The Casey Collins Trilogy

1

1Only two o’clock in the afternoon, but it was the twenty-seventh of December and dusk had fallen in Denmark. The corner tower of Kronborg Castle was stark against the bruised sky. Slivers of icy wind pierced my down jacket. A strand of blond hair pulled free from my knitted cap, whipped across my eyes, forced out tears. A sob escaped me, too. The wind snatched the sound away, silencing my fear but not dulling the ache in my heart. I shoved my hair under the cap and stumbled on. I had to. Up ahead waited the only person who could tell me that Stefan Krajewski was still alive.

And he had to be! Stefan, my lover, had to be alive.

Just four months before, he’d said too many people knew that he was doing contract work for Danish intelligence. He’d spent close to twenty years in covert operations and his time was up. Soon, he’d told me at the beginning of August, he’d move inside.

And he’d move in with me. We’d been in the Allegheny Mountains when he said that. I’d saved up my annual leave, rented a cabin near Clifton Forge for the month of August. The two of us, one bed, no phone for an unheard-of thirty-one consecutive days. And I must have thought thirty-one times—at least once a day—This is what it will be like. Coffee-drenched mornings, sharing a newspaper. Late-afternoon beers, talking over the minutiae of daily life. Evening strolls down to the lake to see if the beavers were having a moonlight swim.

With my body and my soul, I’d loved Stefan for more than a decade, my passion for him never wavering even though we were often separated by the work he did. When we were together, we had everything we needed for happiness—except time. Finally, we’d have that, too. The urgency gone, so many hours stretching out before us, we could squander them. That was how I wanted things to be. My cherished fantasy, shattered now by reality.

Six days ago, a plane had exploded over Scotland. Another plane over Scotland! Global Flight 500 had departed Heathrow on December 21, bound for New York’s Kennedy Airport. It came apart a half hour later over the Inner Hebrides Islands. And Stefan had disappeared.

I neared the corner of the castle and a row of ancient cannons took shape. The fortress hulked beside me, Denmark’s easternmost defense for six centuries. Through the gloom I made out the tall figure of Holger Sorensen, cloaked in a Danish Army parka, standing with his back to the sea. I walked faster, scattering frozen pebbles beneath my boots.

I stopped a yard from him. He was a head taller than my five feet nine and I had to tilt my chin up to see his face. The lines along his cheekbones had deepened since our last meeting. His eyes had faded from blue to gray. And the smile was gone from them, replaced by the consoling expression of a priest prepared to mourn the dead.

I stepped past him, stared unseeing across the water toward the Swedish coastline.

Holger’s gloved hand was heavy on my shoulder. In a voice weighted with sorrow, he said, “Kathryn.”

I’d forgotten Holger always addressed me by my Christian name. These days my friends and colleagues called me by my initials, KC, and I wrote it as “Casey.” The only other person who still used “Kathryn” was my father. And only when he was going to give me bad news.

To stop Holger’s next words, I said quickly, “I’ve seen the passenger list.” I took a breath, pushed on. “Stefan’s name wasn’t on it. He knew Monday was the anniversary of Lockerbie. He wouldn’t have flown an American carrier on Monday.” I was breathing hard, as if I’d been running. My fingertips moved jerkily along the frost-rimed barrel of a cannon.

Holger didn’t speak.

I said, “We warned everyone in the Department not to fly American carriers out of Europe last week.”

Holger’s voice was soft. “Did you tell Stefan that?”

“I couldn’t.” Anguish raised my voice still higher. I took another breath. “I didn’t have a chance.”

He said, “Nor did I.”

The mournful cry of an air horn cut through the darkness. The ferryboat was visible a hundred yards offshore, its white hull wallowing toward the docks at Helsingør. A lone seabird rose from the stony beach below us.

Holger said, “It was some time ago you and Stefan made plans that he would join you in Washington for Christmas?”

“October.” And stingy fate had doled out only eighteen hours that time.

“You made definite plans?”

“Tentative, of course. Two weeks ago, he sent word to expect him on the twenty-second.”

“But you haven’t spoken with him since October?”

“He never used phones.”

“And when he didn’t show up?” Holger asked.

“I knew his trip to the US was no vacation. A lot of things might have delayed him a day. Even two days.”

“So at first you didn’t blame his absence on the explosion?”

“At first? No.” I’d started my Christmas vacation on December 21, on leave from my job at the State Department. When the news started coming in about Global Flight 500, I was sticking bows on a gift for Stefan, a pair of cowboy boots I’d bought from a Western outfitter who sold to real ranch hands. I’d kept an eye on the TV while I struggled to wrap the matching Stetson. Polish by birth, Stefan was smitten with Western regalia.

As I waited for him to contact me, my mind slowly recorded every piece of film from the Hebrides. Long-lens shots of the motley rescue flotilla that had set out from every harbor on the island of Islay. A terse interview with an exhausted diver, his wet suit glistening like black ice. A somber view of the distillery warehouse serving as a makeshift morgue, aged oak barrels stacked against a stone wall. And above it all—again—the ash-gray sky of Scotland in December.

The explosion hadn’t occurred over Scottish soil. The Boeing 747 and all two hundred and twenty-seven aboard submerged in the Firth of Lorne, one hundred and fifty miles northwest of the original disaster. But the words spoken by every newscaster were the same: Lockerbie Two.

Holger’s voice prodded me. “But you got no message from Stefan and you feared the worst.”

I turned, still avoiding Holger’s eyes, studying Kronborg Castle. The weathered bricks were topped by a roof the color of new grass, eerily bright against the murk. The worst. “Yes.”

On the twenty-third, I called the airline but they wouldn’t release information to me. Frantic, I phoned my contact in TIPOFF, the Department’s terrorist lookout program, and she faxed me the passenger list for Global 500. Half the names were of men traveling alone. Any one of them might have been Stefan, working under cover. Too upset to face my co-workers in the office of State’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, I waited until after hours to go to the Department and log on to Intelink, the intelligence community’s private internet. I spent four hours searching electronically. I found only speculation. There was too little data to determine yet if Stefan had been on the plane. I knew I should stay by my phone, wait for his call.

I drifted around my three rooms, carefully evading the packages still sitting on my desk. Christmas Eve came. I moved Stefan’s gifts to my bedroom. Then to the back of my closet, out of sight. But, awake before dawn on Christmas morning, I saw that white hat. Saw Stefan, grinning from under it, flamboyant attire no hazard in the life we should have been living.

I met Holger’s gaze. “As you said. I feared the worst. I figured you and I needed to talk.”

“You traveled to me.”

He’d been my teacher once. I answered his unspoken question, my voice flat, parroting a lecture on evasive maneuvers. “Christmas morning I went to Dulles and got an Air France flight to Paris. Changed planes three times between Paris and Gøteborg. Rented a car, drove south and crossed to Denmark on the ferry yesterday. Went through that whole business to get you out here today.”

Holger’s compassionate look was gone, the sudden clarity like a tempered steel gate, clanging shut. The Major—the part of him that served as a reserve officer in the Danish Army—had pushed aside the Father—the side of Holger that made it possible for him to also serve as a Lutheran priest. He said, “Go home. There’s nothing you can do here.”

“I’m staying. Till we find out what’s become of Stefan.”

“We can’t pursue this further. Stefan was checking on another development, one also related to the Lockerbie anniversary. That investigation is at a critical point. We must proceed delicately. My arrangement with Stefan required that he work autonomously. I don’t know yet what identity he assumed. Nor do I know the names of his contacts, or his destination. Were it not for you, I would not be certain he had headed for the US.”

“Maybe he suddenly went someplace else.”

“Without advising you? Not likely.”

I looked down, my boots a darker shade of black than the stony ground. Stefan and I had secure ways to communicate. He knew how much I’d worry. If he were alive, he’d have found a way to tell me.

Holger gripped my upper arms. “We cannot alert anyone to the direction in which our interests lie. My people will keep their distance from the wreckage of Global Flight 500. So must you. You must return at once to Washington.”

“Not until I know—”

“When was the last time you slept? The last time you ate?” His voice was harsh and he tightened his grip. “I feel only bones.”

“I’ve always been lanky,” I said.

“Slender, yes. But not this. Your face is so thin, you must have lost five kilos since I saw you last.”

“So I’ll eat something. I’m fine, Holger. I can help—”

“You can’t. You left a trail easily read by anyone who wishes to know where you’ve been.”

I pulled away from him, turned toward the sea. Only the whitecaps were visible. The cold enveloped me completely. I smelled nothing and didn’t taste the salt coating my lips. “I had to see you—”

“And I put a great deal at risk so that you could. But it is unfortunate that your journey ends only kilometers from my own parish.”

“Stefan was on his way to me. If he’s dead . . .” I swallowed, tried again. “I hunt terrorists. That’s my job. What I do. If they’ve killed Stefan . . .” I took a deep breath, made my voice hard as Holger’s. “I have to stay. Have to work with you.”

His face was marble. Unyielding. “You can’t remain in Europe. You’re not safe here.” His eyes took on that steely expression again and he said, “You leave first. Drive to Kastrup and fly back to Washington.”

Rage welled up in me and its heat seemed to warm the air between us. “I’ll go back to DC. But I’m not through with this. I can’t be. I have to find out who did this.” I started away from him, pebbles skittering under my heels.

“No, Kathryn.”

If he said more, his warning was lost in the wind.

I hurried down the pathway and back around the outer wall of Kronborg Castle. The darkness outside was as complete as in the ingenious dungeon beneath my feet. It featured a shrinking cell that was reduced in size each day until any turncoat Dane who’d collaborated with the invading Swedes was crushed by his own refusal to confess.

Above me, a pennant snapped with a cracking noise. The keening wind blew in off the Øresund, the sound as haunting as the ghostly voice of Hamlet’s father demanding revenge. I was running over the cobblestones. My Opel was parked in the public lot on the far side of the castle moat. Once behind the wheel, shivering, I picked my way through the seaport town of Helsingør, then out onto the motorway southbound toward Copenhagen.

I’d been driving for fifteen minutes when I saw a sign announcing that it was a thousand meters to the highway exit that would take me to Farum. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service—DDIS—had a safe house there. Stefan and I had stayed in it for six months after we fled from Poland.

Cold War Poland was where we’d met. In 1986, I was a junior officer in the US Foreign Service, assigned to work at our embassy in Warsaw. Stefan Krajewski was a local hire, tutoring new arrivals like me in the Polish language. He was six and a half feet tall with well-defined chest muscles under his black turtleneck, his belly as flat as an athlete’s. He wasn’t handsome—his nose was too large and bony, his mouth too wide, his lips too full—but he was in far better shape than most language teachers. During duller lessons, I diverted myself by imagining him naked.

But never did I imagine that he worked for the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the SB, Communist Poland’s clone of the KGB. Not until he approached me with an offer of intelligence data the US badly needed.

The Abu Nidal Organization had recently massacred Christmas travelers in Rome and Vienna, bombed a TWA flight over Greece and trumpeted its intention to do worse. Stefan was the liaison officer between the SB and the Abu Nidal Organization’s band in Warsaw. In that role, he picked up information about the terrorists’ plans. He offered to pass whatever he learned to the US government, using me as the conduit.

An attractive offer. But there was a catch. Stefan needed a reason for meeting with me—one both the SB and the Abu Nidal Organization would find legitimate. It had to appear that he’d recruited me to spy for him.

Of course, I reported Stefan’s approach and my security officer notified the Department. In another time and place, that would have been the end of it. Jaded spy-watchers would have dismissed Stefan’s offer as a sophisticated version of the honey trap and I’d have been warned against further contact.

But in 1986, we were desperate for a way to stop Abu Nidal. I was told to play along with Stefan to see if he’d pass me anything useful. Very likely, Stefan would tell me nothing while he tried to turn my imitation recruitment into the real thing. I was to proceed with extreme caution. My security officer was more succinct: “Don’t let him get in your pants.”

To protect myself, I reported every meeting I had with Stefan and got approval in advance to hand over the documents he demanded—a list of home telephone numbers of Embassy staff, a floor plan of the chancery, duty rosters for the communicators. All of it innocuous stuff that the SB could get from a dozen sources.

But that’s how recruitment works when it’s real. Minor treason becomes major. Entrapment is a cumulative process, each compromising act leading to something more serious. No one in the Polish SB doubted that Stefan had turned me into a traitor, not until the very end.

And it wasn’t until the end that I discovered that Stefan was not a loyal agent of the Polish SB. He’d joined forces with Holger Sorensen. He was working under cover for Danish intelligence. Lucky for me, because I was beyond rescue. Before I’d known Stefan a month, I was crazy in love with him. I struggled against my feelings. I made all the logical arguments. But logic wasn’t worth a damn when it came to Stefan. In some primitive corner of my soul I knew—I knew—I belonged with him.

That spring the US bombed Libya. Terrorist groups struck back in Europe and the Middle East. Authorities were able to prevent attacks planned for London, Ankara and Paris, because of information Stefan passed to me. Enraged, Abu Nidal ordered us killed. We escaped to safety in Denmark. The Department granted me emergency leave. And I spent six precious months in the Farum safe house with Stefan.

Ahead of me, the brightly lit exit sign reflected off the mist-slick asphalt, gilding the ramp so that it beckoned like a honeyed road to the past. I smelled again the gunpowder on my hand, lingering from target practice at the military range. I breathed in the fragrance of healthy sweat, mine mixed with Stefan’s, the odor as fresh as if we’d come from a vigorous workout. The air around me thickened with the haze of tobacco smoke. For a second I saw Stefan in the passenger seat, the burning end of his cigarette accenting the strong bones of his face.

If I exited, in another minute Stefan’s left hand would find my leg. I’d feel his warmth through my jeans, the heat of his touch spreading through me as we drew closer to home. The instant I parked in our driveway, I’d bring his face to mine, feel the softness of his lips, taste again the mingled flavors of desire.

The exit sign flashed past and darkness stretched out before me. I opened the window to let in the winter air, struggling to fill my lungs before another wave of sorrow pulled me under.