ANNA PACED ACROSS THE Savonnerie carpet in a different hotel room—this one on Unter den Linden, the main boulevard in the Berlin City Centre. Charlie sat in an armchair, watching her. The curtains were drawn.
“I don’t know, I had just hoped he wasn’t involved,” she said. “And yet I was afraid all along that it was true.”
“Does it matter a lot? I mean, he’s a part of the machinery now, right? If not him, someone else.”
“No, it does matter.” Her eyes turned to his, underlining the point. “He’s the sort of man who can actually make this work. They know that; that’s why he was recruited. That’s what your father feared. What I feared. He knows how this can work. He’s a man with utterly no moral bearings. He could make something like this happen and, in a sense, he would enjoy it. Like the person who sets fires because he gets a thrill seeing the fire engines respond. I heard him talk about it in those terms once. That if you let loose a genetically engineered virus, you could depopulate a city in a matter of hours.”
“But Vogel wouldn’t have the resources to do this by himself,” Charlie said. “This is obviously bigger than him.”
“Yes. But he is the one person who could carry it out. I don’t know that anyone else would want to be involved in that way. He was groomed for this, I’m sure.” She finally sat down again, perched on the edge of an armchair. “I heard the stories, too: that Vogel was ill. Or that he’d died. That he had gone back to Russia. That his daughter was ill. I had wished they were true. Maybe he spread those stories himself.”
“He expects to become a very wealthy man because of this, Keller said.”
“Yes, I’m sure he does. But it isn’t just the money. You don’t understand. He has a certain madness driving him, too. I know that. That’s what I was afraid of.”
Charlie stood and walked to the kitchen bar. He poured himself a small drink of Glenlivet scotch in a shot glass. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’m going to have to find him, then, aren’t I? I just hope Keller was careful.”
“Yes.”
“We have an address now.”
Anna sighed. Moments later, her eyes changed. “Can we do something else, first?” she said, her voice sounding timid and childlike. Charlie sipped his drink and set the glass down. “Before it gets too late? That thing you wanted to practice?”
“Oh. Yes.” He smiled. “I think we probably should.”
She came toward him. Charlie felt her silk-like hair and smooth skin against his face. He folded his arms around her back and held on. In the bedroom, they began to take off clothes, hurrying, as if there was a need to do it quickly or the opportunity would pass.
“You’re not going to say this is wrong, are you?”
“I was thinking about it,” she said.
They reached for each other on the bed and kissed, then made love slowly and satisfyingly. He held her afterward and she held him.
Lying in the dark, he said, “You’re not sleepy at all, are you?”
“Not really.”
“You’re thinking about Vogel. What’s coming.”
“Of course. How could I not be?”
“Tell me more about him.”
She did, for nearly a half hour, unmooring thoughts that he knew she had never shared, relaying details about the projects she had worked on with him. Afterward, they held each other again, and Charlie closed his eyes and felt ready for sleep. He may have actually been sleeping when he heard her voice again.
“There’s one other thing,” she said.
“Hmm.”
“You never did tell me about the tattoo on your ankle. Angelina.”
“Oh.”
“You said the next time we met.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. You said that in Nice. Who was she?”
“Just someone I went to school with. Back at Princeton. A lot of years ago.”
“What happened?”
“I can’t really say.”
“Did she break it off?”
“I can’t remember. I think we both did, actually.”
“Why?”
“I guess because we looked into the future and didn’t see the same thing. She was on a fast track. An attorney. Someone who was destined to have a big public career. I wasn’t. We were smart enough to figure that out.”
“Any regrets?”
“None.”
“Good.”
Several minutes later, he realized that she was sleeping. Charlie felt her ribcage lifting with each breath, her heart beating on his arm. It was a very nice feeling, and he wanted to stay awake a while longer so he could savor it.