Blown Read Free

soon as it hit their tongues, crushing the cups in their fists and tossing them to the ground; but Daniel didn’t mind.
    And then, nearly four hours after the race’s start, he saw a face he recognized.
    A white rime of sweat had dried on her flushed cheeks, so that they were mottled as frosted strawberries. She was lean as a Thoroughbred and her long legs were shaking slightly as they moved toward him; a few strands of her dark hair, pulled back in a tight ponytail, dangled by her ear. Dana Enfield. The Speaker’s wife. Couldn’t miss her face, it was plastered all over the newspapers and magazines, taking money from honest people’s purses and giving it to doctors so’s the abortion rate could rise and keep more of the Devil’s Spawn alive. ’Fore you know it they’ll be breeding babies for their stem cells and killing them at birth. A real factory operation for the Zoggites in power.
    She was looking at him, too, her dark eyes filled with something that might be pain. He held out a cup.
    “Is there an aid station?” she gasped, “somewhere around here?”
    He pointed toward the Marines who were working the crowd farther down the road.
    “Thanks,” she said.
    And drank his dose to the dregs.

Chapter 2
    LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, 9:43 A.M.
    The beauty of that Sunday morning—the unseasonable blue of the arcing sky, the crisp breeze tugging at the few remaining leaves—was lost on Caroline Carmichael. There are no windows in the vaults of the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, no view but computer screens and cubicle partitions and the unremitting whiteness of the walls. The fluorescent lights sang to themselves somewhere high over her head, beyond the register of human sound, and a screen saver wove through its monotony of variation. Otherwise the Counterterrorism Center was quiet and almost empty. Only her branch chief, Cuddy Wilmot, was there to witness her act of defiance, and he did so from the safety of his office doorway, leaning wordlessly against the jamb. She was cleaning out her desk.
    It had been more than ten years since Caroline had received her security clearance, the badge with the bar code that admitted her to the CIA’s compounds and covert installations, the months of training in weapons and tradecraft and raw survival that most intelligence analysts never used. She was moving slowly this morning, like a woman who hadn’t slept in days, shifting the piles of useless paper into the brown paper burn bags with her left hand. Her right arm was wrapped in a sling. Seven days earlier she’d been shot in the shoulder while the vice president of the United States died a brutal death. Tomorrow she would attend the woman’s funeral. And then—and then what, exactly? She had no answer for the question of how to live the rest of her life. It was enough to burn the evidence she’d accumulated thus far.
    “You’ll have to come back for your exit interviews,” Cuddy told her. “There are papers to sign. Statements. Dare will want to see you.” Dare being Darien Atwood, Director of Central Intelligence, Grand Poobah of the nation’s spooks. Exit interviews. Vows of silence. They would take her badge. Caroline shrugged dismissively, and remembered too late that it was painful.
    What was Cuddy feeling, exactly? Regret? Helplessness? Abandonment? He was standing over her as she sat cross-legged on the industrial carpet in her jeans, no makeup on and her blond hair tumbled over her forehead. They’d met this way before, in the off-hours of a hundred Sundays wasted in the secure vacuum of the Tempest-tested vault. They’d shared sleepless nights of hunting the terrorist hydra, a beast struck down in one place only to rise in another. They were the U.S. government’s acknowledged authorities on a group called 30 April, neo-Nazi killers who’d kidnapped and murdered the vice president in Germany two weeks before. But she and Cuddy had been operating on partial information for years. Deliberately deceived