explosives. “But what if it's a Semtex-like material from a different source?”
“Forensics could pinpoint exactly where it came from, given some time and a bit more residue.”
“Or maybe it's a problem with the device itself,” she added. “A piece of broadcast equipment left in the bomber's van that carries incriminating fingerprints. Prints belonging to somebody the Voekl regime doesn't want connected to the Brandenburg Gate.”
“Or maybe it's the bomb's timer,” Wally threw in. “That's how we nailed the perps in Pan Am 103. The timer they used to trigger the bomb was one of only twelve made by a single Swiss firm for a single client — Moammar Qaddafis brother-in-law.”
“Or maybe it's a body.” Tom Shephard sounded morose. “The famous extra leg, from Oklahoma City. Or maybe Mian Krucevic himself was blown up in the van, with a love letter from Fritz Voekl in his breast pocket. But it doesn't matter, does it, if we can't get to the fucking crater.”
“You give up too damn easily,” Caroline said.
The scarred embassy on Pariser Platz was once again open for business. A mere two days after the bombing, the marine guards were back at the entrance, black armbands prominent on their biceps. Windows were boarded over where they had not already been replaced. A tattered flag flew at half mast, and concrete blast posts linked with chain blocked the building's exterior — or had they been hidden before, Caroline thought, by the ceremonial platform erected for the dedication?
The posts were designed to keep a vehicle filled with explosive from parking near the door; they had been powerless against commandos on the roof and shock waves traveling across the street. But perhaps they offered the illusion of safety to the people inside — people who knew, as she did, that if someone wanted to kill them enough, he would probably succeed.
Volksturm guards patrolled the streets leading into Pariser Platz, and barricades were everywhere. Wally abandoned his car on a side street and led them through a series of alleys to the embassy. The pavements were slick with the first flakes of snow.
As they turned into the square, Tom Shephard stopped short. Uniformed Volksturm surrounded the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate like a cordon of honor; but behind them, bright mustard against the blackened stone, reared the shovel of a front-loader. As the three of them watched, it swiveled and disgorged a twisted load of metal into the body of a truck.
“Fucking shit!”
Shephard took off at a run. Wally and Caroline tore after him. A few feet from the Volksturm cordon, they caught him and pulled him back.
“Fucking idiots!” He was struggling to break free and hurl himself at the nearest black shirt. “Get that fucking truck out of there!”
“You can't do anything about it.” Caroline's voice was urgent, her fingers straining at his coat sleeve. “Tom — you'll only make it worse.”
He shook her off.
“Do you realize what they're doing?”
“Yes.”
“They're destroying evidence!”
“Of course they are.”
The bright front-loader bent, primal as a dinosaur, to devour a lamppost. Stone, metal, dust, and a few scraps of clothing clung to its jaws. The figure inside at work on the levers appeared to be whistling, oblivious to the spectators, the rolling news cameras, the enraged Shephard.
“Holy God,” he burst out. “There could be human remains in there. What in Christ's name are they thinking?”
“Come on.” Wally steered him gently around. “Let the press deal with it. They always do.”
The Volksturm had massed near the consular section's door. There a long line of Berliners and tourists had assembled in hope of visas; most of them, Caroline noticed, were Turks. They stood in silence, eyes averted from the armed men in black; but there was an ugliness in the air, powerful as the stench of cordite.
Wally pulled her toward the embassy's main entrance. Between the two of them, Carrie and Shephard, he looked like a policeman making an arrest.
“I've got to call the Bureau,” Tom muttered as they flashed IDs at the marine guards and hurried down the main corridor. “This is un-fucking-believable. Do you realize what those bastards are doing?”
“Yes, Tom, I think we all realize,” Wally said patiently. He took the broad central staircase two steps at a time, turned left at the sec and floor, and strode down a corridor. Caroline barely had time to register a team of technicians mounted on ladders, busily rewiring the embassy ceiling, when Wally stopped in front of an office.
“Mrs. Saunders!” he said gaily to the middle-aged woman behind the desk. “Meet Caroline Carmichael, otherwise known as Mad Dog”
“Mad Dog?” muttered Shephard.
Caroline extended her hand; Mrs. Saunders clasped it.
“Mrs. Saunders is the station's nerve center,” Wally told them. “Although she has worked for an Intelligence organization for most of her life, none of us has ever learned her first name.”
“It's Gladys, if you can believe,” said the woman. “My mother was Welsh. Just call me Mrs. Saunders. Everyone does. You have an action cable from Headquarters, Wally” — she looked at him severely over her half- glasses, which were tethered to her head with a black cord — “and Vie Marinelli has been on the phone from Budapest. He wants you before COB today.”
“Station chief,” Wally told Caroline. “I put in a call to him this morning about DBTOXIN. So the cable system's up?”
“No. We used carrier pigeon. Also” — Mrs. Saunders glanced at her notes — “somebody throaty and Russian called. At least, I think he was Russian. Real hush-hush. A bad case of secret-agentitis, if ever I heard one. He hung up when I asked for his name.”
Wally stood stock — still in front of the secretary's desk, considering this.
“When?” he asked.
“Maybe ten, ten-fifteen.”
“Could it have been our developmental?”
“Old what's-his-acronym? I don't know. Heavy smokers all sound the same to me. Particularly when they're foreign.”
“Long-distance call?”
“Either that or our line's bugged. Lousy connection.”
Wally whistled tunelessly under his breath while his fingers riffled the papers in Mrs. Saunders's In box.
“Where's Fred?”
“He and Young Paul are out in the van, per your instructions.” Mrs. Saunders sat back in her desk chair and smiled nastily. “It's so nice to see Fred working again. He managed to get rid of That Girl, you know. Gone home to see her mother.”
Wally looked up.
“That Girl, Mrs. Saunders, is his wife.”
“She'll get him PNG'd one of these days,” Mrs. Saunders predicted darkly. “Absolutely no discretion. Thinks it's a hoot that her husband's a spy. Hasn't the faintest clue spying's still a crime to the host country. How's McLean, sweetie?” This to Caroline.
“Congested,” she managed. “I've got a nice little house in Arlington. Keep it rented. God help me if I ever go back.”
Wally disappeared through the office's inner door, a vaulted one, thrown open to Mrs. Saunders's view. Tom and Caroline followed him inside.
It might have been a gentleman's study — if the gentleman was a little paranoid.
There were no windows: The Agency had long ago discovered that electronic emissions, even the tapping of fingers on a computer keyboard, bounced off glass and could be picked up by anyone remotely handy. Three workstations with computers and a motley collection of files dotted the space. The floor was carpeted in crimson pile that further deadened sound; the walls were lined with bookshelves. Within the walls, multiple layers of steel
