LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Seems like a waste of time for you guys if you’re going to bother registering,” said Karen.

      Caitlin Bercha, the third in the group, had lived across the hall from the other two. “You don’t really have to, you know. That’s just something you do in places where there might be a revolution or something. Not much chance of that here.”

      “Yeah, plus we’re only going to be here for ten days,” Kristina added.

      Karen hesitated, then exhaled wearily, the much-put-upon sigh of youth everywhere. “I know, but I promised my parents.”

      “But it’s pouring out there. You’ll get soaked walking all that way.”

      “Why don’t you just tell them you registered?” Kristina suggested brightly.

      “Yeah! How are they ever going to know?” Caitlin asked. “Then we can see if we can get some stand-by tickets for the theater tonight. The guy at the youth hostel said they disappear fast, so we should get to the box office early.”

      Karen looked from one eager face to the other, sorely tempted. But then her conscience kicked in. She was an only child and her parents worried more than most. She couldn’t lie to them.

      “I can’t. I promised. Look, I’ll tell you what. How about if you guys go over and see about the tickets, and I’ll do this embassy thing, and then we’ll meet up at, umm…” Her forefinger slid across her guidebook map. “Leicester Square. That’s in the theater district.”

      The two other girls exchanged glances. “I don’t know,” Caitlin said. “Maybe we’d better stick together.”

      “No, really, guys, this is a good idea. You go for the tickets and I’ll do this. No point in all of us wasting what little time we have.”

      “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

      Karen waved away their worries and gathered up her things. “I’ll be fine.” She shrugged into her long tan raincoat, leaving her braid inside and flipping up the collar. From her pocket she withdrew a black knit tam which she pulled onto her head. “Watch for me at Leicester Square—say around six-thirty, just to be on the safe side. I don’t want to leave you guys hanging around in the rain.”

      So, the plans were made.

      Karen left her friends with a smile on her face, secretly glad for a little quiet time as she stepped out onto the wide, white front steps of the National Gallery and popped open her black travel umbrella. Not that the streets around Trafalgar Square were all that quiet, what with the swish of tires on wet pavement and the roar and honking of rush hour traffic. But the average teenage girl abhors a conversational vacuum, so Karen had been inundated with high-pitched chatter almost non-stop since she and her two friends had met up at Dulles Airport three days earlier to catch their flight for London. At this point, her craving for quiet was almost physical.

      Life had given Karen Ann Hermann an unusual appreciation for silence. The only child of parents who were both profoundly deaf, her early childhood had been spent in a world as still and serene as it was warm and loving. Karen had no hearing deficit of her own, but long before a preschool tutor had been brought in to help bring her speech up to par, she’d been signing fluently, and she still moved easily between the hearing and non-hearing worlds. Every summer since the age of thirteen, she’d worked at a camp for hearing-impaired youngsters, first as a volunteer, then as a paid counselor.

      Karen’s parents had never been encouraged to cultivate a sense of adventure themselves, but a couple of those kids their daughter worked with, they’d been astonished to discover, had traveled around the world. They skied and scuba dived and parasailed, and got downright snippy if you suggested there was anything surprising in that. Times had definitely changed. The Hermanns had never even been on bicycles for fear they might be struck by an unheard car coming up on them from behind. And though they now ran a small but moderately successful home-based Web site management business, neither had ever traveled beyond a sixty-or-so-mile radius of Washington, D.C.

      Karen was already determined to help give the next generation of hearing-impaired kids more opportunities than her parents had had. She was even considering pursuing a doctorate and then teaching at Gallaudet University, the only one in the country dedicated to the needs of deaf students. Now there, the Hermanns thought, was a hot-bed of militancy. Both were Gallaudet graduated, but would a hearing-enabled professor, even one as sign-fluent and accomplished as Karen, be welcomed there these days, when so many students insisted that hearing people couldn’t relate to the issues they faced? They didn’t want their precious daughter targeted by reverse discrimination.

      It was a source of constant worry, but they comforted themselves with the realization that Karen’s final career decisions were some way off.

      In the meantime, she’d gotten it into her head to do some traveling. Having passed her freshman year at the University of Maryland with flying colors and the start of her summer job still a month off, she’d been eager to join two girlfriends on a spring vacation in England. She was a good kid, an honor roll student who’d never given them a moment of worry. What’s more, she was an adult now, for all intents and purposes, and she’d saved the money for the trip herself from the part-time tutoring she’d done all year. How could her nervous parents forbid her from going, much as they wanted to?

      Before they would agree, though, they’d gone onto the Internet to do their homework. The State Department Web site posted travel warnings to Americans traveling abroad, but Britain, they were relieved to see, fell into a low-risk category. Fair enough. The IRA seemed to prefer negotiation to bombs these days, and London was as security-conscious as Washington where other hot-button populations were concerned. If their daughter must go abroad, England was probably as safe a bet as anywhere.

      Still, the State Department Web site did advise U.S. travelers to register with the embassy on arrival in a foreign country so that they could be notified in case of emergency. If the advice was rarely heeded in the more popular tourist destinations, the Hermanns didn’t know that.

      Afterward, they would bitterly regret extracting the promise that took Karen to the embassy that day. Had they been a little more worldly, they might not have, but Mr. and Mrs. Hermann had never been out of the country themselves.

      Thus it was that Karen Ann Hermann came to be outside the American Embassy that dark and rainy London afternoon when all hell broke loose.

      CHAPTER THREE

      TOP SECRET

      CODE WORD ACCESS ONLY

      NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

      FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

      INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION

      (continued…)

      So when you arrived for the reception that afternoon, Carrie, you didn’t know you wouldn’t be attending the ambassador’s dinner?

      No. Apparently Drum had left messages for me on my mobile and at home, but for some reason, I hadn’t gotten either of them. I gather he’d also asked the Gunny to watch out for me—that’s the Gunnery Sergeant, head of the Marine Guard detachment.

      Sergeant Jenks, yes. He’s been interviewed on several occasions. We’ve got his full testimony covering that day.

      Right. Well then, you know he was on duty in the lobby. He was tied up when I came in, so it was Drum’s secretary who took me upstairs to the reception. She was also the one who told me I wasn’t needed at the dinner.

      Would it surprise you to learn there’s no record your husband ever called your cell phone that day?

      He said he did. I thought the voice-mail system must have been down.

      It was working just fine, according to company records. And although the phone at your apartment did receive one call at about…let’s see…12:27 p.m. GMT—

      That’s when he called

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