The Cutout

One Berlin, 2 a.m.

Anatoly Rubikov cared nothing for the lateness of the hour. Nor for the dull headache that throbbed in his temples, or the sourness in his mouth. He called his wife in Hamburg from the main Berlin train station and felt a shaft of joy at her sleepy hello. Then he told her he loved her and promised he would see her in the morning.

Next he dialed Wally Aronson's cellular phone. Wally answered on the second ring.

“Where are you?” the station chief asked.

“The Hauptbahnhof,” Anatoly replied. “I need to talk to you.”

“About Lajta?”

Anatoly nodded, as though the man might be able to see his face across the rat's maze of city streets.

“I'm scared to death,” he told him softly. “I've got to get out. You've got to get me out”

“You're still alive. Calm down, Anatoly.”

“He threatened my wife. My girls.”

“I understand.”

“Wally — ” The Russian safecracker hesitated, his pride still strong. “I have something for you. In exchange for my safety. I have it here, right now. I will give it to you.” His voice rose and broke, which was utterly unlike him.“But you must help me — ”

“Wait there,” the station chief interrupted curtly. “Buy your ticket to Hamburg and wait. I'll find you on the platform.”

Anatoly hung up. He glanced around. Two o'clock in the morning in Berlin's busiest terminus, and the place was almost deserted. He saw an old man in a newsboy cap, snoring on a bench. A kid in black leather, the arms cut raggedly away — probably a heroin addict, his eyes had the look of death in them. And a woman. A tired woman with two worn suitcases and a rumpled paperback. She was standing alone on the platform as though she had nowhere to go. And he had thought this morning that she was bound for home.

Their eyes met across the distance. Strange, Anatoly thought, that she had chosen a smoking car from Budapest when she had not lit a cigarette all day.

He picked up his duffel bag and walked casually toward the men's room, praying it would be empty. It was. He walked into the echoing tiled space, registered the window high in the wall. He picked a stall at random and locked it behind him. His fingers, when he unzipped the duffel, were trembling like a drunk's.

Inside was a change of clothing, two packs of Russian clove cigarettes, a magazine. And tucked into the bottom, a sheaf of folded papers. He drew them out.

There were footsteps in the bathroom now, the sound of a urinal flushing. The toilet was old-fashioned, its tank bolted under the ceiling with a chain dangling. Anatoly reached up and pulled the flush. Then he closed his eyes for an instant. Muttered something between a curse and a prayer.

Outside on the platform, Greta Oppenheimer discarded her paperback and walked briskly toward the men's bathroom.

Wally Aronson had spent the past two hours and twenty-nine minutes in a landfill twelve miles outside of Berlin. Old Markus had led the station chief and a team of six FBI evidence technicians into the site, and Old Markus was still there, a rented van at his back and an ancient Mauser rifle in his arms. Old Markus had an acute sense of where the Brandenburg evidence had been dumped; he had taken pictures of the trucks during daylight hours. Wally clipped the chain-link metal fence and removed a section large enough for the team's infiltration. Spotlights were out of the question. So was extensive examination of the evidence. The Bureau people had decided simply to cart the largest pieces out of the landfill in the hired van for testing at a remote location: an abandoned U.S. Army base in what had once been the Western Sector of Berlin.

The mood among the collection team — four men and two women — was somber. What evidence they might succeed in retrieving would never be admissible in court; it was tainted by removal from the bomb site. But the clandestine trip had helped the frustrated Forensics people put their time to use. And the larger pieces might reveal something of value — stress patterns, fractures, explosive residues — that would shape the FBI's investigation of the bombing. The darkness and disorder of the dump, however, banished all hope of finding anything small.

Like the timing device of a bomb.

Wally and the others were tense, waiting for a klaxon alarm, the release of dogs and floodlights, or the disappearance of one of their number into a mountain of stinking refuse. Wally had the most to lose: While the Forensics people would merely be sent home on the next available plane, Wally, as station chief, could be publicly humiliated if he were caught. But the landfill was deserted. Whoever had ordered the evidence removed from the Brandenburg Gate had not troubled with it further.

Wally tucked his cell phone back into the pocket of his black windbreaker. He had never heard Anatoly Rubikov sound so desperate; he would have to drive back to the Hauptbahnhof right now.

“Markus,” he told the foreign-service national, “I'm counting on you, buddy. See that these people get back to the ranch, okay?”

Sirens were wailing but the police had not yet arrived by the time Wally reached the train station. A kid in black leather was crouched in the doorway of the men's bathroom, groaning as though he was going to vomit. Wally stepped over him and saw the blood just beyond his black-jeaned legs, the corpse in a heap by the open stall door. “Scheisse,” he muttered in German.

Anatoly had been stabbed. The thin-bladed knife was still buried in his chest.

The boy in leather hadn't done it, Wally knew that. The bathroom window was open. Whoever had cut his Joe to the heart must have left that way. Wally studied the Russian safecracker, the sprawl of his limbs, the way he had fallen, and resisted the impulse to close Anatoly's eyes.

There was not much time.

Wally tugged his winter gloves from his coat pockets and slipped them on. The boy in leather looked up, eyes blank with fear.

“I'd get out of here,” Wally told him in German. “Unless you want to talk to the police.”

The kid stumbled to his feet and ran.

Wally stepped over Anatolys body and looked into the stall. There should have been a bag some sort of overnight piece but there was nothing. No luggage to suggest he had been traveling from Budapest. Wally studied the stall. The lid of the tank was slightly askew.

He jumped up and lifted the porcelain cover. Groped inside with his gloved fingers. And then his expression changed.

The two-note klaxon of an ambulance siren rent the night air.

Wally pulled the sheaf of papers out of the toilet tank and slid them inside his coat.

Two Budapest, 1:23 a.m.

Tonio was snoring by the time Michael drove up to the underground garage. He punched a key code into a remote-control device mounted on the dashboard and the electronic doors slid open. He pulled inside, and the doors closed automatically behind him. It was then he saw that the space reserved for Mian's Mercedes was empty.

He killed the Audi's engine, feeling his skin prickle. Krucevic was still mobile. Had he been arrested at the Budapest checkpoint? Or had he abandoned the two of them, Michael and Tonio, now that the Hungarian job was done?

The door to the compound was probably wired to blow.

He glanced over his shoulder at the sealed electronic garage doors, fighting the urge to panic, to gun the Audi in reverse right through them. Think. Think.

Krucevic had said nothing about an errand tonight. That was hardly unusual. He never shared his plans until they were ready to activate.

But maybe he had learned at last who Michael really was. Maybe he, Michael, had been betrayed. By an overeager Sophie Payne, or perhaps .. . He thought suddenly of Bela Horvath, of the unhappy Mirjana. Obvious risks, to themselves and him. His message might have come too late.

You've had too much time, you son of a bitch!

Tonio muttered in an alcoholic dream, his head lolling toward the armrest.

Michael eased open the door. There was a chance he could discover whether the compound was sabotaged before it killed them.

He crept up to the entrance, every nerve in his body screaming. There was no red pinpoint beam of a laser to break, just the camera focused as usual, recording his stealth; he would have to explain that later. He ran his fingers around the doorjamb — no thin copper wire. And no discernible sound from within.

The only way he would know was to attempt it.

He pressed a second code into a keypad by the door, held his finger against a print detector, and waited for the electronic verification.

The door slid open.

Whatever fate awaited him, it was not on this threshold. He went inside.

Jozsef's good-luck charm was resting forgotten on the table in the main room. A curious lapse; he was never without it. Michael pocketed the rabbit's foot and walked down the corridor to his door. It was sealed shut.

“Jozsef? Jozsef?” He raised his hand to knock just as the boy's voice came groggily from beyond.

“Is that you, Michael? What time is it?”

“Nearly two. Go back to sleep. There's nothing to be worried about.”

So Krucevic had abandoned them, locked into their windowless cells, the boy and Sophie Payne. Necessity must have driven him. Michael felt a stab of fear for Bela Horvath. If Mian were to suspect — He strode back to the main room. Tonio was still snoring in the car. Now for the computer. The payment for Caroline's lost years. He understood far less about the files than Tonio, of course, but he had been watching, secretly, how the man manipulated his data. He knew how to unlock the keyboard's secrets. Mian changed the password every day, and only Tonio was privy to it; but Michael had watched his fingers that morning. He thought he could repeat the strokes.

He sat down in front of the laptop. The password was chaos today, he was certain — but entry was denied. Had he inverted the a and the o? Michael swore aloud. Three failed attempts, and the computer would destroy its own hard disk.

He willed his fingers to stop shaking and tried again.

This time, like the door to All Baba's cave, the way opened. He began to search among the treasures scattered haphazardly on the thieves' floor.

“Michael,” the voice said behind him.

He jumped involuntarily and snapped the computer lid shut. Stupid! Stupid not to be more on my guard.

“Mrs. Payne. You should be asleep. How did you get out of your room?”

“Jozsef. He has a remote, did you know?”

She swayed and clutched at the jamb. That quickly he was at her side. She looked ghastly.

“Here. Sit.” He helped her to a chair.

“I wish you would tell me why you're pretending to be a terrorist,” she said plaintively as she sank into his seat.

“I'm almost dead. I deserve to know.”

“You're not going to die.”

“You don't know what you're talking about. I'm puking pieces of my stomach.”

“The medicine,” he said. “I'll get you some. He'll never know.”

“Don't,” she called after him; but he was already in the passage, he had the code punched into the supply-room pad, and it was only when the door had slid open that he understood what she meant. Twelve dozen ampules lay smashed to powder on the floor.

“My God,” he groaned, and leaned against the doorjamb.

“What have you done, Mrs. Payne?”

Her eyes blazed at him.

“I've placed that boy's life in jeopardy, and he helped me do it. I almost lacked the courage. But it had to be done. I had to force Krucevic's hand. Jozset says there's no more medicine here. If he wants to save his son's life, Krucevic must go back to Berlin. He'll abort this insane campaign.”

Michael stared at her in wonder and pity.

“He'll slit your throat for this.”

“But not the throats of a million Muslims, and that is all that matters. I've been a dead woman since Tuesday.” She sank down to the floor, her back against the wall, and took a shuddering breath.

“Would you kill me now? Like that little girl in Bratislava? Before he gets back?”

“Mrs. Payne — ”

“My name is Sophie. I do not think yours is really Michael, somehow.”

“Let me take you back to your room — ”

“I'd rather die where I am,” she interrupted. “Now get out your gun, God damn it.”

“I can't.”

“You must. I order you as the second in command of your country!”

He knelt down before her.

“I told you once I would not let you die at this man's hands. I'm certainly not going to kill you myself.”

“You won't have to. Krucevic will.” Her eyes closed tightly; she drew a rattling breath.

“Give me your gun, then.”

Michael put his hand under Sophie's elbow.

“Come on. Let's get Jozsef. We'll leave now.”

Her eyes flew open.

“Can you get out? Once you're inside?”

“Of course.”

“Jozsef couldn't.”

“Jozsef's a prisoner,” he reminded her brutally. “I'm a jail”

He crossed to the boy's door and pounded on it, hard.

“Jozsef. Hurry up and get dressed.”

“I can't walk anywhere,” Sophie protested faintly. “I'll just hold you back.”

“There's a car in the garage. We'll take that to the U.S. embassy. You'll be in a hospital in an hour.”

The flash of joy that crossed her face was almost too painful to watch.

“Why now?”

He held aloft his computer disk.

“Because it's all here — the entire 30 April Organization. In American hands, as of tonight.”

“But you won't actually get him, will you?” she challenged. “Krucevic will escape. And he'll wreak havoc for the rest of his days.”

“I'll have saved you. That's enough.”

Sophie shook her head.

“Not for me.”

He started to speak started to tell her that once she was returned safely to the United States, Fritz Voekl and Mian Krucevic would have the World Court to contend with but the lies died on his lips.

Tonio was standing in the doorway. How long had he been there? How much had he heard?

“What's going on, Michael?”

“Nothing much. How's your head?” He did not look at Sophie Payne.

Tonio walked toward him, rubbing his eyes groggily.

“Dio, but it aches. I'm going to bed.” His eyes drifted over the room indifferently. They came to rest on the computer.

“Who's been messing with that?”

Michael began to move easily behind him, coming around in position behind his head, the butt of his gun in his hand. It was a myth that you could knock a person out with a single blow; the human skull was extremely sturdy. It required a punishing force. Or a knock at the base of the cranium.

“I turned it on,” Jozsef said from his door. Little-boy sullenness in his voice. “I wanted to play a computer game, Tonio, but I didn't know the access code.”

Sophie Payne had pushed herself, impossibly, to her feet. Her sunken eyes were crazed with fever.

Tonio focused drunkenly on the woman.

“What are you doing out of your cell?”

“I wanted to play, too,” she said.

Tonio swore viciously under his breath and lifted the laptop's lid. Before he wheeled to confront them, Michael's gun crashed down on his skull.

And at that moment, they all heard the sound of the garage door opening.

Mian Krucevic was back.

Three Budapest, 2:15 a.m.

Mirjana Tarcic was parked in an alley near Bela Horvath's house, about a hundred feet beyond his small backyard. Vaclav Slivik had never noticed her, a lapse in his tradecraft and judgment; but Mian had given the assassin too little time to reconnoiter. Mirjana's car was old and indeterminate of color, it was pulled up in the lee of a battered garage, and a tree trunk blocked the line of sight from Bela's kitchen door. A better man than Vaclav would have missed it.

Mirjana had spent most of the day in the emergency room of a Budapest hospital, waiting to be treated for bruises and cracked ribs. She had never gone home. One call to her answering machine had convinced her that home was a mistake.

Mian and his men had left Bela's house hours ago. If she did not move soon, someone would come back.

She had hoped against hope that it would be Bela himself who returned — whistling cheerfully as he walked up the drive, letting himself in through the front door, putting the teakettle on the stove in the wee hours of morning. That was foolishness, of course.

Her cold hand sought the door handle and eased it open.

The rains had brought down a mass of deadwood from the trees. The crunch of twigs beneath her feet was remorseless as death. She could not allow herself to breathe. She crept up to the back door wondering why his neighbors said nothing, why lights did not go on and alarms sound and yet, they had suffered the noise of breaking glass without reaction. They were Hungarians.

They had grown up under the Party system; black cars in the night had always taken people away. The wisest course was simply to go on sleeping.

Her fingers found the latch. Inside, darkness.

She stepped forward, toward a patch of moonlight bright as halogen on the gray linoleum, and saw a tumbled mass of human hair. The sight stopped her in her tracks.

Not hair. Wet strands of a mop, fallen from the open broom closet. With a ragged breath, she reached for it and propped it inside. What had they wanted with this, in the middle of the night? Or had the broom closet door, poorly latched, fallen open under the mop's weight?

She hesitated, eyes adjusting now to the darkness, and scanned the narrow space.

There was the usual broom, a dustpan neatly stacked beside a pail, bottles of cleaning stuff and a carryall filled with clean rags. She knelt and groped along the floor, dreading mice. And touched the square shape of the knapsack.

She had seen him pedaling to work so many times, the knapsack a memory of those university days in Leipzig when they'd all managed to be happy. Bela had hidden it here in his last moments, and Mian in his viciousness had not understood.

Mirjana clutched the backpack to her chest and ran heedless of the neighbors, of the branches cracking underfoot for her life.

Four Budapest, 7:30 a.m.

“I have a theory,” Torn Shephard said as the taxi pulled away from the entrance to the Hilton, “that a city's soul is something you can feel. It walks the streets, asks you for change on a deserted corner, tells you what song it has to sing. You know what I mean?”

Caroline glanced at him wordlessly. So Tom was a morning person. He had found something to love in this sordid new day, the air rank with burning and the looters asleep in the streets. After Eric had left her, she'd lain awake for hours.

It was impossible not to consider every one of his words, every choice she had made; impossible not to see that she had fucked up abominably. She had drawn Eric straight into her trap, and for emotional reasons, she had let him go. It was unforgivable. Unprofessional. It was exactly the kind of example a male case officer would use in an argument against women in Intelligence. Caroline showered blue language on her own head while Tom Shephard chatted genially at her side — Shephard, who had no idea that she had held the Vice President's kidnappers in the palm of her hand and simply waved good-bye. Eric would never contact her again. And Sophie Payne's life was at risk —

“You okay?” Shephard asked.

“I didn't sleep well,” Caroline said brusquely. She felt bruised and overly sensitive, as though she suffered from sunburn.

“Take Paris,” he went on. “Paris is a wealthy woman with a checkered past. She danced at the Folies Bergeres in her youth, then married a besotted comte”

“The very opposite of Washington,” Caroline managed. “Washington has the fussy correctness of a bureaucrat's briefcase.”

“And a tropical-weight suit,” she added, “permanently creased.”

“Istanbul... Istanbul is a stalled caravan, hardening in the sun.”

“St. Petersburg has diamonds in her hair and a gun at her back.”

“So what's Budas story?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“It's part of your territory.”

“But you've lived here.” His look was almost accusing. Intent, invasive, as disturbing as it had been in the plane the previous night. Her pulse quickened.

What is he looking or ...

“I just visit here,” he persisted. “I want to hear your version of the truth.”

No, you don't, she thought. My version is a lie. The taxi had crossed the Chain Bridge and was now in Pest. Here, rioters had spared not a single shop window; shards of glass were flung across the sidewalk like hail. A lavender silk slip trailed across an overturned park bench; more clothes had snagged on trash cans and street signs as the whirlwind of looters had swept through them. Garbage from the dented cans sprawled across the roadbed. A forlorn dog rooted in a sodden cardboard box. Nearby, the sidewalk was stained with what looked like battery acid. Or blood.

The taxi driver grunted and slowed his car to maneuver around an overturned van.

Its engine block was still burning. They were the only people moving on the streets except for a contingent of black-shirted guards. All stared at the taxi suspiciously as it creaked past. Caroline refused to make eye contact. And prayed that she and Shephard would be allowed to proceed.

“Budapest,” she told him, “is a middle-aged man in a shabby coat, nursing an espresso at an outdoor café. It is very cold, and the smell of dog urine from the wet pavement mingles with the coffee and the sharp scent of pickled beets from somewhere down the street.”

“He's wearing wire-rimmed spectacles,” Shephard offered, “and writing in a notebook with a torn cover. His wife left him years ago, but he's haunted by the memory of her laugh.”

Caroline turned to look at him.

“Is he?” she asked. “Better laughter than tears, Tom.”

The hazel eyes did not waver.

“What are you haunted by, Caroline?”

It was all there before her suddenly, the concourse in Frankfurt and the man turning away.

“The memory of silence,” she replied. And did not speak again until they had reached Szabadsag Ter.

The protesters had abandoned the U.S. embassy. No mega phoned speeches or hurled rocks greeted Shephard and Caroline as they approached. There was a checkpoint, however, backed by the ominous clatter of tanks, so they dismissed the taxi and covered the last thirty yards on foot, their diplomatic passports held high.

After a grim few moments of consideration, the guards waved them through.

The stretch of turf that ran between Magyar Television and the National Bank, a modernist cube of glass and steel, was churned to mud and studded with green shards of what had once been soda bottles. The burned trash cans were smoldering now, and stank of seared plastic; a bird, brown as the Danube in winter, pecked disconsolately among the torn seat cushions of a torched car. But the impulse toward civilization had begun to reassert itself; red tape with harsh Hungarian exclamations already cordoned off the worst areas.

Vie Marinelli met them at the embassy door.

“I'm glad you're early,” the Budapest station chief said without preamble. “Our meeting's off.”

“Because of the riots?” Caroline asked.

He shook his head.

“We'll discuss it upstairs. Let's get you through security.

“Morning, Corporal. I'd like to take these people up.”

The marine guard studied their diplomatic passports, then gave them embassy passes they clipped to their clothing. Vie hovered impatiently. He looked, she thought, like a Medici prince — black eyes heavily lidded, full lips set in a permanent curl. She glanced at his hands: the long, tapering fingers of a philosopher-priest.

“Wally Aronson sends his regards,” she told him. “I've already talked to Wally this morning.”

“Then he's up early,” Shephard said.

“I'm not sure he ever went to bed.” Vie looked appraisingly at Caroline.

“He thinks a hell of a lot of you.”

Tom Shephard was staring through the embassy's front window at the garrisoned square below.

“Are those Hungarian tanks?”

“Yes,” Marinelli said tersely, “but only a few Hungarians are manning them. Most of those men are Germans. They arrived this morning. The prime minister asked for NATO help two hours before he resigned. He was refused.” The station chiefs eyes flicked over to Caroline's.

“You've heard about the provisional government, of course?”

“Not a word. Tell us.”

Marinelli led them down a high-ceilinged corridor, past the state drawing rooms and the ambassador's suite.

“Hungarian Pride has formed a cabinet. They seem to have anticipated the treasury heist.”

Hungarian Pride was a right-wing faction led by a charismatic and highly articulate history professor named Georg Korda. The group had never boasted significant power, but their nationalist, pro-cleansing rhetoric had steadily gained adherents.

“Korda's hitting the former government over the head for incompetence, and calling for economic austerity. As though belt tightening can protect you from electronic plunder.” Marinelli grimaced.

“You believe it, then?” Caroline asked.

“That Lajta embezzled the treasury before he killed himself?”

“Somebody did,” he said curtly.

The door of the station suggested a closet tucked into the second-floor landing, something to be overlooked. Marinelli waited for her to precede him, arm outstretched in a gesture of courtesy; this was, after all, his domain. But in Caroline's mind it would always be Eric's. She stepped past him.

Every moldy smell, every curling bit of plaster, every length of electrical wire glimpsed under an upturned edge of carpet screamed to her of the days that were gone. Eric had ruled this station for a while — he had breathed, drunk, and ingested it for the length of his tour and if the soul of that dead time could be said to live anywhere, it was here in the Budapest embassy.

“Okay,” Marinelli said, shutting the door behind them, “here's the state of play. DBTOXIN Bela Horvath was found shot to death in his laboratory this morning. His house and the lab were thoroughly ransacked.”

“Then he's been blown.” The sick feeling of disaster tightened Caroline's shoulder blades.

“I'd like to think it was a coincidence, something to do with the riots. But the timing is too perfect. It looks to me as though Horvath was silenced.”

“By Krucevic?”

“Or his wife.” Marinelli gazed at her levelly. “You know Wally Aronson passed on her number yesterday. A call came through while we were monitoring her line last night. It mentioned toxin's first name.”

“What exactly did it say?” Shephard was frowning.

“"It's me. We're in town. Tell Beta to watch his back. And for Christ's sake, be careful,"” Marinelli quoted.

Eric. It could be no one else.

“That sounds like a warning. Not a death threat.”

“Perhaps the caller is someone she betrayed,” Marinelli suggested. “Just like she betrayed Bela.”

“But the we makes it sound like one of the terrorists.” Shephard's scowl had deepened.

“Or a different group altogether. We can't know for certain.” If Eric could not trust Mirjana Tarcic, Caroline thought but no, the very idea was absurd. The woman hated Mian Krucevic. He had robbed her other son.

“Is anything missing from Horvath's lab? Or his house?” she asked Marinelli.

“Did they find what they were looking for, you mean? I don't know. I'm trying to get that information from the Budapest police. I have a contact there, but with the riots, the looting “ He shook his head.

“I suggested they get one of Horvath's lab partners to go through his things with them. Tell them what might have been taken.”

“If Horvath is blown,” Tom asked, “do we assume that 30 April has already left Hungary?”

“I sure as hell hope not. Because Wally Aronson just came through with something brilliant.” Marinelli reached across his desk for a manila envelope.

“Look at this.”

A sheaf of blueprints, overwritten with handwriting so fine it was almost impossible to read. Page after page of blueprints perhaps a dozen in all.

Caroline bent over the plans.

“What are these?”

“The security details of Mian Krucevic's Budapest headquarters.”

“Jesus,” burst out Tom Shephard. “Has anyone called Washington?”

“Of course,” Marinelli said patiently.

“I suppose we owe this to old what's-his-acronym,” Caroline murmured.

The station chief glanced at her sharply.

“Wally got these blueprints from a developmental. A Russian security expert. He's dead.”

Tom expelled a gusty breath.

“This job just gets less and less healthy. So when do we storm the compound?”

“When we know where it is,” Marinelli said crisply.

Caroline and Tom exchanged a look.

“One person might be able to help us,” she said.

“Mirjana Tarcic.”

“We can't trust her.” Marinelli dismissed the notion instantly. “It's probable that she betrayed Horvath. If we contact her and she warns Krucevic, he'll be long gone by the time we arrive.”

“But Tarcic is all we've got.”

Marinelli opened his mouth to argue and then abruptly closed it as the truth of Caroline's words hit home.

Tom looked up from the blueprints.

“Are the Buda police searching for this woman?”

Marinelli's eyes shifted away.

“I don't know. Maybe they are.”

Which meant, Caroline thought, that they certainly were. Marinelli had given his police source Mirjana Tarcic an even trade for the mans information about Horvath.

“Perhaps we should get to her first,” Shephard mused. “Control the situation. The Vice President's fate demands that much.”

“I have to agree.” And for the first time, Marinelli's medieval face wore a troubled expression. Had he begun to doubt himself?

“Maybe I can help,” Tom offered. “I've got contacts here at the Interior Ministry. The Hungarian FBI. Do you have a photograph of Tarcic, by any chance?” The station chief did.

It was a candid shot, probably taken by a case officer through a car window. She was walking along a city street, muffled in a winter coat; but miraculously the photographer had gotten the angle right, and the woman's face filled the frame.

Lank dark hair, deep-set Balkan eyes it was an arresting face, gaunt with middle age, hollow with anxiety.

Caroline passed the photograph to Tom Shephard. He tapped it lightly with one finger.

“The federal police owe me some favors.”

“Let's hope they can keep their mouths shut,” Mannelli said.

Five The Danube Bend, 10:03 a.m.

Szentendre was an ancient town of Byzantine Rite churches, all facing east; of artists and musicians and tourist kitsch. A small jewel of Balkan architecture, it had been founded in 1389, after the Turks won the Battle ofKosovo and the vanquished Serbs fled west and north. Like many places born of exile, it felt more authentic than the original. Most of the Serbs had returned to Belgrade four hundred years later, rather than swear allegiance to the Hapsburg Empire; but a few had remained. Mirjana Tarcic's mother was descended from one of them.

She rented an apartment above an art gallery on Gorog Utca, a steep and narrow street running down to the banks of the Danube. Two rooms, with wide-plank pine flooring and red woven rugs, wooden tables painted in the Hungarian folk fashion, and a galley kitchen hung about with antique copper butter molds.

Skylights were cut into the sloping roof, and on days of bright sun the rugs fired crimson, the trailing flowers on the painted chair-backs leapt to vivid life. It was a comfortable place for a single woman — or two women, when Mirjana drove out from the city for the weekend.

She had driven out a day early this time, because of the riots. She had driven out of Bela Horvath's alley as though Mian Krucevic were after her with a chain saw. She arrived at three A.M. and let herself into the apartment with her spare key. Four hours later, her mother found her asleep on the living-room sofa.

Bela Horvath's body had not yet been discovered in the ruins of his lab. She was granted a period of ignorance.

Mirjana slept fitfully, despite the soothing drum of rain on the skylight glass.

She awoke with a start to the slam of a door and knew that her mother had left for work. The older woman owned an antiques store on the main street of Szentendre, Fe Ter, a thriving business now that people had cash to spend.

It was already after ten o'clock.

Panic washed over Mirjana. She turned, threw off the wool blanket her mother had tucked around her, and searched frantically for the notebook and ampules. They were there still, on the floor at the sofa's foot, where she had dropped them the night before.

The strong earthen smell of coffee pulled her to the kitchen. Her mind was still dazed with terror. Her ribs, cracked and tightly taped by a Budapest hospital, ached with every breath. Mian Krucevic lurked in the corners of her brain, in the closets she forced him to occupy; he hammered loudly at her padlocked doors.

He knew about her mother. He knew the apartment in Szentendre. What had she been thinking of to draw him this way? Fool. She had thrown herself down the Danube Bend in desperation, in the middle of the night, but she could not stay. Her mother — Where were the ampules? The notebook? What time was it, now?

She stared crazily around the room, her throat swelling with fear, then saw them lying where she had left them — on the floor near the sofa. Thank God. She wasn't losing her mind. She took a deep swallow of the coffee, choked, and spat it into the sink.

Why was she so afraid of him? He had done almost everything to her body that one man could do. If he killed her at last, it would be nothing more than a single moment of terror in the long line of such moments that had punctuated her life.

She was not afraid of pain. She was terrified of losing. For once in her life she had the upper hand with Mian Krucevic — she had the notebook and the ampules, she had knowledge and power over his life. She had a chance to take back Jozsef.

She would find a safe place. She would hide herself and her mother. And then she would contact Mian — somehow, there was always a way — and tell him what she knew. What she could give to the world, to the United States: the truth about vaccine No. 413.

And at last, after decades of torment and loss and terror, she would grind his balls under her heel, and wear cleats to do it. She would demand the return of her son.

And then? Wiaf flicn, Mirjana? You do not make deals with the devil. Because the devil always wins.

Where is the notebook? The ampules? Dabo sacuva — There. Near the sofa.

She poured half the cup of coffee down the drain with shaking fingers. And at that moment, there was a knock on the door.

Mirjana went rigid. She could not breathe.

Another knock, louder this time.

And then the sound of a metal pick sliding into the lock.

There was no other way out of the apartment. She was trapped.

Mirjana tore wildly across the small room, whimpering deep in her throat, and snatched up the notebook and ampules. He will not win.

She thrust Bela's things under her mother's mattress in a kind of frenzy. She had mounted a chair and unlocked the skylight by the time the front door was kicked open.

Shephard insisted on escorting Caroline past the Volksturm tanks and down Dorottya Utca toward Vorosmarty Ter.

“Are you coming with me?” he asked abruptly.

“To the Interior Ministry?” She was surprised. “I'd just cramp your style. These are your contacts, Shephard. You don't need me hovering in the background. I require too much explanation.”

“That you do,” he muttered under his breath. “So are you off for a quick change in a telephone booth? Caroline Carmichael into Sally Bowles? A meeting with Sharif's Budapest division, say?”

She stopped short. So he had taken Wally Aronson's hints to heart. What else was Tom Shephard beginning to suspect?

“Look,” she temporized, “I'm sorry I haven't been completely frank. We work for different agencies. We have different kinds of constraints. I don't expect you to explain your operational code. So don't ask me to explain mine. I promise you that everything I do with blond hair or black is dedicated toward finding the Vice President.”

His sharp eyes bored into hers, unappeased.

“If you want to nab Mirjana Tarcic, you'd better get going,” she said.

“Where will you be?”

“At Gerbeaud's. The cafe in Vorosmarty Ter. I need some coffee.”

“I'll meet you there for lunch.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Let's say one o'clock.”

“Done.”

She waited on the sidewalk until he was out of sight, despite the raw wind gusting off the Danube. Something in the way he carried himself in his rumpled clothes graceful as a cricketer in flannels, from an era long dead lifted her spirits immeasurably. She found that she was actually thankful for him: for Tom Shephard, the millstone around her neck. She had not anticipated how useful he could be. He was, after all, the Central European LegAtt. The security systems of an entire region were theoretically at his fingertips. Mirjana Tarcic was as good as bagged.

She was still gazing after him when Eric's car pulled up to the corner of Dorottya Utca.

He had the passenger door open. She got in.

Six Budapest, 10 a.m.

Don't speak, Eric had written on a scrap of paper. Car's bugged.

Caroline held the note tightly in her hand and stared straight ahead through the windshield. It had begun to rain, a fine mist that clouded the glass; the interior of the Audi was musty with wet wool and dead smoke.

He drove fast, toward the Elizabeth Bridge and across the Danube to Gellert Hill, up the winding, park like roads that switched back and back. In the eleventh century, pagan Huns had rolled St. Gellert down this hill — to his death in the Danube. In the nineteenth, the Hapsburg rulers had mounted cannon here and trained them against their own city. More recently, the Soviets had erected statues on the hill, celebrating Communist brotherhood. It was, Caroline thought, a place consecrated in betrayal.

He pulled up at the summit, monuments soaring behind his back. Gellert Hill was deserted at this time of day, in this shower of ram. She got out.

Eric left the keys in the Audi's ignition and joined her.

“We don't have much time.” He began to walk, tugging her with him, toward the river roiling gray through the streaming trees.

“What are you doing out here in broad daylight, alone? That's not Krucevic's MO,” Caroline said tensely.

“He sent me out.” Eric's voice was almost feverish. “He sent me out for a fucking newspaper, Caroline. It's a setup.”

“Beta Horvath is dead.”

He stopped in his tracks, swearing softly, and released her.

“Mirjana?”

“Hasn't been found. But Buda station's screening her calls. Don't use her number.”

A hundred yards behind them, the Audi they'd left seconds before exploded with the scream of a flying shell. The drivers side door flew off, kited high into the air, and plummeted to the ground ten feet from where they stood.

“Holy shit,” Caroline whispered.

They stopped running at the entrance to the baths that formed the basement of the Hotel Gellert. Eric paid their admission without waiting for change and they ducked inside, as though intent on some shameful assignation. The air was thick with steam and the pungency of eucalyptus. She looked up, saw the cathedral height of the mosaic tile ceiling, an illusion of sanctuary. And thought. They are hunting him.

Eric led her to a table set into an alcove. She sat down, weak-kneed. He remained standing, a man with places to go, always on the verge of leaving her.

“Last night,” he said, “after I left your hotel, I drove back to Krucevic's base. He wasn't there. Tonio was dead drunk and the boy and Mrs. Payne were sleeping. I downloaded everything from his computer. Everything that matters. Then I tried to get the Veep and Jozsef out. Krucevic came back before I could.”

“And?”

“And he accused me of selling him out to his ex-wife and Horvath.”

“Which I presume you've done.”

“Systematically,” Eric agreed, still in the same intense undertone. “It's the whole point of this operation. I've got a network out there. It's in place. I use it.”

“Why didn't he kill you?”

“I told him he was wrong.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“That alone should have bought you a bullet.”

“I pointed out that I had never been given access to his computer. His computer holds everything that Krucevic values. One person alone has access.” He leaned closer to her, his blue eyes blazing.

“To save myself, I gave him Tonio, who was lying unconscious at his feet, reeking of alcohol. I'd knocked him on the head with the butt of my gun. I told Krucevic that if he was looking for a traitor, he should check first with the man who owned his keyboard. Would you call that cowardice, Caroline?”

“Don't ask me to stand in judgment over anything you do, Eric. I can't grant you absolution.”

“The Veep is dying,” he said. “She's dying, Caroline, and you're right, we're out of time. I can't leave her alone.”

“I think you just did,” she retorted. “There's no road back from a blown car. Did you push the button, or did they?”

“I didn't wire the car. Let's just call that Krucevic's insurance.”

Across the distance of maybe a hundred feet, a wet head was bobbing in the warm spring pool. The echoing vastness of the Gellert baths could play tricks with sound, send deceptive waves curling along the ceiling tiles. But Eric was speaking softly.

“How sick is Payne?” she asked.

“I'd give her twenty-four hours. Less, probably.”

“The antibiotic doesn't work?”

“It works for a while. She's had several doses of it, which accounts for the fact that she's still breathing. But Krucevic has cut her off. His antibiotic supplies were limited. He was saving them for his son. And then Payne smashed all that he had.”

Caroline stared at him in dismay.

“That's .. . that's insane.”

“She thought that if Krucevic was out of drugs, he'd trash his campaign. Head back to the labs in Berlin.”

“You don't agree.”

“Krucevic never retreats, Carrie.”

“He'll kill her for this, won't he?”

“I think that's what she wants,” Eric mused. “She's got immense courage, Caroline. She's tougher than you'd believe but she's in enough pain to think death would be a relief. Last night she asked me to shoot her. I probably should have. Now” He reached into his jacket and withdrew a small brown envelope. “Get this to Scottie.”

“What is it?”

“A computer disk. Everything Scottie needs to know is on it. Mian's contacts in terrorist organizations worldwide, his complete list of accounts, the way the money flows, the mumps epidemic”

“Mumps epidemic? You mean in Pristina?”

An angel with flushed cheeks sinking on her mother's shoulder. Thousands of sick and dying children, the Muslim horde Krucevic despised. No more sacred to him than fire bombed hostels, or dead chancellors, or winsome Dagmar Hammecher, her blond hair shaved and her small hand sawn off. Of course the mumps epidemic was no accident. Caroline's anger flared as the random pieces shifted into place.

“And copies of Krucevic's e-mail correspondence with Fritz Voekl,” Eric concluded.

“Voekl's sending German medical teams into Pristina with vaccines right now,” she said. “Is that the point? Create an epidemic so that Fritz can save a few Muslim lives?”

“You're the analyst.”

She stared at him. The disk in her hand held over two years of their lives.

Outside the rain beat down on Budapest, dead leaves swirled in the city park.

The city park. Where Scottie's ghost still walked in tweeds, an arm around each of their shoulders “Scottie knew about you, didn't he?” she said very softly. “All this time. Scottie knew you weren't dead.”

Eric went utterly still. His face took on a look of brittle awareness.

“He never told you?”

“Told me what?”

Slowly, he reached for the chair opposite and sat down.

“Are you saying that Scottie never told you I was alive?”

When he could have the most exotic undercover operation ever conceived in his own backyard, subject to no oversight, financed by selective borrowing among the CTC's ample accounts? With Eric to run and enough room to run him, Scottie could screw them all Congress, the guys who'd been promoted past him, Dare Atwood in her cherry-paneled office on the seventh floor. Why tell anyone at all? It was a much better secret savored in silence. And with a little luck and expert timing, Scottie might even catch Mian Krucevic, certified sicko, with all the adulation that could bring.

Deception was second nature to Scottie; he had compartments to spare in his sinuous brain. Eric fit so conveniently into one of them. Caroline felt suddenly giddy with hilarity. Of course Scottie told nobody. This thing was as sexy as a stripper in the living room, it was the wet dream of a case officer's long, dry career.

“What do you think Scottie is,” she replied with a shaky laugh. “Unprofessional?”

Eric stood up suddenly and tossed the small table aside like so many milk cartons, tossed it at the tiled wall of the baths with a violence that echoed and reechoed under the streaming ceiling. Her second explosion that hour. And seized her by the shoulders, oblivious of the bathers watching them now.

“You honestly thought that I would leave you spend all this time under cover without a word? You think I would do that? You think any kind of operation would be worth that kind of pain?”

“I had nothing else to believe.”

“Thirty months.” He paced viciously away from her. “Thirty months of hell, of being not what I am, of plotting and calculating and hoping there's some kind of God between me and death, of thinking, Caroline is there. She is there. I will get back to her ” He stopped. “Only that was never part of the plan, was it? That's why he didn't tell you. Scottie never thought I was coming back.”

“Eric,” she said brusquely, “you're dead and buried. And believe me, right now, everybody at the Agency would prefer you stayed that way. No one's prepared to offer an explanation for your survival. The truth has never had much to do with Operations, has it?”

“But this is Scottie we're talking about.” He stared, unseeing, at the steam rising like cumulus from the surface of the pool.

“There's no way he could have told me. I'd have rejected the entire idea. Or I'd have shared the secret with Cuddy, maybe. You know I would.”

“Cuddy doesn't know?” Eric stared at her blankly. “What about Dare Atwood?”

“She sure as hell knows nothing.”

“You all wish I were dead.” Accusing now, with herself as proxy for the man he couldn't strike. “That's what you want.”

“Well .. .” She rose and went to him, afraid of the high-vaulted chamber's effect on sound. “Nobody was thrilled to see you alive and well and kidnapping the Vice President, understand?”

Eric wheeled away from her.

“He used me. Completely and utterly. And I volunteered for the privilege. I was so proud that he trusted me...”

“Are you saying that Scottie engineered the hit against Payne?”

“That would be Oliver Stone's version, Caroline. Don't be paranoid. Scottie put me under deep cover, working for Krucevic. And told me that when I had what I needed to nail the asshole, he'd get me out.”

What had Scottie said only Tuesday morning? He's a killer, Caroline, and he's out in the cold. It wouldn't be Scottie who brought Eric home. Scottie had run a rogue operation. As a result, Vice President Sophie Payne was dying.

But Scottie had complete deniability — as long as Eric was silenced forever.

They crept through the Var, the Castle District, scorning the open expanse of the Danube ramparts, the funicular railroad, the places where tourists thronged.

They took the side streets and alleyways beyond Gellerthegy until at last they emerged at the north end of the Var. This part of Buda had been destroyed and rebuilt so many times — by Mongols and Turks and Austrians and Nazis — it seemed a fitting place to turn over the rubble of their lives. A place where the appearance of order was all that remained.

“There was a girl,” Eric said as they walked, “at the university. A graduate student in molecular biology. Her name was Erzsebet Kiraly”

“What about her?”

“She worked part time in Mian's lab. I recruited her there, before the end — before MedAir 901. She was sharp and funny and you would have liked her, Caroline, with her peasant skirts and her long red braids hanging down her back. She knew something was wrong with Mian's vaccines.”

“You mean the mumps?”

“His small contribution to the Muslim problem.” Eric looked at her searchingly. “It's all on the disk. Make sure you get it to Dare. Not to Scottie. Is that understood?”

She nodded. He walked on, head down, hands thrust in his pockets. She tried not to look over her shoulder for a man with a gun.

“Three years ago, I started paying Erzsebet to smuggle information out of the lab,” Eric said. “She did a good job. So good, Mian chose her to carry his germs to Turkey.”

“On MedAir 901?”

“It made excellent sense.” Eric kicked at a paving stone and watched it skitter into the street. “Airlines don't x-ray boxes of certified medical supplies. Not vaccines. Not when the boxes come with the right government seals and stamps. They're too afraid that radiation will destroy the drugs. Do you see?”

“There was a bomb in the VaccuGen cargo and Erzsebet put it on the plane,” Caroline said flatly. “Why weren't you on that flight, too?”

“I was. I gave up my seat.” His voice was still flush with amazement at it, the narrowness of chance. “I gave up my seat to a woman with a sick child, a woman who needed to get back to Istanbul. The baby was wailing. A flight attendant stood at the front of the plane and asked for volunteers. I went.”

“They didn't bother to pull your boarding pass?”

“This was not an American airline, Carrie. It was a third-world plane with about forty seconds to hit its takeoff slot at one of the busiest airports in the world. They sent me to the counter to rebook and plunked the woman and baby down in my seat. Never took my name off the 901 manifest.”

“But you didn't rebook.”

“I went first to your gate. Your plane had already pulled back. So I got lunch instead.”

“And thirty-three minutes after takeoff, MedAir 901 exploded,” Caroline finished. Life as I knew it, shot down in flames. The jetway at Duties seven hours later, Scottie and Dare wailing with the news. I didn't believe it. I didn't believe it. And then Scottic's face — yiefon that perfect forehead. Mourning tlic only tiling that mattered. His Eric. Then I knew it was true.

“The plane blew up with Erzsebet and the woman and her baby on board,” Eric said. “I called Scottie as soon as the news came through.”

“Why didn't you call me?”

“You were somewhere over the Atlantic. And Scottie promised he'd explain.”

Explain. As though I were a lunch date skipped for a perfectly good reason. She raised her fists and beat them against his chest in fury.

“You did this for Erzsebet Kiraly? You traded me for her?”

He circled her wrists and held them tightly.

“I paid her to betray Mian. I caused her death. A twenty-one-year-old girl. I owed her something, I think.”

“Your life for hers. Our marriage.” Caroline's voice was lacerating. “So was it worth it, Eric? Your payment in blood? Are you happy with the bargain?”

His eyes were shuttered.

“Happiness was never the point, Mad Dog”

“No. I see that now.”

Three blocks from the Hilton he stepped into the doorway of a vacant storefront and pulled her roughly against him. The embrace was cover, she thought; there was no emotion behind it. Just a piece of business in case anyone was watching.

The cold hollow in the center of her chest widened and spread, dulling her senses.

“I've got to leave you here,” he said, “and get back to Sophie.”

“Back? That's insane! Krucevic will kill you.”

Caroline gazed at Eric's face and saw the wind howling in his bones. He was only forty. He looked far older. He had no way in from the cold, and he knew it. He would live for a while, a hunted man. And then he would die in the dark, far from home. This time, no one would break the news.

He reached into his pocket, his eyes scanning the street beyond her head.

“Take this. It's a map to Krucevic's Budapest: base. Take it to your COS” — he was dissociating himself now, he wanted nothing to do with the Agency apparatus — “and get a raid going. But do it fast. You haven't much time.” Caroline glanced at her watch. It was 12:32 p.m.

“The place is an arsenal...”

“I know. We have the blueprints.” She clutched the paper between chilled fingers. “Eric, Krucevic blew your car. He wants you dead. Bela Horvath may have told Krucevic everything before he died. You can't walk back into that sort of situation. Unless you have a death wish.”

“Sophie Payne is alone, Caroline.”

“We'll get to her. In a matter of hours. But it's time you walked away. Anything else is just ego. The Eric Carmichael I knew would never throw himself away on pride.”

“We both know there's no going back, Mad Dog.” And at last, she heard bitterness in his voice.

“To survive evil, you have to become its friend. You have to take its hand and walk with it a ways. And then the path behind is barred to you. You're no longer the person you were, the person who would never think of putting a silencer to a little girl's head. You can't wake up on a Saturday morning in the suburbs of Washington and take a run along the canal or chat over coffee about the Super Bowl not if you have the remnants of a soul. You're too guilty for peace.”

“It's as though you really did die,” she said.

“I've done some terrible things, Caroline. I don't live with them easily. I can't wipe them off my soul.”

It was true, she thought, with infinite sadness; and there was no going back to her marriage, either. The man she had loved yearned for in death, and desired in life was gone.

“Take this.” He was holding out a beeper. “It's a homing device for a transmitter I planted. Highly sophisticated German technology. If you're within two miles, it should lead you to the Veep.”

Her fingers closed around it.

“Promise me you won't return to that bunker.”

“What promise could I possibly make that you would ever believe?” He studied her narrowly. “Krucevic suspects he's been betrayed. He may already have left Budapest. If the maps no good”

“Then what? Berlin? For more antibiotic?”

He shook his head.

“Like I said, Mian doesn't retreat. He'll go onward, not back. There's only one place left.”

Caroline's brain raced furiously. To Poland, where Cuddy had traced the Hungarian treasury funds? But Krucevic had no lab in Poland or none that she had ever identified. If Krucevic cared at all about Jozsef...

“He'll go to ground,” she murmured. “Like a wounded animal. He'll go home, won't he?”

Eric nodded.

“To Bosnia. Ziv Zakopan. The old death camp south of Sarajevo. He's got a lab there, set high in the hills.”

She took a step backward, her breath catching in her throat. Ziv Zakopan. A place so terrible, even rumor spoke in whispers. A place no prisoner had ever left alive.

“It really exists?”

“It must,” Eric said bleakly. “I've been there. Now listen carefully, Mad Dog. I'm going to tell you where it is.”

Seven Budapest, 1:03 p.m.

In that last moment, when Eric turned to walk away, Caroline reached for him and held him close. She was done with bitterness and rage. Done with weighing her options, cataloging pain, attempting to control the future — it was enough, in that moment, to feel the heart of the man she loved beating close to her own.

“God, don't leave me,” she whispered. “I can't stand it, Eric”

“Neither can I,” he muttered into her hair. “You tear the soul from my body, Carrie.”

“Then take me with you. We can run together.” She felt no loyalty now to the Agency that had betrayed him. He loosened the hands she had locked around his waist and held her at arm's length. For perhaps three seconds, she watched him consider her offer. Then he shook his head.

“Its not finished. This business. Running won't end it.”

“You've done enough!”

“Remember Sophie, Caroline. Sophie. I owe her a chance. And I need you to help me.”

Caroline's protests died on her lips. She dropped her head to his chest, as futile as pounding a brick wall. Sophie Payne was more innocent than Eric. Sophie Payne demanded retribution.

“Let it go, Mad Dog,” he said quietly. “We live the lives we're left with.”

“We will not let him win, do you hear?”

“Mian?”

“Scottie,” she said fiercely. “Seattle. We will not let him ruin us and walk away clean.”

He smiled at her, but there was no belief in his eyes. She felt like a child he was humoring. She snatched at his wrist.

“Damn it, Eric. I won't let you just lie down and die”

“No. You never would. My mad dog — ” He leaned forward and kissed her full on the mouth. The savagery behind it was like an electric shock.

“Do you still have your grenade pin?” he asked her.

She nodded, too breathless to speak. The cunning and unlikely grenade pin.

“Here's mine.”

It dangled before her nose, an olive drab metallic ring broad enough to circle a man's finger. She reached a trembling hand to his, and their fingers locked.

“I've kept it all these years,” Eric said. “My link to the past. To you.” His grip tightened. “If we both survive this, Mad Dog, I will find you. Believe that”

And then her hand was hers again. The grenade pin slipped back into his pocket.

She watched him walk away, hoping he would look back — but what would she do if he did? To stand stock — still on the paving stones of Budapest while Eric left her once again was much more difficult than running. Caroline is no trouble, whispered Uncle Hank in her ear. Caroline does the hardest tiling, always.

Eric did not look back.

When he had turned into a side street and vanished from view, she took a shuddering breath and thrust her hands into her pockets. The sharp, clean edge of his computer disk. The homing device. And the folded piece of paper that was the key to Sophie Payne's prison.

Time was short. She would need an explanation for the map's existence — Vie Mannelli would demand it. Heading for her hotel, Caroline crossed the street at a run. Tom Shephard was sitting inside Gerbeaud's with a copy of the Herald Tribune spread open before him. He had consumed almost all of a chocolate torte and, to Caroline's surprise, had taken it with tea. A pot of Earl Grey still perfumed the air gently with bergamot.

“You're late.” He tossed his napkin aside. “I haven't got much to tell you, I'm afraid. Mirjana Tarcic was treated in a hospital the day of the riots, then disappeared. The federal police think they might have a lead — ”

“Have you paid, Tom? I've got a taxi waiting.” The impatience in her face stopped his objection.

“What is it?”

“Krucevic.” She held aloft a slip of paper. “His Budapest base. The one that matches Wally's blueprints.”

“Jesus.” Shephard emptied his pockets of loose change. “How the hell did you find that?”

“Call it a gift from Mahmoud Sharif's Budapest division,” she said.

Vie Marinelli came to attention in his chair.

“A map?” he said into the receiver.

“Right — it's coming through the secure fax right now. Jesus! What do we do with it?”

“You wait for Atwood and Bigelow to come on-line in the VTC room,” Cuddy Wilmot told him, “and then you conference.”

Marinelli was already staring at the rough line drawing of the northwest sector of Budapest, a neighborhood of warehouses and commercial trucking. The map was furred and ratcheted with electronic interference, but he could piece his way, bit by bit, to the center of Krucevic's heart. His own began to thud with excitement. Headquarters had finally done its job.

“What time's the teleconference?”

“One-thirty. Have Caroline and your LegAtt in the vault three minutes before.”

“Caroline? You mean your analyst?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think that's wise?” Marinelli's tone made it clear that he did not. “This is operational, Wilmot. She shouldn't have access.”

“Caroline is an expert on Mian Krucevic,” Cuddy replied patiently, “and she's already seen the map, Vie. I sent a copy to her hotel.”

“You what?”

“I thought she'd be able to tell me whether the details made sense. She thinks that they do.”

“But she's an analyst,” Vie repeated in disbelief. “Not a case officer. What were you thinking?”

“We don't draw those lines so strictly here at the CTC.” Cuddy sounded almost amused. “We use an interdisciplinary approach to cases. And you owe the map to Caroline in the first place. It was at her suggestion that we queried this source.”

The source. Cuddy had already explained, was an American citizen they would call the Volunteer. He was in the habit of dealing gray arms to dubious clients, but from time to time, he offered information to the CIA in recompense for his sins.

“This is un-fucking-believable,” Marinelli muttered.

“Caroline thought of the Volunteer immediately when she saw Wally Aronson's blueprints. But she was worried about turf — who handled the guy, what she was allowed to tell you. So she called me.”

Marinellis eyebrows lifted satanically at a target six thousand miles away. He'd spent enough time in the game to know when Headquarters was trying to upstage him.

“Luckily, the asset was available for questioning — he's being held in a medium-security facility in West Virginia.”

“And he just .. . volunteered .. . the route to 30 April's bunker,” Marinelli mused. “Lucky doesn't even begin to describe it, Wilmot.”

“Strap one on, Vie.” Now the amusement was obvious. “We'll be pulling for you back home.”

In Washington, D.C., it was only seven-thirty in the morning. Caroline studied Dare Atwood's face on the secure video monitor and found new lines of weariness and strain. The Vice President of the United States had been kidnapped seventy-two hours ago. Since then, Dare had probably briefed Congress once or twice, met or avoided a legion of reporters, held endless meetings with her Intelligence chiefs, and taped a political talk show appearance for airing on Sunday morning. In between, she would have eaten badly, dispatched aides to her Georgetown home in search of a fresh silk blouse and pink lipstick, and taken the long walk from the East Gate to the White House six or seven times, briefcase in hand. The possibility that Eric might go public about his Agency affiliation would have destroyed what little sleep Dare had. The appearance of this map to 30 April's bunker should have come as an enormous relief. But gazing at the monitor, Caroline couldn't find relief in Dare's face.

Jack Bigelow, on the other hand, looked as though he were wired for sound. His image nearly catapulted through the television screen. He'd slept well, had a big breakfast, and was goin' out hunting', loaded for bear.

“Hey there, folks,” he drawled genially when Embassy Budapest came on-line.

“Hear y'all been doin' yer jobs real well fera change. Soph's gonna be pleased as punch when y'all come knockin' at the asshole's door.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. President, Director Atwood,” said Ambassador Stetson Waterhouse. He was a recent political appointee to the Buda post — a lifelong fly-fishing buddy of Jack Bigelow's — and a man crucified by concern for protocol.

“I have with me COS Vie Marinelli; the Legal Attache for Central Europe, Mr. Tom Shephard; and Ms. Caroline Carmichael, of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Are we coming through clearly on your end?”

“Clear as mud, Stetz,” said Bigelow. “DCI's gonna give us a little summary.”

“Mr. President,” Dare began, “it is our view that Vice President Sophie Payne may presently be held at 30 April's Budapest headquarters, a warehouse with underground facilities located in an industrial sector of the city. You have a copy of the map to that warehouse in front of you. Our sources suggest that Payne was present at that site as recently as three hours ago. We have a fix on the facility's location, and blueprints of its security systems. We do not yet know, however, whether the terrorists and Mrs. Payne are still there.”

The DCI had barely finished before Bigelow's voice cut over hers.

“You guys on the ground got any ideas?”

Ambassador Waterhouse looked around at the three of them, flummoxed.

“Mr. President,” said Marinelli, “we received the map only fifteen minutes ago. I — ”

“Get some surveillance on the place.”

“Yes, sir.” Marinelli reached for a phone on the desk before him; he dialed an internal embassy number.

“And make sure yer watchers are armed, son. We don't want another Bratislava.”

Bratislava. The memory of two case officers shot to death in a plumber's van loomed large in all their minds.

Caroline kept her eyes on the screen. Since her return to the station, the COS had been treating her as though she carried the plague.

A gray-haired man in uniform who sat at Bigelow's left stabbed his microphone button abruptly. She recognized the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“We can send up some AWAC planes,” Clayton Phillips barked. “Intercept all electronic emissions coming out of Budapest. There are NATO crews on the ground already in Hungary.”

“But you'll have to get NATO consent,” objected Matthew Finch, the National Security Advisor. “That means giving NATO a reason for the intercepts. Sharing the truth. And losing control. Could be a big mistake.”

“What about Delta Force?” Bigelow asked.

“If we had more time — ” Phillips began.

“Then what about Germany?” Bigelow was getting impatient. “Ramstein Air Base. Scramble a bunch a guys outta there.”

“Again — to assemble the team, get them in a plane, send them to Budapest, and deploy them at the site,” General Phillips said, “you're talking three hours.”

“Three hours.” Bigelow glanced at his watch, then squinted at the video monitor. “What time's it over there?”

“In three hours, Mr. President, it will be almost five p.m.,” Stetz Waterhouse told him.

“Gettin' dark. That'll have to do. Unless — ” The President released his mike button and leaned to whisper in his security advisor's ear.

“Ms. Carmichael,” said Matthew Finch, “in your bio of Mian Krucevic you state that he never negotiates. Could you amplify on that point?”

“Certainly.” She threw a glance at Marinelli; his expression remained wooden. “Negotiation is a nonstarter for several reasons. First, Mian Krucevic would have to come out in the open — speak under the eyes of the world press — as Mrs. Payne's kidnapper, and he shuns that kind of publicity. He'll avoid it at all cost. Second, negotiation means Krucevic gives up Mrs. Payne in order to get something else. We have nothing to offer Krucevic that he wants. And it's a point of honor to the man that he does not concede.”

Mannelli 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 Mian 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. “Mian 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. Mian's father, in his eyes, must have seemed like God himself. He held people's very lives in his hands. No one survived Ziv 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, Clay. 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 profile of the man crouched next to him in the back of the armored van. Vie 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 Shephards 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 Vie 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 Esterhazy, 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. Esterhazy'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: Esterhazy 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 Gorog Utca and crossed to the far sidewalk. None of them carried an umbrella.

Esterhazy 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 Esterhazy 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 Esterhazy'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. Esterhazy 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. Esterhazy'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. Esterhazy 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. Esterhazy looked at Shephard's photograph once more. Mirjana Tarcic wore a white silk scarf.

“Boss!” yelled Berg from the foot of the steps.

“There's an old lady down here, says she lives up above! You want to see her?”

The mother. Bassza me.

Esterhazy's stomach heaved. He ducked back into the bathroom without a word.

Tom Shephard could not have reached Marinelli before the red eye blinked, before the laser beam he could not see was intersected and the explosive circuit completed. But he ran anyway, his mouth open in a yell against the stupidity of all cowboys, the bravado of SEALs, toward the Medici prince outlined for an instant against the mouth of hell.

Nine Budapest, 6 p.m.

Embassy Budapest officially closed for business at five p.m., but no U.S. installation in a rioting city, with a hostage Vice President and a rescue mission in progress, simply shuts its doors and sends its people home. Caroline had company in the station vault: Vie Marinelli's secretary, an efficient woman in her forties named Teddy, who scrupulously organized files while waiting for news. Teddy was slim and stylish in her long, narrow skirt; she shifted paper with quick hands that never mistook their purpose. Caroline would have been grateful for a distraction — she was tense and apprehensive — but Teddy seemed disinclined to talk.

In her mind, Eric walked slowly away down a rain-washed street.

Christ, Eric, I won't let you just lie down and die.

No. You never would.

She pushed him aside with difficulty, pulled up a chair to a computer terminal, and began composing a cable for Dare Atwood.

Classification: Top Secret.

Routing: the DCI's personal channel. Caroline added her Cutout slug, which would limit access to Dare Atwood alone. Then, confronted with the body of the cable, she typed: The following is information received from Michael O'Shaughnessy, an operative working under nonofficial cover who penetrated the 30 April Organization. During the past thirty months, C/CTC handled O'Shaughnessy in place. This intelligence was secured at C/CTC's direction from 30 April's main computer database.

C/CTC meant “Chief, Counterterrorism Center.” Dare would know immediately what Scottie Sorensen had done, from the moment of MedAir 901's explosion; Dare was a High Priestess of Reason, too. She would unravel the knots taster than Scottie could tie them.

Caroline retrieved Eric's disk from her coat pocket. Downloading foreign data onto a secure Agency computer was technically forbidden; the fear of electronic virus transmission was too great. Caroline suppressed a qualm and pulled up the disk's file list. She began systematically copying it into the DCI's cable.

A phone pierced the station's stillness. Teddy cut it off on the first ring.

“Caroline? Could you go down to Reception and talk to a guy from the federal police? He asked for Shephard or Marinelli, but I said they were unavailable.”

Mirjana. She stood up, her pulse accelerating, and hit the computer's screen saver.

“Please don't secure the vault, Teddy. I'm still cabling Headquarters.”

The visitor, a broad-shouldered, stocky man in a rumpled wool suit, was pacing by the time she got to the marine guard.

“Caroline Carmichael,” she said. “How may I help you?”

He shook her hand mechanically, but his face remained guarded.

“Where is Shephard?” he asked in halting English.

“We expect him momentarily. I work with Mr. Shephard. I'm happy to relay any message — ”

“You are FBI?”

“Department of State,” Caroline said smoothly. “Temporary duty from Washington. And you are — ?”

“Esterhazy.” He flipped open a badge; she studied it briefly.

“Shephard brought you a photograph this morning.”

His eyes widened slightly. He nodded.

A few chairs were ranged against one wall of the reception area; Caroline turned, and Esterhazy followed her. They sat down fifteen feet from the impassive marine guard.

“Tell Shephard the woman is dead,” Esterhazy said softly.

“Mirjana Tarcic? Murdered?”

“But yes.”

“Was she shot? Like Horvath?”

“She was beaten. A scarf around her neck, tight. You do not want to know….”

“You found her in Budapest?”

The man had no reason to tell her anything. His gaze slid uneasily around the foyer; then he seemed to concede.

“In Szentendre. A small town on the Danube Bend.”

“I know it.” Two Sunday-afternoon trips in search of antiques, spring wind in her hair and red wine in her veins. Back when she and Eric had a home to fill.

“Her mother has a flat there,” Esterhazy said. “We learned of it this afternoon. Someone else got there first.”

Krucevic. Or one of his men — Otto, perhaps. He'd have enjoyed choking the woman to death.

Caroline swore under her breath. Eric's network had been rolled up inside of a day. And Eric —

“We found some things stuffed under a mattress. One was a book.. ..” Esterhazy gestured, groping for words. “In Horvath's writing. From his lab — ”

“Notes?”

He nodded.

“I want Shephard to see. Is evidence, you understand, he cannot have this book — but I wish his opinion — ”

“Of course. Did you find anything else?”

The man scrutinized her nervously.

“Glass .. .” The word escaped him. He held up his fingers four inches apart. “So big. Filled with .. . we do not know what. Six of them. These we send to our police lab for study.”

Somebody's prescription got into the wrong hands, Scottie's voice whispered in her mind. The Big Man was quite upset. Drugs from VaccuGen's Berlin headquarters had been stolen two days before.

Not the anthrax vaccine, Scottie had said. So what else would be worth the murder of two people?

Erzsebet knew something was wrong with Mian's vaccines. What would Krucevic kill to conceal? Mumps. His small contribution to the Muslim problem.

“I'll tell Shephard.” Caroline stood up, intent upon the answers she knew she'd find on Eric's disk. “He'll contact you as soon as he can. And Mr. Esterhazy — ”

“Yes?”

“Tell your lab to be careful with that glass.”

She knew disaster well — its look, its smell, the way the static charge of air itself changed in disaster's presence — and the station was filled with it when she returned three minutes later. Teddy was standing behind her desk, the phone pressed against her shoulder. She stared unseeing at Caroline's face, then dropped the receiver with a clatter and sank into her chair.

Caroline snatched up the phone.

“Carmichael.”

“It's me,” Shephard said.

“Where are you?”

“Marinelli's dead. Bunker was wired. Blew sky-high.”

“You should have known it would be wired! You had the goddamn blueprints — ”

“Don't yell at me.” Shephard cut across her viciously. “I nearly died tonight, okay? Because of a guy who should've known better. Hell, we all should've known better. That map was a dangle. Krucevic was long gone.”

Dangle. A deliberate plant. Had Krucevic suspected, then, what Eric was doing? Had he known everything?

“You searched the bunker?” she asked Shephard.

“Once the flames were out. Flames have a way of drawing police, even in Budapest, even in the midst of riots. Try explaining that one, Sally. Just try explaining what the hell the U.S. Legal Attache for Central Europe is doing with explosives in Buda. Christ.”

“Tom — ”

“So I told the fucking police the truth. That we thought the warehouse held the Vice President. They were not impressed. It took every string I could pull to get me off the hook, every apology I could think of in three different languages, before they'd let me go into the place with the firemen.”

“You went in.”

“I stepped over what was left of Vie Marinelli, Caroline, and I crawled through a shitload of wreckage.” The savagery in his voice scalded her. “You never told me Krucevic had an American in his entourage. But then there's lots of crap you've never told me, right? Like your alias. Jane Hathaway. The name Mahmoud Sharifused in Berlin to set up contact with 30 April. What the hell are you playing at, Caroline? And when are you going to come clean?”

“What American?”

“One Michael O'Shaughnessy, from the passport in his breast pocket. A blond guy in his mid-thirties. But you know that, don't you? Michael was Sharif's other bona fide.”

Her legs nearly folded under her.

“You saw him?” she whispered.

“What was left of him, yeah. Krucevic tortured him, then strapped him to the door and set it to blow. There was a grenade pin still dangling from his finger.”

Caroline cradled the receiver and walked unsteadily away from Teddy's desk. She groped her way to the computer. Her face was a mask, her mind screaming his name.

She had already mourned Eric once. She knew how it was done. But this second time felt like a thin steel blade twisting between her ribs, a torment she could not grip strongly enough to tear out.

Remember Sophie, Caroline. Sophie. I give her a chance.

He had gone back, despite her best arguments. While she waited for Shephard to pay his bill at Gerbeaud's, they had nailed him to the cross.

Good-bye, dear love. Goodbye.

And then the word torture — that idle little word on Shephards tongue — flooded her senses. She gasped, leaned hard against the desk, gripped it until the pain knifed upward through her shoulders and she knew that she could feel.

For the past four days Eric had dominated her thoughts, her work, her sleep, her heart. She had flown out of Washington in a fog of bitterness, suppressing emotion like a terminal illness. The High Priestess of Reason had no time to feel. Love could never be as strong as rage. Caroline had had no room for empathy, no thought for Eric's torment during the past thirty months. Retribution was what she wanted, payment in blood for the agony he'd caused.

She had seen him clearly for the first time in years. Calculating. Morally equivocal. Ruthless. A man for whom, nonetheless, justice had still meant something. He had thrown them both into this final battle because he thought it was more important than love or happiness. He had never asked permission. He had assumed that she would understand.

The one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe, regardless of everything.

She had never justified that trust. She'd punished him like a spiteful child.

And Krucevic had tortured him. The grenade pin. She drew a shuddering breath, her throat so choked with unspent tears she could not breathe. It was too late for regret. Too late for love. What remained must be a settling of accounts, for Eric's sake.

It was the consummate Agency word, account. She and Eric had shared one for years: 30 April. It was time to make Krucevic pay.

Teddy was weeping harshly for Marinelli in the outer room. Caroline pressed her fingers against her burning eyes and steadied herself. Then she stared once more at the computer screen. Clicked back into her cable. And began to learn what Eric had died for.

Ten Ziv Zakopan, 9:30 p.m.

Sophie Payne regained consciousness as the helicopter landed in the clearing beyond the trees. Pain tore at the lining of her stomach like talons; pain rattled in her lungs with every breath. For hours now she had drifted in a delirium where the voices of her son Peter and the terrorist named Michael blended with the face of her dead husband. I'm coming, Curtis, she told him, and was vaguely irritated by his impatience, by the way his looming form twisted and vanished before her eyes. It seemed desperately important that she reach for Peter; she clung to him, and held him tight, and felt his thin, little-boy bones tremble in her arms. And then, when the darkness cleared and Curt's face receded, she knew that it was young Jozsef she clasped, not her son, and that her filthy sweatshirt was damp with his sweat and spatters of blood. The boy was burning with fever.

When Vaclav killed the rotors. Otto and Krucevic carried her from the chopper.

Jozsef whimpered as she was taken from him — he clung to her like a small bird, as though he knew that he would never see her again — but in her illness she was no proof against the men's strength. She squeezed his hands tightly once in parting and felt him press something small and hard into her palm. The rabbits foot. He had given her his most precious possession. She clenched her fingers around it and did not look back.

They dumped her unceremoniously on the ground. She lay there, curled in the fetal position, thinking of water. Cool water that trickled down the throat, still tasting of the ice it had once been. Water that gurgled over stones in the paddock at Malvern. It had its own language, that stream, an inconsequential chatter of horses' mouths dipped and lapping, the scarlet flit of a cardinal's wing, the slow, sinuous glide of a trout. Leaves spiraling in an eddy and the puncture point of a raindrop, Peter's boats made of empty egg cartons, a toothpick for a mast. Sophie's parched throat ached with the taste of blood.

The thin beam of a pocket torch picked out a tumbled stile, a heap of scattered stones. Otto heaved the latter aside with a grunt. Beneath them was a manhole cover fashioned of solid iron. It took Otto and Krucevic pulling together to haul the thing out. Rust stained their hands corrosive orange. Then Otto turned and looked at her. He smiled.

Oh, Michael, Sophie thought uselessly, you were wrong. I am going to die at this man's hands.

Slung over Otto's shoulder in a fireman's carry, she flailed out with her fists against his back... but she might as well have been the summer rain in the paddock stream, for all that she diverted him from his course. He dropped feet first into the manhole, his face against a ladder, so that her dangling head and back filled the passage's remaining space. Her legs were pinned between the tunnel wall and Otto's chest. There was barely room for one large man, much less the burden he carried; Sophie's hair snagged on old concrete, she smelled dirt and mold and felt the small creatures that live in mold scatter at their passage. Where his shoulder jutted into her abdomen, pain shot upward and radiated, as severe as the contractions of labor. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of her mouth. She could not wipe it away.

They went down and down, Krucevic following, maybe thirty feet into the earth until the dying darkness at the tunnel's mouth became impenetrable and the air was stale and decades cold.

Otto dumped her on the tunnel floor. She retched, whimpered, and vomited blood. Somewhere above, Jozsef lay dreaming in the field. She had done this to him with her violent fingers, she had dashed to the ground the drugs that could have saved him, and he had watched her, silent, with the mute submission of a child whose life has always been determined by other people.

Would she have risked so much if the boy were her son?

The passage before them had once been concrete, or something more akin to the earth, like stone. She could see nothing until Krucevic's flashlight played over the wall in front of her. An archway, perhaps five feet high, yawned like the mouth of a whale. Beyond it, only darkness and the fear that thrives in darkness. It reeked as a catacomb reeks, as all the dead spaces where civilization ends. Uncontrollably, Sophie began to shudder.

She had thought that the vials of crushed antibiotic would force Krucevic's hand, that to save his son he would abandon his mad quest to purify Europe. She had not reckoned with obsession. And now Jozsef was dying. His blood on her soul.

Otto dragged Sophie forward, past openings narrow as cannon ports in the cold stone walls. Krucevic stopped suddenly and shone his beam into one of them.

“Welcome to Ziv Zakopan, Mrs. Payne.”

Sophie squinted against the light, pain shooting through her eyeballs. The beam picked out a heap of skeletons, innumerable, splayed across the dirt floor of the low-ceilinged space. They had probably been shot, and died where they lay:

Half a century later she had a snapshot of how it had been the moment of their murder.

“What is this place?” she croaked.

“It is the most hallowed ground of sacrifice in Bosnia,” Krucevic replied, “which is saying a good-deal. Do you know what happened here fifty-eight years ago?”

“The war”

“The war.” Krucevic's laughter was brittle with contempt. “Mrs. Payne, there has been war in these hills for centuries. But in 1942, Ziv Zakopan was a Croat place. It was part of the Independent State of Croatia, which for three glorious years ruled this country.”

“Ustashe,” Sophie muttered.

“Ustashe, which in the Croatian language is another word for fascist. Yes, Mrs. Payne. Ziv Zakopan was established with the help of Nazi commanders and with the leadership of our great Ante Pavelic, the father of independent Croatia. We swept the Serb hordes out of Bosnia, we threw their women and children oft our cliffs, we converted the Orthodox to the one true Catholic faith, and then we sent them to meet their God. There are the camps that everyone knows about Jasenovac, near Zagreb, and Stara Gradiska but at Ziv Zakopan, we destroyed our worst enemies, the partisans ruled by Tito, the faithless ones. We left them here to rot in the bowels of the earth, already less than human. And the world did not care.”

“No,” Sophie protested. The pain was growing inside her like a swarm of bees, angry and intense, on the verge of bursting.

“We would have known. This place...”

“This place has been buried for half a century, and it will be buried long after your name is forgotten,” he said implacably.

“Do you think they remember history in your country, Mrs. Payne? Everyone who knew about Ziv Zakopan is dead. Except for me.”

Half a century. Of being classified as Missing, Presumed Dead. Of no one knowing. Her gaze met the hollow eye sockets of a skull, inches from her face, flooded with Krucevic's beam. A thousand jaws, gaping wide in terror. No one walking in the fields above had even heard these people scream.

“Do you know what it means in English Ziv Zakopan?” Krucevic stared into her fevered eyes. “Literally it means, "buried alive." But a more elegant translation might be “Living Grave,” Mrs. Payne.”

Sophie knew, now, why she was here.

Otto dragged her away from the charnel pit.

They reached what must have been the central room, the command center, twelve feet by twenty, with two wooden tables and a scattering of chairs, some broken and canted on their sides. Krucevic stopped short in the entryway, sliding the beam around the walls, his breath rapid now and shallow with excitement.

“The Kommandant lived in Sarajevo, but his days were spent here his days and many of his nights. Underground, all hours are the same.”

“You can't know that. You're older than I am, but you probably weren't even born in World War Two.”

“I was three when the Kommandant was taken. Old enough to remember the door to the tunnel, to remember these fields.”

“Your father?” Sophie gasped.

“He denied them the final victory, Mrs. Payne. He died in captivity, by his own hand.” Impossible now to read the crazed eyes under the clipped black hair. But she could feel the singing tension in the dank air of the chamber, the crackling of obsession barely suppressed. Krucevic was at his most dangerous.

“A son should know his father's greatness. A son should live to see his father avenged.”

“You will never live to see your kind of vengeance, Krucevic, unless the world runs mad and everything good and true is utterly destroyed.”

He turned the torch full on her face, blinding her.

“You are dying, Mrs. Payne.”

His voice was utterly indifferent.

“I want you to die knowing just how wrong you are. You destroyed those vials of antibiotic yes, Tonio told me how it was done in the hope that Jozsef's illness would stop me. You thought you could crush my vision of a new Europe with the ampules under your heel. You tried to kill my boy. For that, you forfeit any right you might have had to consideration. You deserve to be tortured, Mrs. Payne.”

“I have been,” Sophie muttered. By the thought of what she had done to Jozsef.

“You deserve a public execution.” His face was close to her own now, his eyes shining in the torchlight.

“But execution is too painless. I want you to die slowly here, I want you buried alive. And while you struggle for breath while you crawl through the dirt I will go on. I will save Europe. And my son.”

“Otto, let us see whether Mrs. Payne is able to stand.”

Otto heaved her to her feet, then backed away. Sophie swayed and clutched at a chair; it toppled over as she fell.

“I should judge her in no danger of escape,” Krucevic said.

Eleven Langley, 2:46 p.m.

“The call just came through from state,” Scottie Sorensen told the DCI. “Marinelli's body will be on a plane home tomorrow night.”

“And Michael O'Shaughnessy?” Dare didn't turn away from her view of the pin oaks bordering the chasm of the Potomac River. “Does his body come home, too?”

The news of Eric's death had filtered through to only a few of the Agency faithful. It had come in a roundabout fashion, as such news must, because the passport he held as Michael O'Shaughnessy bore a next-of-kin notification number that ended eventually at the CIA. The person designated to take such calls — from the State Department's consular section — also had access to the bank of real names associated with false passports. Haley Taggert could now be included among the number of those who knew that Eric Carmichael hadn't exactly died two and a half years before.

In a private session in the DCI's office, Dare had tried to impress upon the administrative assistant that the matter was compartmentalized beyond her level of security clearance. Haley didn't know where Eric's body had been found or under what circumstances. With any luck, Dare could keep that information a close hold. But luck depended in part upon the Central European LegAtt's control of the Hungarian police and the press corps milling through Budapest. Dare figured her luck had run out.

“O'Shaughnessy's body will be on the same plane,” Scottie told her.

“Good. You'll meet both caskets.”

“Marinelli's brother will be there.”

“Then meet Eric's. You owe him that much.”

“I'm sorry. Director, I — ”

Dare wheeled around. “Don't want anything to do with him? It's a little late for that, Scottie.”

He rocked a little in his Cole-Haan loafers, as he might have done in a White House receiving line, then bent his head attentively toward the DCI. She was suddenly sick with fury at the man — the man who thought he had her snowed, had her right where he wanted her, the man who probably laughed each night in the privacy of his own bedsheets about just how thoroughly she was screwed.

“Sit down,” she said wearily, “you goddamn son of a bitch.”

Scottie sat.

Dare moved purposefully behind her desk. She found the hard copy of Caroline's Cutout — channel cable, the cable filled with the past thirty months of Eric Carmichael's life and enough intelligence to roll up Mian Krucevic's networks worldwide. Before she handed it to Scottie, she said, “Caroline is missing.”

Concern furrowed the CTC chief's brow.

“I called Embassy Budapest when I got the news about Eric. Caroline is gone. She's checked out of her hotel.”

“I'll alert our friends at every border crossing,” he said immediately. “Notify the airlines, the trains —”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen come out in the noonday sun,” Dare quoted softly. “I've already talked to Hungarian border control. I don't want Caroline stopped. I want to know where she's headed.”

He stared at her, perplexed.

“Tell me something, Scottie. That nickname of hers. Do you know how she got it?”

“Eric gave it to her.”

“But why, Scottie? Why? You don't know?”

Dare waited implacably. She had a forbidding face in the best of circumstances, a voice like rain-drenched gravel. Scottie lost some of his self-possession. It dissipated, like bubbles in warm champagne.

“Let me tell you a story,” she suggested. “About a woman run mad. You've got all the time in the world, Scottie. Eric's dead and now it's Caroline's word against yours about all the dirty tricks you've pulled. We don't place people on trial here; we simply send them to Tbilisi and Uzbekistan and all the other shit holes in the world until their time runs out. It's a long list, the list of shit holes Scottie; and you have all the time in the world to consider it. So listen.

“Caroline Carmichael lives by her wits. She prides herself on being logical. On remaining calm in any crisis. On finding objective truth through her subjective lens. She's so good at projecting complete control that you have to know her well to see the fault lines inside, the places where surfaces shift and crack. There are forces in the earth, Scottie, that even Caroline can't suppress, and sometimes she remembers it.”

Dare stopped, expecting him to object to squirm in his chair or express annoyance but he was paralyzed for once. Tbilisi had taken the wind from his sails.

“You know the training she's had. Denied Area Penetration, Terrorist Tactics and Countermeasures, Isolation and Interrogation every course Eric scheduled before he went out to Nicosia, Caroline had, too. They trained together. Eric the teacher, Eric the Green Beret, just another student like his logical wife.

“Tell me, Scottie how does the training go in Isolation and Interrogation?”

He crossed his right leg over his left. Unconsciously protecting his crotch from a ball-breaker, Dare decided.

“The trainers try to find a person's vulnerability. Show him just where he's weak. So that the weakness can be corrected … or avoided.”

“They put Caroline in isolation for three days. She was told, going into the cell, that there was a way out if only she could find it. She analyzed every square inch of the place, looking for a method of escape. She had no furniture, no bed coverings only a pot in the corner and one window. A window that showed her Eric, lashed upright to a pole and periodically subject to abuse from a gang of soldiers.

“After the first day, a trainer visited Caroline. He told her she could leave as soon as she confessed to her crimes espionage, conspiracy, the usual gamut of trumped-up charges. He drew her over to the window and showed her Eric, who by this time was semiconscious, his head hanging, dried blood smeared above one ear. Eric would go free, the trainer explained, once Caroline confessed. She refused. She knew that they expected her, as a woman a supposedly emotional creature to find the sight of Eric's suffering unbearable.

“The process was repeated over two more days. By that time Eric's moaning could not be shut out; it filled her head. She recited poetry aloud. She screamed. She ripped her clothes and stuffed scraps into her ears. When the trainer walked in on the third day, Caroline was already waiting at the window. He approached her carefully. She allowed him to come close; she seemed oblivious to everything around her. When he was within two feet of her right hand, she reached out and snatched a live grenade off his uniform belt.”

“Cut Eric down or you die,” she said. Completely calm. Utterly logical. And twenty seconds from annihilation.”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen,” Scottie muttered. “So? What happened?”

“Her trainer screamed an order through the window. Eric was released. Caroline tossed the grenade through the bars of her cell and it detonated in the air. The prison shack collapsed. Caroline was pulled from the rubble along with her trainer, both of them concussed.”

“I'm surprised she wasn't fired,” Scottie said.

“She nearly was. I intervened. I had the power to do that, even then. She was my analyst. My office owned her. I forced her to submit to a complete psychiatric evaluation, and the docs vetted her clean. She had just been pushed, they said, a little too far. And Eric went to Nicosia alone. She was allowed to visit him, of course. They gave her Budapest's analyst-in-station post two years later, for good behavior.”

Dare came around the end of her desk. “So what's the moral of the story, Scottie? Now that Eric's coming home in a body bag and Caroline is A.W.O.L. in Central Europe?”

“Beware men bearing live grenades,” he suggested roguishly.

The DCI raised her right hand in an arc as though she might actually strike her counterterrorism chief — and then she stopped short. Dare, too, could be pushed too far.

“The moral, you stupid ass, is that Caroline fights for what she loves, sometimes beyond the point of reason. She's done trusting the Agency — the Agency, in the form of Scottie Sorensen, sold her husband out. She's on her own now. And she'll bring the prison house down around her if she has to, to save Sophie Payne. It's the only thing she can do to restore Eric's honor.”

“She should be fired,” Scottie said, tight-lipped.

“And it would suit your purposes nicely if Mian Krucevic killed her,” Dare retorted. “But if anything happens to Caroline — if she's hurt in the slightest way — I will hold you personally responsible.”

“May I remind you, Director, that it was your decision to send her to Berlin?”

“You decided for all of us, when you made Eric a rogue operator thirty months ago. In a different country, another century, you'd have been executed by firing squad at dawn, Sorensen.”

Scottie's mouth opened, then shut without a sound. He looked as though she had sucker-punched him. He understood, finally, all that Dare Atwood knew. But he had been too long a professional dissembler to consider honesty now. He rose and stood before her, the last true scion of the old-boy net.

“If you're unhappy with my performance. Director — ”

“Then I can take your SIS slot and hand it to the next available warm body,” she agreed. “That's always been the case. You just never thought I'd do it.”

Dare reached for the Cutout cable and tossed it in Scottie's lap.

“Read this. And if you decide to shoot yourself in a stairwell, call me first, okay? I'd like a front-row seat.”

When the CTC chief had scuttled out of her office like a whipped dog, Dare picked up her phone and called Cuddy Wilmot. She had sent him a copy of the Cutout cable as soon as she saw its importance. “Well? Have you read it?”

“Five times,” he muttered. “There's so much here, we can't digest it fast enough. Networks, operations, fund transfers — ”

“Where will Caroline go, Cuddy?”

“Wherever Krucevic leads. She's on a vendetta now — you realize that, Director?”

“And where will it take her?”

Cuddy hesitated.

“To a place we've never located on any map; Mian Krucevic's boyhood home. Ziv Zakopan.”

“Caroline knows where it is?”

“Eric certainly did.” Cuddy's voice was like flint. “It's clear from the Intel contained in this cable that he saw the place.”

“You thought Krucevic had plans for Poland. You watched money flood into coffers there.”

“I did,” Cuddy admitted.

“But the funds have stopped moving and everything's quiet, from Danzig to Krakow. Poland's as dead as that Budapest bunker.”

Dare debated the point. It was a risk, throwing time and resources at a guess; but Sophie Payne's kidnapping was eighty hours old and the President was losing patience.

“You're sure in your mind?” she asked Cuddy. “You stand by this judgment?”

“I do,” he replied. “God help me.”

“Any idea at all where this camp might be?”

Cuddy hesitated.

“During World War Two, it was thought to be somewhere on the outskirts of Sarajevo. But we only have whispers and rumors. Director. And what happened there occurred over fifty years ago. So much of Yugoslav history was distorted after 1945 — made the tool of Communist ideology — that for a long time, the whole idea of Ziv Zakopan was discredited. Western historians called the story antifascist propaganda. But since the fall of Communism and the Bosnian war, the rumors have resurfaced. And Krucevic is always at the center of them.”

“Sarajevo,” Dare repeated, clutching at the one element she needed to understand. “We still have NATO peacekeeping planes on the ground there; I'll request AWAC coverage in a hundred-mile radius around the city. Retargeting overhead recon will take too much time.”

“Caroline may call in,” Cuddy said, “and give us a fix on her location.”

Or the harder patrol may find her. Tim passports I know of, two possible names. But what if there's a third identity she hid from all of us?

“We don't have time to wait.” Dare's tone was brisk. “Dig your tie out of a drawer, Wilmot, and put it on. We're going to brief the President.”

Twelve Sarajevo, 11:43 p.m.

For a moment, holding the opposing currents between her fingers as she hot-wired the Skoda, Caroline was thrust back into a Tidewater May. The streaming curb of an ill-lit Sarajevo alley was transformed without warning into morning sunlight, kudzu and midges, the sharp green smell of bruised skunk cabbage underfoot.

Forty people were somewhere in the woods around her, forty people attempting to cross the Farm's ten thousand acres to a pinpoint on the map where a chopper would be hovering — and Eric was hunting them from the air.

He had a machine gun mounted in the belly of the Chinook, he had forward-looking infrared, he had aggressors on the ground in jeeps and crawling on their bellies through the underbrush. He had radios and flare guns and diversionary tactics.

His squad had nothing but the camouflage on their backs.

They crouched in a gully, Caroline and three friends, their eyes barely visible above the tips of the wild grasses, watching a dirt road they could not avoid crossing. Suddenly, a green army jeep roared out of nowhere and skidded to a stop. The driver jumped out, his M-16 pointed to the sky. Caroline noted his cap, soiled with sweat above the brim; she saw the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. His name was Carl. He had a baby about twenty months old. And, fake bullets or no, he was going to shoot them down.

Two men burst from the trees behind Carl and flung themselves across the road.

The driver turned and gave chase.

The keys to the jeep were still in Carol's pocket, but Eric had taught her which wires to choose, which ends to touch. Holding her breath, she fired the ignition, a prickling of fear striding up her back, and even when the engine turned over and she whipped the jeep around in the dust, she waited for the sputter of Carol's M-16 and a radio call that would end the exercise for all of them.

Nothing but midges and a cooling breeze across the windscreen, high cirrus curling above, she drove to the pickup point eating the lunch Carl's wife had probably packed that morning, sharing it with her friends — potato chips, a fat ham sandwich, and three chocolate cookies scrupulously divided. They had not eaten in two days.

The jeep they abandoned in the middle of the base's main road, where someone was sure to find it. They slept away the afternoon among the dandelions and headstones of an abandoned graveyard. Caroline awoke at three p.m. to the sound of rotors churning the humid air.

Carl demanded a confession. He demanded an apology. He declared the theft of the vehicle to be against the exercise rules. The rules dictated that one should suffer in order to survive. Caroline admitted nothing.

In the field, Eric told her, you do whatever it takes. If the car means you live and somebody else doesn't, you take the car. You don't stop to think about whether the guy will miss his next meal.

The Skoda's engine turned over. She raised her head above the dashboard and stared out at Sarajevo.

Caroline had been on the road now for nearly four hours. She had formed the vaguest of plans — a hash of hope and guts — thrown together as she scrolled purposefully through Eric's files on an embassy computer. As she read, her mind dazed and jumping with violent death, the superstructure of Krucevic's plan appeared beneath her fingers, like a stockade of privets shaken free of snow.

She saw the brilliance in his simplicity, the tragedy he had engineered. And saw how his dead wife could be used against him.

She left Embassy Budapest and hailed a taxi. She had the presence of mind to go back to the Hilton before heading for the airport she needed a change of clothes and her Walther, comfortable shoes, some extra cash. She checked out of the hotel and left her luggage with the bellman. To be called for later, if she survived.

Caroline had absolutely no right to decide the Vice President's fate in the backseat of a Hungarian taxi. She had no business keeping vital information, such as the location of Krucevic's lab at Ziv Zakopan, entirely to herself. The High Priestess of Reason stood back in judgment, showing Caroline the flaw in all she did; she scolded her and pleaded with her to call in reinforcements Caroline almost tapped the taxi's glass partition and sent the driver back to the Hilton. She should be awash in self-doubt. She was an analyst, after all one who demanded time, one who required more pieces of the puzzle.

But recklessness sang in her veins. Mian Krucevic and Scottie between them had pushed her past her breaking point, and she would have juggled grenades if a few had been handy.

If she failed in this last great act of hubris if she swung out from her trapeze and found no hands dangling she would be destroyed. Failure, thought Caroline, was the headiest prospect she'd been offered in years.

She wanted to go home. She had no home any longer.

Hank, she prayed as her driver leaned on the horn, I promise I will call you if I manage to survive.

When she closed her eyes, she saw a man in black leather walking slowly away.

Did he wave once, in farewell? Or was he motioning her onward? The one woman I could trust I'm the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything.

What, Caroline thought, would Eric do if he were alive tonight and sitting beside her? He would trust her to follow her particular instincts, the ones she never believed she had.

Remember Sophie, Caroline. Sophie. I owe her a chance.

She should contact the Agency. Tell them how and where to throw raiders into the breach. She should give them the location of Ziv Zakopan. But Caroline was uncertain whom to trust at the CIA. Twice in the past four days, rescue operations had failed horribly. Eric was dead and Sophie Payne close to it. The military option was dicey at best; even the reluctant High Priestess in her head agreed.

Not Tom Sliephard, she thought as the taxi careened over the northwest highway. I cannot trust Tom with this questioning eyes and his u'ay-too-obvious suspicion. Not Cuddy — not poor loyal Cuddy, with one thumb on his classes and his pulse on the polygraph. Not Dare, who has her position to think of. An entire bureaucracy to protect. And never Scottie.

Scottie of the debonair suits and the poker face, Scottie who ran agents the way a child threw toys into battle — Scottie danced among shadows of his own, a parallel kingdom within the Agency itself. In a world where who you are depends upon what you know, Scottie had always known the most.

Now, for the first time, Caroline knew more.

She had a fix on 30 April's location. She had a homing device for tracking the Vice President. And she knew what Mian Krucevic did not: that Beta Horvaths lab notebook and vials of stolen vaccine — mumps vaccine No. 413, according to Eric's disk — were in the possession of the Hungarian federal police.

Krucevic feared that notebook and those vials more than Chinooks on the roof or Delta Force troops in the heating ducts. He feared them more than losing Sophie Payne. He had killed his wife and his oldest friend to suppress the truth. And now Caroline was going to inform him that he had failed.

She made the last plane out of Budapest that night — the last plane that week — bound for Bosnia. She bought a ticket in her true name because she had no intention of leaving the Walther in Hungary, and her paperwork for the weapon read Caroline Carmichael. The Agency was already tracking her — the look on the face of the Hungarian border control guard told her that. Her alias was probably compromised as well. He did not have a poker face, that passport official; it was rumpled like a used paper bag, his eyes two small prunes. He studied her malevolently, glancing from passport to woman and back again. The question in the back of Caroline's mind was why he didn't simply bar her from the plane.

Nothing was easier. A polite word — a hand on the arm — a tedious wait in a featureless office — and her documents returned when the flight took off. The answer, she knew, was because he didn't care where she came from. He wanted to know only where she was going. And so an hour later she bundled Jane Hathaway into a garbage can at Sarajevo Airport and became someone she had almost forgotten: Caroline Bisby, High Analytic, with her finger on the afterburner and contrail streaming. The stuff of which mad dogs are made.

She pulled the hot-wired Skoda away from the curb and drove deeper into the city, feeling her way. She knew Sarajevo only as a series of images on a television screen, a garble of names too difficult to pronounce. It was a European city, beautiful in the Baroque manner of Vienna and Prague and old-town Bratislava, a small city cupped in a valley ringed by mountains. On the hills above the red tile roofs, the army of neighboring Serbia had erected siege guns and positioned tanks. Each day between 1992 and 1996, the Serbs had bombarded Sarajevo with four thousand shells. It was the longest siege in modern memory, longer even than the vicious Nazi siege of Leningrad; but in the end, NATO marched in and the Serbs marched out.

The Stabilisation Force peacekeepers were still there, afraid of what might happen if they left.

The Skoda bobbled and dipped as she drove across a shell hole. Someone had filled it with bright red epoxy, a cartoon attempt at public works. As far as the eye could see, brilliant gouts of blood dotted the street.

She was looking for the university on a map spread across her knees — which was in Croatian with Hungarian translation, neither helpful — while driving through the darkness of a city that seemed to have had most of its street signs blown away. But the university must surely possess a student center that never closed down, a place where coffee could be bought and politics debated and a laptop connected to the World Wide Web. Caroline had memorized Mian Krucevic's E-mail address. It was there like a lost pearl among the terrorist's messages to Fritz Voekl, part of the archives Eric had managed to steal.

“Papa,” Jozsef croaked through his swollen lips, “what have you done to the lady? Where is she?”

Mian Krucevic laid his cool hand on his son's forehead and brushed back his sweat-soaked hair. The antibiotic for which he had retreated to Ziv Zakopan was already streaming through an IV into his son's veins, but it would be hours before he glimpsed signs of improvement in Jozsef.

He refused to consider that improvement was beyond him, that Jozsef might have slipped too far into the maw of the disease. Mian Krucevic had not played God for so many decades to succumb to failure now. He had not built this new Ziv Zakopan high above the old killing ground and labored patiently for years in its laboratory to be defeated by a germ of his own making. He would not pay for immortality with the blood of his son.

“Shh,” he said. “You must rest. You are safe now. I have saved you.”

The boy squirmed fretfully under the sheet, tugging at the tape that secured his arm to the bed, the precious IV feeding into his wrist.

“Sophie,” he murmured, and then the sheet above his abdomen blossomed like a flower, a spreading stain that darkened as it grew, first peach and then salmon and then a rusty orange.

Jozsef was pissing blood.

Krucevic shuddered. He sank to his knees on the cold cement floor. He gripped the metal rail of the boy's bed until his hands lost their feeling, and this alone must be his prayer, the prayer of a man who acknowledges no god. He was crouched thus, doubled over with grief and rage, when Vaclav appeared in the doorway.

“Don't bother me,” Mian spat out.

“There's something you should see.”

“Go away.”

“But Mian — ”

He came to his feet with a howl, whipping his gun from its shoulder holster. Vaclav was twenty-two inches removed from a bullet in the brain. The cherub-faced Czech stared the gun barrel down.

“You should, Mian. See this.”

Krucevic drew a shuddering breath, bolstered the gun, and followed Vaclav down the hall.

Otto was seated in front of Tonio's laptop, his forehead almost touching the screen.

“It's from the university. How the tuck did some college kid find Mian?”

Krucevic stood behind him and read the Email. Bela's blood is on your hands, MIaii. Mirjana's dead. But I have Beta's notes and vaccine No. 413. Come and get them, if you can find me.

“The salba told someone,” he whispered.

Caroline left the university student center immediately after sending the first message. Time was of the essence: if her ruse was to help the dying Vice President, it must be effected quickly. She drove to the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, temporary home of war correspondents and relief workers, where a third of the three hundred and fifty rooms still showed damage. Patches in the curtains covered machine-gun holes, concrete crumbled under the hallway carpets, and a bored cocktail waitress chain — smoked through the lobby at 12:03 a.m. Caroline ordered a large cup of coffee and found an Internet port.

The worst of it isn't the epidemic itself — those thousands of children dead in Pristina, the disease spreading like a red stain on the snow. The real horror, Mian, is the salvation yon offered. Vaccines. Your special vaccines. Flown into Pristina on German planes, administered by the most selfless doctors the world has known — Nobel laureates, above reproach, Doctors Without Borders.

What happens to some boys who contract mumps in childhood? What happens to every boy inoculated with vaccine No. 413?

Sterility, Mian. Your small contrilnition to the Muslim problem, as the man called Michael once said. A generation of Albanians incapable of reproducing itself. Genocide without camps, a bloodless wave of cleansing. No one will even suspect the damage for another fifteen years at least. And by then it will be merely a flaw in the science. Regrettable. But hardly a crime.

And all those toddlers rotting in mass graves, all the parents destroyed with grief — just so much wreckage along the way.

Yon sicken me, Krncevic.

I'm going to the press. To the Americans. I have proof, and I want to sec you burn.

“Michael,” Otto murmured.

“Of course it'd be Michael who sold us out. He must've talked to a friend. An associate. His little form of insurance, in the event of death. And now that prick's got your E-mail address.”

“I'm going to the Americans,” Vaclav repeated.

“So he's not American himself. A free agent? One of Michael's Arabs?”

“He's a prick, whoever he is,” Otto insisted.

“A clever one. He sent the first message from the university. This ones from the Holiday Inn.”

“All he wants is money.” Krucevic stared at the text on the screen, weighing his options, then turned his back and headed for Jozsef's room.

“Ask his terms, Vaclav.”

“What makes you think Mr. Prick wants to deal?”

Krucevic smashed his hand once against the door frame, and the supporting wall shuddered.

“Nobody telegraphs a punch, idiot, unless they expect it to be dodged. He could have gone to the press and the Americans hours ago. So find out what he wants. Then we'll give him what he deserves.”

Caroline typed out her last message at the Sarajevo airport.

My terms? she wrote after an instant's thought. I want Mian Krucevic's head on a platter. I want the pleasure of watching him beg for mercy, the pleasure of refusing his dying wish. I want justice for MedAir 901 and for the Brandenburg Gate and for all the children who will never have children.

But I'll settle for the release of Sophie Payne.

Bring her to the Tunnel by 2 a.m. I will be waiting alone with the vaccine. If you are not there by 2:30, I will take what I know to the people who will destroy you.

“The Tunnel” required no explanation. Everyone in Sarajevo knew about the Dobrinja-Butmir Tunnel. Four feet wide and a quarter of a mile long, it was little more than a culvert that had been clawed under an airport runway during the height of the siege, a culvert that had been shelled by the Serbs for months and that served as the beleaguered city's chief link to the outside world. The Tunnel was a black-market conduit, a ribbon of commerce in a state of war; it was a thoroughfare, too, a communications link, a rite of passage. When bureaucrats from elsewhere in Bosnia needed to reach the capital, they used the Tunnel; even the American.