The Whole Truth (34 page)
She’d wrapped the small metal device in a layer of sterilized mesh surgical wrap. “You can’t keep this in there long,” she said. “I’ve sterilized it, but there will eventually be infection. It’s unavoidable.”
“Funny, you didn’t say that the last time.”
“The last time was different.”
“Not for me it wasn’t.” He touched his side. “You never said me having
this
thing in me long-term was a problem.”
“Apples and oranges,” she snapped. “That device is like a pacemaker, designed for long-term use inside the body. But not this thing. So, as a doctor, I am giving you that warning. There will be infection here.”
“Duly noted.” Shaw grunted. “Now stick it in.”
She carefully wedged the device into the wound, her nimble, gloved fingers finding a small cavity where it would fit.
The pain made Shaw’s entire body shake.
“Take my hand, Shaw, squeeze it,” Katie offered.
“No,” he grunted.
“Why?”
“Because I’ll break every damn bone in it.”
A second later, the armrest came away in his hand, the screws sheared off.
Leona withdrew her fingers from the wound and looked with satisfaction at her work.
“I can put new staples back in, or even cauterize it.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t be able to get to the damn thing when I need it, Leona. Which is the whole point,” Shaw snapped. “Old-fashioned thread will be just fine.”
She shrugged, cleaned the wound as best she could, stitched him up, wrapped gauze around it, and sat back.
“All done.”
Katie let go of Shaw and also let out a relieved breath. Shaw slowly sat up, carefully moving his arm.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
“For you, Shaw, anything,” she said sarcastically. “As you said, I so clearly
owe
you.”
“Yeah, well now we’re even.”
“At
least
even,” she corrected. “The needle in fact might have swung to my side.”
“I don’t think so. Calling it even was a gift on my part.” He put his shirt on. While he was buttoning it up she glanced at the scar on his right side. “How is it working, by the way?”
“Ask Frank, I’m sure he’d love to tell you all about it.” He reached over and pocketed the tiny instrument she’d used to put the metal device in his arm. “For old time’s sake,” he said, when she looked ready to protest.
As they were leaving Leona stopped him at the door. “Is that thing in your arm what I think it is?”
“You never know, Leona, you just never know.”
“S
HAW, ARE YOU GOING TO TELL ME
what’s going on? What is that thing in your arm? How do you know that Leona person? Where’d you get that scar on your side?” Katie fired off these questions as they ate dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel across the street from St. Stephen’s Green in central Dublin. It was late enough at night that they had a quiet table in the back and could discuss things. Though Shaw didn’t appear to be in a
discussing
mood because she’d been asking these same questions for hours and hadn’t gotten a single answer in return.
He stoically finished chewing his food. He hated Dublin now. He’d asked Anna to marry him here, at a little place north of the Liffey. On his knee with the damn ring. She’d said yes in nine languages. And now she was dead. There would be no marriage, no four or five kids, no growing old together. Nothing. Everywhere he looked he saw some place, some nook, cranny, smell, sound, even a funny thing the sky did, the drop of the rain, the honk of an Irish car horn that reminded him of her. He could barely breathe here. He could barely function. Hated it. And that wasn’t all.
Anna was on her way back to Germany for burial with parents who blamed him. Blamed
him
for the death of a woman he would have gladly sacrificed his own life to protect. Anna on a cold metal bed in London with a hole in her head. Anna being shipped to cold, lonely ground in Wisbach, for all of eternity, instead of being held in his warm arms. Safe, together.
Katie interrupted these thoughts. “We need to find out who was really behind the Red Menace.”
“The whole world has been looking, and nobody seems to have found it yet.”
“I’m not sure the whole world
really
has been trying to find out the source. They’ve just accepted that it was true, sort of a rush to judgment. Or if they did look it wasn’t very hard. And then events kept happening and kept people jumping. After awhile, the story didn’t become
who
was behind it, but what the hell are we going to do about the evil Russians. I think the whole world was basically snookered.”
Shaw looked at her with new respect. “That’s sort of what Anna was thinking.”
“I’ll take that as a big compliment.”
“Any ideas?” he asked.
Katie pulled her chair closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve actually been giving that some thought.” She dug in her purse and pulled out a battered notepad. “When I was in Anna’s office that day she had to step out to see someone and I sort of looked around.”
“You mean you were snooping,” Shaw said a little angrily, instinctively defending Anna’s right to privacy.
“Do you want to hear what I found or not?”
“I’m sorry, go ahead.”
“I looked through some of the Red Menace stuff on her desk and some notes she’d jotted down. One was a list of Web sites or e-mail addresses. Maybe she’d contacted them. Anyway, one stuck with me and I wrote it down.”
“Why’d it stick with you?”
“It was called Barney’s Rubble-Land. You know,
The Flintstones
? It was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. Anyway, it was a blogger page. I didn’t check it out then, but while you were showering back at the hotel after Dr. Doom worked on you, I accessed the site from my laptop.”
“What’d you find?”
“This blogger, apparently his name is Barney, had some questions about the Red Menace too. From his postings he didn’t think it was legit.”
“How does that help us?”
“Well, quite frankly, I didn’t think the blogger site was legit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think Barney is a sham. I have lots of friends who’re bloggers. You get obsessed with them, write stuff all the time. There’s really nothing regimented about them. Free association, spur-of-the-moment stuff. And you usually have a place for people to discuss things. I mean, that’s one of the main reasons to have a blog in the first place. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, this blog didn’t have that. I checked the dates of the postings. They come out every other day at the same time. That doesn’t sound like Barney’s Rubble-Land to me. It sounds like it was on some sort of preset spit-out-a-blog mode, bi-daily pattern.”
“Why would someone set up a system like that?” Shaw wondered out loud.
“They might if instead of a real blog, it was a way to test the waters.”
“Test the waters?”
“Yeah, people in the entertainment and ad fields do it all the time. I actually did a story on it years ago. You put out a product and you want to gauge people’s reaction to it. You can have focus groups, opportunities to phone in opinions, Web site discussions. But some companies go a step further. They use blank drops, like a façade to get people to
really
let them know how they feel without feeling pressure. It can be a fake Web site, 800 number phone bank, or a questionnaire put out under a sham company’s name.”
Shaw looked very interested now. “So you’re saying this Barney Rubble might have been a façade to test how people were reacting to the Red Menace campaign?”
“And since Barney’s blog was highly critical and suspicious of the campaign . . .”
“They might have put that carrot out there to see if anyone else felt the same way. But you said there was no forum on the site to leave your opinion.”
“But if you e-mailed the site, which Anna did—”
Shaw finished for her. “Then they get your e-mail address. And Anna’s e-mail was [email protected].” He looked sharply at Katie. “That may be how they found out about The Phoenix Group. Not through you.”
“That’s probably something we’ll never know for sure.”
A minute of silence passed while they fiddled with the remains of their meals.
“Katie, I . . .”
“Don’t even go there, Shaw. This thing is complicated and we’ve both made mistakes. And we’ll both probably make some more along the way.”
“Let’s just hope one of them doesn’t end up getting us killed.”
“Can we track this Web site somehow? I’m not that great with technical things.” Shaw nodded, made a call to Frank. He put his phone away and finished his wine. “We’ll see what he comes up with.”
“So are we staying in Dublin?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We’re flying out tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Germany. A little town called Wisbach.”
T
HERE IS NEVER A GOOD DAY
to bury someone. Even when the sun is shining and the air is warm, there is nothing whatsoever positive about laying a cold body in the cold earth, particularly someone with three bullet holes that cut her life short by at least four decades. And in Wisbach there was no sun, no warmth. The rain was coming down in sheets
and
buckets as Shaw and Katie sat in the car at the graveyard that was set next to a small church.
They’d flown into Frankfurt that morning and driven over. Going through airport security in Dublin the alarms had sounded when Shaw had stepped through the metal detector. The wand the security guard ran over him homed in on his left arm.
“Roll up your sleeve, sir,” the guard had ordered, an edge to his voice.
When his gaze hit the row of metal staples revealed under the bandage, he flinched.
“Damn, does that hurt?”
“Only when I roll up my sleeve,” Shaw answered.
At the gravesite the rain had turned the mound of fresh earth next to the six-foot-deep hole into a mud pile. Anna’s coffin and the people here paying their respects were under a large tent set up next to the gravesite to keep them reasonably dry.
Shaw had decided not to join the mourners. He’d spotted Wolfgang Fischer’s lumbering figure, Natascha next to him. Neither looked very tall today. They seemed bent, destroyed. So Shaw just sat in the car. And watched them lower the coffin into the grave. Wolfgang nearly collapsed with grief. It took several men to get him back to the car.
Next to him Katie felt tears slide down her cheeks as she watched.
Thank God
, she thought,
that I don’t have to write death lines about this
. She looked at Shaw. His gaze was impassive, his eyes dry.
“It’s so sad,” she said.
Shaw didn’t answer. He just kept watching.
Half an hour later the last person had left and the gravediggers moved in, tempest and all, to plant Anna in the earth of Wisbach for good.
Shaw got out of the car. “You remember what to do?”
She nodded. “Just be careful.”
“You too.”
He shut the door, glanced around, and headed to the hole in the earth, trying not to think about the much bigger one in his heart.
He pulled some euros from his pocket and asked the diggers, in German, to give him some time alone here. No doubt happy to be relieved of their wet duty, they took the money and fled.
Shaw stood next to the grave and looked down at the coffin. He did not want to visualize Anna inside that box. She didn’t belong there. He spoke in quiet tones to her, saying things he should have said while the woman was alive. He had many regrets in his life. The most devastating by far was not being with Anna when she needed him most.
“I’m sorry, Anna. I’m sorry. You deserved a lot better than me.”
He grabbed a shovel and spent the next half hour filling in her grave. He felt it was his task to perform, no one else’s. He was soaked through to the skin by the time he was done, but didn’t seem to notice.
He looked at the headstone. It gave Anna’s full name, Anastasia Brigitte Sabena Fischer. Her dates of birth and death. And the phrase at the bottom in German, “May our beautiful daughter rest in peace.”
“Rest in peace,” Shaw said. “Rest in peace for both of us, Anna. Because I don’t see peace ever coming my way again.”
He knelt down in the mud, his head bowed.
As he did so the two men stepped clear of the trees, guns in hand.
The car horn instantly split the silence of the cemetery and then Katie slid down in her seat.
Startled, the two men ran straight at Shaw.
A split second later the rear glass of the car Katie was in was shattered by a gun blast.
I
N A BLUR OF MOTION
, Shaw erupted forward like a blitzing linebacker, knocking both men to the ground. In another instant his pistol was stuffed nearly down one man’s throat as his partner lay unconscious next to him.
A moment later the men in black swooped in.
Katie sat back up in the car, flicking glass off her. She looked anxiously over at Shaw. When he rose from the ground clutching one of the gunmen, she breathed a sigh of relief and climbed out of the car.
Twenty feet behind the car Frank stood over the dead man who’d tried to kill Katie. She joined him.
Frank said, “Sorry we cut it so close. Bastard got the shot off before we could nail him.”
Later, they sat in an empty barn outside of Wisbach. The two would-be killers were manacled together back to back in the middle of the straw floor.
Frank, Katie, and Shaw stood together in an informal powwow.
“Thanks for agreeing to back us up on this,” Shaw told Frank.
“Hey, other than keeping the world safe and secure, I’ve got lots of time on my hands.”
They’d already run the pairs’ prints through the usual databases and gotten zip for their troubles. Their interrogation so far had resulted in a cascade of foul language from the man who’d ended up chewing on Shaw’s gun barrel. By contrast, his partner, a beefy man with a stoic expression, hadn’t said a word. He looked like he might not even speak English. They’d tried several other languages out on him but his silence remained golden. They had no IDs. Two pistols and a gutting knife were the only things of interest found on their persons. The dead man had been similarly sterilized.