“Some campaign platform,” she muttered.
“Listen.” Wally raised a forefinger and shook it under her nose. “People said that about the National Socialists in 1930. By 1933, the Nazis had their hands around Germany’s neck. Never underestimate the lure of the Big Lie.”
The Big Lie.
Like the one she was living herself.
ELEVEN
Bratislava, 6:37 P.M.
OTTO WAS SNORING on Olga Teciak’s couch.
Vaclav was scrounging for food in the kitchen. Tonio was bent over a laptop computer, absorbed in the numbers he was crunching; Michael stood guard before the bathroom door. Mlan Krucevic pulled the carved antique chair close to the television screen and watched the evening news. A restless anger fretted at his entrails. The lead story was Vice President Payne’s disappearance. The White House refused to release any information about her captors or their demands, citing the sensitivity of the issue, but media speculation was rife. Most of the world’s terrorism experts had deconstructed the Brandenburg hit and concluded it was entirely engineered to mask the political abduction. The FBI was analyzing footage of the helicopter’s occupants to determine their identity, but the German police maintained that the terrorists were Turkish. An intensive interrogation of Berlin’s resident alien population was under way. A curfew had been imposed on Turkish neighborhoods. The image shifted to the Brandenburg Gate, where police guards in black and red and gold surrounded the bomb crater. Tourists crowded to the international lens, and the Volksturm looked hostile.
“Michael,” Krucevic said over his shoulder. “Bring Jozsef. He should see this. Hurry, before the footage ends.”
It was important that the boy understand the effects of violence—the political as well as the actual. What Krucevic had caused to be done in Berlin was a direct challenge to every Berliner’s comfort. Krucevic had brought fear into all their lives; he had returned them to the state of nature, when every day survived must be considered a form of victory. Jozsef should be made to understand what power truly was.
“Look at that,” he said, sensing the boy behind him.
No response.
He looked around and saw his son’s white face, Michael’s hand on his shoulder. Both were staring at a blond woman whose camera was pointed at a Volksturm guard; the guard was screaming at her in German. In another instant the uniformed man might snatch the camera away.
“Americans,” Krucevic said bitterly. “They behave like children wherever they go.” He moved to turn off the set, but Michael said, “Wait.”
It sounded oddly like an order. There was a set expression on his ashen face, an expression Krucevic had seen only once before, when Michael was on the verge of killing a man. Looking at him, Krucevic forgot to be insulted and said quickly, “What?”
“Bombs in Prague. There were bombs in Prague after we left.” The fixed look wavered and vanished. “The Czechs called for German assistance. Could be why the border was tight.”
Krucevic considered this. It would be beyond Fritz Voekl’s control, of course, what the Czechs actually did. But a miscalculation nonetheless.
“Would you like to fly tonight, Jozsef?” he asked the boy playfully. “A small plane, something Vaclav can manage? If you’re very good, I’ll let you take the controls.”
His son gave him a look so dark and glassy with fever that he was appalled. Krucevic rose to his feet, hand outstretched, but the boy’s eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the floor.
“Get him to the woman’s bed,” Krucevic snapped at Michael. “He’s sick. Can’t you see that he’s sick?”
Without a word, Michael scooped up the child and carried him away.
Fear jangled in Krucevic’s brain. He bit back a curse and went in search of his antibiotics.
The little girl named Annicka was huddled in a corner of the bedroom with a blanket, murmuring to a doll. Olga hovered in the doorway, one hand clutching the neck of her robe tightly, as though the men might rape her. It was ludicrous, Krucevic thought as he bent over his unconscious son. Whatever beauty the woman had once possessed, whatever had attracted Vaclav Slivik, was long since gone. She was too thin, too tired. Too beaten in spirit to be anything but abysmally depressing. He slid the needle into Jozsef’s vein and sent a small prayer with it.
Olga came to stand silently beside him.
“What do you want?”
She swallowed nervously. Jozsef moaned and his head turned once on the pillow. He was still unconscious. If the anthrax had resurged … if the antibiotic wasn’t working … But it must be working. He, Krucevic, had designed it himself.
“Well?” he asked Olga.
“I want to send my daughter to my sister’s.”
“No.”
“But Annicka goes there whenever I work!”
“You’re not working tonight.”
Her head drooped like a condemned woman’s.
“Mlan,” said Vaclav from somewhere behind her. “There will be talk. Olga has a concert tonight. If she does not appear, the phone will start ringing. There will be knocks on the door, explanations—”
“Yes, yes,” Krucevic snapped. “When is the performance?”
Hope flared in her eyes. “Eight o’clock. I usually leave at six-thirty.”
He rose from the bedside and studied her face. Olga’s fingers clutched at the robe convulsively. He reached out, irritated by the terror, and took her icy hand in his.
“Then go,” he said. “Do everything you normally would. Except for the child. She stays here until you return. Understand?”
“But my sister—”
“Tell her Annicka is sick. Tell her you have asked a neighbor to sit with her. Tell her anything but the truth.” His grip tightened on Olga’s wrist. “If you tell the truth— to your sister or anyone—your little girl dies.”
Olga’s eyes dilated, then shifted imploringly to Vaclav’s face. Krucevic released her hand.
“Get dressed,” he said.
Sophie lay alone on the tile floor of the bathroom and stared at the ceiling. The patch of damp she had seen upon first waking had darkened with the failing light. It seemed to have grown, too—it was growing still, as she watched, like a visible manifestation of some inward cancer, the edges creeping remorselessly into the dull gray plaster.
A wave of heat rolled over her. Was her mind betraying her? Was she getting delirious? The point was to focus on something other than herself, something beyond her fever, beyond the room. She searched her brain for a safe fingerhold, a pit in the rock she might cling to.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Then something, something—twilight and black night …
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie As the death-bed whereon it must expire Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
She shuddered, coughed. And tasted blood.
The door opened.
“Mrs. Payne.” Krucevic’s face bobbed and swam in the dim light; the door frame he leaned against wavered like a snake.
“Where is Jozsef?” she asked.
“Jozsef is ill.” Did she imagine it, or was his voice less in command? He held aloft a hypodermic needle. “And so, I imagine, are you.”
“Don’t touch me!”
“I have no choice.” There it was, the strain behind the words, faint as a ghost. The man was afraid. “This is medicine, Mrs. Payne. You require it.”
She began to struggle, but a great weight had pinned her legs, her arms were like lead, her sight was reeling. Krucevic is afraid. He grasped her wrist and thrust the sweatshirt sleeve upward.
He is afraid.
The pinprick of a needle in her vein.
He had not expected this, then. The fallibility of modern science. The spiking of his own power. Not just Sophie Payne was at ris
k now—not just the hated hostage—but his own son.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
TWELVE
Bratislava, 6:45 P.M.
OLGA TECIAK FLED FROM HER APARTMENT with her cello case dragging behind her like a corpse. She fled with her blood pounding in her veins and tears welling in her eyes. In all the years of her life, years when Slovakia was a police state and years when it was a democracy in name only, she had never felt the depth of terror that animated her at this instant. The police state had never threatened her child.
She tossed the cello into the back of her car and drove out into the night, through the chasms of ugly concrete buildings, all of them alike. Rain lashed down, and a dark gray service van—electricity? plumbing?— blundered heavily into a puddle ten feet away and sent a sheet of water slapping against her windshield. She jerked backward, as though the dirty brown stream had struck her in the face. The van shouldered past. It went on, the driver glancing neither to right nor left.
Olga sped over the bridge that spanned the Danube. She did not spare a glance for the houseboats pulled up along its banks. She ignored the floodlit ramparts of Bratislava Castle; the fortress had never saved her from anything. She drove toward the city’s heart, debating within her mind what exactly she should do.
“Mlan,” said Vaclav Slivik quietly. He was positioned at the window, staring through a slit in the drawn drapes. A pair of high-powered binoculars hung around his neck. Behind him, the lights were doused. With the coming of night and Olga’s release had also come caution; they would post a guard until she had returned, until they could leave.
“What is it?”
Vaclav held a finger to his lips and with his other hand motioned Krucevic to his side. The two men stared down at the darkened parking lot. Vaclav pointed. On the curb opposite the building’s main drive, the dark gray van was almost invisible in the night; Krucevic could make out nothing but a broad, square hump. An apparently deserted hump. The hairs rose along the back of his neck.
The listeners had arrived. They had tracked him through Greta Oppenheimer’s phone call; soon they would be searching the building with electronic ears for the voice that matched their profile. Criminal stupidity. Why had he waited for darkness? He should have gone when he had the chance.
They would not find him immediately. But in a matter of minutes, the building would be surrounded. The roof, a landing pad for commandos. And he had let Olga Teciak go.
“The fire escape,” Krucevic murmured in Vaclav’s ear. “There must be one. Take the car and find that woman while you still can. Then meet us tomorrow in Budapest. Go!”
The Slovak State Orchestra was performing that evening in the opera house, not far from the U.S. embassy, where even now, the CIA station chief was in communication with the team in the dark gray van. Olga Teciak looked at her watch. She had twenty-seven minutes until curtain time, which was in fact no time at all. At this very moment, she should be pulling into her parking space, unloading the cello, and tuning her strings amidst the gabble of her section’s voices.
She drove past the opera and the Carlsbad Hotel (where the Soviet-era casino lights gleamed red and white in the darkness), past the U.S. embassy building with its invisible guards. Rain pelted her windshield, rain that held the promise of snow, and she mopped frantically with her bare hand at the steam clouding the underside of the glass. Unable to come to a decision.
They did not simply let you walk into the embassy, of that she was certain. It was United States territory, after all, and no one could merely walk into the United States. You required powerful friends, influence, a great deal of money or the proper kind of blackmail. Olga’s life was too ordinary for these.
She drove aimlessly, her vision clouded by the fog on her windshield. Then she swerved abruptly and brought the car to a halt at the curb. She fumbled in her purse for a token.
A dash through the rain in her high heels and long dress, the coat pulled willy-nilly around her, no protection at all. The icy rain streamed through her chignon and down her neck as she reached the pay phone. Her hair would be ruined now, the hem of her formal gown splashed with mud. Impossible to appear onstage even if she threw down the receiver and drove back like a maniac. She willed her numbed fingers to thrust the token through the slot. Her die was cast. She asked for the number of the U.S. embassy.
The operator gave it to her in a neutered voice. The operator had no conception of what it was like to leave a terrified little girl in a house full of violent men, to leave your only child because you had no choice. The operator did not know what this phone call would cost.
“Embassy of the United States,” said a woman in abominable Slovak.
“Please,” Olga said, the tears suddenly crowding her throat, “you have got to help me and I have not much time. I must speak to your ambassador.”
“The ambassador is engaged this evening.”
“But the woman you are looking for is in my house, and they are going to kill her. They are going to kill my daughter, they are going to kill me—”
A hand slammed down abruptly on the phone’s cradle, cutting the connection. The line went dead.
Olga gasped.
Vaclav Slivik stood behind her, a quizzical smile on his face. She must look wild, and pathetic, Olga thought: wet snarls of hair about her forehead, mascara streaming.
“You’re soaked, my dear,” he said. “That will never do for the performance. What are you thinking of?”
“I—I needed to call a friend,” Olga said.
She replaced the useless receiver, her fingers clenched as though she could not bear to relinquish hope.
Vaclav grasped her arm. “You’re in no condition to drive. It has been a long day.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then perhaps I should take you to the opera.”
His fingers tightened around her coat sleeve; she was a rabbit in a snare. She stumbled at the curb. Rainwater drenched her shoes. Vaclav pulled her upright without a word and steered her toward his car.
It was parked a few feet behind her own, and in his haste to reach her, Vaclav had left the headlights on. They flooded the backseat of Olga’s car and the cello case huddled there like a third person. Vaclav didn’t bother to fetch the instrument. They both knew she would never need it again.
Otto Weber ignored the fire escape—no one who intended to appear innocent before the eyes of a dark gray van would consider climbing by stealth down the back of the building. Otto walked out the front door, in a drab old raincoat borrowed from Olga’s closet, with a serviceable black nylon briefcase slung over his shoulder. He wore a knit cap on his shaved head. And for the first time in a long time, he looked possessed of a certain decency.
He strolled casually down the drive, head bowed in the rain, his eyes on the puddles forming at his feet. His gloved hands swung idly at his sides. He seemed oblivious to gray vans and their questionable occupants, although he was making directly for their position at the curb.
He went up to the blue car sitting two spaces behind the van and groped in his pockets for keys. They would be studying him in the rearview mirror now, ready to drive on at a moment’s notice. He let his eyes drift indifferently over the bulky old vehicle, its lettering scratched and the bumper eaten with rust, and then his expression changed to one of joyful interest. He had need of an electrician himself. He had been meaning to call one today. He sauntered up to the driver’s window and tapped on the glass with one large knuckle, grinning foolishly at the guy behind the wheel.
They were polite to a fault, these Americans.
When the window slid down, Otto put a bullet in the driver’s brain. His companion died reaching for a gun.
THIRTEEN
Berlin, 9:17 P.M.
WALLY CALLED A TAXI FOR CAROLINE and gave the driver instructions to take her directly to the Hyatt. But the moment the lights of Sophienstrasse dwindled in the distance, s
he tapped on the man’s window and told him in passable German to pull over. She handed him some marks and set off alone, on foot, into the darkness of the Jewish Quarter. She was looking for Oranienburger Strasse and Mahmoud Sharif.
The abandoned building that Wally had called the Tacheles was really the remnant of a much larger structure that had been mostly destroyed by Allied bombs. It rose five stories above the street and consumed most of a city block. Neon lights and clouds of steam punctuated the Berlin darkness. She stopped in front of Obst und Gemüse, a restaurant across the street, and studied the wreck of a building from a safe distance. It was the sort of structure a giant might assemble as a play toy, all tumbled blocks of concrete, jagged frames where there had once been windows, a few massive Art Nouveau figures still poised on the ends of columns. Arches that trailed away into nothing. An elevator shaft exposed to sky. Most of the windows were boarded up or bricked over; the scorch marks of intense heat still flickered up the walls. Derelict pipes and the remains of a refrigerator were scattered on the ground, found art. And from within came the sounds of laughter, a racking cough, the current of voices.
The helmeted Volksturm guards were there, of course, pacing along the broken sidewalk with machine guns raised. But the policemen seemed less menacing against a backdrop of smoky light and laughter. It was remarkable, Caroline thought, that they even allowed the Tacheles to exist. It looked like the kind of building the Fritz Voekls of the world tore down.
There were several entrances punched in the building’s side. She chose one, hitched her purse higher on her shoulder, and dashed across Oranienburger Strasse.
A rusted iron door, standing ajar. She slid inside and paused an instant, allowing her eyes to adjust. Before her, a corridor tunneled into the Tacheles, bare bulbs swinging from an outlet in the ceiling. She followed it until it dove right and presented her with a flight of stairs; then she went up, heels clattering on the bare iron treads.
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