Park, buildings that had a story, each and every last one of them. They were going to destroy so much of their heritage if they did this.
'Let me think on it, Tommy,' Kipper said. 'In the meantime, I authorize you to begin redeployment of the marines you mentioned to New York.' A door knock behind them drew Kipper's attention, and he saw a young woman tapping her wristwatch apologetically.
'Mister President, we're about to lose the link.'
He mouthed 'thanks' at the woman and apologized to Franks for the interruption.
'Thank you, General. We're about to lose the satellite. Please, rest assured, I'm not going to dick around with this decision. You'll have word very soon about…'
But the screen where Franks had been sitting was already full of white noise.
Kipper and Jed sat in silence in the hot, oppressive room. For once his chief of staff seemed to understand that he did not want to be talked at. He most wanted just a few moments of quiet to think things through. The president tried to put himself in the place of all those men and women he had ordered to New York, at first assuming he was sending them on nothing more than a brief policing operation. The pirates, after all, were little better than glorified criminals, looters. They were a problem all over the country, not just in New York, and as well armed as they were, they had never presented as anything other than a rabble, until now.
And now?
He had no idea. There just wasn't enough information. How he envied his predecessor in this job. Bush had enjoyed almost infinite resources, the all-knowing intelligence agencies, the all-seeing spy satellites, vast networks of spies. Kipper often found himself having to put aside an almost childish jealousy when he thought of how much information Bush must've had as he prepared to go to war in Iraq. If only he now had but one-tenth of those resources available to him.
Instead he had imperfection, uncertainty, doubt. And fear. The fear that every decision he made was wrong, disastrously so. Every judgment in error. His reasons ill founded.
'Jed, I don't know what to do,' he said hoarsely. 'I never seem to get it right.'
Culver reached across and squeezed his arm.
'No, Mister President, you do get it right more often than not. But you forget that the world is not an engineering problem, sir. You're not dealing with elegance and balance and discretely measurable artifacts. You're dealing with people. Flawed, imperfect people. You can never set right human affairs the same way you can square off a right angle in a technical drawing. Neither the virtues nor the malevolent rottenness of the human soul can be specified to millimeter tolerances. You can only do the best you can.'
Kipper let his head fall forward into his hands. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, which were throbbing painfully.
'Jesus, Jed, way to cheer a guy up,' he said.
He knew the TV screens in front of them were still running loops from the fighting in New York. He did not need to look at them. He would always be haunted by what he had seen there and, even worse, what he had imagined. Crowding out all those hellish images, however, was the woman he had visited in the hospital, the woman whom he had sent into battle and who had come back a broken and incomplete remnant of everything she once was and might yet have been.
The president of the United States of America let his hands fall slowly away from his face. He turned to his military aide, Colonel Ralls, who was standing quietly off to one side as always.
'Mike, can you get General Franks back for me?' he said. 'A phone line will be fine. I've made a decision.'
40
Berlin Caitlin did not follow the woman immediately. Fabia Shah was on her lunch break and would not venture far. She disappeared around the corner about a hundred yards down the street, marching the whole way, stopping to talk with nobody. Caitlin and Mirsaad finished their meals with a couple of very short, strong Turkish coffees before leaving to spend a few hours working on the reporter's behalf. Having found Baumer's mother where she expected, Caitlin could pick up her tail later in the day. Meanwhile, Mirsaad moved about Neukolln, and Caitlin tagged along with him, dutifully playing the obedient intern as he drove from one appointment to another, interviewing the imam of a small reformist mosque that had taken over a Chinese Christian church on Werbellinstrasse, the local welfare officer for the city's Islamic Federation, and the director of a women's shelter operating about a mile north of the shariatown.
As the light began to fail, they headed back into Neukolln's dense warren of faded identikit apartment blocks, the ranks of grimy whitewashed four-and five-story tenements recalling for her a line she'd read sometime in her college years. Aesthetically worthless rent slabs. Caitlin struggled for a second to recall where she'd seen such an evocative description. She frequently had trouble recalling little things like that after the operation to remove her tumor. She knew the line wasn't written about this section of Berlin but was struck by how apt it was.
'This woman you are looking for…'
'Not looking for, Sadie. We found her already. I just needed to confirm she was still here in Neukolln. Do you think you could head over to Mahlower; it's the next right.'
They motored through a big intersection on Hermannstrasse and made the turn she had pointed out. Mahlower was relatively short and home to just six apartment blocks, three on each side. Caitlin had him pull over and park.
'This woman we saw today, she is somehow connected to the attack on you, on Bret?'
Caitlin shook her head. 'No. Not directly. But she knows somebody who almost certainly was, and for now she's the best link I have to him. He came back here when he got out of jail awhile ago. I'm willing to take a bet she's either seen him or heard from him. It's a start. That's all.'
'She is his girlfriend?' he asked dubiously. 'Such arrangements are frowned upon here, you know.'
'No,' Caitlin said. 'His mother.'
'Ah, I see.'
Mirsaad seemed satisfied with that. After all, it wasn't too far removed from the way he might go about tracking a difficult contact for a story. If you can't find them, find the people around them.
'So should we not we go back to the cafe and follow her?' he asked.
Caitlin smiled.
'No. I have the last known addresses for her. Residential and work. That office has moved, but she moved with it. She was living in a council flat down the end of this street as of three years ago. My best information is that she's still there. Makes sense. She hasn't gone anywhere else. She'll walk past in a few minutes if she is there. Fabia is a tough old bird, but even she won't linger long after dark on her own. We can wait. Besides, there's not really enough road traffic to hide in if we had to follow her.'
Caitlin dimly registered a call to prayer somewhere outside, muted by the closed windows of the little Lada. Here and there she could see groups of people, some small gatherings and others quite numerous, making their way into local prayer rooms. When she had last stalked Baumer, she'd built up an encyclopedic knowledge of Neukolln's ethnic and religious topography. But she had enjoyed much greater freedom of movement back then, and so many things had changed in the intervening time. Thousands more residents had flooded in, for a start, refugees from both France and the charred wastelands of the Middle East, making the already cramped suburb almost intolerably overcrowded. There was very little chance that Fabia would have given up her small but precious council flat.
'So why not just talk to her now, when she walks past?' Mirsaad asked.
'Now is not the time, Sadie. I just need to confirm she's here. Then we're going back to your place. You have my thanks and your marching orders. I'm afraid when I come back in here tonight, I'll be coming on my own.'
'But this is madness,' he protested, turning his body toward her in the cramped confines of the car. He had to release the seat belt to do so. 'You have seen how it is here. You cannot hope to move around unaccompanied. For you it will end badly. Very badly.'
'Not for me, buddy,' she assured him as movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention. It was Fabia, walking with a woman who was wrapped up in a dull gray ankle-length coat and escorted by a middle-aged man in
