“The Georgetown Inn,” she said. “It’s only a couple of blocks. That’s why I thought it would be okay to take a walk, you know? I mean, just around the corner, get some fresh air . . . Oh, God . . . My bag, I had everything in there. . . .”
“Here, I’ll walk you back,” he said, taking her good arm.
It took only a couple of minutes. Along the way they exchanged names. The woman was Sandra Marcotti, in town for a meeting with a firm of lobbyists. At the hotel, Vermulen spoke to the front desk, explained what had happened, and left his contact details. Then he gave the woman his business card, and shook her hand, quite formally.
“Good night. You take care now, ma’am. If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just call.”
As he left, Sandra Marcotti looked at his card for the first time. At the top it said, VERMULEN STRATEGIC CONSULTANCY and then, below that, LT. GEN. KURT VERMULEN Dsc, PRESIDENT.
My God, she said to herself. He’s a general.
Back on the street, Vermulen got out his phone, intending to call his friends and explain his absence. Before he could dial, he noticed a flashing icon, telling him he had a message waiting.
It was a woman’s voice, a southern accent: “Hello, Lieutenant General Vermulen? This is Briana, from the president’s office at the Commission for National Values, here in Dallas. I know you expressed an interest in addressing our organization. Well, we have a meeting of our charter members coming up in Fairfax, Virginia, day after tomorrow, and one of our speakers has dropped out. I appreciate it’s awful short notice, sir, but if you could take his place, we sure would be grateful.”
Vermulen listened to the rest of the message, which gave contact details for confirming his appearance. As he walked back toward the restaurant, he looked a whole lot happier than he had walking out.
12
F
inally Carver was making progress. The last few mornings he’d managed a short stroll around the gardens that surrounded the clinic. Alix went with him, patiently telling him the names of all the people they met, the same names she’d told him just the day before. They played little games to see if he could find his way back to the main entrance from different parts of the grounds. On the rare occasions he succeeded, or recognized a passing face, Carver lit up with boyish glee at his own achievement. But just as often, something or someone spooked him. All that was needed was a sudden loud voice, a car backfiring, even the low winter sun dazzling his eyes, and he was plunged into a cowering, weeping anxiety that had nurses dashing over to administer sedatives and return him to his room in a wheelchair.
There came a point, as she watched his slumped body being wheeled away after another panic attack, when Alix realized she couldn’t go on like this, doing nothing. It wasn’t just the need for money, however acute; it was a matter of self-preservation. She had to find a way to make him better, not just for him, but for her, too: for them. With every day that went by, she could feel herself falling a little more out of love, and she hated it. Her feeling for Carver was the one true emotion in her life. To lose that would be to lose everything.
She left Carver unconscious in his bed and went back to the apartment, determined to take charge of her destiny and maybe to take charge of his. As she washed the smell and depression of the clinic from her body and hair, she reminded herself of the well-trained, resourceful agent she had once been. What would that woman do? Simple: She would steel herself, and get on with her job.
By the time she’d made lunch, she’d decided.
She dressed in the cleanest, least shapeless pair of jeans she could find, a plain white T-shirt, and her winter coat, with a scarf around her neck and a beret over her hair. She slipped her only pair of shades alongside her purse in her shoulder bag. She took a small pair of wire cutters from the household tools Carver had left in a kitchen drawer. She was ready for action, she had a plan, and just having that sense of focus, the spur of determination, made her feel better than she had in months.
Her first KGB operations had taken place in smart hotels, whether in Moscow or Leningrad. She knew how those places worked, and felt at home amid the flow of workers and guests. That’s where she’d go to work now.
Her first choice was the Impérial, one of the city’s classiest establishments. It attracted wealthy foreign tourists and businessmen to its rooms, and the bankers and diplomats of Geneva to its bars and restaurants. It was the perfect environment for Alix to rediscover her old magic. First, however, she had to dress for the performance, and since she lacked the means to buy the right clothes, she would have to find another way of acquiring them.
She walked right by the front of the hotel and went around the block to the staff entrance at the rear. The entrance was wide enough to admit vans into an unloading bay. To one side there was a small hut. Time clocks were fixed to the wall beyond it, where the cleaners and catering and maintenance staff clocked in and out. Alix went up to the porter standing guard in the hut and spoke in her worst French and strongest Russian accent.
“Excuse, please,” she said.
The porter was reading a tabloid newspaper. He ignored her.
“Excuse,” she repeated. “Have appointment with housekeeper, fifteen hours, for get job chambermaid.”
The porter reluctantly dragged his eyes to the date book in front of him.
“Name?”
“Yekaterina Kratochvilova,” said Alix, speaking quickly in an incomprehensible gabble of syllables.
The porter gazed helplessly at the open page, an angry frown on his face. He clearly hadn’t a clue what she’d just said.
“Not here,” he said. “Come back another time.”
“Impossible! I make appointment. Please to look again, Yekaterina Kratochvilova.”
A couple of uniformed maids walked by, turning their heads to see what the fuss was about. Alix caught their eye.
“Maybe you help,” she called to them. “I come see housekeeper, have appointment. She can see me now, yes?”
The maids looked to the porter for guidance.
“It’s not my decision,” he insisted. “There’s nothing in the book.”
Alix gave the two women another pleading stare. She’d timed her performance carefully. By three in the afternoon, any guests that were leaving a hotel would have checked out and their rooms prepared for the next occupants, but few of the coming night’s guests would have arrived. It was the quietest time of the working day, when even the busiest housekeeper might be able to see an unexpected job applicant.
One of the maids took pity.
“I’ll go and get her,” she said.
“Thank you, thank you,” Alix gushed, while the porter looked on indifferently.
The maids disappeared.
Alix took a couple of steps backward, out of the light.
The porter returned to his tabloid.
A middle-aged woman appeared at the far end of the passage, tight-lipped and stern-eyed, her steel-colored hair pulled back in a bun, reading glasses hanging from a gold chain around her neck. She was talking to the chambermaid, clearly irritated by the intrusion.
It took Alix no more than a couple of seconds to fix an image of the housekeeper in her mind’s eye. Then she slipped away from the entrance, unseen by anyone as she left. By the time the housekeeper got to the hut, she was long gone.
13
K
urt Vermulen looked around the banquet hall where the Commission for National Values was holding its private meeting. The room was located on the fifth floor of a modern hotel close by a shopping mall on the outskirts of Washington. The interior designer had gone for a gentlemen’s club effect, with dark paneling, lights in ornate sconces, and vintage oil paintings in gilt frames. Vermulen hoped the men he’d come to address weren’t equally phony.
The meal had been cleared away, and the speeches were about to begin. Vermulen, however, would have to wait his turn. For now a stocky, pugnacious man, in a sober black suit, his shock of silver hair glinting in the glow of the chandeliers, was making his way to the podium, which had been placed on a low stage just behind the top table.
His name was Reverend Ezekiel Ray. Across a swath of states in the South and Midwest he could draw crowds to hear him preach that would put platinum-shifting rock acts to shame, but today there were no more than eighty men present. No women had been invited, and the only brown faces in the room belonged to the waiters.
This select congregation belonged to the innermost core of a secretive organization, invisible to the public eye. Its membership constituted some of the heaviest hitters in American conservatism: politicians, preachers, lobbyists, strategists, lawyers, academics, and business leaders. Their congregations ran into millions, their fortunes to tens of billions. They could bankroll candidates, or boycott TV stations. Though they were, for the time being, denied control of the White House, they still wielded enormous, if well-disguised influence on their nation’s politics.
The “national values” with which the commission was concerned were defined in a very particular way. They felt that it was immoral, even blasphemous, to keep God out of government. Their God, however, was a very specific, Baptist Christian deity, and they regarded the followers of Islam with a fear and hatred equaled only by the loathing that Islamists felt toward America’s satanic, crusader culture.
These were not Kurt Vermulen’s values. He believed in God, but his faith was a personal, private affair. When it came to the country for which he had so frequently risked his life, he believed that the Constitution was a more important document than the Bible, and that the nation’s Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they argued for the separation of Church and State.
At this moment, he wasn’t in the position to debate such philosophical niceties. He needed every friend he could get, and if that meant talking to his audience in their own language, he would do it. So Vermulen aimed to pay careful attention to Ezekiel Ray: to both what he said, and how.
For a while, Ray stood in silence, acknowledging the applause that had greeted his arrival at the podium. He waited till it had risen to a crescendo before he bowed his head and clasped his hands in front of him, murmuring the words of Psalm 19: “ ‘
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.
’ ”
His audience responded with a murmured “Amen.” Again, the preacher let the silence build, holding himself in a pose of prayer and contemplation until he suddenly stood tall again and flashed a smile that lit up the room as brightly as the chandeliers.
“My friends,” he began, “I bring you joyous news of our Savior’s return! This is news of exultation for those who are brothers and sisters in Christ. But it is news of pain, and death, and eternal torment for those who have turned away from Christ, those unbelievers who mock the Lord and wallow in the sin and temptation offered by the Antichrist.
“You know the news I’m talking about. You have the words of the first letter to the Thessalonians, chapter four, verses sixteen and seventeen, engraved upon your heart.
‘For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:
“ ‘Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.’ ”
Many of the congregation had mouthed the words as they were spoken, and murmurs of approval greeted their conclusion.
Ray nodded in acknowledgment. “Gentlemen, we only have to look around us today to see those who are pious, God-fearing, and living a life of decency and morality. But if we turn on the television, or read the poisonous words of the media elite, we see those who
mock
the word of God . . . who sneer at those who believe . . . who degrade the holy institution of matrimony . . . who wallow in decadence and fornication.
“Believe me, they will soon be cut down by the sickle of Christ, and all the followers of the Antichrist with them. For their day of reckoning is coming soon, as the word of the Lord makes plain.
“Consider the second epistle of Timothy, chapter three:
‘In the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection . . . despisers of those that are good . . . lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.’
“The Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty-four, warns that ‘
nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom . . . And many false prophets shall rise . . . iniquity shall abound.
’
“Sounds familiar. Sounds like the world today. So now we wait for the final warning that the end is nigh, the arrival upon the earth of Satan himself. Gentlemen, you must be on your guard. For Satan will come soon, and when he does come we must make ready for war.
“We know where that last, great battle will take place, for it is written that
‘he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.’
“As you know, this place truly exists. It is the hill of Megiddo, which stands in the land of Israel. And you can visit this place. You can see it with your own eyes.
“But do not be afraid of this great battle. For the Christ who will return in glory is a mighty Christ, a warrior Christ, riding on a white charger, a Christ who will make His enemies tremble. So be joyful that He comes. Be happy that you will be saved. But be prepared for that final conflict between good and evil.
“For He is Christ . . .
“He brings us rapture . . .