Games of State

Liz Gordon had just finished grinding up coffee beans and was lighting her first cigarette of the day when the phone rang.

"I wonder who that can be?" the thirty-two-year-old said to herself as she took a long pull on her cigarette.

Ashes fell on her Mike Danger nightshirt and she brushed them off. Then she absently scratched her head through her curly brown hair as she listened to see where she'd left the cordless phone.

Since rising at five, Liz had been going over some of the things she might say when she visited the Striker team later this morning. At their third group session two days before, the elite but very young soldiers were still in shock as they mourned the loss of Charlie Squires. Rookie Sondra DeVonne was taking his death especially hard, sad for Charlie's family and also for herself. Through tears, the Private had said that she'd hoped to learn so much from him. Now all that wisdom and experience was gone. Not passed on.

Dead.

"Where is the freakin' phone?" Liz snarled as she kicked aside the newspapers by the kitchen table.

Not that she was afraid the caller would hang up. At this hour it could only be Monica calling from Italy. And her roommate and best friend would not go away until she got her messages. After all, she'd been gone nearly an entire day.

And if Sinatra calls, thought Op-Center's Staff Psychologist, you want to be able to get right back to him.

For the three years they'd been living together, Liz's workaholic freelance musician friend had done all the nightclubs and weddings and Bar Mitzvahs she could get.

She'd been working so hard, in fact, that Liz had not only ordered her to take a vacation, but had kicked in half the money to make sure she could go.

Liz finally found the phone sitting on one of the kitchen chairs. Before picking it up, Liz took a moment to change worlds. The dynamics between Liz and each of her patients were such that she created separate worlds in her mind for each of them, and inhabited those worlds fully in order to treat them. Otherwise, there would be spillover, lack of focus, distractions. Though Monica was her best friend, not a patient, it was difficult sometimes to make a clear distinction between the two.

As Liz slipped into her Monica world, she checked the message list from under the Chopin magnet on the refrigerator door. The only ones who had called were Monica's drummer, Angelo "Tim" Panni, and her mother, both of whom wanted to make sure she got to Rome okay.

"Pronto, Ms. Sheard!" she said as she clicked on the phone. A telephone hello was one of the two Italian words she knew.

The decidedly masculine voice on the other end said, "Sorry, Liz, it isn't Monica. It's Bob Herbert." "Bob!" Liz said. "This is a surprise. What's happening in the land of Freud?" "I thought Freud was Austrian," Herbert said.

"He was," Liz said, "but the Germans had him for a year. The Anschluss was in 1938. Freud died in 1939." "That's almost not funny," Bob said. "It looks like the Fatherland may be flexing its muscles for a new era of empire-building." She reached for her cigarette. "What do you mean?" "Have you watched the news this morning?" Herbert asked.

"It doesn't come on till six," she said. "Bob, what the hell happened?" "A bunch of neo-Nazis attacked a movie set," Herbert said. "They killed some of the crew, stole a trailer filled with Nazi memorabilia, and drove off. Although no one's heard from them, they appear to have taken an American girl hostage." "Jesus," Liz said. She took several short puffs.

"It appears as if the group was led by a woman named Karin Doring. Heard of her?" "The name is familiar," Liz said. She took the phone from the kitchen and began walking toward the study. "Give me a second and I'll see what we've got." She switched on the computer, sat down, and accessed the database in her office at Op-Center. In less than ten seconds, the file on Doring had been downloaded.

"Karin Doring," she said, "the Ghost from Halle." "The Ghost from where?" Herbert asked.

"Halle," Liz said. She scanned the report. "That's her hometown in East Germany. They call her the Ghost because she's usually gone from the scene before anyone can catch her. She doesn't go in for ski masks and disguises, wants people to know who's behind things. And get this. In an interview last year with a newspaper called Our Struggle, she describes herself as a Nazi Robin Hood, striking a blow for the oppressed majority of Germany." "Sounds like a psycho," Herbert said.

"Actually, she doesn't," Liz said. "That's the problem with people like this." Liz coughed, continued to draw on her cigarette, and spoke as she scanned the file. "In high school, in the late 1970s, she was briefly a member of the Communist Party." "Spying on the enemy?" "Probably not," Liz said.

"Okay," Herbert said, "why don't I just shut up?" "No, what you just said would be a logical assumption, though it's probably a wrong one. She was obviously looking for herself, ideologically speaking. The Communist left and the neo-Nazi right are very much alike in their rigidity of thought. All radicals are. These people can't sublimate their frustrations so they externalize them. They convince themselves, usually subconsciously, that others are causing their miseries--- 'others' meaning anyone who's different from them. In Hitler's Germany, they blamed unemployment on the Jews. Jews held a disproportionately high number of positions in banks, universities, medicine. They were visible, obviously prosperous, and very clearly different. They had different traditions, different sabbaths, different holidays.

They were an easy target. The same was true of Jews in Communist Russia." "Gotcha," Herbert said. "Have you got anything on this woman's contacts, hideouts, habits?" Liz scanned the document. It was broken into sections labeled "vital statistics," "biography," and "modus operandi." "She's a loner," Liz said, "which in terrorist terms means she always works with a small group. Three or four people, tops. And she never sends anyone on a mission she wouldn't undertake." "That's a match with today's attack," Herbert said. "Any known hits?" Liz said, "They never claim credit---" "Also a match with today." "---but witnesses have tied them to the firebombing of an Arab-owned shopping mall in Bonn and the delivery of a grenade-rigged liquor carton to the South African Embassy in Berlin, both last year." "Ruthless too," Herbert said.

"Yes," Liz said. "That's part of her appeal to the hardcore neo-Nazis. Though it's strange. The store she attacked was a men's shop, and the liquor was delivered to a bachelor party." "Why is that strange? Maybe she hates men." "That doesn't fit in with Nazi ideology," Liz said.

"True," Herbert agreed. "In war and genocide, they were equal-opportunity killers. This may be good news for the American kid, if she is a hostage. Maybe they won't kill her." "I wouldn't bet the ranch on that," Liz said. "Sparing women isn't likely to be a commandment, just courtesy. It also says here that two of those witnesses who tried to I.D.

her personally died within days of talking to the authorities.

One in a car crash, one after a mugging. The crash victim was a woman. One woman who tried to quit her group Feuer--- Fire--- was also killed." "Watched and whacked," Herbert said. "Just like the mob." "Not quite," Liz said. "The retiree was drowned in a toilet after being beaten and slashed. This is one sick little schatze. Anyway, so much for sparing women." Liz scanned back to Karin's biography.

"Let's see if we can see where Ms. Doring is coming from," Liz said. She began reading, then said, "Here we are.

Her mother died when she was six and she was raised by her father. Bet you dollars to pesos there was some nasty business going on there." "Abuse." "Yeah," Liz said. "Again, it's a classic pattern. As a girl, Karin was either beaten, sexually abused, or both. She sublimated like crazy as a kid, then looked for a place to put her anger. She tried Communism, didn't like it for whatever reason---" "It was dying," Herbert contributed.

"Then she found the neo-Nazi movement and assumed the role of father figure, something her own father, never did." "Where is Papa Doring now?" Herbert asked.

"Dead," said Liz. "Cirrhosis of the liver. Died when Karin was fifteen, just about the time she became a political activist." "Okay," said Herbert, "so we think we know who our enemy is. She's happy to kill men, willing to kill women. She assembles a terrorist group and roams the country attacking foreign interests. Why? To scare them off?" "She knows she can't do that," Liz says. "Nations will still have embassies, and businesses will still come. More likely it's the equivalent of a recruitment poster. Something to rally other aggressive misfits around her. And by the way, Bob, it obviously works. As of four months ago, when this file was updated, Feuer had thirteen hundred members with an annual growth rate of nearly twenty percent. Of those members, twenty active, full-time soldiers move with her from camp to camp." "Do we know where any of these camps are?" "They keep changing," Liz said. "We've got three photographs in the file." She accessed them in turn and read each caption. "One was taken at a lake in Mecklenburg, the second was shot in a forest in Bavaria, and the third was in mountains somewhere along the Austrian border. We don't know how they travel, but it looks to me like they pitch tents whenever they get there." "They probably move around in a bus or van," Herbert said. He sounded dejected. "Guerrilla groups that size used to travel in patterns to establish regular supply lines. But with cellular phones and overnight parcel delivery, they can arrange for pickups just about anywhere now. How many camps do we know about?" "Just those three," Liz said.

The phone beeped. It had to be Monica calling for her messages. Her roommate would be frantic, but Liz wasn't going to answer.

"What about lieutenants?" Herbert asked. "Who does she rely on?" "Her closest aide is Manfred Piper. He joined her after they graduated from high school. Apparently, she handles all the military matters and Piper does the fundraising, runs checks on aspiring members, that sort of thing." Herbert was silent for a moment, then said, "We don't really have very much here, do we?" "To understand her, yes," Liz said. "To catch her, I'm afraid not." After a moment, Herbert said, "Liz, our German host thinks she may have pulled this heist off so she could pass out trinkets for Chaos Days, the little Mardi Gras of hate they have here. Considering her record of striking political targets, does that make sense?" "I think you're looking at this the wrong way," Liz said.

"What was the movie?" Herbert said, "Tirpitz. About the battleship, I guess." Liz tapped into Pictures in Motion, a Web site listing movies in production around the world. After locating the film, she said, "The set was a political target, Bob. It was an American co-production." Herbert was silent for a moment. "So either the memorabilia was a bonus, or the American crew was." "You got it." "Look," Herbert said, "I'm going to have a chat with the authorities here, maybe pay a visit to one of these Chaos Days celebrations." "Watch it, Bob," Liz said. "Neo-Nazis don't hold doors for people in wheelchairs. Remember, you're different---" "You bet I am," he said. "Meanwhile, give me a buzz on the cellular if you come up with anything else on this lady or her group." "Will do," Liz said. "Take care and ciao," she added, using the other Italian word she knew.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Thursday, 11:52 A.M., Toulouse, France

The wood-paneled room was large and dark. The only light came from a single lamp which stood beside the massive mahogany desk. The only items on the desk itself were a telephone, fax machine, and computer, all of them collected in a tight semicircle. The shelves behind the desk were barely visible in the shadows. On them were miniature guillotines. Some were working models, made of wood and iron. Others were made of glass or metal, and one was a plastic model sold in the United States.

Guillotines had been used for official executions in France until 1939, when murderer Eugen Weidmann was beheaded outside St. Peter's Prison in Versailles. But Dominique didn't like those later machines: the guillotines with the large, solid buckets to collect the heads, screens to protect the executioners from the spray of blood, shock absorbers to cushion the thunk of the blade. Dominique liked the originals.

Across from the desk, lost in the ghostly dark, was an eight-foot-tall guillotine which had been used during the French Revolution. This device was unrestored. The uprights were slightly rotted and. the trestle was worn smooth from all the bodies that "Madame La Guillotine", had embraced.

Drawn nearly to the cross-beam on top, the blade was rusty from rain and blood. And the wicker basket, also the original, was frayed. But Dominique had noticed particles of the bran which had been used to soak up blood, and there were still hairs in the basket. Hairs which had snagged the wicker when the heads tumbled in.

It all looked exactly as it did in 1796, the last time those leather straps were fastened under the armpits and over the legs of the doomed. When the lunette, the iron collar, had held the neck of its last victim--- held it within a perfect circle so the victim couldn't move. However much fear possessed them, they couldn't squirm from the ram and its sharp blade. Once the executioner released the spring, nothing could stop the eighty-pound deathblow. The head dropped into its basket, the body was pushed sideways into its own leather-lined wicker basket, and the vertical plank was ready to receive the next victim. The process was so quick that some bodies were still sighing, the lungs emptying through the neck, as they were removed from the plank. It was said that for several seconds, the still-living brains in decapitated heads enabled the victims to see and hear the ghastly aftermath of their own execution.

At the height of the Reign of Terror, executioner Charles Henri-Sanson and his aides were able to decapitate nearly one victim every minute. They guillotined three hundred men and women in three days, thirteen hundred in six weeks, helping to bring the total to 2,831 between April 6, 1793, and July 29, 1795.

What did you think of that, Herr Hitler? Dominique wondered. The gas chambers at Treblinka were designed to kill two hundred people in fifteen minutes, the gas chambers at Auschwitz designed to kill two thousand. Was the master killer impressed or did he scoff at the work of relative amateurs?

The guillotine was Dominique's prize. Behind it, on the wall, were period newspapers and etchings in ornate frames, as well as original documents signed by George Jacques Danton and other leaders of the French Revolution. But nothing stirred him like the guillotine. Even with the overhead lights off and the shades drawn he could feel it, the device which was a reminder that one had to be decisive to succeed. Children of nobles had lost their heads to that sinister blade, but such was the price of revolution.

The telephone beeped. It was the third line, a private line which the secretaries never answered. Only his partners and Home had that number.

Dominique leaned forward in the fat leather chair. He was a lanky man with a large nose, high forehead, and strong chin. His hair was short and ink black, a dramatic contrast to the white turtleneck and trousers he was wearing.

He hit the speaker button. "Yes?" he said quietly.

"Good morning, M. Dominique," said the caller. "It's Jean-Michel." Dominique glanced at his watch. "It's early." "The meeting was brief, M. Dominique." "Tell me about it," he said.

Jean-Michel obliged. He told him about the lecture he had been given under torture, and about how the German considered himself M. Dominique's equal. Jean-Michel also told him about what little he had picked up about Karin Doring.

Dominique listened to it all without comment. When Jean-Michel was finished, he asked, "How is your eye?" "I think it will be all right," said Jean-Michel. "I've arranged to see a doctor this afternoon." "Good," Dominique said. "You know you shouldn't have gone without Henri and Yves. That is why I sent them." "I know, monsieur," Jean-Michel replied, "and I'm sorry. I didn't want to intimidate Herr Richter." "And you didn't," Dominique said. His voice was tranquil and his wide mouth was relaxed. But his dark eyes were heavy with rage as he asked, "Is Henri there?" "Yes," Jean-Michel replied.

"Put him on," Dominique said. "And Jean-Michel? Be sure to take them with you tonight." "I will, M. Dominique," Jean-Michel replied.

So the little Fhrer is on the march, thought Dominique, bullying representatives. He wasn't terribly surprised. Richter's vanity made him ideally suited to believe his own press. That, plus the fact that he was German.

Those people did not comprehend the notion of humility.

Henri came on the line, and Dominique spoke with him for just a few seconds. When they were finished, Dominique punched off the speaker button and sat back.

Richter was as yet too weak to be a real force in Germany, but he would have to be put in his place before he became one. Firmly, and not necessarily gently. Richter was still Dominique's first choice, but if he couldn't have him he would have Karin Doring. She was also independent, but she also needed money. And after seeing what was going to happen to Richter, she would be reasonable.

The anger began to leave his eyes as he looked at the dark shape of the guillotine. Like Danton, who began his crusade against the monarchy as a moderate man, Dominique would become increasingly more severe.

Otherwise, his allies and enemies both would perceive him as weak.

It would be a delicate thing, making sure that Richter was disciplined without driving him away. But as Danton had said in a speech to the Legislative Committee of General Defense in 1792, "Boldness, and again boldness, and always boldness!" The boldness of the guillotine, the boldness of conviction. Then as now, that was what people required to win a revolution.

And he would win this. Then he would settle an old debt. Not with Richter but with another German. One who had betrayed him on that long-ago night. The man who had put everything in motion.

He would destroy Richard Hausen.

CHAPTER TWELVE Thursday, 11:55 A.M., Wunstorf, Germany

It was the bathroom fire alarm which stopped Jody from screaming.

Wisps of smoke seeping through the vent had triggered the alarm. The high whine pierced her panic and, brought her back to the moment, to the situation at hand. She breathed in, calmed herself, then exhaled.

They're trying to blow the trailer up, she told herself.

As when she faced the gun, Jody knew that every second--- any second--- could be her last. Quickly, she went to the window and pushed her hand through the metal bars.

She threw the latch with her fingertips, put her palms to the frosted glass, and pushed up. She pressed her face to the bars and watched the twisted length of cloth as it burned. It wasn't stuffed into the gas tank. It was just lying there, air flowing around it, providing the catalyst for the fire. She pushed her arm out the window, tried to reach the wick. She fell over a foot short.

"God, no!" She threw herself back from the bars, pushed her hair from her eyes, and looked around. There had to be something she could use to reach it. Sink. Toilet. Nothing.

The Sink--- She thought of dousing the fire, but there was nothing in the bathroom to use as a bucket or ladle.

"Think!" she screamed.

She turned around slowly. She saw the shower, but there were no bath towels. She tried to pull the towel bar off the back of the stall, couldn't, then noticed the showerhead.

It was attached to a hose.

Quickly turning on the water, she yanked the head from the hook and pulled it toward the window. It didn't reach, short by inches.

The flame had nearly covered the mouth of the gas tank when, snarling with frustration, Jody dropped the showerhead and grabbed the hand towel. She pushed it in the toilet, then ran back to the window. Extending her hand, she swung the wet towel up and let it fall. She heard a hiss, then put her face to the window.

The upper portion of the flame had bin extinguished.

Part of the underside was still burning.

There was only the one towel, and it was gone now.

Quickly pulling off her blouse, Jody plunged it into the toilet.

This time, however, she slapped it as hard as she could against the side of the trailer. She didn't drop it, but let the water trickle down the wall. Then she pulled in the blouse, wet it again, and slammed it even harder against the trailer.

The water ran down in a solid sheet, dousing the last of the flame and sending up a thin wall of smoke. It was the sweetest smell Jody had ever tasted.

"Screw you!" Jody shouted at the image of the woman in her mind. "I don't like killing women," she said. "Well you didn't, bitch! You didn't get me!" Jody pulled in her arm and put on the wet shirt. It was cold and felt good. She looked at the door.

"You're next," she said with fresh-earned confidence.

There was time, now, to work the towel bar from the shower stall. Putting her back against the front wall she kicked the bar free. Then she went to the bathroom door and put her shoulder to it. She opened it just enough to get the bar through, then used it as a lever. The door moved slowly, as Jody pulled against whatever had been pushed against it. After several minutes, she'd succeeded in opening a crack large enough for her to slip through.

She stepped over the upended table, ran to the door, and opened it.

"You didn't get me!" she said again, her jaw outthrust and her fists raised. She turned and looked at the trailer.

A shock sizzled down her back.

What if they're expecting to hear the explosion? she asked herself. And when they don't, will they come back?

Exhausted, Jody ran to the other side of the trailer. She used a twig to pull the smoldering cloth from the gas tank, then climbed back into the cab. She pushed in the cigarette lighter. While she waited for it to heat up, she tore strips of cloth from the inside lid of one of the trunks in the trailer itself. When the lighter was ready, she lit one of the pieces and walked toward the gas tank.

Jody used one strip to dry off the area; then laid another strip half in and half out of the tank. She used the burning strip to ignite the one in the tank, dropped it, and ran into the woods, away from the trailer. In all her years of movie watching, she'd seen a lot of cars and trucks blow up.

But those were rigged to blow with carefully placed explosives, not a full tank of gasoline. She had no idea how big, how loud, or how destructive the blast would be.

It occurred to her to put her hands over her ears as she ran.

Only a minute or so passed when she heard the muffled timpani boom of the blast, followed by the louder rending of metal and the deafening explosion of the tires. A heartbeat later she was hit by the concussive heat wave which rolled from the blast. Jody felt the intense heat through her wet blouse and against her scalp. But she forgot about the heat as hot shards of metal rained down, along with particles of glass. She thought of the burning hail from The Ten Commandments, how when she saw the movie she remembered thinking there was no way to protect yourself from that. She dropped to the ground and covered her head with her arms, bent her chest to her knees. A large piece of fender tore through the canopy of trees and slammed to the earth just inches from her foot and she jumped.

She swung toward a tree and hugged it, kneeling, thinking that the branches might offer some protection against the larger chunks of the trailer. She held the tree tightly, sobbing again, as though all the courage had been drained out of her. She remained there even after the downpour had stopped. Her thighs were shaking wildly and she couldn't stand. After a moment, she couldn't even hold the tree anymore.

Letting go, Jody walked for a while. She was exhausted and lost and decided to rest. Though the soft, green grass looked inviting, she pulled herself up into a tree. Cradling herself in two closely spaced branches, she put her head on one of the branches and shut her eyes.

They left me to die, she thought. They killed others.

What gives them the right?

The sobs came less frequently. The fear didn't go away.

But along with a realization of how vulnerable she'd been was a sense of the strength she'd managed to find as well.

I didn't let them kill me, she told herself.

She saw Karin's face in her memory, vivid and cold.

She hated it, hated how smug and confident the woman had been. Half of Jody wanted to let the monster know that they had nearly taken her life but not her spirit.

The other half of Jody wanted to sleep. Within a few minutes the sleep-half had won, though not without a struggle.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Thursday, 6:40 A.M., Quantico, Virginia