The Cutout

One Sarajevo, 12:33 a.m.

Ambassador had pushed his way through whenever he was forced to leave the city.

No one's dignity was beneath Dobrinja-Butmir.

Caroline hesitated. Could Krucevic possibly believe she was so stupid? The taunts in her message were incautious to the extent that they ought to amuse him. The author of such a message was intoxicated with her own power; in possessing the vaccine, she believed herself invincible. Such a person never considered that Krucevic made no deals.

Caroline, however, was not intoxicated. She was the very opposite of stupid. She was shrewdly calculating a risk. She had spent years studying Mian Krucevic's personality — reconstructing his behavior, assessing his deeds — in an effort to predict how he would act when it really mattered. She was about to find out just how good an analyst she was.

Krucevic, Caroline believed, would never bring Sophie Payne to the Tunnel on so slight a lure as her offer. He would keep his hostage safe at Ziv Zakopan; he would send his men to hunt down the vaccine. If the E-mail bargain was in fact a setup, he might lose a few men, but nothing more. If Caroline were alone, as she had promised, he'd order her brought back to his base for questioning. And after the questions, he'd kill her.

Only Caroline would not be crouched in the mouth of the Dobrinja-Butmir Tunnel.

When Krucevic's men appeared for the rendezvous, she would be on her way to Ziv Zakopan, where only Krucevic himself might guard the Vice President. It was dangerous, of course; she could not know how many men Krucevic would send for her and how many would remain behind. She was feeling her way toward Krucevic's camp. She did not have the luxury of playing 30 April like a fish. She no longer had the indulgence of time.

Caroline glanced at her watch. 12:40 a.m. Roughly twelve hours earlier, she had said good-bye to Eric. He had told her then that the Vice President could not live long.

Sophie had managed to crawl through the darkness of her prison, pulling herself forward with excruciating effort, her belly on the ground. She had crawled past the opening of the martyrs' charnel house, her skin prickling with horror at the bones beyond the wall, everything in her mind and body screaming. It was important, she told herself silently, not to consider what might lie on the floor around her. It was important to think of other things, to keep from going mad.

She had never been a person who minded the dark. At the house in Malvern she would lie restless in bed, long after Curtis had fallen asleep, his face turned into his pillow. She would listen for Peter's dreaming sigh from across the hall, then get up and walk noiselessly through the house. The things she had chosen and placed in these rooms were like strangers in the moonlight. She would caress the burnished arm of an antique chair, pick a feather from a cushion. And then, like a shadow, she would catch her reflection, a muted form shimmering in the mirror, only her eyes still luminous. She had liked to think that a century hence, on moonlit nights, her image would gaze out from the gilt frame.

Her eyes were tightly closed now. The difference between the darkness of Malvern and the night of Ziv Zakopan, she knew, was the silence. Here she was an amoeba suspended in water, a yolk inside an egg. There was no ancient house settling on its stone foundations, no wind sighing through the elms. No Peter dreaming across the hall — The anguish at her core when she thought of her son was unendurable; it sharpened the pain of her sickness, the slow agony of dying. Peter, with his eyes the color of moss, his quick speech and laugh of deprecation. Peter, whose square chin was Curt's chin whenever he was angry. Peter, who needed Sophie more than he could admit now, at the age of twenty — Sophie, who was his only family.

She clenched her teeth on the thought of Peter, burrowed deep into the pain, and used her son's face to keep the ghouls of Ziv Zakopan at bay.

She was very weak, and her throat was so parched that she could no longer swallow. At intervals she slept, then awoke with a start, cheek pressed against the filth of the stone passage, and sensed that she had been unconscious. It was probable, she thought, that sometime soon she would never wake again. But still she dragged herself forward, toward the manhole cover and the air above. Her journey covered perhaps ninety feet. It took over three hours. She collapsed for the last time at the foot of Otto's ladder. But the rabbit's foot she still clutched in her hand pulsed steadily through the night, transmitting its signal like an unquiet heart in the grave.

Ziv Zakopan is twenty-three miles south, Eric said in Caroline's mind, along the road to Foa. You climb out of the city and then descend through the pass. After maybe ten miles you'll see a power plant and an explosives factory. The road's rough to begin with, but by the time you're thirteen miles out of Sarajevo, it's pretty smooth. You're in a valley, it runs down to the Drina River. About mile nineteen you'll start to pass collective arms or what's left of them. The buildings are burned-out shells. Four miles beyond, on the left, is a rutted dirt road. Don't miss it in the dark. That's the turning for Ziv Zakopan.

She drove south through the night, along a road littered with derelict tanks and abandoned gun positions and the refuse of war that time had not yet buried. NATO had condemned the Serbs for what they did in Bosnia, and later for the atrocities of Kosovo, but the world did not remember the Ustashe terror of World War II; it knew absolutely nothing about the horrors committed by Croats at Ziv Zakopan. The world had the luxury of simple solutions.

Caroline allowed her gaze to veer for an instant from the empty ribbon of shell-pocked road, to take in the midnight landscape. She thought of postwar movies, still ardent with propaganda. Of desperate partisans allied to the British, of Chetniks who died on behalf of King Peter while he slurped oysters in London and danced at the Ritz. There were no angels in the Balkans, no heroes one could name. This was not a place for choosing sides. It was a place to abandon hope.

“Tell me about Ziv Zakopan,” she commanded Eric's ghost.

It was a Ustashe killing field. The earth there is riddled with tunnels — ancient holes gouged into the hills. The Romans built them. The Hapsburgs hid an army time. And the Ustaslie tortured partisans far below the ground. Mian's laboratory is hidden among the cliffs that soar above.

“A bunker, like in Budapest?”

He shook his head in the shadows. A concentration camp. Barbed wire, electrified fences, searclilights, armed guards. One woman equipped with a double-action Walther TPH, accurate range maybe twelve feet, will never storm tin' fastness alone. Even if she's as steady with a handgun as you are, Mad Dog.

“What's he use the place for?”

Experimentation. He tests his vaccines, this drugs, his clicmical weapons, on Serb and Muslim prisoners.

“And nobody comes looking for these people?”

They're the Disappeared, Carrie. Taken away at gunpoint in the middle of the night. And who knows where they end up? Nobody ever leaves Ziv Zakopan. There's a reason the place is called “Living Grave.”

They came up suddenly — the abandoned collectives, the burned outbuildings. A tractor's skeleton loomed like an iron gibbet near the verge of the road, whispering of ancient crimes. Caroline glanced at her odometer to calculate the distance; when three and a half miles had worn away, she pulled the car to the shoulder and slowed to a stop. From here she would go forward on foot.

She was wearing black micro fleece leggings and a pair of running shoes — workout clothing that would have to double as combat wear. The Walther she pulled out of a black nylon shoulder bag — the only luggage she'd brought with her from Budapest — and strapped it to her thigh. She practiced drawing the weapon from its holster a couple of times, the mechanics a cover for her increasing nervousness, the acceleration of her pulse. She was alone in the middle of dumb-fuck nowhere, with a ghost and a .22-caliber gun for company; she had, at last count, six rounds in the chamber and thirteen extra bullets. Above her head the stars shone with a brilliance that was excruciating; they reminded Caroline of nights in Southampton, the sky deepening after sunset to ink blue rather than black, the constellations whirling to the sound of her great-uncle's voice. The chink of ice cubes. Cicadas. A splash of Bombay Sapphire. Hauls, she assured him, I'm thinking seriously of law school. I just might take you up on it.

A pinprick of light scintillated in her palm. Eric's homing device, registering a signal. Sophie Payne was within range.

“After you,” she told him.

And followed where he led.

Jozsef's eyelids fluttered open, and he stared up at the ceiling. The room had no windows. Light, such as it was, came from a pair of gas lanterns propped on a crude table made of packing crates. Shadows, primitive and strangely comforting, flickered on the wall like the Indonesian puppet dance he'd once seen; for a moment he could not imagine where he was. The haze of delirium receded slowly, the way water drains from a basin — imperceptibly at first, then in a final rush that sweeps everything with it. And when that rush to consciousness came, Jozsef sat up abruptly. There was the helicopter, the lady torn from his arms, the rabbit's foot pressed into her hand. And then the dash from the landing pad to this room, the lines of barracks whirling about him, the faces thrust against the chain-link fence. He was alone in a room on top of a cliff. He was at Ziv Zakopan.

“Papa!” he cried out.

Krucevic appeared in the doorway.

Jozsef kicked away the soiled sheet and wrestled his wrists free of the tape that restrained them.

“Where is the lady? What have you done with her?”

“She is dead and buried,” Krucevic replied.

Two Ziv Zakopan, 1:23 a.m.

“That is a lie. I know you lie!” Never had he spoken with such venom to his father, and for an instant, the boy felt sharply afraid. He cowered backward, white-faced and trembling, waiting for the punishment that would surely come.

“If she was not dead when I left her, she is certainly dead now,” his father told him calmly. “You should rest. You're still quite weak. Get back in bed before you disturb your intravenous feed.”

Jozsef set his foot on the floor. His muscles screamed as though they had been crushed under the wheels of a truck. He tasted blood, felt himself sway, and clutched at the mattress.

“Get back in bed.” His father came nearer, looming over him. “You were close to death yourself.”

The boy stared at his own hands, clenched around the sheet to keep from trembling.

“You cannot leave her in the ground, Papa. It is not right.”

“But it is done,” Krucevic said, “and nothing will change it now.” He closed his fingers over Jozsef's wrist, pried his weak hand from the sheet. Then he gathered up the boy and laid him carefully back in the bed, drew the sheet over his body. Jozsef closed his eyes on a surge of rage and anguish; he could not look at his father's face, could not trust himself to speak without sobbing. A tear slid from under his lashes and lay wetly on his cheek. He turned his face into the pillow.

“I am sorry for your pain, my son,” Krucevic said.

It was the first and last time Jozsef would ever hear an apology on his fathers lips. He did not answer him.

Krucevic turned away.

And at that moment, a shout went up from Vaclav at his security station down the hall.

She found the entrance to the ancient tunnels where Eric had told her it would be.

Mian's escape route from Ziv Zakopan. He'll be certain to keep it in good repair.

“He only has one?”

By land. But time's always the air.

Caroline glanced swiftly toward the dark hulk of hillside rising above the ruined barn. No lights, no sound from the heights, to suggest an armed encampment. Just the transmitter signal pulsing strongly in her pocket now, reason enough to keep going.

She crept forward through the withered November grass, the dead stalks rigid with hoar frost The smell of damp earth mingled with the sharp scent of distant snow — a fresh, nostril-flaring whiff that, absurdly, charged Caroline's blood with hope. The barn door's frame was blackened, the space beyond impenetrably dark. If Krucevic was waiting for her, this would be the moment for ambush — for some explosion of light and sound as death came shooting through the shattered door.

The floor of the barn disintegrated in the blaze, Eric reminded her. It fell into the sheep fold below. The drop may be eight feet. You can manage it. Drop close to the wall and walk around the foundation to the right. He's mined the center, where the going looks easiest. Remember, Mad Dog, never take the path somebody carves for you. It's there for a reason.

She balanced on the ruined threshold carefully, her gun in her hand.

The floor of the barn was a mass of rubble — tumbled bits of wood and stone, the shafts of a plow, glimpsed fitfully in the starlight streaming through the gutted roof. An iron bar, set into the dirt in the far corner —

“I know,” she told him irritably. “I see it, okay?”

“Mian,” Vaclav said, his eyes on the screen, “there's an infiltration. At the tunnel entrance in the barn.”

Krucevic was at his side instantly.

“It looks like a woman.”

“A woman?” He peered at the monitor with narrowed eyes, disbelieving.

“Probably some dick with long hair.”

“Do you want me to go down?”

They were short of men. Otto and two others — Ziv Zakopan guards — had driven north to Sarajevo Airport to meet the author of the E-mail messages. They had not yet returned. Six men patrolled the barracks area where the prisoners slept fitfully; another guard was on duty in the hospital ward. He could not spare Vaclav, who alone was monitoring the new security system. If the woman had penetrated the barn, others would be climbing the cliffs. Krucevic glanced swiftly at each of the video display screens — there were four in all, facing every possible means of ascent to the fortified aerie. Blank. No triggered alarms, no red lights blazing. He slapped the panel in frustration. Where the hell were they? Nobody attempted an assault alone.

The helipad. Dabog saliva! If they had already landed — But the security monitor showed him a quiet compound, two guards patrolling with machine guns at the ready. No rotors thunka-thunked through the clear night air.

“Stay on the screens,” he told Vaclav. “I need you to follow the assault.”

From his bedroom doorway, Jozsef watched his father wheel around, gun in hand, and race down the hall to the supply closet. He knew the tunnel ended there; he had often been locked in the dark and crawling passage as punishment when he was just a small boy. A woman was climbing steadily through the earth.

Mama, Jozsef thought, you came for me at last. You came for me. And his father meant to kill her.

Eyes huge and dark in his ravaged face, Jozsef lifted his hand from the support of the door frame. He swayed an instant, dangerously. Then he tore the adhesive tape from his wrist and threw the IV feed to the floor.

The dirt walls of the tunnel were crudely carved and narrow. She crawled on her knees toward an uncertain end, a passage that could be blocked, a possible cave-in. She had no flashlight; the first law of infiltration is never tell them you're coming. The dark was so profound that Caroline was disoriented; for a time she had no idea whether the passage was in fact rising or whether she was falling with infinite slowness toward the center of the earth. She closed her eyes and crawled on.

The tunnel widens at the end so that. You can comfortably stand, Eric whispered. But for God's sake, be careful.

Caroline stopped a moment to catch her breath. The darkness was smothering.

Blood pounded in her ears, a throbbing cadence, adrenaline-fueled, and so loud it must tell the entire terrorist world, Here I am, why not I fill me? She drew the homing device from her pocket. Soundless, vibrating, a needle point of red light — but the signal was fainter now. As though the transmitter was farther away. Apprehension knifed through her. What if I'm headed in the wrong direction? Shit.

Then her head came up. She sniffed the air. It was less heavy, less weighted with earth and disuse. She was only feet from the tunnel mouth.

She tucked the homing device away. She willed her heart to stop pounding. It ignored her. So she crawled on anyway.

Jozsef moved like a sleepwalker, like a child learning to toddle, his legs barely obeying his will. He moved out of his room toward the hospital ward three doors down the halkvay. Vaclav was staring at his surveillance monitors; the corridor was deserted.

At the entrance to the ward Jozsef stopped and clutched at the door frame. There was screaming behind him, his father's rage, a sharp cry of terror.

Mama — He fought the mad desire to run to her, to hurl himself at his father and save them all — because failure lay that way. Jozsef did not have time for failure. He drew a shuddering breath and stepped across the threshold.

There were sixteen of them strapped into beds, arms handcuffed to the iron railings. The livid glow of a fluorescent light spotlit their faces. A guard Jozsef did not know sat in a chair with a tattered copy of a Sarajevo newspaper spread open on his knees. He was in the act of rising, alerted by the screams, when Jozsef appeared.

“Go!” the boy commanded. “My father needs you. We are betrayed!”

The guard tossed aside the newspaper and reached for his gun.

“Give me the keys.” Jozsef thrust out his hand. “My father's orders.”

The man looked doubtful.

“Are you well enough?”

“The keys!” Jozsef snarled.

The man hesitated, then slapped a metal ring into his palm and dashed through the doorway. Jozsef shut the door behind him and locked it. Then he turned to face the damaged things lying in the beds.

Two old men he discounted at sight; both were obviously adrift in coma. A girl of perhaps five stared sightlessly upward while her fingers plucked at the thin sheet. A woman was moaning, the sound repetitive, maddening — she had already lost her mind. But the rest, three women, two boys his own age, and seven men — were staring at him with expressions ranging from curiosity to open hatred.

He moved toward the first as quickly as his own illness would allow, fingering the keys. No time. No time to test them all, with these people helpless and his mother's screams silenced.

“That one,” the man before him muttered in Serbian. He had bright blue eyes, impossibly blue eyes, under a mat of filthy black hair. His face was scabbed and bruised. “The one between your fingers. No — the one you just let go. It is the skeleton key.”

Jozsef's hands were shaking uncontrollably. He thrust the key into the lock, turned it to the right, and heard the click. The cuffs fell away.

“You must fight,” he said haltingly in his mother's tongue. “Fight for your life. Can you do it?”

The man sat up and rubbed his aching arms. Then he stared at the door at the end of the hall, the one Jozsef had not yet locked.

“There are guns in that storeroom. But it will be guarded.”

“Then we must draw the guard to us,” Jozsef told him. He had unlocked four more sets of cuffs; all the prisoners capable of listening were listening now.

He nodded at one of the women — dirty-blond hair chopped any which way, bright spots of color burning in her cheeks. She looked more alert than the rest.

“Scream as though someone wanted to slit your throat. Break some glass. When the guard comes through that door, we will be waiting.”

The blue-eyed man found a scalpel on a shelf. And when the woman screamed and the gun-room guard raced in with his automatic leveled, the man stood ready behind the door.

The guard fell with the scalpel through his neck.

Jozsef steadied himself against a bed. Stars were exploding behind his eyes. I must not faint. The blond woman's hand gripped his shoulder. He saw, as from a great distance, that three of her fingers were missing. In her other hand she held a knife.

“What now?” she asked. As though he were a grown-up. Someone who knew what should be done.

“To the barracks,” he cried. And heard his father in his voice.

Caroline crouched with her ear against the tunnel door, listening intently. Her gun was raised. Beyond the flat panel of wood must be the supply closet; beyond that, a silence that made her flesh crawl. Too tight. Too heavy. A silence screaming for air.

Someone was waiting beyond the closet door.

Of course he's waiting. You didn't really think this would work, did you?

Shut up. I don't have time for this now.

Caroline clutched her Walther more firmly and thrust aside her fear. She was within an inch of death and singing about it, she was intoxicated with derring-do. For an instant she stood alone on a forty-foot jump tower in deepest Tidewater — only this time there was no Eric to shove his hand into the small of her back. She took a deep breath. Felt for the latch of the tunnel door. And hurled herself off the platform — He must have expected her to ease the door open gently, to peer around the edge, a deer in his headlights, while he pumped a round of bullets straight into her face. Instead the tunnel door slammed open and Caroline propelled herself, still crouching, straight at the man's knees. He lost his balance and swayed heavily against a shelf, raining boxes and vials to the floor. The crash of glass.

Caroline screaming, a guttural, wordless battle yell.

It won her a few seconds longer.

She saw the man's dark eyes, the close-cropped hair, the healed white sickle at his temple where a bullet had traveled long ago. Mian Krucevic. The man she had hunted obsessively for years, the man whose face she had never seen. The man who had strapped Eric to a door and waited for it to explode.

His foot swung in an arc toward her head. She had no place to roll in the closet's narrow space, no place to dodge. A piece of glass knifed into her bicep — She thrust herself upward and fired. If you're going to use a Walther, Eric murmured to her, a closet's the only place to do it.

Krucevic grunted with pain. Then the boot completed its arc and smashed into her cheekbone. Pain exploded behind her eyes, her hands came up to her face, she was curled in a fetal ball on the floor. He kicked her again in the kidneys. Then his hand was on her wrist, twisting. The delicate bones snapped under his strength — and she let go of the Walther's grip. Two iron talons grasped her shoulders and hauled her to her feet.

In an instant he would put his gun to her skull and pull the trigger. The pain was a dull roar in the back of her ears, like the sound of the sea captured in a shell.

“Where are they?” he screamed in German. “Your team. Where are they?”

Her bullet had struck him in the abdomen. Blood spread like a map across his stomach, it stained the dark gray sweater he wore to black. Why was he still standing?

“Where are they?”

The sound of a gunshot, and a man's brutal scream, from the hallway beyond.

His gun smashed again into her battered cheekbone. Agony cut like a jagged knife through her brain. She summoned her last shred of strength — and shoved her knee straight into the dark stain at his abdomen.

He howled and doubled over, still clutching his gun. She kicked backward and scrabbled for the missing Walther.

Footsteps pounded toward them.

“Papa!”

Her skull still ringing, Caroline glanced over her shoulder and saw a thin kid in underwear, his eyes two charcoal holes in a bone white face. Jozsef. He had called Krucevic Papa. Behind him were other faces — haggard, deranged, a crowd of eyes burning. He had brought the whole camp with him.

“Vaclav!” Krucevic yelled hoarsely. One hand clutched his stomach, his gun was still potent in the other. “Vaclav!”

Caroline rose slowly to her feet, her eyes fixed on Krucevic. He had sunk to the floor, and the Walther was pinned beneath him. There was no salvation that way. Blood spilled between the fingers he pressed against his shirt. His teeth were clenched in a snarl. But still he raised his gun — “Papa!”

The boy slid across the floor to huddle at Krucevic's side, his face a mask of fear.

“You're bleeding!”

Krucevic clapped a crimson hand on his son's shoulder. He turned Jozsef around to face Caroline and the throng of silent inmates standing twelve feet away. She saw now that they were armed. There would be no reply from Vaclav.

Krucevic raised his gun to Jozsef's temple. He gasped out something in Serbian.

Caroline could not understand the words, but she caught the meaning. He would shoot the boy in the head if they came any closer.

The value of a life is relative. Krucevic has known that since birth. He's on record as saying that death is always preferable to failure.

Jozsef's lips parted, but no sound came. And then his eyes slid closed with a terrible weariness. He leaned his head into the barrel of his father's gun and sighed, a child up too long past his bedtime. And Caroline at last understood.

He was Krucevic's son, as Mian was the child of his father. Jozsef was waiting for the death he had always known would come.

Fury swept over her like a wave of heat: fury for this boy who had always been trapped, exchanged like a prisoner of war between parents who never loved him enough. Fury for Eric, who was Jozsef grown up. Fury for herself, and what she had become.

Krucevic muttered something more. But his hand was shaking and his voice was faint. He had lost too much blood.

Caroline felt a spark of satisfaction — her one bullet had evened the odds — and then she threw herself at the pair of them without pausing to think, as though Krucevic were just a trainer in a prison shack, the grenade dangling temptingly from his munitions belt. She fell on top of the boy, her hands clawing at Krucevic's face.

His gun went off.

The bullet winged her, then plunged over her shoulder to bury itself in the closet wall. She tore the boy from Krucevic's arms and rolled backward, fighting her own pain. The gun fired again — A woman with ragged blond hair and intense green eyes leapt over Caroline and fell upon Krucevic. Caroline saw the knife in her hand rise — then rolled again to shield Jozsef from his father. She had managed to thrust them through the closet door. She dragged herself to her knees, her arms still around the boy's frail body, as the horde of crippled things Mian Krucevic had made surged past them.

Caroline pressed herself flat against the wall, pain stabbing through her shoulder, and took a dizzying blow on the side of the head. They were like animals, like brutes, their hatred and blood lust destroying reason; she would be overwhelmed and then she would die.

“Papa!” Jozsef's voice, pinched and shrill with terror.

A hand scrabbled at her neck, gripped hard on her collar. She screamed into a pair of shocking blue eyes, a mouth open in a snarl; then the man yanked her ruthlessly toward the hall. One of the camp's inmates.

Krucevic was being bludgeoned with pieces of chairs, with laboratory tools, with shattered frames torn from the windows. The inmate dragged Caroline forward, stumbling, through the insane tangle of bodies. She could not fight him. She could not feel the fingers of her right hand. Blackness clouded her vision. She tripped over a leg. A child's leg, bare to the edge of his filthy shorts.

The dark-haired man lifted Jozsef in his arms and shouted at Caroline, an incomprehensible word. He was gesturing for her to follow.

A terrible, high-pitched cry rose from the knot of bodies behind. He's dead, Caroline told the leather jacket receding in her mind. Mian Krucevic is dead.

But Eric did not turn to look — he had better things waiting down the road ahead — and in the end, neither did she.

Three Ziv Zakopan, 2:52 a.m.

An army of the disappeared had seized the hallway ahead. Caroline caught sight of the man who had saved her, his black head and wiry body pushing a tortured path through the shrieking faces. Fear and pain overwhelmed the adrenaline surge that had propelled her out of the tunnel mouth; a few more minutes, and she might crumple to the floor. She tried to keep the black hair in her sights, wavered, and then toppled against the wall, waiting for the dizziness to pass. A screaming woman clutched at Caroline's wounded right arm. She cried out in pain, and felt the blackness roll up to claim her.

Blue eyes, fierce and relentless. He had come back. The man threw his arm around her waist and pulled her forward through the chaos. The wall beside her disappeared and abruptly, Caroline was falling sideways. The doorway to a room.

She landed hard on the floor and rolled over. The door behind her slammed.

Darkness. Not the heavy weight of unconsciousness, but the absence of all light.

The man flipped a switch on the wall; nothing. Someone had gotten to the camp's generator. Caroline glanced swiftly around, her eyes adjusting to the gloom, and staggered to her knees. She was in a cubicle, a room with one unshaded window, a metal cot, an IV stand, some crates for a table. The blue-eyed man threw a torrent of Serbian at her. Useless.

A boy's voice answered, broken with exhaustion and grief. Jozsef. He lay in a heap at the foot of the cot. Caroline pushed herself toward him, but he flung out a hand in mute warning. He did not need this stranger. What she could see of his face was blank with shock.

There was a clatter behind them, a spattering of words. The blue-eyed Serb had turned the crates on their sides and jammed them against the closed door. Then he pulled the sheet from the cot and tore at it with his teeth. A roll of cotton from the room's supplies was already in his hand.

He was making her a bandage.

The Serb pressed the folded linen against the shredded fabric near her collarbone. Caroline's breath hissed raggedly through her clenched teeth. It was an awkward area to dress — but the man wrapped cotton gauze several times around her armpit, then tied it off with ruthless force. Caroline bit down so hard on her lip that blood oozed under her teeth. Unhygienic, inexpert — but it would do.

She grabbed his hand as he stepped away, looked up into his eyes. She knew not one word of Serbian.

“Thank you.”

He nodded, then crossed the room and thrust up the window. He held out his hand to Jozsef.

Unable to stand, the boy crawled.

“Halt,” Caroline said hoarsely. “Sophie Payne. We ist Sophie Payne?”

The boy's head came around; his eyes widened.

“She konnen die Dame?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“I know the lady. Jozsef, I'm Michael's wife. I came to help you.”

The Serb prisoner stared at Caroline, uncomprehending, then spat something harsh and desperate in his own tongue. Fists pounded against the locked door. The wave of violence sweeping the camp was indiscriminate, now; the only sane thing to do was flee.

“You killed my father,” Jozsef whispered in lacerated English. “You are the one who shot him like a dog.”

“The camp killed him. I came for Mrs. Payne.” With her left hand — Krucevic had broken the other wrist — Caroline pulled Eric's homing device from her pocket. The signal was fainter than in the fields below the compound.

“Jozsef, where is she?”

“Ich u'eiss NightI”

The twelve year old was sobbing, his hands beating the cement floor, on the edge of hysteria. And why not? A few minutes ago, his father had held a gun to his head. And now his father lay in pieces somewhere down the corridor.

“She's not with you?”

Jozsef shook his head.

Caroline crouched close to the boy and held out the homing device.

“See this red light? It's a signal. Michael buried a transmitter somewhere in her things.”

“The lady has nothing,” he said dully.

The Serb prisoner tossed two words at them and then thrust himself through the open window. At that moment, the door frame shattered and the wooden crates were pushed backward into the room. Caroline seized Jozsef's waist — he was as light as a cat from illness, a bundle of sticks to be tossed on the fire — and hurled him at the sill.

“He left her down below,” the boy said against her cheek. “He told me she was dead and buried.”

Dead and buried. The tunnels of old Ziv Zakopan.

There was a six-foot drop from the windowsill. He sat for an instant, weak legs dangling, then crumpled to the ground. Wishing uselessly for her Walther, Caroline thrust herself face first through the window, kicking at the frame. She dropped with a sharp jolt onto her left side, and her collarbone creaked and shifted under her skin; she cried out, then clamped down on the pain searing through her chest.

She felt for Jozsef.

“Here,” he breathed, and she saw his eyes peering through the slit of a doorway opposite. She crawled over and ducked inside the small shed.

The stench was overwhelming. He had hidden in a latrine.

Caroline held her breath against the sour odor. Feet thudded past them.

Something crashed into the door of the latrine with a piercing shriek, bounced away, fell silent. Jozsef shuddered and pressed against her. Caroline put her good arm around him. They waited for what seemed hours, probably no more than eight minutes. The smell of excrement and lime would cling to her clothes and hair, Caroline thought, a stink so solid she would taste it for days to come. If she survived.

Her collarbone was numb, and the bandage had stanched the flow of blood. But she was weakening. Her eyelids drooped. Maybe she could sleep for a while and look for Sophie Payne in the morning.

“I gave her my rabbit's foot,” Jozsef muttered. He seemed to have slipped sideways, down the current of a dark river. She groped her way back to him.

“What?”

“My good-luck charm. The lady needed it more than me. But what if the luck fails?”

Dead and buried. The tunnels... Caroline roused herself with effort. The screams from the compound were fainter now, the pounding feet gone elsewhere.

“Jozsef — can you show me the gate?”

He reached for her hand.

“I do not think it will be guarded any longer.”

It took them thirty-three minutes to descend the narrow path through the rocks.

Caroline's vertigo returned, and Jozsef fainted halfway down, a dead weight dragging on her left arm. She stopped to revive him, chafing his wrists and slapping him methodically; and remembered, as he lay senseless, the antibiotics in Ziv Zakopan's labs. Antidotes to anthrax that might have saved two lives.

They were probably smashed to pieces by this time.

Caroline cursed viciously. It was too late to go back. Jozsef's eyes flickered open. She crouched beside him.

“I can't carry you.” Blood had soaked through her makeshift bandage. “You can stay right here. Close to the cliff face. I'll come back soon with help.”

She had no idea whether she would find Sophie Payne or how to summon help, if any was at hand; but there was nothing else to tell the boy. Jozsef struggled to his knees. And began to crawl. The Skoda still sat where she had left it, wide open to the world. No one had seen fit to use it for a getaway. Despite the slow torture of the hillside path, they were the first to descend from Ziv Zakopan. The rest were too intent on blood and vengeance.

Jozsef heaved himself weakly into the back of the car and lay motionless.

Caroline fumbled in her pocket for the homing device and held it to her ear.

The signal was stronger than it had been in Krucevic's camp.

“Don't leave me,” Jozsef said weakly. She looked down and found his eyes upon her. They were bright with fever and anguish and death.

They struggled across the field together, in search of the signal's source. It was 3:07 A.M. In a little while the birds would sing.

“Mrs. Payne.”

Nell Forsyte, the same Nell Forsyte she had seen murdered in Pariser Platz; Sophie heard her voice with a flush of joy. She loved Nell. Nell had died for her, a senseless sacrifice. But they would be together always. She reached out her arms to hold Nell close. It was so dark in here. She had thought she was buried alive once, in the trunk of a car.

“Mrs. Payne. Can you hear me?”

She tried to open her lips. She may have moved her head. A faint sound, like the mewling of a cat. Then a steel rod was thrust under her back, agony exploded in her skull. Blood surged from her abdomen to her mouth, flooding between her lips. She choked on the words she needed to say.

Someone was crying. Small, little-boy fingers fluttering on her cheek. She would kiss Peters knee and make it better again.

Mrs. Payne, Nell called again, with that gentle insistence of the professional bodyguard, the untitled nanny.

I'm coming, Sophie answered gaily, and took one last look at her reflection in the golden mirror. It was hard to see anything at Malvern tonight. Especially from such a distance.

Panicked, Caroline searched for a pulse in the wrist and neck. She laid her head on the woman's blood-soaked sweatshirt and listened. She felt with her fingertips for a wisp of breath, frantic to snatch this life back — for she had found Sophie Payne alive, and the woman had slipped through her fingers. Water in a bowl of sand.

She stared down at the Vice President and thought of Eric, whom she had failed.

Not Jack Bigelow or Dare Atwood or even, really, Sophie herself — but Eric, who had placed the map and the transmitter and the woman's life in her hands.

Caroline wasted no time debating whether such a burden was fair. She did not hate him for it. It was the burden she had chosen.

She closed Sophie's eyes and left her alone at the base of the ladder. Without help from Sarajevo, there was nothing else she could do. Then she climbed slowly toward the surface, her left hand cramping on the ladders iron rungs. Tears seethed at the back of her throat.

“You found her?” Jozsef asked. He was huddled against the stile near the iron manhole cover, filthy and stuttering with cold.

“We should hurry and get help,” Caroline told him.

He sat up, eyes vivid with hope.

“She's alive?”

Caroline opened her mouth, then shut it again. Not for this boy the kind prevarication, the words better left unsaid. She shook her head.

He went very still. Everything in his face died. Caroline crouched down and drew him close.

Terrible, these tears so long unshed, falling now on a stranger's neck. The fierce, inhuman sobbing of grief. Jozsef wrapped his arms around her and said nothing while she cried.

At 3:32 a.m. the first wave of NATO helicopters thundered overhead.

Four The White House, 12:34 a.m.

Jack Bigelow got the news from the White House Situation Room two minutes after midnight. He had attended a reception f or the president of Somalia; he had listened to a large young soprano sing arias in Italian; he had stood near his wife and smiled tirelessly into the eyes of people whose names he occasionally remembered. Now he sat alone with his bow tie undone and his dress shirt half open, a glass of ice water in his hand. He was reading three paragraphs of an article on the backswing in Golf magazine.

The news came with a ring of his internal phone and the hesitant voice of a detailee from the State Department. Dare Atwood, she said, was on her way over.

Bigelow closed the magazine, his forefinger resting for an instant on its glossy cover; then he whipped off his tie and dress clothes and threw on a polo shirt and khakis. He would have to call her son. Peter had arrived at his mother's residence — the Naval Observatory — that afternoon. Should he do it now? Or let the boy sleep? Terrible, if Peter heard it first from a television screen. Like the outcome of a close election.

He fumbled with his belt buckle, and then his fingers stilled. Sophie was dead. Throughout each hour of the past five days, he had known it was a possibility. But the fact of her death threw his crisis management in a harsher light. Death demanded reevaluation. Where had they gone wrong? The pundits would certainly ask. And the next question was inevitable: Who would pay?

“So Krucevic is dead?”

“We have confirmation of that, yes. From Caroline Carmichael.”

“The woman who found Sophie.”

“My analyst,” Dare Atwood amended. “And our Budapest station managed to collect a remarkable amount of intelligence from... the 30 April bunker in Hungary.”

This was technically true; she saw no reason to explain exactly how Eric's disk had survived the explosion.

“We're rolling up Krucevic's networks all over the world. Thirty-five arrests have already been made, in fourteen raids.”

“Do we have enough to screw Fritz Voekl?” Bigelow asked pensively.

“I believe we do. He's clearly implicated in the VaccuGen mumps scandal — the records of E-mail correspondence between the chancellor and Mian Krucevic confirm his full knowledge and support of the vaccination campaign. And then there's the Brandenburg dump.”

“What dump?”

“Voekl ordered all evidence from the 30 April bombing destroyed. Our station chief in Berlin, Wally Aronson, has found out why.”

“Go on,” Bigelow ordered.

“You may remember that Fritz Voekl got his political start running a munitions plant in Thuringia.”

“Best little gun shop in the GDR.”

“The FBI's forensic technicians have traced chemical residues from the explosive responsible for the Brandenburg Gate's destruction directly to plastic explosive produced in that plant.”

Bigelow whistled softly.

“It ain't exactly proof the man planned a hit on his own capital.. ..”

“And it won't be admissible in court. But its as close as we'll ever get to a smoking gun.”

The President swiveled in his desk chair thoughtfully.

“We're not goin' to court. Dare. What we want is Fritz Voekl outta office.”

“For that,” Dare replied, “you need only public outcry. Give the mumps epidemic to the press, Mr. President, and you'll have it.”

Bigelow glanced over at his DCI.

“We owe that much to Sophie. Having failed her in every other respect.”

Dare Atwood bowed her head.

“May I say, Mr. President, how deeply I regret the Vice President's death?”

The President stared out the Rose Garden window. At this hour of night, a spotlight lit the bare canes; they threw a shadow like barbed wire across the withered lawn.

“I know you did everything possible,” he said. “Don't know what else we coulda done. But I'm sure I'll be reading about this fiasco in the Washington Post for the next six months.”

So much, Dare thought, for mourning Sophie Payne.

“How much access should the Agency afford the press, Mr. President?”

He studied her.

“The Agency? Or your analyst — the Carmichael woman?”

“She's something of a heroine,” Dare observed delicately. “The fact of the Vice President's death takes nothing from the extraordinary courage and brilliance Ms. Carmichael displayed. That should not go unrecognized.”

Jack Bigelow considered the point. A heroine might be useful at dispelling the funk of failure. But they would have to be careful how they handled Carmichael.

“There's just one question I gotta ask, Dare.”

“Yes, sir?”

“The Sarajevo cable says she used a homing device to find Sophie in that tunnel. But who planted the transmitter — and where, exactly, did your gal get the device?”

Dare felt a tremor between her shoulder blades and stood a little straighter.

“From someone within the 30 April Organization, sir. That much is obvious. If difficult questions are asked, I suggest we refer to our constant need to protect our Intelligence sources and methods. That tends to put an end to certain conversations.”

Bigelow tossed a copy of the Financial Times across his desk. Even upside down, Dare knew what the headline said: American's Body Discovered in Terrorists' Lair.

“You realize the kind of stink this could cause?” Dare returned his gaze steadily.

“I haven't read that piece yet, sir.”

“You in the habit of runnin' rogue operations, Dare?”

“Absolutely not, Mr. President.” She hesitated. “The groundwork for that ... operation ... was laid during my predecessor's tenure.”

Bigelow scowled.

“And no one saw fit to inform you of it?”

“No, sir.”

“Wonder how many other DCI's that bastard Sorensen has end-run.”

Dare had asked herself the same question. Had Scottie made a practice of deceiving his superiors? Or was her case special — a higher threshold of mistrust — because she was a woman with no operational experience?

“Mr. Sorensen has already proffered his resignation,” she told the President.

He shook his head.

“We can't accept it in the present climate. Too many questions would be asked. And Sorensen might feel obligated to answer them.”

“I agree.”

The President crumpled the Financial Times and tossed it in his wastebasket.

“Watch your back, Dare,” he advised her. “You're not careful, son of a bitch will have your job next.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

Tom Shephard caught up with Caroline thirteen hours after Delta Force did.

He stood in the doorway of her room — the embassy had pulled rank with the Sarajevo hospital and insisted it be private — and studied her. She was sound asleep. Her head lay slantwise across the pillow, her blond hair lank from several days' neglect. The bandaged collarbone was just visible through a gap in her gown. The room was filled with dusk and the green glow of a fitful fluorescent tube, so that the quality of her skin was cadaverous; nothing of Caroline's force or spark remained.

He had not entered a hospital since the day five years before when his Jennifer had died. He found he was still not ready. With a flutter of panic, he turned to go.

“Hey, Shephard.” Perhaps it was her wound that had stripped her of all defenses, or the fact that the long, hard quest was done. Whatever the reason, she looked at him baldly and stretched out her hand. He understood then just how lonely she was — how much in need of human contact.

He took her fingers between his own and squeezed them gently.

“Couple of inches to the right, Mad Dog, and you wouldn't be here,” he said with a nod toward her bandage.

“Couple of inches to the left, and I'd be home by now,” she retorted.

He grinned at her, his spirits rising suddenly, the ghost of that lost other love lifting as quietly as a bird from his shoulders. He pulled a chair close to her bedside.

She studied his face as though nothing but the truth could possibly be read there. He wondered if she understood how much he had mistrusted her — and how much he had wanted to believe. He decided that neither was worth saying right now.

“How's the boy?” she asked. “How's Jozsef?”

“Not good. They've got him pumped full of drugs from the embassy stores — but he hasn't turned the corner yet.” The corner being an S-bend between death and life, sharp enough to derail a train.

“We're thinking about airlifting him to Germany.”

“No.”

“Caroline — he needs an I.C.U worthy of the name.”

“He'd get far better care in the U.S.”

“But it's farther away. He could die in transit.”

“We are not sending him back to Germany. Not even to a NATO base. He has no one left, Tom — no one. You heard about Mirjana?”

“There may be supplies of the Anthrax 3A-specific antibiotic in Berlin,” Shephard attempted. “At VaccuGen.”

“So get your buddies in the BKA to break into the warehouse! Send some drugs home! The CDC would kill for a sample.”

Dare Atwood, Shephard reflected, had already suggested something similar in a teleconference with Embassy Sarajevo.

“But don't drop that kid smack in the middle of Fritz Voekl's camp,” Caroline insisted. “He deserves a break. Sophie Payne would have wanted that much—” She broke off and bit hard at her lip.

“Fritz Voekl shot himself two hours ago.” Caroline's eyes widened fractionally. Then surprise gave way swiftly to calculation, so that Shephard might almost have believed they were back in Berlin, briefing Ambrose Dalton.

“Who took over? His deputy party chief, or—”

The corners of Shephard's mouth twitched. Her case could not be that desperate if she was already analyzing.

“Get some sleep, Carrie,” he ordered. “I'll talk to the ambassador about Jozsef Krucevic.”

“Talk to the CKA,” Caroline ordered, “then come back and tell me who's running Germany. I want to know!”

“But you don't need to know. Mad Dog,” he said. “Not yet.”

The body of the Vice President of the United States was returned to Washington two days later. Jozsef Krucevic accompanied his lady on the plane, a dirty white rabbit's foot clutched tightly in his hand.

Jack Bigelow and an honor guard were waiting on the tarmac. So were the press crews of thirty-four nations and a crowd of nearly a thousand people, held back by a phalanx of helmeted police. The coffin was draped in the American flag; the mood was solemn. Peter Payne laid his cheek on Sophie's casket before fifty million television viewers, then paced slowly behind the honor guard to the waiting hearse.

Jack Bigelow put his arm around the young man's shoulders and said a few words the microphones could not catch. Something, probably, about sacrifice and sorrow. Peter Payne nodded and extended his hand.

Later, the pundits would say a torch of some kind had been passed.

But before all this occurred — before the motorcade to Arlington and the Newsu'cek cover of Caroline Carmichael, before the presidential letter of appreciation and the Bronze Intelligence Star — there was a different sort of homecoming, in a freight hangar at Washington Dulles, and Scottie Sorensen was the only person there.

He stood with his hands in his pockets while they wheeled the coffin forward on a gurney, a medical examiner at his side. “Are you ready, sir?” the attendant asked him. Sorensen nodded, his expression debonair as always. He was not required to make a formal identification of the body. It would probably be unpleasant. There had, after all, been an explosion. But Scottie thought he might sleep better, nights, if he knew for certain that Eric Carmichael was dead. Eric had possessed too many secrets.

They lifted open the casket's cover. Scottie stared down at the blond hair, the corpse riddled with shrapnel. Most of the facial features were missing. He studied one hand and an arm. Ugly red weals crisscrossed the wrist. Eric had, after all, been tortured; but these scars were old. These scars had healed years before. They were the marks of a razor blade inexpertly applied by a man who hadn't really wanted to die.

He took a step backward. He motioned that the casket should be closed. He drew a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it delicately against his nose.

“Can you identify this man as Michael O'Shaughnessy?” the medical examiner asked.

Scottie hesitated. There were so many possible answers.

“His name is Antonio Fioretto,” he said at last. “An Italian national, and a terrorist.”

And for a wild instant, he almost laughed.