV. The gun, hair- trigger, explicit in the hollow above her ear. Her lungs were screaming for air, and for an instant, she believed he would throttle her that she would die clawing at his wrist in desperation. Anger knifed through her.
“One thing intrigues me,” he said idly. And laid the gun down on the table. His other hand still gripped her throat. She could not croak the question he seemed to expect. He dangled the grenade pin before her nose.
“This thing intrigues me. A keepsake, Akbar says. Something you treasure of Michael's.” He snorted derisively.
“A grenade pin?”
She could no longer see for the black dots dancing before her eyes. In a second she would pass out. She reached up with both hands and dug her nails into his wrist. His eyelids flickered, but otherwise, he regarded her steadily. The pressure of his thumb against her windpipe increased. Flames flared inside her head. Panic imploded like a screaming child. Her fingers went slack.
And then he released her.
“I confess I do not comprehend the grenade pin at all.”
Caroline drew a shuddering breath.
“People .. . attach importance to all kinds of things.”
“Women, in my experience, attach none whatsoever to the instruments of war.”
“Then you and I know very different sorts of women.”
“Perhaps. But even if we allow for the differences between Western and Arab women, Miss Hathaway even if we suppose for an instant that any number of bankers in London carry such things in their purses even then, the grenade pin does not fit. You were sent by your organization to discover this man's whereabouts. Correct?”
Caroline did not reply.
“An organization such as yours does not think in subtle terms. It offers up the sentimental things: a high- school ring, a cherished love letter. It does not make a keepsake of a grenade pin.”
“Then perhaps, praise be to Allah, your assumptions about me are false.”
“My assumptions are never false,” Sharifsaid softly. “The day that I am wrong is the day that I shall die.”
The bomb maker's margin of error.
“So,” he said briskly, “I must conclude that there is more to this matter than appears to the eye. You are unable or unwilling to be truthful; I cannot force you to be otherwise. But you know something more of this Michael than merely his false name. I will not tell you where he is. That I cannot do for anyone. But because of this — because of the grenade pin — I shall undertake to pass a message.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said faintly.
“It will not be this silliness about the dead father,” Sharif continued. “We both know that Michael was raised by vermin.. .. Do you stay in Berlin long?”
“In a day or two I will go to Budapest.”
“Then I shall inform Michael that he may find you — Jane Hathaway of the cunning and unlikely grenade pin — at the Budapest Hilton. You know it?”
“Yes.” She had had afternoon tea there once. The ruins of a monastery were built into the walls. The hotel, however, was anything but ascetic, and quite beyond a State Department stipend.
“Very well, then. We are done. Akbar! The blindfold!”
They drove her to the Spandau S-Bahn station and left her at the foot of the platform stairs. They returned her purse and her belongings, so that she was able to purchase a ticket from one of the automated machines. The next thing, of course, was to mount the stairs and await the train; but she knew that if she attempted the steps, her legs would fold up beneath her, and all her delicate subterfuge would come to an end.
But for a grenade pin — She had never felt so callow, so outmaneuvered. So goddamn stupid.
The steps rose up before her. A man in a black felt hat edged around her with a curious look, hastily averted, and clattered up to the platform. She had less than ten minutes to reach Potsdamer Platz and her hotel. She would have to change out of her clothes and wig before meeting Wally Aronson. And yet she lacked the will to move.
It was as she was standing there, surveying her ticket, that a white Trabant pulled up to the curb a few feet away.
“Hiya, doll,” said Tom Shephard. “Need a lift?”
