The Lie (13 page)

“Where are the cameras?” Paulie asked.

Dechen stubbed out his cigarette and rose. “Just about everywhere. Come. I’ll give you the tour.”

Outside the security office, the rooms and corridors hummed with the hushed voices of tourists. Their faces were solemn, their
eyes wide, their feet shuffling.

The major unlocked a door off a central corridor and took Paulie into the surveillance room. Two uniformed guards sat with
earphones on, watching banks of closed-circuit television screens. Paulie saw many of the same people on the screens he had
just passed in the corridors and other rooms.

“We have cameras covering almost every usable space in the building,” said Major Dechen. “Other than for the actual toilet
stalls, they even cover the rest rooms.”

He took a set of headphones from one of the guards, let Paulie wear it, and had the guard switch on the audio for one location
after another as Paulie listened to the sound connect with the video. Breathing the same air freshener he remembered from
the security office, Paulie followed Major Dechen out of the locked surveillance room with its banks of silent screens and
continued the tour.

“Understand, Mr. Hendricks,” the major said, “the surveillance room is normally manned and functioning just for high-security
occasions. I have it operating today only to demonstrate its coverage to you and some other security people I’m expecting
this afternoon.”

He led the way down into the lower-level library section, where about a dozen researchers were bent over books and microfiche
screens.

“As a matter of fact,” continued the major, “two of the people I’m expecting later are from your own State Department’s inspector
general.” He looked at Paulie. “Did you know they were coming?”

“Yes.”

“But of course they don’t know about you.”

“That’s right, Major.”

“I understand.”

You only think you do
, thought Paulie.

They circled the stacks of books and went into the utility area. Then they came back to the library and stood silently in
a corner.

“How do you feel about spending so much time in this place?” Paulie asked. “Or is it just another job to you?”

“This could never be just another job to me.”

The major looked hard at Paulie Walters. “Let me tell you something, sir. Every day I spend about half an hour just watching
the faces of those passing through here. I see how they look and what they feel. That in itself is enough to keep me from
blowing my brains out for at least another day.”

K
LAUS
L
OGEFELD LAY ON HIS BACK
, the young woman fitted smoothly over him, her mouth sucking on his as they neared the end.

He tasted the Chardonnay on her tongue and the wine tasted better to him this way than it had from a glass. His hands were
on the soft spread of her hips and he felt the trembling there first as she began her final run. Then the shaking was all
through her and she was taking him right along, until they cut loose whatever was left and cried out together.

They lay in the sudden stillness, gasping for breath in the cool, blue-green dark.

They were in her apartment, not his. Klaus never took a woman to his own place. That would have been a breach of an essential
security. Let a woman into your burrow and she was halfway into
you
. One of his more inflexible sexual precepts. Along with never making love to the same woman more than three times, and never
spending the entire night with her.

My basic survival code
, he thought.

Or was he simply mad?

At times, it had begun to seem so.

Especially in the brighter lights of his memory, when moments with some wondrously appealing woman would return and they would
be merged in moonlight. Then a hundred details would be set loose: strands of perfumed hair, a
soft loving voice, a young body just learning to feel, its nerve endings still curled like fernheads in the first days of
spring.

Faces and words came back to hurt him and he cast them away like some ghostly plague. Why? He had retreated into an emotional
deadness, and he wanted no one to call him out.

He did have love and caring in him, but he let it be for the greater number rather than just one.

Only once had it been for one, and that was enough. Too much. Sometimes, in dreams, it was still too much, with her bending
to him as he lay alone. He would make the mistake of reaching up through the dark to touch her face and feel only his own
wet eyes. That was better, he supposed, than touching the blood and torn flesh to which she had finally been reduced when
they were both sixteen and he was still making bombs until a bad fuse went off too soon.

Maybe I should have died with her
.

Near midnight he got out of bed and began to put on his clothes.

“I wish you could stay till morning,” said the woman.

She was very young, barely past twenty, and looked even younger. As he became older, younger became better.

“Are you sure you can’t stay?” Her voice was soft, almost pleading.

“You know I can’t.”

“I don’t know anything. You’ve never even told me why. Are you married, or living with someone, or what?”

“None of the aforementioned, Pigeon.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you had someone else,” she said. “That wouldn’t bother me. I just love being with you.”

Klaus switched on a small lamp to help him find his socks. “Why on earth do you love being with me?” he asked.

“Because you know absolutely everything.”

“That’s all?”

“And you’re wonderful in bed.”

Klaus laughed. “At least
that
makes some sense.” He leaned over the bed and kissed her forehead.

She looked up at him, unsmiling, her dark eyes wide. “When am I going to see you again?”

She never would, of course. This was their third time together.

“I’ll call you,” he told her, and went out of the room, out of the apartment, and into the midnight quiet of Rome’s streets.

There was not a taxi in sight, but it was not too far to where he lived. His body suddenly felt weightless, and he was just
as pleased to walk.

Moments later, a shiny black Mercedes glided slowly past him and stopped at the curb about fifty yards ahead. A man got out.
He paused to light a cigarette and stood smoking under a street lamp.

As Klaus drew closer, he saw that it was Nicko Vorelli. He saw, too, that no one else was in the Mercedes, and that every
move had been deliberately thought out so as not to startle him. The pulling up to the curb a fair distance ahead, the street
lamp to make Nicko instantly recognizable, the lighting of a cigarette to keep both hands in clear view were all for reassurance.
Yet none of these things were enough to dispel the cloud of foul intent that Klaus could feel himself entering.

“Dr. Vorelli,” he said.

“Hello, Professor.”

Neither man offered to shake hands: they just stood staring at each other in the small island of light. Klaus glanced around
at the passing traffic and a few late strollers along the Tiber.

“It’s all right,” said Nicko. “I’m alone. I just thought it might be a good idea if we talked a little.”

Klaus considered Dr. Nicholas Vorelli. Standing there in his dark, impeccably tailored suit, his manner cool and poised, his
eyes knowing, he made Klaus feel the difference between them. It might have been that of a malodorous peasant with sweaty
palms, confronting a member of the reigning aristocracy.

“How did you know I’d be coming out at this time?”
Klaus asked. “How did you know I wouldn’t be spending the night with her?”

“Because you never spend a whole night with any woman.”

Klaus knew the worst of it then. “How long have you had me under surveillance?”

“Long enough.”

Klaus shook his head in disgust. “I thought I was watching my back every second.”

“You were. I just have good people. Quite honestly, Professor, other than for a few of the more current details, they haven’t
told me anything about you that I hadn’t already known. They’ve done little more than confirm my own judgment of you.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re very dangerous.”

Nicko touched the German’s arm, gently urging him forward. “Shall we walk? I always feel more comfortable in motion.”

Klaus was unable to imagine Nicko less than comfortable under any conditions. In the near distance, he saw the floodlit walls
of the old Colosseum and the Palatine Hill where emperors once built their palaces. Things change, he thought.

“I’m not going to ask what you were doing inside Warnsee the other night,” said Nicko. “You would only lie, and there’s nothing
I can do about it anyway. It might be helpful to us both if you gave me some idea of what you hope to get out of the conference
on the thirteenth.”

“The same things you want from it.”

“You’re so sure you know what I want?”

“I
should
know. There’s nothing you’ve ever written or said on the subject of human rights that I haven’t swallowed whole.”

Nicko stopped and looked at Klaus. “You’re a strange man, Professor.”

“You mean besides being dangerous?”

“It’s all part of the same package.”

Nicko began walking again. “Since you’re so sure of yourself,” he said, “suppose you give me four specific motions of your
own you’d like to see adopted by the conference before it breaks up.”

“I can give you a lot more than four.”

“I don’t want a lot more. Just the four you feel most strongly about.”

Klaus thought it through as they walked.

“All right,” he said. “I’d like to see a permanent, international committee established, a quick-reaction strike force to
back them up, a multibillion-dollar fund to give them independence, and an immediate move into Liberia, Angola, Burundi, and
Rwanda to impose cease-fires and end the slaughter and suffering.”

“You don’t like the United Nations?”

“What’s there to like? They’re an exercise in futility, politics, and speech-making.”

“If I were to ask you for a brief, one-line message to be sent to the world by Wannsee,” Nicko said, “and to be adopted by
your committee as its guiding principle, what would it be?”

Klaus did not have to take time to think about this one. “We must love one another or die.”

“
This
from a bomb maker who kills?” said Nicko.

Klaus looked surprised. “Who would know better?”

P
AULIE
W
ALTERS FINISHED
a solitary dinner in his Rome hotel room and poured a third glass of Chianti, feeling tired, hurt, and depressed.

He had spent a futile, frustrating couple of days in his hunt for Klaus Logefeld, and he was fast approaching a dead end.
Dieter Hoffman had given him nothing in Berlin, Sebastiano Pucci turned out to have accidentally blown himself to bits i a
Florence more than two years ago, and the first of his two leads in Rome, Amelia Vorto, had disappeared from his only known
address. Roberto Spaderi was the last of the four links to Logefeld that Tommy Cortlandt had given him.

He planned to check out Spaderi later that night.

In the meantime, wanting Kate, he carried his Chianti over to one of the twin beds, propped a couple of pillows behind him,
and called her number in Naples.

“Tell me something nice,” he said when she answered.

“I miss you terribly.”

“A good beginning.”

“I adore you.”

“Go on,” he said.

“I’m only half alive without you.”

“Now you’re getting it.” Paulie sighed, delighted with Kate’s voice: warm, familiar, and full of affection over the phone.
“Except I’m afraid they might pass some sort of law against you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re addictive. I can’t get through a day anymore unless I hear your voice.”

“When are you coming back to me?”

“Soon.”

“Where are you tonight?”

“Rome.”

“At least you’re getting closer.” His other calls had been from Florence and Berlin. “I’ll bet you’re really a traveling lingerie
salesman,” she said.

“You’ve finally found me out.”

He had concocted a story about having to look over some new galleries bidding to represent his work, but it sounded hollow
even to him.

“Have you been changing the dressing on your arm?” Kate asked.

“Of course. Every day.” Actually he hadn’t, and the wound was starting to bother him.

“I know when you’re lying.”

“You mean you’re some kind of witch?”

“Please, Paulie.” Kate’s voice had turned serious. “You can’t fool around with that kind of lesion. You could end up losing
an arm. Promise you’ll take care of it as soon as you hang up.”

“I promise,” he said.

Paulie tried to picture Kate as he had seen her last, but somehow he was unable to conjure her up, resulting in an instant
of panic.

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I want to be able to see you.”

“A T-shirt and jeans.”

“Does it say anything on the T-shirt?”

“Yes. ‘Life stinks. Then you die.’”

Paulie laughed. “You’ve just made my night.”

“I got it before I met you.”

“What does your latest one say?”

“ ‘Life is a dream. Don’t ever wake me.’”

“I love you,” Paulie told her, needing to say the words.

“I love you too. Just take care of your arm.
You
may not need the two of them, but
I
do.”

When Paulie hung up moments later, he put the receiver down slowly, smiling, remembering Kate. He sat propped against his
pillows for a while, thinking of her, sipping his wine.

Then he went out to a public phone near the hotel and called Tommy Cortlandt in Washington, where it was close to 2:00
P.M.
His last call to the CIA director had been made two days ago, when he reported on his security visit to Wannsee. Cortlandt
had asked him to check back again tonight for possible follow-up information.