Making her way through the trees into a deserted utility yard, she crept past sheds full of machinery, rolls of Astroturf and heaps of dead flowers until she entered the grounds of the cemetery itself. Here she stopped and listened again. A slight wind stirred the birch leaves, and a dove was cooing somewhere, offering a plaintive counterpoint to the distant sound of the minister reciting the Lord’s Prayer. She headed for the sound until she caught sight of the sun glinting off the chromed winch that held Hans’s casket. She crept closer. She was close enough to see a tall woman with full pale lips approaching the grave. Once there, she dropped a rose on the casket, then stepped away, pulling a black veil across her face. Yvette, thought Elizabeth, ducking discreetly out of sight behind one of the larger crypts. It occurred to her suddenly that Hans had never shown her a picture of his wife, nor had she ever asked to see one. She was almost sorry she had seen her now. The woman looked so strangely blank, so bitter, so distracted, as if-the thought came to her suddenly-Hans had somehow left the woman he had married penniless. Or was that her own desolation talking?
She tried to feel the loss, the reality of it, but the tears refused to flow. Was everyone else feeling empty at this moment? Was that Hans’s legacy? To leave behind nothing but blankness and bafflement? Then Elizabeth caught sight of another woman, this one standing slightly off from the rest, sobbing so deeply her shoulders shook. No one seemed to know what to make of her, or who she was, and several people moved a step or two away embarrassed. For Elizabeth, suddenly the floodgates opened. She found herself crying so hard she was wracked by a physical pain that hit her in the gut and twisted her throat so badly that she thought she might choke. With that, she lost all hope of remaining hidden. She, too, was sobbing out of control, causing several of the mourners to turn in her direction. The grief-stricken woman also turned, and her eyes locked on to Elizabeth’s like a traveler lost in an infinite desert catching a glimpse of another human being. Elizabeth felt a flash of recognition She struggled through her grief to think who this woman might be. Hans’s mother? No. It couldn’t be. She was tiny, this woman, sinewy and dark, almost Mediterranean, with a closed-off, deferential air, even in her grief, like a forgotten aunt or a beloved old family servant. Hans’s nanny, maybe? Did he ever have a nanny? And if this wasn’t his mother, where was she? Or his father? Were his parents even alive? What did she or anyone, for that matter, really know about this man? What did anybody know, apart from the realities of his financial success and sports trophies? The woman was approaching her.
Elizabeth started to back away, then held her ground. What she had mistaken for a Mediterranean complexion, she now saw as the woman drew closer, was a leathery suntan. The woman came right up to her, reached out a tiny hand and gripped Elizabeth by the wrist. “Elizabeth,” she said, her eyes intensely meeting Elizabeth’s as if over some invisible abyss. Startled, Elizabeth shot a glance toward the woman with the black veil. They were out of earshot of the other mourners, but the small, tanned woman’s hand was still on her arm. Elizabeth felt an icy chill. “How do you know my name?” she asked. The woman’s lips tightened. “I’m-I was-his mother.” “Oh. I’m so sorry.” So Hans had actually spoken of Elizabeth to another human being, to his mother no less. Her heart was beating so hard she was having a hard time breathing. She stood there in a daze, listening to the woman breathe, feeling, for a brief moment at least, strangely calm. It was the first time she had ever been with anyone who knew Hans, someone who had loved him. That fact alone seemed to give her strength. “I was hoping to talk with you,” the woman said, her eyes red and her voice husky from tears. “You were?”
“Yes, I was,” the woman said matter-of-factly, and her deep-set brown eyes studied Elizabeth. She had a Southern accent-Texas, EIizabeth guessed.
“I think I could use talking to someone about now,” Elizabeth admitted quietly. “I can imagine.” The woman stuck out her hand. “I’m Rose-Anne.” With a covert glance in Yvette’s direction, Elizabeth shook it, then dropped her voice. “You knew about me?” “Oh, yes.”
She gathered her courage. “Then there’s something you should know. I was talking to Hans moments before he died. Before the … accident.” She realized as she said this how frightened she was. She looked back toward the widow. Yvette was now staring right back at her, and in the next moment the two men in pin-striped suits she had noticed outside the chapel turned slowly around to face her way as well. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” Rose-Anne said abruptly. Elizabeth looked back at her, feeling suddenly that time was running out. “Something doesn’t make sense,” she said hurriedly. “About his death. About the way he died.” Rose-Anne nodded gravely. “You know the restaurant Kronenhalle?” she asked. Elizabeth blinked in confusion. “What, in Zurich? By the river?” “On Ramistrasse, yes. Meet me at the bar, next Tuesday. Three o’clock. Is that good for you?” “Three o’clock. Yes. That’s fine. I’ll be there.” “I’ll look forward to it,” said Rose-Anne, and releasing her grip on Elizabeth’s arm, she turned back toward the knot of mourners. Elizabeth saw one of the men whisper in the other’s ear. The second one nodded, and Elizabeth felt a stab of anxiety so acute she ducked out of sight behind the monument and started running back into the birch grove. My God, she thought wildly. Yvette had him killed! No, but that’s insane, she decided.
But why are they watching me?
If they are watching, if I’m not going crazy. She forced herself to stop and look back. Through the trees she could see that nobody was looking at her now-all eyes were on the grave-Yvette, Rose-Anne and the others were turned again to the ceremony as Hans Brink-man’s casket was lowered into the ground. She could not see the two men in suits, however. Elizabeth turned and ran back to the sheds, her heart pounding. She found a ladder tall enough and slammed it to the wall, scaled it and jumped to the sidewalk. From there she ran for a long time, as if her life depended on it. And for all she knew, it did.
VIEQUES ISLAND, COMMONWEALTH OF PUERTO RICO
Vieques Island was unique in the Caribbean. To begin with, it was half-civilian, half-military, and known to very few off-island civilians. A scant six miles from the east end of Puerto Rico and officially Puerto Rican territory, Vieques was an island tom between contrasting eras. Cattle and egrets dotted its heavily wooded hillsides, and its fifty-one square miles held only eight thousand year-round residents, most of whom earned their living from raising livestock, fishing or farming sugarcane much in the way of their sixteenth-century ancestors. The other Vieques, very much of the twentieth or even the twenty-first century, was host to a vast United States naval installation that dominated both its eastern and western extremities. This base, a two-island monstrosity ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, was called Roosevelt Roads. It was composed of 31,000 acres, 8,600 on Puerto Rico, and some 22,000 acres on Vieques itself. In addition to seventeen naval station departments, Roosevelt Roads contained sub-bases or facilities for the Army Marines and United States Coast Guard. It was a virtual hive of military activity, and much of that activity was classified. The eastern end of Vieques was a gunnery and bombing range, and had for three decades been the center of fierce controversy Both the local community and various environmental groups had fought its existence since the 1960s, angrily claiming that it had more craters than the moon. To add insult to injury, the Navy had recently returned to practicing with live napalm as well. Colonel Oscar Henderson knew some tree-hugging sonofabitch would forever be surveilling it through binoculars, and that was why, as far back as 1958, he had vetoed Frederick Wolfe’s idea of building his lab on the eastern shore, no matter how many feet down it could be buried. Instead, he had funded a state-of-the-art facility at the far end of the western compound. Since the island spanned 33,000 acres, the bulk of it owned by the Navy, there was plenty of spare room to build the necessary buffer zone. And so, beginning in the early 1960s, Wolfe had been authorized to conduct his experiments in genetics here, operating under a blanket of secrecy that had allowed him unprecedented freedom as a government scientist. A close friend of a string of secretaries of the navy, Wolfe had promised results that would pass down great benefits to humanity, beginning with the personnel of the Navy itself. But more important, politically speaking, he promised the Navy brass he would monitor any changes in civilian DNA that might be occurring-as was feared by certain bleeding hearts-as a consequence of the range’s lesser known activities. It was known in-house that the munitions being tested on the bombing range released an increasingly exotic mixture of particulates and gases into the air each time they exploded. On a typical day of bombing practice, perhaps three hundred tons of munitions-TNT, NO3, NO 2, RDX and Tetryl-loosed their smoke and debris downwind. The Navy was nervous, but since it was nine times cheaper to fly in their fighter-bombers from their base at Cherry Point, North Carolina, than it would have been to send them to its alternative, Nellis Air Force Bomb Range in Nevada, no one wanted to close the range. Besides, who wanted to wait for the goddamn Air Force to find room in their schedule when the Navy had its own class-A bombing range right here? So Wolfe had monitored and advised, keeping everyone placated with his genetic experiments, none of which the Navy really understood, or wanted to. And to further ingratiate himself, Wolfe volunteered to open and run a first-rate OB-GYN clinic on the base, one that would make it the envy not only of the rest of the Navy but of the entire armed forces. It was an instant hit, and one of the most popular and successful services Wolfe offered was fertility counseling. The small white clapboard clinic on an obscure naval base on an even more obscure island soon became a Mecca for Navy families frustrated in their attempt to have children. The word quickly spread that Dr. Frederick Wolfe had the golden touch when it came to ensuring pregnancies, and couples young and old flocked to his door. Over the course of fifteen years, before the clinic was absorbed by Bethesda Hospital in Maryland, over fifteen hundred children were born in Vieques, and of these, nearly two hundred were the result of in vitro fertilization, donor sperm and, later, fertility drugs. Frederick Wolfe was a hero on the base. Absolutely no one questioned a single thing he did. His prestige soared even higher when he was awarded a top secret contract by an agency so classified that even the Navy was not copied on its intent or progress. The Navy did, however, benefit from a healthy increase in Wolfe’s funding, gladly adding a ring of iron-clad security around his outermost facilities, and, once again, asking no further questions. It was into these facilities that the body of Hans Brinkman was delivered.