The boy slid across the floor to huddle at Krucevic's side, his face a mask of fear.
“You're bleeding!”
Krucevic clapped a crimson hand on his son's shoulder. He turned Jozsef around to face Caroline and the throng of silent inmates standing twelve feet away. She saw now that they were armed. There would be no reply from Vaclav.
Krucevic raised his gun to Jozsef's temple. He gasped out something in Serbian.
Caroline could not understand the words, but she caught the meaning. He would shoot the boy in the head if they came any closer.
The value of a life is relative. Krucevic has known that since birth. He's on record as saying that death is always preferable to failure.
Jozsef's lips parted, but no sound came. And then his eyes slid closed with a terrible weariness. He leaned his head into the barrel of his father's gun and sighed, a child up too long past his bedtime. And Caroline at last understood.
He was Krucevic's son, as Mian was the child of his father. Jozsef was waiting for the death he had always known would come.
Fury swept over her like a wave of heat: fury for this boy who had always been trapped, exchanged like a prisoner of war between parents who never loved him enough. Fury for Eric, who was Jozsef grown up. Fury for herself, and what she had become.
Krucevic muttered something more. But his hand was shaking and his voice was faint. He had lost too much blood.
Caroline felt a spark of satisfaction — her one bullet had evened the odds — and then she threw herself at the pair of them without pausing to think, as though Krucevic were just a trainer in a prison shack, the grenade dangling temptingly from his munitions belt. She fell on top of the boy, her hands clawing at Krucevic's face.
His gun went off.
The bullet winged her, then plunged over her shoulder to bury itself in the closet wall. She tore the boy from Krucevic's arms and rolled backward, fighting her own pain. The gun fired again — A woman with ragged blond hair and intense green eyes leapt over Caroline and fell upon Krucevic. Caroline saw the knife in her hand rise — then rolled again to shield Jozsef from his father. She had managed to thrust them through the closet door. She dragged herself to her knees, her arms still around the boy's frail body, as the horde of crippled things Mian Krucevic had made surged past them.
Caroline pressed herself flat against the wall, pain stabbing through her shoulder, and took a dizzying blow on the side of the head. They were like animals, like brutes, their hatred and blood lust destroying reason; she would be overwhelmed and then she would die.
“Papa!” Jozsef's voice, pinched and shrill with terror.
A hand scrabbled at her neck, gripped hard on her collar. She screamed into a pair of shocking blue eyes, a mouth open in a snarl; then the man yanked her ruthlessly toward the hall. One of the camp's inmates.
Krucevic was being bludgeoned with pieces of chairs, with laboratory tools, with shattered frames torn from the windows. The inmate dragged Caroline forward, stumbling, through the insane tangle of bodies. She could not fight him. She could not feel the fingers of her right hand. Blackness clouded her vision. She tripped over a leg. A child's leg, bare to the edge of his filthy shorts.
The dark-haired man lifted Jozsef in his arms and shouted at Caroline, an incomprehensible word. He was gesturing for her to follow.
A terrible, high-pitched cry rose from the knot of bodies behind. He's dead, Caroline told the leather jacket receding in her mind. Mian Krucevic is dead.
But Eric did not turn to look — he had better things waiting down the road ahead — and in the end, neither did she.
Three
Ziv Zakopan, 2:52 a.m.
An army of the disappeared had seized the hallway ahead. Caroline caught sight of the man who had saved her, his black head and wiry body pushing a tortured path through the shrieking faces. Fear and pain overwhelmed the adrenaline surge that had propelled her out of the tunnel mouth; a few more minutes, and she might crumple to the floor. She tried to keep the black hair in her sights, wavered, and then toppled against the wall, waiting for the dizziness to pass. A screaming woman clutched at Caroline's wounded right arm. She cried out in pain, and felt the blackness roll up to claim her.
Blue eyes, fierce and relentless. He had come back. The man threw his arm around her waist and pulled her forward through the chaos. The wall beside her disappeared and abruptly, Caroline was falling sideways. The doorway to a room.
She landed hard on the floor and rolled over. The door behind her slammed.
Darkness. Not the heavy weight of unconsciousness, but the absence of all light.
The man flipped a switch on the wall; nothing. Someone had gotten to the camp's generator. Caroline glanced swiftly around, her eyes adjusting to the gloom, and staggered to her knees. She was in a cubicle, a room with one unshaded window, a metal cot, an IV stand, some crates for a table. The blue-eyed man threw a torrent of Serbian at her. Useless.
A boy's voice answered, broken with exhaustion and grief. Jozsef. He lay in a heap at the foot of the cot. Caroline pushed herself toward him, but he flung out a hand in mute warning. He did not need this stranger. What she could see of his face was blank with shock.
There was a clatter behind them, a spattering of words. The blue-eyed Serb had turned the crates on their sides and jammed them against the closed door. Then he pulled the sheet from the cot and tore at it with his teeth. A roll of cotton from the room's supplies was already in his hand.
He was making her a bandage.
The Serb pressed the folded linen against the shredded fabric near her collarbone. Caroline's breath hissed raggedly through her clenched teeth. It was an awkward area to dress — but the man wrapped cotton gauze several times around her armpit, then tied it off with ruthless force. Caroline bit down so hard on her lip that blood oozed under her teeth. Unhygienic, inexpert — but it would do.
She grabbed his hand as he stepped away, looked up into his eyes. She knew not one word of Serbian.
“Thank you.”
He nodded, then crossed the room and thrust up the window. He held out his hand to Jozsef.
Unable to stand, the boy crawled.
“Halt,” Caroline said hoarsely. “Sophie Payne. We ist Sophie Payne?”
The boy's head came around; his eyes widened.
“She konnen die Dame?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“I know the lady. Jozsef, I'm Michael's wife. I came to help you.”
The Serb prisoner stared at Caroline, uncomprehending, then spat something harsh and desperate in his own tongue. Fists pounded against the locked door. The wave of violence sweeping the camp was indiscriminate, now; the only sane thing to do was flee.
“You killed my father,” Jozsef whispered in lacerated English. “You are the one who shot him like a dog.”
“The camp killed him. I came for Mrs. Payne.” With her left hand — Krucevic had broken the other wrist — Caroline pulled Eric's homing device from her pocket. The signal was fainter than in the fields below the compound.
“Jozsef, where is she?”
“Ich u'eiss NightI”
The twelve year old was sobbing, his hands beating the cement floor, on the edge of hysteria. And why not? A few minutes ago, his father had held a gun to his head. And now his father lay in pieces somewhere down the corridor.
“She's not with you?”
Jozsef shook his head.
Caroline crouched close to the boy and held out the homing device.
“See this red light? It's a signal. Michael buried a transmitter somewhere in her things.”
“The lady has nothing,” he said dully.
The Serb prisoner tossed two words at them and then thrust himself through the open window. At that moment, the door frame shattered and the wooden crates were pushed backward into the room. Caroline seized Jozsef's waist — he was as light as a cat from illness, a bundle of sticks to be tossed on the fire — and hurled him at the sill.
&n
bsp; “He left her down below,” the boy said against her cheek. “He told me she was dead and buried.”
Dead and buried. The tunnels of old Ziv Zakopan.
There was a six-foot drop from the windowsill. He sat for an instant, weak legs dangling, then crumpled to the ground. Wishing uselessly for her Walther, Caroline thrust herself face first through the window, kicking at the frame. She dropped with a sharp jolt onto her left side, and her collarbone creaked and shifted under her skin; she cried out, then clamped down on the pain searing through her chest.
She felt for Jozsef.
“Here,” he breathed, and she saw his eyes peering through the slit of a doorway opposite. She crawled over and ducked inside the small shed.
The stench was overwhelming. He had hidden in a latrine.
Caroline held her breath against the sour odor. Feet thudded past them.
Something crashed into the door of the latrine with a piercing shriek, bounced away, fell silent. Jozsef shuddered and pressed against her. Caroline put her good arm around him. They waited for what seemed hours, probably no more than eight minutes. The smell of excrement and lime would cling to her clothes and hair, Caroline thought, a stink so solid she would taste it for days to come. If she survived.
Her collarbone was numb, and the bandage had stanched the flow of blood. But she was weakening. Her eyelids drooped. Maybe she could sleep for a while and look for Sophie Payne in the morning.
“I gave her my rabbit's foot,” Jozsef muttered. He seemed to have slipped sideways, down the current of a dark river. She groped her way back to him.
“What?”
“My good-luck charm. The lady needed it more than me. But what if the luck fails?”
Dead and buried. The tunnels... Caroline roused herself with effort. The screams from the compound were fainter now, the pounding feet gone elsewhere.
“Jozsef — can you show me the gate?”
He reached for her hand.
“I do not think it will be guarded any longer.”
It took them thirty-three minutes to descend the narrow path through the rocks.
Caroline's vertigo returned, and Jozsef fainted halfway down, a dead weight dragging on her left arm. She stopped to revive him, chafing his wrists and slapping him methodically; and remembered, as he lay senseless, the antibiotics in Ziv Zakopan's labs. Antidotes to anthrax that might have saved two lives.
They were probably smashed to pieces by this time.
Caroline cursed viciously. It was too late to go back. Jozsef's eyes flickered open. She crouched beside him.
“I can't carry you.” Blood had soaked through her makeshift bandage. “You can stay right here. Close to the cliff face. I'll come back soon with help.”
She had no idea whether she would find Sophie Payne or how to summon help, if any was at hand; but there was nothing else to tell the boy. Jozsef struggled to his knees. And began to crawl. The Skoda still sat where she had left it, wide open to the world. No one had seen fit to use it for a getaway. Despite the slow torture of the hillside path, they were the first to descend from Ziv Zakopan. The rest were too intent on blood and vengeance.
Jozsef heaved himself weakly into the back of the car and lay motionless.
Caroline fumbled in her pocket for the homing device and held it to her ear.
The signal was stronger than it had been in Krucevic's camp.
“Don't leave me,” Jozsef said weakly. She looked down and found his eyes upon her. They were bright with fever and anguish and death.
They struggled across the field together, in search of the signal's source. It was 3:07 A.M. In a little while the birds would sing.
“Mrs. Payne.”
Nell Forsyte, the same Nell Forsyte she had seen murdered in Pariser Platz; Sophie heard her voice with a flush of joy. She loved Nell. Nell had died for her, a senseless sacrifice. But they would be together always. She reached out her arms to hold Nell close. It was so dark in here. She had thought she was buried alive once, in the trunk of a car.
“Mrs. Payne. Can you hear me?”
She tried to open her lips. She may have moved her head. A faint sound, like the mewling of a cat. Then a steel rod was thrust under her back, agony exploded in her skull. Blood surged from her abdomen to her mouth, flooding between her lips. She choked on the words she needed to say.
Someone was crying. Small, little-boy fingers fluttering on her cheek. She would kiss Peters knee and make it better again.
Mrs. Payne, Nell called again, with that gentle insistence of the professional bodyguard, the untitled nanny.
I'm coming, Sophie answered gaily, and took one last look at her reflection in the golden mirror. It was hard to see anything at Malvern tonight. Especially from such a distance.
Panicked, Caroline searched for a pulse in the wrist and neck. She laid her head on the woman's blood-soaked sweatshirt and listened. She felt with her fingertips for a wisp of breath, frantic to snatch this life back — for she had found Sophie Payne alive, and the woman had slipped through her fingers. Water in a bowl of sand.
She stared down at the Vice President and thought of Eric, whom she had failed.
Not Jack Bigelow or Dare Atwood or even, really, Sophie herself — but Eric, who had placed the map and the transmitter and the woman's life in her hands.
Caroline wasted no time debating whether such a burden was fair. She did not hate him for it. It was the burden she had chosen.
She closed Sophie's eyes and left her alone at the base of the ladder. Without help from Sarajevo, there was nothing else she could do. Then she climbed slowly toward the surface, her left hand cramping on the ladders iron rungs. Tears seethed at the back of her throat.
“You found her?” Jozsef asked. He was huddled against the stile near the iron manhole cover, filthy and stuttering with cold.
“We should hurry and get help,” Caroline told him.
He sat up, eyes vivid with hope.
“She's alive?”
Caroline opened her mouth, then shut it again. Not for this boy the kind prevarication, the words better left unsaid. She shook her head.
He went very still. Everything in his face died. Caroline crouched down and drew him close.
Terrible, these tears so long unshed, falling now on a stranger's neck. The fierce, inhuman sobbing of grief. Jozsef wrapped his arms around her and said nothing while she cried.
At 3:32 a.m. the first wave of NATO helicopters thundered overhead.
Four
The White House, 12:34 a.m.
Jack Bigelow got the news from the White House Situation Room two minutes after midnight. He had attended a reception f or the president of Somalia; he had listened to a large young soprano sing arias in Italian; he had stood near his wife and smiled tirelessly into the eyes of people whose names he occasionally remembered. Now he sat alone with his bow tie undone and his dress shirt half open, a glass of ice water in his hand. He was reading three paragraphs of an article on the backswing in Golf magazine.
The news came with a ring of his internal phone and the hesitant voice of a detailee from the State Department. Dare Atwood, she said, was on her way over.
Bigelow closed the magazine, his forefinger resting for an instant on its glossy cover; then he whipped off his tie and dress clothes and threw on a polo shirt and khakis. He would have to call her son. Peter had arrived at his mother's residence — the Naval Observatory — that afternoon. Should he do it now? Or let the boy sleep? Terrible, if Peter heard it first from a television screen. Like the outcome of a close election.
He fumbled with his belt buckle, and then his fingers stilled. Sophie was dead. Throughout each hour of the past five days, he had known it was a possibility. But the fact of her death threw his crisis management in a harsher light. Death demanded reevaluation. Where had they gone wrong? The pundits would certainly ask. And the next question was inevitable: Who would pay?
“So Krucevic is dead?”
“We have confirmation o
f that, yes. From Caroline Carmichael.”
“The woman who found Sophie.”
“My analyst,” Dare Atwood amended. “And our Budapest station managed to collect a remarkable amount of intelligence from... the 30 April bunker in Hungary.”
This was technically true; she saw no reason to explain exactly how Eric's disk had survived the explosion.
“We're rolling up Krucevic's networks all over the world. Thirty-five arrests have already been made, in fourteen raids.”
“Do we have enough to screw Fritz Voekl?” Bigelow asked pensively.
“I believe we do. He's clearly implicated in the VaccuGen mumps scandal — the records of E-mail correspondence between the chancellor and Mian Krucevic confirm his full knowledge and support of the vaccination campaign. And then there's the Brandenburg dump.”
“What dump?”
“Voekl ordered all evidence from the 30 April bombing destroyed. Our station chief in Berlin, Wally Aronson, has found out why.”
“Go on,” Bigelow ordered.
“You may remember that Fritz Voekl got his political start running a munitions plant in Thuringia.”
“Best little gun shop in the GDR.”
“The FBI's forensic technicians have traced chemical residues from the explosive responsible for the Brandenburg Gate's destruction directly to plastic explosive produced in that plant.”
Bigelow whistled softly.
“It ain't exactly proof the man planned a hit on his own capital.. ..”
“And it won't be admissible in court. But its as close as we'll ever get to a smoking gun.”
The President swiveled in his desk chair thoughtfully.
“We're not goin' to court. Dare. What we want is Fritz Voekl outta office.”
“For that,” Dare replied, “you need only public outcry. Give the mumps epidemic to the press, Mr. President, and you'll have it.”
Bigelow glanced over at his DCI.
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