“Revenge, if it's done right, makes you thorough,” she told Shephard brutally. “It makes you own the enemy. It forces you to live inside another person's brain and think like he does. And that may be just what Sophie Payne needs right now. Nothing less than obsession will save her.”
“Are you obsessed?”
She glanced away from him, toward the night beyond the plane window. The wing lights were flashing blue and white.
“I dream of Krucevic, Tom, and I don't even know what he looks like. I feel him like a violence in my sleep.”
He nodded wordlessly.
“Tell me about Eric. If it's not too painful.”
She almost laughed. Since Eric's phone call the previous night that ruthless shot in the dark Caroline had been tortured by every moment of loss and confusion endured in the past thirty months. But his voice had aroused her sleeping love, the love that had persisted, beyond terror and a false grave.
She had flown to Berlin on rage. Rage was gone now; but she could not define what had taken its place.
“Eric was a cowboy,” she told Tom Shephard. “An ex-Green Beret with a lot of physical courage, the kind of person you'd want at your back when things got rough. The CIA used to be full of them.”
Shephard grinned.
“Now the cowboys are all day traders, one inch away from financial ruin.”
“I suppose.”
“I find it .. .” He hesitated.
“Hard to see me with someone like that? Cowboys aren't Sally Bowles material? If I remember correctly, she preferred Yale men with failing courage.”
“So what was it? Opposites attracting?”
“He made me feel alive,” she attempted, as though telling Shephard might explain it for herself. “More alive than I'd ever felt before. Like a pulse was beating right under my fingertips. Eric never thought about his next step he just took it. There's a huge freedom in that kind of life.”
“And terrible consequences.”
“Yes but it's not how I live at all.” She glanced at him. “I live in my head. Loving Eric was reckless and intoxicating and risky. It had nothing to do with careful consideration. It was complete emotional surrender.”
Like a shove off a jump tower from forty feet, fear and exultation rising with the ground.
“I've never felt anything like it before or since.”
“And you miss it. Miss him. So I guess you were happy.”
“Yes and no.” She thrust aside the memory of sex like a hand at the throat, sex as ruthless as hunger, sex that cast her up on the sands of morning a bleached and whitened bone.
“Eric was difficult. Moody, hard to reach sometimes he took his work very seriously. But he had a great deal of charm. And a sense of humor. He was intelligent without being well educated; he had a canniness that was pure gut.”
“A man's man,” Shephard mused.
“Entirely. But he was often afraid sick with fear, churning inside. Fighting it gave him a sense of purpose, I think. Aside from a love of good beer and Jack Nicholson, I don't know what else to tell you.”
“How long were you married?”
“Just over ten years. How about you? Ever married?”
“Yes.” His face tightened.
She thought of the initials engraved on the hip flask and the fact that he carried it everywhere.
“Divorce?”
“Breast cancer.”
“Ah,” she managed.
“You know what it's like to lose someone.” His eyes were now fixed on the plane bulkhead.
“We went back to the States last posting, thinking she'd get better treatment.”
“Strange, isn't it, how you learn that you can't change what's going to happen? That you can only endure it.”
“You remind me of Jen,” he said simply.
“With blond hair or black?”
It was the wrong thing to have said; she felt it acutely the moment the words were out, but she had done it and now would have to live with the adjustment in his expression, the closing offoffeeing. She realized a moment too late that the glib impulse had been self-protective. Tom Shephard was getting under her skin.
He was contentious and irritable and he shot from the hip, but Caroline sensed that what drove him was a fund of caring. He was brutally honest. His gaze was too piercingly intent, his questions too unswerving; he wore his heart on his soiled trench-coat sleeve. Tom was as transparent in his prickly defenses as Eric was opaque. She was afraid she might even be able to trust him.
He reached into his briefcase for a paperback novel and said with deliberate casualness, “Are you going to Marinelli's meeting tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“You think TOXIN will just hand you the Veep?”
“Not without persuasion. Then we follow him into the enemy camp with as much firepower as we can beg, borrow, or steal.”
“I'm beginning to understand your nickname. Mad Dog,” Shephard said. And flipped open his paperback.
Caroline sank into her seat and looked firmly out the window. A man as good-hearted as Shephard could not possibly comprehend the violence that had won her the name, or the limits to which she could go. But she was very much afraid that he would discover both before their teamwork was done.
Last night's broken sleep was catching up with her; her eyes burned with exhaustion. She could pick out lights now in the darkness below, and a wide black band that might have been a road or a great wall but which she recognized as the river. The plane window was freezing against her cheek. It would be colder in Buda than in Berlin, and the air would be sulfurous with smoke from the cheap brown coal they still burned all over Central Europe. For an instant she could almost taste it, the damp Hungarian winter of her failed marriage.
Twelve
The Night Sky, 8:12 p.m.
It is November again, almost four years ago, November and her feet are scuffling through the dead leaves in Varosliget Park, They are strolling idly along the winding path around the artificial lake. The fall afternoon slips sadly between boating season, just ended, and ice-skating, which is yet to come; the lake is forlorn and deserted under the brooding metal sky, a cup filling steadily with sodden leaves. Scottie is at Eric's left, and Caroline is on his right. Scottie sports a jaunty tweed jacket — green and brown with flecks of plum in it, as though he has jetted in direct from the Highlands for a country-house weekend.
They have tried to rise to the occasion his clothes suggest; they have attempted to make their life in Buda appear an expatriate's dream. For Scottie, they window-shop for Herend porcelain, they compare notes on gulyas,
