The Lie (27 page)

His first incident in more than a week and when did it hit him? Not with a pair of loaded automatics pressed to his head but
during one of the most relaxed moments he’d had in a long time.

Sitting there, he clamped his jaws against a possible outcry and stared at himself in the mirror. His color was gray-green.
His skin oozed moisture. He touched his cheek and it felt cold. His eyes in the icy fluorescent light appeared unseeing. The
entire lavatory seemed made of glass. One wrong move would shatter everything.

He heard a groan and sweat soaked his neck, his shirt. The toilet tilted beneath him and he slammed his hand against a wall
to keep from going over.

Then the door burst open and Maggie was staring at him, her handcuff dragging her chair.

“I’m all right,” Jimmy Dunster told her.

Seeing Professor Mainz and his grandfather peering over his wife’s shoulders, he forced a grin that came out a gargoyle’s
grimace.

They half walked, half carried him back into the surveillance room. Maggie grabbed a towel and mopped his face, his neck,
his hands.

“Did you take a pill?” she asked.

The president nodded. “It’s fine. It’s working.”

He saw the way Professor Mainz was looking at him, saw Major Schadt’s eye blinking rapidly.
My new extended family
.

“Stop looking so worried,” Jimmy Dunster said. “I won’t die and ruin all your plans.”

Klaus turned to Maggie. “What is it, Mrs. Dunster? What’s wrong with your husband?”

Maggie remained silent.

“What sort of pills do you take, Mr. President?” asked Klaus.

“A painkiller my doctor prescribed.”

“May I see them, please?”

“Why? Are
you
hurting too, Professor?”

Klaus stared evenly at Jimmy Dunster. “I don’t want to have to go through your pockets, Mr. President.”

Dunster felt his body change tone as the pressure in his chest eased. “They’re nitro pills. Nitroglycerin.”

“What’s wrong with your heart, sir?”

“Nothing that can’t be lived with.”

“Or died from,” said Maggie.

She said it softly, but it came out with the hiss of steam under pressure.

“Is that true?” the old man asked Dunster.

“My wife leans toward the melodramatic, Major. Actually, I’ve been living with this and functioning very well for months.”

“Who else knows about it?” asked Klaus.

“Just my personal physician. And that’s how I intend to keep it until I’m out of office.”

Jimmy Dunster sat cooling himself, once again experiencing the relief of having made it safely to shore.

No one spoke. Something was happening and they were waiting to see where it would go.

It was Klaus Logefeld who finally said to Dunster, “My grandfather and I would like you to do something we feel would benefit
us all.”

“What would that be?”

“Earlier, you said you were impressed with the terms of our treaty demands. You said you thought they had real substance.
Did you mean that?”

Dunster nodded.

“Would you make a statement to that effect before the cameras?”

Jimmy Dunster stared at Klaus and the old man. “You really think an endorsement made under a death threat means anything?”

“In your case, yes.”

“I’m not that special.”

“You underestimate the stature of your office, Mr. President. It overrides your mortality. Doubly so when you truly believe
in what my grandfather and I are trying to do here. And nobody in this room could possibly doubt that belief.”

Dunster let it all filter through him. He was beginning to feel like a prize game fish hooked deep. In the heart.

“You mean because you and the major have fixated on me as your blood brother?” he said flatly.

“No. Because you obviously risked your life just to be here.”

“S
O WHAT HAPPENED
?” asked Tommy Cortlandt.

Dr. Nicholas Vorelli was back in the security office to report on his visit to the surveillance room. Present once more were
the CIA director, Major Dechen, and Paulie Walters in his persona as Agent Hendricks.

“It was downright depressing,” Nicko said. “There wasn’t the slightest give. I may as well have been talking to myself.”

“Who
did
you talk to?” asked Major Dechen.

“Just Professor Mainz. I never glimpsed the president and his wife, or the old man. Mainz had them off in the lavatory before
he let me in.”

“Did you discuss their treaty terms?” pressed Cortlandt.

“Yes. I told him they were brilliant. I said I agreed with every major point and would back them all the way. Just let the
president go, I told him, and I could all but guarantee conference approval and amnesty for him and his grandfather. But I
said he had to do it now because all sorts of disasters could happen during the next seventy-two hours.”

“How did he respond?” asked Cortlandt.

“By as much as telling me to go to hell. He said he had spent half his life making a careful study of reason versus force,
and it really was no contest.”

Nicko turned to Paul Walters. “So what I’ve been thinking, Mr. Hendricks, is that since we’ve just given reason a fair chance
and failed, maybe it’s time we tried the professor’s own alternative.”

Paulie looked deep into the doctor’s eyes and said nothing.

“I was impressed by that device you described before,” said Nicko. “Do you suppose you could set me up with something like
that so I can get back in there with a gun?”

Paulie shook his head. “You’re way ahead of yourself, sir. That’s not how these things work.”

“How
do
they work?”

“First, it has to be decided whether it should even be attempted.”

“Who decides that?”

Paulie glanced at Tommy Cortlandt and Major Dechen, but they remained silent.

“To begin with, those of us right here in this room,” said Paulie. “Later, perhaps Chancellor Eisner and the pro tempore American
president.”

“And if it’s decided?”

“Then the mechanics of the operation would have to be worked out. Something that’s always dangerous with lives at stake and
no margin for error.”

Cortlandt broke in. “You never told us, Dr. Vorelli. When the professor patted you down before, did he feel your arms?”

“No. He never touched them.”

“Have you ever fired a handgun?” asked Major Dechen.

“Yes, Major.”

“What about firing at someone who’s shooting back?”

“I’ve done that too, sir. And the fact that I’m sitting here talking about it has to tell you
something
.”

It told Paulie, for one, a great deal. But what it failed to tell him was the purpose of Nicko’s playacting.

They sat like four tired hunters in the dark of some early-morning blind.

Nicko studied the three men facing him. “Well, gentlemen? Am I going to get a shot at this or not?”

“You mean you want an answer right now?” asked Cortlandt.

“If possible, Mr. Director.”

“Then speaking for myself, the only thing I’d be willing to commit to at this moment is a very conditional maybe.” The CIA
director looked at Paulie and Major Dechen. “Could you gentlemen live with that?”

The security chief offered no more than a slight nod; Paulie, not even that.

“It’s too dangerous to be anything but a last resort,” said Cortlandt. “We still have seventy-two hours before we reach that
point. Still, I can’t see any harm in preparing a few things in case of a sudden emergency.”

The CIA director appeared to consider Nicko with fresh interest. “You’re actually ready to go through with this, Doctor?”

“I said I was.”

“I know what you said.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“I don’t
understand
it. At best I see you with less than a fifty percent chance of getting out of that room alive. Why on earth would you want
to place yourself in such a position?”

“I thought I explained all that at our last two meetings.”

“You’re a worldly, practical man, Dr. Vorelli. I just can’t imagine you putting your life on the line out of a sense of guilt.”

Nicko drew deeply on his cigarette, blew a trail of smoke, and sat watching it spiral upward.

“All right,” he said. “If practicality is what you’re looking for, then how about fifty million American dollars contributed
to my favorite cause? World freedom.”

Tommy Cortlandt stared. “Are you serious?”

“Very.”

“You mean you didn’t just scrape this off the top of your head?”

“Not at all, Mr. Director. It’s been a dream of mine for almost twenty years. I’d certainly have put it on the table anyway
before going much further with this. Since you’re pressing for reasons you can understand, we might as well talk about it
now.”

No one spoke.

“Here’s the deal,” said Nicko. “If I go into that room and bring out the president and his wife alive and well, your government
makes a cash donation of fifty million dollars to the Olympus Freedom Foundation in Naples sometime during the following twenty-four
hours.”

“If you don’t get them out alive and well?”

“There’s no obligation.”

The CIA director’s face was blank. “What made you pick fifty million?”

“Because it seemed a fair measure of the Foundation’s current budget needs.”

Nicko looked at Tommy Cortlandt. “Consider it this way, Mr. Director. I’m Wannsee’s only hope of getting completely free of
this calamity. Which means whatever amount I name, it has to be a bargain.”

“Why?”

“Because unless I get in there and eliminate Mainz and his grandfather before they’re granted amnesty and disappear, our respective
governments are still going to have to face whatever future demands they might decide to make. Or have you forgotten their
seven mined buildings?”

“I haven’t forgotten a thing,” said Cortlandt.

“So even if we hand them everything they’re asking, and the Dunsters are safely back in their White House beds, Mainz and
the old man will still be writing key parts of our agendas.”

Nicholas Vorelli considered his audience of three. “I think that should certainly be simple enough to understand.”

A
T
10:00
P.M.
B
ERLIN TIME
, Klaus Logefeld called his first four-hour conference break. He then announced that President Dunster would make an important
public statement when the Wannsee delegates reconvened at 2:00
A.M.

Twenty minutes later, Paulie Walters and Kate Dinneson were in a hotel room just a few miles down the road from the conference
center.

Fifteen minutes after that, they were asleep.

They slept holding each other.

Until in one of Paulie’s brief, vagrant dreams, Kate suddenly was gone and he awoke calling her name.

Grief rasped out of burning eyes and a parched throat. “Kate!”

The bedside lamp came on and she was holding him again.

“What is it, Paulie?”

It embarrassed him. “A dream.”

“That bad?”

“You were gone,” he said.

Kate saw the touch of wetness on his cheek.

She turned off the lamp and they lay in the dark.

“How much more time do we have?” Paulie asked.

“About forty minutes.”

“I’m sorry I woke you.”

“I’m not.”

Paulie was silent and Kate could feel him leaving her.

“So what’s finally going to happen?” she asked.

“Who am I? God?”

“For me, in this, yes.”

“In one way or another people are going to die,” he said quietly. “Logefeld and his grandfather for sure. About a fifty percent
chance for the president. Slightly better odds for the president’s wife. And if we ever get as far as the blowing of just
one of those mined buildings, Christ only knows how many hundreds more.”

Paulie pursed his lips as though adding up a terribly expensive bill. “I don’t suppose your friend Vorelli has told you, but
he’s been pushing to get in there and shoot Klaus and the old man himself.”

He felt Kate stiffen.

“But how? I don’t understand.”

Paulie briefly told her about Nicko’s meetings with them in the security office and his visit to the surveillance room.

“You knew nothing about any of this?” Paulie asked.

Kate shook her head.

“But what I
did
know,” she said, “was that Nicko had worked a fifty-million deal with Klaus to let him and his grandfather go ahead with
their plans for Wannsee.”

It was Paulie’s turn to be surprised. “When did Vorelli tell you that?”

“About a week before the conference. When he told me he had gotten me a press pass for Wannsee and that he might be needing
my help there.”

“What sort of help?”

“Nicko never said. Soon after we got here, he apologized for even wanting to involve me and said to forget the whole thing.”

In the following silence, Paulie groped for signs of logic. “A couple of things I can’t figure. If Vorelli has this big money
deal with Logefeld, why is he so eager to kill him? And what’s suddenly happened to his concern about those tapes and pictures
of you going to the police if Logefeld dies?”

“I guess Nicko was worried about Klaus not paying off, and decided to do business with your CIA director instead.”

“But that money would be going to the Olympus Freedom Foundation.”

“Which Nicko controls.”

Naturally
, thought Paulie.

“As for those tapes and pictures of me,” Kate said. “A few days ago Nicko located and destroyed Klaus’s three extra copies.”

“He told you that?”

“He more than told me. He let me watch them burn.”

“And the originals and negatives I saw in Logefeld’s apartment?”

“Nicko burned those an hour after Klaus left for Wannsee.”

K
LAUS
L
OGEFELD OPENED THE DOOR
to a single cameraman at exactly 1:45
A.M.
and had everything ready for the planned telecast ten minutes later.