But first, another call. He slid into the darkened doorway of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and pulled out his cell phone.
“It's me,” he said after the beep. “We're in town. Tell Bela to watch his back. And for Christ's sake, be careful.”
Fourteen
Budapest, 10:53 p.m.
Caroline sat on the floor of her hotel room, drapes pulled wide to the glowing sky over Pest. She couldn't sleep. Sleep would be an insult to the ugliness of what was happening in this city, akin to picnicking on the fringe of battle. How had the British slept during that long spring of 1940? Or the Dresdeners gone to bed with carpet bombs? Did exhaustion take over, relentless? Or did you simply grow accustomed to the mutter of unrest, the flare of violence against the night sky?
She swallowed some whiskey from a diminutive bottle, pulled at random from her generous minibar. Violence. She had taken it to bed with her amid the Hilton's hushed opulence; it patrolled the corridors and stairwells and banks of elevators. Violence had Eric's alias on a piece of audiotape it smelled his ruin in the smoke roiling off the Danube. She supposed she had Vie Marinelli to thank for the nondescript man reading newspaper after newspaper in a hard chair in the lobby, or the young woman with owlish glasses who spoke earnestly into the phone. Marinelli was Chief of Station, Budapest. It was his job to send out the best, to place a sympathetic face behind the front desk, a hulking bruiser among the valet parkers. It was a kind of game for Caroline to play, betting the silent odds on exactly who was who. The Agency's net ringed her round with smiling faces, it strangled her with helping hands. If Michael and Jane ever dared to meet, the two of them were as good as bagged.
Yes, she had Marinelli to thank for the last bars of this cage — but only herself to blame. She had not been able to leave Sharif and his friends alone.
She tipped her whiskey bottle up, let the sweet flame flicker along the lining of her throat, and stared at the orange glow across the river until her eyes burned. She could be honest with herself now. She could tell herself the truth.
She wanted Sophie Payne alive and bound for Washington on a C-130 transport. But she wanted Eric to walk away clean — free of Krucevic and Agency and Caroline alike.
It was a paradox she could not reconcile. She was Jane Hathaway, bona ride in a box; she was Caroline Carmichael, the baited wife. Her whiskey was gone. She tossed the bottle toward a wastepaper basket under the desk, and at that moment her telephone rang.
She froze. Eric. Talking in the dark. And Marinelli would have the hotel phone lines hugged.
She almost didn't answer. Then, as though it moved of itself, her hand grasped the receiver.
“Caroline,” he said.
“Scottie .. .” She felt a knife edge of relief — and disappointment.
“Did I wake you?”
“No” — she glanced at the clock — “its only eleven.”
“How's Buda?”
“Pretty hot. People aren't hurling themselves out of windows yet — but then, most of the windows are already smashed. The Volksturm arrive tomorrow.”
“Ah,” Scottie said with understanding. “Then we can put the Hungarian republic in the chancellor's column.”
So Scottie believed it, too. The Third Reich rising like a phoenix from half a century of ashes.
“What's next?”
“If I knew that, you'd be on a plane home. Caroline, you heard about our mess in Bratislava?”
“Yes. I'm sorry.” She kept her voice neutral, her words vague, in deference to the open phone line. There was a rustle across two continents as Scottie shuffled paper.
“It's not a complete loss. We traced a phone call to the Big Man himself. And the conversation was extremely interesting. His VaccuGen secretary had to tell him about a delivery that went awry.”
Delivery. Caroline pushed herself upright in bed. Had Krucevic planned to dump Sophie Payne?
“Somebody's prescription got into the wrong hands,” Scottie continued. “The Big Man was quite upset. We're crying to figure out why.”
“Was this medicine intended for our missing friend?” she asked.
“We don't think so. But she may not be doing too well. The specialists on this end are worried about her prognosis.”
Caroline's heart sank. Careful as Scottie might be, the message of his last words was unmistakable. Sophie Payne was dying.
“And the secretary? The one who made that call? Could you find her?”
“That's been tried. She's left work under something of a cloud. The Big Man was rather angry, to judge by his tone of voice. Surprised and rattled, even. As though a fly had devoured all the ointment.”
“I see. What do you want me to do, Scottie?”
“I may need you to fly to Poland. I'll call you tomorrow if it's necessary.”
“Poland?”
“Our friend Cuddy has spotted some activity there. In the accounts he's monitoring.”
VaccuGen's corporate accounts. He'd fired up DESIST and found a financial trail.
Caroline's heartbeat quickened.
“New money?”
“Lots of it. Cash is flooding into a certain German party organization — and from there to friends in Poland. We find that .. .”
“Ironic,” Caroline replied. “Given the state of coffers here.”
“Well, one market's bear can be another's bull,” he retorted lazily, as though he enjoyed this game of charades.
But Caroline was sick of it.
“You think our missing friend has gone to Poland, too?”
“Possibly. But she's running out of time.” His voice changed.
“Have you heard again from the fair-haired boy?”
“No. But I've changed cities. Even he might need some time to adjust.”
Which showed how poorly she'd judged Eric.
She had closed the drapes against the fading glow of the ruined Houses of Parliament and was almost asleep when the knock came on the door.
Shephard, she thought, and had the impulse to hide under the covers. There was something in the way he looked at her now that made her uneasy. The LegAtt's eyes were too intense, too probing; somewhere in the air between Berlin and Buda, they had lost a professional distance. Perhaps, Caroline thought, it was because she reminded him of his dead wife. She preferred Shephard caustic and uncommunicative; it made him less threatening.
Another knock, louder this time.
She crossed the room and looked for a peephole. There was none. She slid the chain into the bolt and cracked the door four inches, peering out into the hallway.
Whatever she had intended to say died on her lips.
“For the love of God, get me inside before somebody sees me,” Eric muttered.
She pulled the chain hurriedly out of the bolt.
He slipped through the door and shut it behind him. He was wearing a white busboy's coat; the dining trolley he'd abandoned in the hall.
Employee entrance, she thought; and a kitchen computer listing all the guests, for room service.
“You shouldn't have come here. The station's all over the place.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?” he asked, and took her in his arms.
The shock of his hands moving over her in the darkness of that room was too much. Dead hands, she thought. How many lost nights in the last two and a half years had she cried for Eric's touch, for the solid span of his shoulders beneath her fingertips, the warmth of his face skimming hers? She allowed herself an instant of indulgence and breathed deep of his scent. He smelled of cigarettes and of sulfurous brown coal, of dead leaves and city rain; he smelled of human skin and human hair and the lingering hint of floral-scented soap. He smelled of Budapest and Nicosia and Tidewater, Virginia, of years and heartache and sex and longing. He smelled of life, a life lived without her; a band of pain tightened around her chest.
She had mourned the loss of his body as much as his soul — this body, strong and controlling, almost feral in the darkness. Sh
e shuddered and closed her eyes, feeling his hands on her rib cage, her shoulder, the lobe of her ear. His touch stung her skin with so much rippling life — and for an instant, she wanted to cry aloud with joy, she wanted to forget every unbearable moment of her days without him, she wanted to cradle his head and thank God that he was alive. It was what she had prayed for so uselessly during the long nights of grief: a life returned. A second chance. And her prayer had been answered.
But with what vicious reckoning.
This man was no miracle. He was a walking lie.
The rage of the past two years boiled hotly to the surface, so that her own mouth tore back at his, a savage thing that wanted to hurt him. Through the busboy's coat he wore she could feel the thud of his heart, too fast, and the tension in his body, as though he were coiled to spring. But then, Eric was always a predator. She gripped his arms tightly and thrust him away.
“Where is Sophie Payne?”
He was breathless, a diver mad for air.
“I can't tell you that. Not yet.”
If he refuses to give up the goods, Scottie muttered in her brain, shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“You're here,” he said baldly, and took a step toward her again.
“I'm here to find the Vice President. Your death made me an expert on 30 April, Eric.”
“Caroline — ”
“Tell me where she is. That's all I want from you.”
“I need more time.”
“You've had too much time, you son of a bitch!” Tears of rage pricked at her throat — rage at his insouciance, at the way he had walked back into her life as though he expected her to be there, her arms wide open — She was terrified, suddenly, of breaking down. Rage was her friend. Rage was a tool. Let him believe she was stronger alone than she had ever been in his shadow. Let him fear the High Priestess of Reason.
She moved toward him, her hand punching hard into his chest with each step.
“One call to the lobby, Eric, and I shut you down! One call”
“You won't do that.”
“Give me a good reason!” She had one already: Bring Eric in, and he'd damage the Agency irrevocably. She cared little for bureaucracies creaking roughshod over the world, but Dare Atwood, Cuddy, Scottie Sorensen — they were all the people Caroline loved, the only ones left to protect.
“Don't you understand? It's over. No more vendettas, no more little girls with bullets in their brains. No hijacked VP's.” It ends lie re He gave way, a bewildered expression on his face.
“Much more is at stake than Sophie Payne. You need Krucevic, Caroline. More than that, you need everything he runs — the bank accounts, the networks, the points of liaison worldwide. You've got to roll him up. That's what I've been working for. Not just Krucevic's life, but everything he's built.”
“So work with we,” she den-landed. “Give me the route to his base here in Hungary. Give me the Polish operation. Anything, Eric, that might help.”
“You know about Poland?”
Caroline laughed harshly.
“What did you think — that only you could do this job? We've all been doing it while you were dead and buried. I wish to hell you'd stayed that way.”
“No, you don't,” he whispered. His face was stark in the orange glow flooding the room from across the river. The light made a death mask of the sharp planes of his face, and she saw how much the past few years had aged him.
But she could not relent. Relent, and she'd lose him.
“Where's your base, Eric? Tell me and I'll have a team inside of it before dawn.”
He hesitated; he gave it an instant's thought. But the habit of self-reliance ran too deep.
“I need a few more hours, Carrie.”
“Time's up.” Her voice was sharp with contempt.
“Now get out of here before I call the cops.”
“Caroline...”
“Nothing.”
It came out with explosive force.
He stopped, frozen.
“Nothing. You. Say. Will. Make. Any. Difference.” It seemed important to pronounce each word with equal weight, as though he were deaf, half literate, a confused and pathetic foreigner. The small flower of hope that had bloomed in Berlin turned brown within her and died.
“I know I hurt you,” he began. He raised a hand to touch her, and she went rigid.
His eyes Eric's eyes, bluer than the sea and stark with pain stared at her wordlessly. Was he begging her? Her?
Shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap.
One call. That was all. Let him plead to the station if he was so goddamn desperate.
“Get out,” she whispered.
And he did.
Fifteen
Budapest, 11:40 p.m.
“Lady. Lady Sophie — are you awake?”
He was whispering urgently from the hallway. She pulled herself to the edge of her bed and dangled one arm toward the floor. If she could roll off the bed, perhaps she could crawl over and talk to him.. .. She tested her weight, leaning down on one hand, and felt her wrist buckle. The effort made her dizzy with exhaustion.
“Lady Sophie!”
“Yes, Jozsef?” she croaked.
“My father is gone. May I come in?”
Despite the pain cramping deep in her bowels, Sophie smiled. It was like the boy to ask permission.
“By all means. If only I could open the door.”
It slid back soundlessly. She saw his small body outlined against the light of the passage, the remote control in one hand. In the other, he held a hypodermic.
“I have medicine.” He slipped to her bedside still whispering. He was a boy who would probably whisper for the rest of his life.
“You must take it soon, before it is too late. There is not much medicine left. And I have had more than my share.”
“Your father can make more,” Sophie said.
“Not here in Budapest. If he went back to Berlin, maybe, to his lab .. . the Anthrax 3A bacillus is highly secret and very dangerous, lady. Papa does not carry it everywhere.”
“Keep your antibiotic, Jozsef.”
He frowned.
“But you must take it! Do you know what is happening to you? It is very bad, lady. First you vomit blood. Then you vomit your entire stomach. Your heart is eaten away within you. And then at last, in unbearable pain, you die. My father has told me.”
“And is your father always right? Was he right about your calls to your mother?”
He looked away.
“Where did he beat you?”
Wordlessly, he lifted the front of his shirt. His abdomen was a mass of red lines.
Asshole, Sophie thought impotently. He's already bleeding inside.
“No one has the right to keep you from her. She's your mother and she loves you.”
“If she's alive,” Jozsef retorted, “then why hasn't she tried to find we?”
“When your father decides to kidnap somebody, he makes sure they're never found. Don't blame your mother. Look what he's done to the marines.”
Jozsef giggled — a boyish sound, the first she had ever heard him make — and she was transported for an instant back to her old house in Malvern, before Mitch's death, Peter's grubby hands clutching his father's ankle while Mitch dragged him along, pretending not to notice. Rough housing. Wrestling. The tumble of boyhood.
“Do you want to escape?” she asked Jozsef.
The laughter died.
“I could not.”
“Do you want to?”
It was easier to be honest in this darkened room, her voice as relentless as the voice of conscience.
“How? We can't even get out of this compound. We're locked in. The doors are impossible to force. They're electronic. And you're too ill.”
“Then we'll have to make your father give us up.”
Jozsef snorted.
“My father will never do that. You're too imp
ortant.”
“I don't mean anything to him at all,” she said firmly. “I've served my purpose. But you mean the world to him. For you, Jozsef, he would do anything.”
“Then why does he beat me? If he loved me, he would not beat me.”
“I wish that were true. There'd be far less abuse in the world. But beatings or no, he fears for your life. He fears the illness inside you. That's why he's saving the antibiotic he has for you — and letting me die.”
The boy turned and looked at her piercingly.
“Where did you get that hypodermic?” Sophie asked.
“From the supply room, where he keeps the antibiotic.”
“Do you have the strength to take me there?”
He did not answer for fully fifteen seconds. Then he said: “Don't do this, lady. It will make him angry. Papa cannot control himself when he is angry.”
“I know,” she said.
He shook his head.
“You know nothing at all. I have seen him kill. I know what he can do.”
“Jozsef — do you want to see your mother?”
“More than God Himself,” the boy whispered.
“Then take me to the supplies.”
Anxiously, Bela Horvath scanned the pages of his notebook and then thrust it into the plain black knapsack he carried to the lab every day. It was nearly midnight. The meeting with Vie Marinelli in Varosliget Park was only eight hours away, but he was sweating with fear and nausea. The notebook was the embodiment of his betrayal, the embodiment of his faith. It must not come to harm.
He searched his untidy bedroom, eyes straining in the dark. A light at this hour would be a mistake. He had taken a risk even returning to the house. At the thought of Mian and what he would do if he knew of the notebook — if he knew of the meeting with Marinelli — Horvath's fingers twitched spasmodically. He dropped the knapsack.
He had wanted this meeting, had almost initiated it when the city went up like a torch that afternoon and the laboratory had closed. He had suspected the truth at last tonight, he had tested and retested it out of thoroughness and disbelief, until with a scientist's harsh honesty he understood. Someone had to stop it.
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