Marinelli snorted beside her. “Put a gun to his head. He’ll concede in a heartbeat.”
“Third,” Caroline continued, “in order to negotiate at all, Krucevic would have to recognize his counterpart as an equal. He’ll never do that.”
“Even if he’s negotiating with the President of the United States?” Jack Bigelow’s voice was still genial.
“Seems to me he’s been negotiatin’ with every one of those videotapes.”
“I would consider those more in the form of direct insults, Mr. President,” Caroline said. “He intends to taunt and humiliate you by displaying Mrs. Payne’s subjugation. He believes this could make you feel frustrated and powerless. The videos are one of Krucevic’s instruments of terror, not a method of brokering a deal.”
All three men in the White House Situation Room were listening to her now. Dare Atwood, on the Agency screen, had a faint smile playing about her lips.
“But let’s just say,” Matthew Finch argued, “that we pretend to negotiate in order to buy some time. Keep Krucevic focused on the dialogue while Delta Force gets their act together. Then we’ll have tried the diplomatic option—and the world will know it—and we can go in shooting.”
Caroline shook her head. “Go in shooting and all you’ll find is bodies.”
Finch threw up his hands and stared at Jack Bigelow.
The President smiled at Caroline through the secure video feed. “You’re pretty damn sure of yourself, young lady.”
“Mr. President—” She sighed and searched for a succinct way to explain. “For the past five years, I’ve followed Mlan Krucevic and 30 April. He’s a tough man to pick out of the crowd. But I’ve done it. It’s my job. I’ve read every scrap of classified and open-source material on the man, I’ve researched his childhood, I’ve placed him on a couch and trotted out the psychiatrists. I know more about Krucevic than anyone, with the possible exceptions of his mother and his wife. His mother’s dead. His wife is missing. I’m all you’ve got.”
“How can you say he’ll never negotiate?” Matthew Finch was still resistant. “This could mean life and death to the man.”
“The value of a life is relative, Mr. Finch,” Caroline said patiently. “Mlan Krucevic has known that from birth. His father was a member of the Croatian Ustashe—the fascist allies of Nazi Germany. Anton Krucevic is believed to have been in charge of a concentration camp somewhere near Sarajevo that was built entirely underground. Everyone connected with the camp’s organizational hierarchy was ordered to commit suicide at the German surrender, and the location of the camp itself has never been positively identified—but estimates of the number of Serb partisans executed there range from several thousand to nearly one hundred thousand.”
“In Krucevic’s biography,” Finch noted, “you say he’s fifty-eight. That means he was born during the war.”
“Krucevic reportedly lived out his babyhood on the camp grounds,” Caroline affirmed. “He grew up watching people die rather horrible deaths. Mlan’s father, in his eyes, must have seemed like God himself. He held people’s very lives in his hands. No one survived iv Zakopan. Rumors of the place circulated during the war, and that’s what historians are left with. No witnesses surfaced to tell the tale of the camp’s horrors— unless you include Krucevic himself.”
“What happened to his father?” Jack Bigelow asked.
“He shot himself-—and his wife—when the Russian liberators came for them.”
“But not the boy.”
“Krucevic was found bleeding in his dead mother’s arms. He has a bullet scar to this day on his temple. He’s on record, Mr. President, as saying that death is always preferable to failure.”
Jack Bigelow scowled. “Too bad the bastard’s had such a string o’ good luck.”
Matthew Finch looked down at his notepad.
“So what do you think will work, Caroline?” Dare Atwood asked. As though the Director of Central Intelligence routinely deferred to her junior analysts.
Caroline hesitated an instant before replying. She would not allow herself to consider Eric. If he had returned to 30 April’s bunker, he had placed himself beyond all protection. The High Priestess of Reason was back in the briefing room; what the Policy-makers did with her information was their affair.
“If we announce our presence—try to negotiate—he’ll divert us long enough to launch a counterattack. If we land a helicopter on his roof, he’ll kill Mrs. Payne before we’ve killed the rotors. Our only hope lies in stealth.”
Matthew Finch looked straight into the camera. “Thank God. I thought there was no hope.”
“We need to use the blueprints Wally Aronson gave us. We need a squad of professionals trained to infiltrate electronic barriers,” Caroline persisted. “Pros who can creep up to the bunker, find the air vents we know are there, and drop canisters of chloroform right into Krucevic’s living room. We need to take out 30 April before they even know they’re blown—and free the Vice President without a shot being fired. But we need to do it now”.
Jack Bigelow rocked back in his conference chair. “Get the AWACs in the air, Clayt. Tell NATO whatever ya like. Scramble a Delta Force team from Ramstein or wherever else you got ‘em hidden. And make sure they bring their chloroform, hear?’ Cause they ain’t getting off the plane without it.”
When the screens had gone blank and the ambassador had scurried away to his round of appointments with the new Hungarian government, Tom Shephard stood up and held out his hand. Caroline took it in surprise.
“What’s that for?” she asked him.
“Work well done.”
“You coming?” Marinelli barked from the doorway of the vault.
Shephard turned. “Where to?”
“Surveillance. I’m going to watch the bunker until those flyboys arrive. Just in case Krucevic tries to split before it’s convenient.”
Tom vaulted a stray chair and was at the station chief’s side. “You think I’d miss that?”
Marinelli clapped the LegAtt on the shoulder. Then his gaze drifted over to Caroline. “I’d appreciate it if you’d stay behind. This is entirely operational, you understand. And while you convinced the President you know your tradecraft, I’m not entirely sure. I like my visiting analysts safely behind their desks. It saves a lot of explanation back at Headquarters when things go wrong.”
The hostility was unmistakable. Tom Shephard’s eyes widened in surprise. But this was neither the time nor the place, Caroline knew, for a bureaucratic squabble, for a drawing of the line between Analysis and Ops. Too much was at stake.
“Right,” she told Marinelli through bitten lips. “You’re the station chief. I take my orders from you.”
“’Bout time,” he retorted, and swung into the hallway.
The screaming had been going on for what seemed like hours now, beyond the sealed door, and even Jozsef was done crying.
Krucevic had thrust the boy into Sophie’s room without a word of explanation earlier that day—she did not know what time, she had no clock and no window, nothing but a sense of having slept badly and in increasing pain. She had held Jozsef close to her fevered body, held her hands over his ears to stop the noise, cursing vividly and relentlessly under her breath to drown out the screams. She poured forth a torrent of vituperation into the dead air while Jozsef shuddered with sobs and the screams went on—varying sometimes in pitch, sometimes in duration, but inevitable, as though the tortures they subjected him to had a preordained rhythm.
He was singing now—a broken, dying tune. Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”
“What did he do?” she asked Jozsef at one point. “What could he possibly have done to deserve this?”
The boy had shuddered. “He betrayed Papa.”
Even the singing, now, had stopped.
EIGHT
Budapest, 3:13 P.M.
DUSK FELL SWIFTLY on a November afternoon in Central Europe, and dusk was their ally.
Tom Shephard studied the pale profil
e of the man crouched next to him in the back of the armored van. Vic Marinelli was roughly the same age as Tom, but he was in better shape and he had once been a SEAL. That fact alone gave Tom some comfort. The Agency, as a rule, didn’t deal in guns. The FBI did. But a SEAL— even one who’d been out of the navy for the past ten years—knew what the hell he was doing. And Tom, at this moment, felt as though he was flying by the seat of his pants.
Krucevic’s stronghold was innocuous in appearance—a loading dock in a neighborhood of warehouses, accessed by an alley. One of Marinelli’s case officers had parked the station’s van in front of an animal-feed-supply warehouse perpendicular to the bunker. The CO jumped out of the cab and made a great fuss over his cousin, another young Hungarian laborer who had just driven up in a shining red Volkswagen Passat. The CO pulled off his work overalls, secure in the knowledge that no one could be watching; threw on a clean shirt; dragged a comb through his hair; clapped his putative cousin on the back; and slid into the Passat’s passenger seat. The two men drove off into the darkness, intent on beer, lap dancers, and oblivion.
The van was left locked and apparently empty in front of the warehouse. Except that Marinelli and Tom were crouching inside. Their position in the back of the armored van was an uncomfortable one: The last team dispatched to monitor the Veep’s kidnappers in Bratislava had been murdered as handily as wild geese under a low cloud ceiling. Neither Tom nor Marinelli troubled to make much small talk. Each had brought a personal weapon. They kept their eyes trained on the surveillance equipment that was the key to Krucevic’s kingdom, while silence gathered between them like dead leaves.
Marinelli was the master of a formidable array of electronics. He had eyes that could see and ears that could hear through layers of protective steel. He had hidden antennae and radar and television monitors. Tom heard a warehouse’s metal door slide down with a crash; a truck creaked past, looming like a leviathan on the van’s black-and-white screen. Snatches of Hungarian sputtered in their earphones. If a dust mote were to settle on the van’s roof, Tom thought, they would know about it.
But precious little emanated from the bunker. When Marinelli’s beams intersected Krucevic, they fell dead.
“This guy’s already walked,” Marinelli muttered as he turned a dial. “All that bowing and scraping before the Joint Chiefs, and we’re gonna look like idiots. It won’t be your friend Little Miss Muffet who takes the fall, either. It’ll be me. Because I didn’t get surveillance out here before the ink was dry on that map. Sometimes I hate this fucking job.”
“The entire U.S. Army couldn’t find Saddam Hussein, Marinelli, when it was parked in his front yard. Sometimes people defy technology. You know that.”
The station chief slammed the palm of his hand against the recalcitrant dial he was tuning. “Hell, yes. And sometimes technology isn’t worth shit. I’m just pissed off about that chick in jackboots, Tom. She had Bigelow eating out of her hand. Why do they let women anywhere near Intelligence? They don’t know dick about operations.”
Shephard smiled faintly, remembering the steel gray Mercedes and the little black wig. “Caroline doesn’t roll over. She looks at you with those cold blue eyes—she lets you dig yourself in deeper as you try to justify your existence—and then she walks right around you.”
“You just want to get into her pants.”
He frowned. But it wasn’t Shephard’s job to explain Caroline Carmichael to the station chief. He had harbored enough doubts about the woman himself. Her conjuring of the map, however, had buoyed his confidence. Whatever her deceptions, her closet loyalties— the things she would not explain—Caroline had gotten the job done.
Marinelli flipped a switch on a scanner; static crackled. “He’s blocking us. Son of a bitch is blocking us.”
“That’s the least of what he’s doing.”
They had both studied the blueprints of Anatoly Rubikov’s security system, the blueprints Wally Aronson had fished out of a train station bathroom at two A.M. A U.S. government–issue scanner was about as effective against Krucevic as a slingshot and dried peas.
“He’s not in there,” Marinelli repeated tensely. “He’s blown this hole while we watched Mary Sunshine cream the Prez.”
“You don’t know that.”
The afternoon’s misting rain had changed to a downpour. Outside the van, darkness was almost absolute. A few spotlights lit isolated corners of the warehouse district—Tom could see them when he panned the surveillance cameras wide—but none had survived Krucevic’s installation. The loading dock was blanketed in shadows.
Marinelli bent over a small square item that looked like a viewfinder.
“What is that?”
He glanced up. “Infrared detection device.”
“You’re looking for heat?”
“It’s November in Budapest. Coming on for dark. Temperature is dropping to thirty-nine, thirty-seven degrees. The heat should be on in that bunker.”
It should be flying through the seams of the loading-dock door like a sonic wind, Tom thought. Marinelli stood aside; Tom peered through the infrared viewfinder. The outline of the garage door glimmered coldly.
“It’s dead,” Marinelli told him. “Shut down. I’d bet my life on it.” The station chief pulled gently on the van’s rear-door handle, eased it open.
“Are you nuts?” Tom hissed.
“We’ve got Delta Force on the wing, Shephard, and the Veep’s not here. That map was a fucking diversion. It got us looking at where 30 April was, not where they are. If I’m not back in fifteen, call the station.” He slipped through the door as softly as a whisper.
Marinelli, Tom fumed, was like all of these goddamn Agency people. He was not what he seemed. He’d perfected the art of appearing to be other than what he was—perfected it so well that he made you believe he was a Medici prince when in fact he was nothing but a goddamn cowboy. An adrenaline junkie. Like Caroline Carmichael in her red beret, stepping out of a terrorist’s car—
Tom bent over the infrared oculars. He tracked Vic Marinelli through the darkness and rain, the heat of the man’s body flaring against the green crystal screen. The station chief eased his way from warehouse doorway to trash bin to utility pole, all of them cold under the lens. Tom scanned the roofline, the corners of the building where the blueprints showed fiber-optic cameras to be. And then he saw it, like a wink in the night. A red laser eye that opened once, then closed. Marinelli had missed it.
The heat might be off-—the bunker empty—but something was wired to blow.
The federal police caught up with Mirjana Tarcic twenty-three minutes before her aged mother mounted the steps to her quiet two-room apartment and found the door standing wide open.
There were three of them: Ferenc Esterházy, who was in charge, and two deputies named Lindros and Berg. They wore charcoal-colored wool suits redolent of nicotine and sausage, petrol fumes, and rain. Esterházy’s features were heavy and his pallor unhealthy; he smoked unfiltered cigarettes and had spent fifty-three years in a country where life expectancy for men was fifty-eight. His tie was bright green; his wife had bought it in Prague last Easter. Lindros and Berg were less obviously natty.
The three of them moved, through long habit, in an arrowhead that pierced the foot traffic on Szentendre’s streets: Esterházy to the fore, his deputies flanking each side, none of them requiring direction or even much speech. They had parked the dark blue sedan two blocks above the art gallery on Görög Utca and crossed to the far sidewalk. None of them carried an umbrella.
Esterházy mounted the narrow staircase first. Lindros drew his gun and came behind. Berg looked for a second exit to the street, found none, then posted himself at the foot of the stairs. It was quiet enough in the apartment above that when Esterházy kicked open the door, the sound exploded in the passage and brought Berg around with his gun raised.
The door was unlocked.
It bounced hard against the interior wall and slammed shut in Esterházy’s face before
he had a chance to slide through the opening. But not before he glimpsed what lay within.
The body of a woman, sprawled on the floor. Her face was a mask of blood.
Lindros was already beside him, pallid-faced but silent. Esterházy clutched the doorknob, raised his gun in his other hand, and slid quietly into the room. Lindros followed.
The apartment was cold and raw, a gusting draft pouring in through the ceiling. He looked up and saw the skylight open. There was a chair overturned like a second body near the woman’s corpse. She had been trying to escape through the roof when her killer caught up with her. Esterházy’s gaze slid away from the ruin of her face.
He made his way along the living-room wall to the bedroom doorway, then swung inside with gun raised.
No one was waiting for him.
His heartbeat thudded in his ears. He searched quickly under the bed. Behind the closet door. Through the bathroom.
No one.
Lindros was crouched at the woman’s side, checking for a pulse. Esterházy could have told him not to bother. He pulled a photograph from his breast pocket—the candid shot of Mirjana Tarcic that Tom Shephard had given him four hours earlier.
“Mirjana Tarcic?”
Lindros shrugged. “Who knows?”
Her face had been crushed to a pulp with something heavy—a crowbar, a vicious boot. Fragments of the woman’s skull and teeth were scattered about the wide-plank floors. The bright red rugs were clotted with blood. And the rain had dripped steadily through the open skylight, washing the gore across the room toward the galley kitchen— she must have been killed hours before. In the morning, when they still hadn’t known enough to look for her.
Lindros pointed to the corpse’s neck. “Look at that, boss.”
A silk scarf was tightened like a tourniquet around her windpipe, crimson with blood. Esterházy looked at Shephard’s photograph once more. Mirjana Tarcic wore a white silk scarf.
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