The Cutout

One Berlin, 12:03 p.m.

She was a small woman; the press had always made much of that. On this crisp November morning in the last days of a bloody century, she stood tiptoe on a platform designed to lift her within sight of the crowd. They were a polyglot mass-threadbare German students. Central Europeans, a smattering of American tourists. A few Turks holding bloodred placards were shadowed, of course, by the ubiquitous security detail of the new regime. After twenty-four hours in Berlin, Sophie Payne had grown accustomed to the presence of riot police.

The international press corps jostled her audience freely, cameras held high like religious icons. The new German chancellor had not yet banned the media.

Just across Pariser Platz, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, sat a tangle of television vans and satellite dishes. Sophie surveyed them from her podium and understood that she was making history. The first American Vice President to descend upon the new German capital of Berlin, she had appeared at a troubled time. The people gathered in the square expected her to deliver an American message — the promise of solidarity in struggle. Or perhaps redemption? She had come to Berlin at the request of her President, Jack Bigelow, to inaugurate a foothold in the capital. Behind her, to the rear of the seats held down by the German foreign minister and the U.S. ambassador, the new embassy rose like an operatic set. Before it, Sophie Payne might have been a marionette, Judy playing without Punch, an official government doll.

The U.S. embassy's design had been fiercely debated for years. The trick, it seemed, was to avoid all visual reference to Berlin's twentieth century — that unfortunate period of persistent guilt and klaxons in the night. Comparison with the present regime might prove unfortunate. But neither was the nineteenth century entirely acceptable; that had produced Bismarck, after all, and the march toward German militarism. The State Department planners had settled at last on a post modernist compromise: a smooth, three-storied expanse of limestone corniced like a Chippendale highboy.

It might, Sophie thought, have been a corporate headquarters. It made no statement of any kind. That was probably her job today, too.

But in the last thirty-six hours she had read the obscene graffiti scrawled on the new Holocaust memorial. She had met with third-generation Turkish guest workers — Gastarbeiters — about to be repatriated to a country they had never seen. She had even dined with the new chancellor, Fritz Voekl, and applauded politely when he spoke of the rebirth of German greatness. Then she had lain sleepless far into the night, remembering her parents. And decided that a statement must be made.

Now she set aside her carefully crafted speech and adjusted the mike.

“Meine Damen und Herren.”

In the pause that followed her amplified words, Sophie distinctly heard a child wailing. She drew breath and gripped the podium.

“We come here today to celebrate a new capital for a new century,” she said.

That was innocuous enough; it might have been drawn from the sanitized pages she had just discarded.

“We celebrate, too, the dedication and sacrifice of generations of men and women, on both sides of the Atlantic, who committed their lives to the defeat of Communism.” Nothing to argue with there — nothing that might excite the black-clad police or their waiting truncheons.

“But the fact that we do so today in the city of Berlin is worthy of particular attention,” she continued. “The capital of Germany's past as well as her future, Berlin can never be wholly reborn. It carries its history in every stone of its streets. For Berlin witnessed Hitler's tyranny and horror, and Berlin paid for its sins in blood. As we dedicate this embassy, let us commit ourselves to one proposition: that never again will this nation submit to dictatorship. Never again will it shut its doors to any race. Berlin must be the capital for all Germany's people.”

There was a tremendous roar — spontaneous, uplifting, and utterly foolhardy — from the crowd in the middle of Pariser Platz. A bearded figure waved his placard, chanting in a torrent of Turkish; he was followed by others, scattered throughout the square, and in an instant the police truncheons descended in a savage arc. Someone screamed. Sophie took a step back from the podium; she saw a woman crumple under the feet of the crowd.

Nell Forsyte, her Secret Service agent, was instantly at her side.

“Say thank you and get out,” Nell muttered.

Sophie reached for the microphone. And before the sound of the blast ripped through the cries swelling from Pariser Platz, she felt something — a vibration in the wooden platform beneath her feet, as though the old square sighed once before giving up its ghost. Then the Brandenburg Gate bloomed like a monstrous stone flower and the screaming began — a thin, high shriek piercing the chaos. A wave of red light boiled toward the podium where she stood, paralyzed, and she thought, Good God. It's a bomb. Did I do that?

Nell Forsyte flung Sophie to the platform like a rag doll and lay heavily on her back, a human shield shouting unintelligible orders. Somewhere quite close, a man cried out in French. Glass shattered as the shock wave slammed outward; the plate-glass windows of the luxury hotels buckled, the casements of a dozen tour buses popped like caramelized sugar. And then, with all the violence of a Wagnerian chorus, the massive glass dome of the nearby Reichstag splintered and crashed inward.

The chaos suspended thought and feeling. For an instant, Sophie breathed outside of time.

“You okay?” Nell demanded hoarsely in her ear.

She nodded, and her forehead struck the wooden platform.

“Get off my back, Nell. You're killing me.”

“Stay down.”

“I'd prefer to get up.” The Secret Service agent ignored her, but Sophie felt a slight shifting in the woman's weight; Nell was craning her neck to scan the square. Sophie had a momentary vision of a pile of dignitaries — American, German — all crushed beneath their respective security details. She giggled. It was an ugly sound, halfway between a sob and a gasp. If I could just. get up, I'd feel better. More in control. She dug an elbow into Nell's ribs.

The agent grunted.

“When I count to three, stand up and face the embassy. I'll cover your back.”

“Shouldn't we crawl?”

“Too much glass.”

Nell gave the count and heaved Sophie to her feet. Only then did the Vice President notice that she'd lost a shoe. All around her, men and women lay on the platform amid splatters of blood, a hail of glass. The podium, Sophie realized, had miraculously shielded her from shrapnel. A tense ring of German security men surrounded the foreign minister; he sprawled motionless amid a heap of splintered chairs. Somebody — the embassy doctor, Sophie thought — was tearing open his shirt.

At the right side of the platform, maybe a yard from where she stood, a dark-skinned scowling man drew a machine gun from his coat and aimed it at Sophie.

She stared at him, fascinated.

Then Nell's pistol popped and the mans left eye welled crimson. He reeled like a drunk, his gun discharging in the air.

This time, Nell tackled her at the knees.

The medevac helicopter circled over Pariser Platz twice, ignoring the frantic signal of an ambulance crew from the rubble below. There was nowhere to land; survivors trampled the wounded underfoot, and the main exits to the Tiergarten and Unter den Linden were choked with tumbled stone and rescue vehicles. The chopper pilot veered sharply left and hovered over the roof of the embassy.

Normally, a marine guard would have been posted there for the duration of the Vice President's speech, but the soldiers had probably rushed below in the first seconds after the explosion. The roof was empty. The pilot found the bull's-eye of the landing pad and set down the craft. A two-man team scuttled out of the chopper, backs bent under the wind of the blades. They rolled a white-sheeted gurney between them. A third man-blond-haired, black-jacketed-crouched in the craft's open doorway. He covered the team with an automatic rifle until they reached the rooftop door.

There, one of the men drew a snub-nosed submachine gun from his white lab coat and fired at the communications antennae bolted to the embassy roof. Then he blew the lock off the door.

A security alarm blared immediately. It was drowned in the clamor of Pariser Platz.

The blond-haired man raised his gun and glanced over his shoulder at the helicopter pilot.

“They're in. Give them three minutes.” He scanned the rooftop, the heating ducts and the forest of defunct antennae. Brand-new, state-of-the-art listening posts, all shot to hell in seconds. The CIA techies had probably been there for weeks installing them.

The helicopter rotors whined, and the man in the black jacket steadied himself against the door frame as the craft lifted into the air. The screams below seemed hardly to affect him. He scanned the square like a hawk, waiting for the moment to dive.

Machine-gun fire. It was the sound of her recurring nightmare — a dream about execution and a firing squad. Sophie struggled in Nells grip, choking on the wave of oily smoke that had flooded Pariser Platz. It was impossible to see much — only the blank wall of the embassy looming. The agent lifted her under the armpits like a child.

“We've got to get inside.” Nell thrust Sophie toward the dignitaries' chairs, vacant now as a theater on a bad opening night, shards of glass sparkling everywhere. Sophie could feel Nell's urgency nipping at her heels.

A marine guard thrust open the shattered main door. Then he fell, slack-mouthed and startled, dead at Sophie's feet. Nell's arm came up beside her. The agent fired at something in the shadows of the entryway. And then, with a sound like a punctured tire, Nell dropped to her knees. There had been no report from another gun. Someone inside the embassy had a silencer. A clatter of footsteps, a gurney being lifted over the marine guard's corpse. Blood was spreading rapidly across the dark blue wool of Nell's suit. A rescue team in white coats surged toward Sophie, and she sank down beside the agent with a feeling of relief. Nell grabbed Sophie's waist with one arm and with the other raised her gun. As Sophie watched, a bullet struck the agent square in the forehead and she slumped over, rage still blazing in her eyes.

Sophie was cradling her, a dragging, bleeding weight, and screaming Nell, Nell, when they seized her from behind. Then night fell like the guttering of a candle flame.

“Get out of the way!”

The man at the head of the gurney shouted in German to the bewildered survivors at the edge of the platform.

“We need room! Move it!”

The medevac helicopter hovered two hundred yards above Pariser Platz, a gurney line descending from the motorized reel. It took only seconds for the two men below to attach the stretcher. It rose slowly, smoothly, with its white-sheeted burden. A figure appeared through the swirling maelstrom of smoke-black leather jacket, blond head. He reached for the stretcher, steadied it, and swung it carefully inside.

A German newsman, his face smeared with soot, had his lens trained firmly on the chopper. Where it gripped the video cam, his right hand was slick with blood.

“Who's on the stretcher?” he demanded.

The gurney team ignored him.

The newsman swung his camera into the face of one of the medical techs. Livid with anger, the man shoved it aside. The reporter dropped the camera with a cry of pain and clutched his wounded hand.

Shedding their white coats, now stained with blood and dust, the two men pushed through the crowd. An ambulance idled at the edge of the Tiergarten, strangely unresponsive to the hundreds of wounded in the square. They made for it at a run.

Two Arlington, 7 a.m.

Caroline Carmichael balanced her coffee cup — an oversized piece of Italian pottery with Deruta stamped on the bottom — between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Her gaze was fixed on the dull blue wing of a jay carping beyond her window. She may have seen the bird — may have recorded something of its petulance, the way its beak stabbed angrily at the sodden leaves. She may have acknowledged the rain streaming down into the defeated grass, and in some hollow of her mind determined which suit to wear to work; but for the moment she was content to sit nude beneath her oversized terry-cloth robe. It enfolded her like an ermine, a second skin. It had once belonged to Eric, and that alone made it precious.

The cotton loops smelled faintly of lemons. She closed her eyes and imagined him breathing.

Lemons. The groves of Cyprus, dry hillsides crackling with rosemary. Cyprus had come well before Budapest and was thus a place that Caroline could consider without flinching. Raw red wine and merciless sunlight, the sea a cool promise through the tumbled stones. She had bought the robe in a shop in Nicosia. He had worn it maybe four times. I'm not a robe kind of guy, he'd told her when she packed for home. Take it with you. Really.

And just what, Caroline wondered, was a robe kind of guy?

When Eric emerged from the shower, his hair a tousle of spikes and the night's growth of beard a haze along the jaw, he rarely reached for a towel. The drops beading his skin evaporated in the Cyprus heat, while he stood lost in thought, eyes fixed on nothing. Caroline never asked where his mind went in such moments.

She was too well acquainted with Eric's demons — the fear that gripped him before certain meetings, the uncontrolled retching over the porcelain bowl.

Nicosia was bad. Budapest was worse.

She could have loved the craggy old city on the banks of the Danube were it not for the change in Eric. Some nights, working surveillance in the passenger seat beside him, she would lose herself in the spectacle ofBuda Castle, floodlit and austere on its manicured slope. By day she plunged into the warren of Pest's back streets, where the buildings' grimy plaster facades, untouched as yet by the mania for renovation, hovered like the backdrop to a Bogart movie. Beneath the coal dust that penetrated every crevice of every shop, she found carved chests daubed with brilliant birds, embroidered linens, spurs once owned by a Magyar horseman. She fingered the cloth, stroked the splintered wood, and imagined a vast plain swept by wild herds. Later, when the incessant rains of March fell, she retired with a book to Gerbeaud's, the city's most venerable coffeehouse. She toyed with chocolate torte and eavesdropped on young Italian tourists.

Eric refused all refuge. He grew hollow-eyed from strain and restless nights; he spoke sharply when he spoke at all. When she referred to a time beyond Buda, he lost the thread of conversation. Always a creature of discipline, he became, if anything, an ascetic-forgoing sleep, the after-embassy drinks hour, even her body in the small hours of morning. The night meetings ended increasingly at dawn, long after she had closed her book and put out her light. She would awake early and dress for the embassy in silence, her husband an insensate stranger shrouded amid the sheets.

Three months before the end of their tour, Eric accepted temporary duty in Istanbul for the summer. Caroline decided to head for the States the same day he left Budapest. She had no reason to go on to Turkey with him, no duty in Istanbul. She would work in Langley and hunt for a house. Headquarters would be glad to have her back — they never asked inconvenient questions. And perhaps absence would improve Eric's frame of mind.

Dispatch him from his present limbo, a restored creature.

I'll call you, he says as they stand in the echoing concourse of the Frankfurt airport. There are no lounge areas at the individual gates, no place to sit and talk. Bearded men too large for their tropical-weight suits are wedged between newspapers and duty-free bags, smoking endless cigarettes. Their wives pace the concrete floors in wrinkled saris, children curled in their arms like sacks of flour.

The international terminal is one vast waiting room between past and future, punctuated by drooping plants and security portals and guards with electronic sensors. Terrorism haunts the Frankfurt airport, because a decade ago a boom box wired by two Libyans was loaded from the tarmac into the baggage compartment of Pan Am 103. That flight ended in fiery chaos over a small town in Scotland. And now Frankfurt is determined to shut the barn door on the horse's ass.

It takes hours to process through security. Tourists disinclined to learn from history ignore the gate queues and raise their voices in complaint. Bags are opened, or x-rayed, or swathed in yellow twine. Forms are stamped. Cameras monitor. People stand and sweat and stare blankly with ill-defined tension. And at last, the baggage dismissed, they win the freedom of this concourse. Its sterility is almost harrowing.

Caroline clutches her boarding pass in her right hand, her carryon in her left, when what she really wants is to hold Eric until the breath leaves his body.

“I'll be at the Tysons Marriott,” she says.

“I'll let you figure out the time change between Istanbul and Virginia.”

She notices with half her mind that the Americans complain the loudest. They eddy in a tide of sweatsuits around the island that is Eric, convinced they deserve some sort of dispensation. They've paid in blood for world dominion, and this German obsession with order is an outrage. It smacks of cattle cars shunted to a Polish siding, of diversion to the death camp showers. Patience is a virtue Americans distrust.

Eric touches her cheek. Kisses her forehead chastely, as though in benediction. And turns away, his mind shifting elsewhere. Caroline stretches out her hand to his retreating back. But it is already too late. It is this she will remember, years later, when people ask. She will remember that they parted in silence.

Did he suspect what would happen that frantic April morning? Or did he go ignorant as a calf to his destruction?

Caroline drank the last of her coffee, the taste of sewage in her mouth. The jay beyond her window lifted its wings and flitted away; she was very close to being late for work.

When the news breaks, she thought, it's the one thing on everybody's mind, the question we never ask aloud. We shrug off disaster, hurl obscenities at the slow car in the fast lane, skip our workouts for a long lunch. But the question remains; it hovers like a priest's profile, half glimpsed through a confessional screen.

When a plane explodes five miles above the earth, how exactly do you die?

Over the past two years, she had pinned down some specific answers. Twelve of the passengers on MedAir 901 were found seventeen miles from the plane's point of impact, dead but still strapped into their seats. Five others — first-class passengers who sat directly over the forward baggage compartment, where investigators believed the bomb exploded — were incinerated at ignition. Seven of the taller members of the coach section were decapitated when a wing sheared off. Ninety-eight others never got out of the fuselage. But the worst of it, in Carolines opinion, were the ones who were sucked from their seats, to swirl with the air currents like leaves or empty candy wrappers high above the coast of Turkey. At thirty thousand feet they would lose consciousness in seconds, suffocate in the thin air, freeze in the subzero winds. And disintegrate on impact.

Even now, when she closed her eyes at night, she saw the children. There'd been twenty-one of them on MedAir 901, some of them teenagers, some of them still in diapers. Candy wrappers, all of them, in their pastel Easter clothes.

Eric's was one of the bodies they never found at all. Two and a half years of probing the metaphoric wreckage, a thousand days of questions thrown out into the clandestine universe, and Caroline still did not know how her husband had died.

It was Eric she longed for now, in the rain of Arlington, as she tossed the dregs of her coffee in the sink and padded down the length of carpeted hall to her solitary bedroom. She longed for the tautness of a thigh, the delicate flesh above the hip. The time of sweat that lived in the crease behind his knee. All these, she thought, all these are denied me. And the pain of it stopped her short in the doorway, to take a ragged breath, to calm herself, and to move then with resolution toward the closet door.

She was halfway up the George Washington Parkway when the news from Germany broke.

The CIA's Counterterrorism Center was in the grip of its daily frenzy. Tucked away on the ground floor of the New Headquarters Building, the CTC was a windowless three thousand square feet of stale air and blue industrial carpeting, where fifty — odd terrorism experts jockeyed for space and priority among a welter of cubicle partitions. It brought together CIA case officers, Intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and Secret Service detailees in a way that no government organization had ever attempted before. Turf battles and chains of command were set aside in the Center; here, the common threat took precedence.

There were people who knew Farsi and people who knew explosives and people who knew where Moammar Qaddafi slept each night; people who dreamed in Arabic, or understood counterfeiting, or chemical precursors, or how storage centers were hidden in the hearts of mountains. Here the stuff of fiction was commonplace — the satellite images of guerilla training camps, the electronic intercepts of private conversation. In Caroline's mind, it was the most fulfilling and exciting three thousand square feet in the entire world.

She paused at the door, expecting the inevitable — the bruising flight of one of her colleagues toward the hallway connecting the New Headquarters Building with the Old — and was rewarded with a sharp jolt in the rib cage as Sandy Courts careened past her.

“Sorry,” he muttered. And never looked up from the cable he was reading.

Sandy was a small, fussy, white-haired man with a correct British accent. His wire-rimmed spectacles were clouded with thumbprints. He disapproved of Caroline — Sandy disapproved of all young people on principle, and particularly female ones — and yet she regarded him with affection. He was a character straight out of George Smiley's Circus. And he knew everything there was to know about Beirut and Lebanon. If, while crossing the street in his distracted fashion, Sandy Coutts were to be hit by a bus one day, the collective memory of Middle East analysis would be wiped out in an instant.

Where partitions divided the room, a particular branch held sway: the Hizballah people, the Bin Laden people, the ones who followed the PFLP-GC. Caroline turned right on Bin Laden Lane and made her way to Via Krucevic. It was the place she called home in the CTC — the branch that watched the 30 April Organization. Its members were an elusive band of international killers — madmen, probably; psychotics and sadists and all-around bad boys, certainly — but disciplined and deadly. Their agenda was simple. They wanted a Europe cleansed of the non-Aryan races; they waged terror in order to achieve it.

Thirty months earlier, they had blown up Eric's plane.

“Hey, Mad Dog.” Cuddy Wilmot was already standing by Caroline's desk. He was one of the few people allowed to call her that — the name Eric had given her after a reckless display of courage during her paramilitary training — but then, Cuddy had been Eric's friend. Now he was Caroline's. He was also her branch chief.

“The afternoon briefing at State is canceled,” he told her.

“Scottie's called a staff meeting for nine A.M.”

“Any news of the Veep? What hospital she's in?”

Something about Cuddy's face — the half-apologetic way he shoved the bridge of his glasses upward with one finger — warned Caroline that bad news was coming.

Cuddy never apologized.

“Have you seen the footage?” he asked.

“Didn't have time.” She glanced at a television monitor suspended from the ceiling; a few people were gathered in a tight knot under it. She started to walk toward Scottie Sorenson, the Center's director, but Cuddy grabbed her elbow.

“Come into my office.”

They serpentined through the huddle of desks, past fat piles of paper balancing rotary fans and coffee mugs tattooed with lipstick, past bookshelves bulging with academic journals and videotapes and yellowing scraps of newsprint. Other than the people watching the news, everybody in the place was bent over their terminals, intent on scanning the traffic that had been dumped overnight. Searching for the spoor that presaged a terrorist kill — the threat phoned in to an embassy, the report of a suspicious briefcase — anything that might scream culpability in the Berlin bombing.

“What is it?” she asked Cuddy, feeling her heart accelerate.

He closed his office door behind her. Not that it mattered; the walls were made of glass.

“I think you ought to see this in what passes for privacy.” He bent over the VCR and stabbed at a button.

“Why?”

He didn't answer. Everything about Cuddy — the sleeves of his yellow oxford cloth shirt rolled up to the elbows, the ugly polyester tie he kept in a desk drawer and knotted around his neck as an afterthought — was as it should be. But in the small room Caroline could feel his tension humming.

“You think this was done by our boys.” She said it quietly.

“That they hit the Gate. You think 30 April tried to kill the Vice President.”

“I don't know what to think. That I'm going insane, maybe. Have a seat, Caroline.”

The footage was German, pulled off the Agency's massive satellite dishes. She ignored the network voice-over and focused on the screen. A wide-angle shot of the new embassy, the crowd milling around Pariser Platz. A surprisingly nice day for Berlin in November.

“Who's the guy at the mike?” Cuddy asked.

“Dietrich, Graf von Orbsdorff,” she replied.

“Foreign minister. Former Christian Democrat turned Social Conservative. He fought with Helmut Kohl for two decades, then switched parties when Fritz Voekl and his fascist buddies moved into town.”

“He's dead,” Cuddy said without emotion.

Caroline took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. As a leadership analyst in the Office of Russian and European Analysis (a place known by the unfortunate acronym of DI/OREA), she had followed von Orbsdorff for nearly six years, before Scottie Sorenson had persuaded her to join the CTC. She knew everything about the German foreign minister — where he bought his suits and how much he paid, the address of the apartment where he kept his mistress, why his father had committed suicide before the Nuremberg trials.

“There's Payne,” Cuddy said.

“Watch closely.”

“Meine Damen und Herren …”

The Vice President looked so very small, Caroline thought, as she stood poised behind the podium. Her black hair, cut in a smooth bob to the chin, fluttered in the breeze. She wore a dark red suit well tailored, the color of blood.

“Interesting speech.” Caroline folded her arms across her chest, as though they might protect her from the coming blast.

“Probably not the one she was supposed to give.”

Cuddy did not reply.

And then Sophie Payne lifted her head, distracted by something off camera. A second later, the image rocked, then careened wildly out of focus.

“Veep's down,” Caroline said, eyes on the screen.

The television camera wheeled to face the Brandenburg Gate. The lens caught a mad stampede of bodies, the opened mouths screaming. Cuddy lowered the volume.

“Now watch.”

The film went blank. A pause, and then a helicopter filled the camera, wavering against a slate gray sky. A stretcher swung gracefully upward into its belly.

“That's Payne?” Caroline leaned forward, frowning.

“What exactly happened to her?”

“German liaison is claiming she was shot by a Turkish sniper. They found the guy with a slug in his head from a dead Secret Service agent's gun.”

“The agent's dead? Shit.”

“Twenty-eight people are dead, Carrie.” Cuddy said it savagely.

“Forget the Veep. Look at the belly of that chopper.”

He picked up the remote and rewound the tape. Again, the helicopter filled the screen.

“Look at the guy at the winch. Everyone's so focused on the goddamn stretcher they haven't even noticed.”

Caroline looked. She saw a man with unruly blond hair curling over his black leather jacket. Aviator sunglasses. Powerful shoulders. A thin blade of a nose. Wide lips pinched together in concentration. His hands reached out to steady the swaying stretcher, and with one glimpse of his strong, blunt fingers Caroline knew the truth.

She stumbled out of her chair and fell on her knees by the monitor. Splayed her hands across the screen as though that might bring him home.

The man in the chopper was Eric.

Three Langley, 8:23 a.m.

“Okay. So she's probably not in 3. hospital.”

Caroline was pacing like a leopard on a short leash, five feet in one direction, five feet in the other. She wanted to run out of the Center, run madly down the hall, run to wherever Eric was at that moment. He's alive, he's alive. The bastard is alive.

“Sit down, Caroline,” Cuddy told her.

“Someone will notice. We don't want that to happen.”

She started to speak, started to hurl the anger of wasted years in his face — then sat down abruptly.

“You didn't know,” he said.

She looked up.

“Did you?”

“I wasn't married to him.”

His bitterness was like a sharp blow.

“Do you think I could pretend that he was dead? For two years? Or that Eric would trust me to do it?”

“Eric loved you, Mad Dog.” Cuddy studied a brown stain — coffee, probably — on the carpet at his feet. Unable, now, to meet her eyes.

“He trusted you with a lot.”

“Not with his life,” she retorted.

“Eric trusted nobody with that.” They were both silent a moment, the thought of Eric like another person in the room.

“It'd be one hell of a way for a terrorist to get information,” Cuddy said distantly.

“To have a wife in the middle of the most sensitive counterterrorism network in the world.”

“You know me better than that.”

“I thought I knew Eric.”

“Stand in line,” she whispered.

“Don't cry, Mad Dog. It doesn't suit you.”

He was wrong; she wasn't going to cry.

“Who else knows?” she asked.

Cuddy shrugged.

“Can't say. He looks different. There's the sunglasses, the longer hair.”

And most of the CTC personnel were fairly new. Their rotations through the Center were at the most two years old. They thought of Eric as a dead hero, one of the stars chiseled sharply on the Agency memorial. There was a good chance he had gone unrecognized.

“Scottie?” she asked.

“We'd have to tell Scottie in any case.”

“He'll go to Atwood. He'll have to.”

Cuddy shoved at his glasses impatiently.

“What do you want, Caroline? Your husband screwed the entire U.S. government this morning, okay?”

She tore open the door and sped toward the CTC directors office. Stumbled once on her high heels and swore out loud. It was a testament to the madness of the day that nobody even looked at her.

Scottie's door was open, but he'd turned off the fluorescent lights. He sat behind his desk in the unnatural gloom — white-haired, hollow-eyed, host to more parasites than medical science had isolated. His face bore a look that Caroline recognized. The look of a case officer alone in the field who knows he has been betrayed.

He was a private man who kept most people at a distance. He had graduated from Yale at a time when Intelligence was still glamorous, and he wore the code of silence like a good English suit — unobtrusive, yet tailored to the man. A string of ex-wives would argue that he was charming too charming for his own good and charm had made his career. Scottie's recruitments were like an exercise in seduction, and the rush of it all of taking a soul into the dark side of Intelligence kept him hungry for the field. He loved running agents, loved the dead drops in the deserted parking lots, the midnight surveillance, the unexpected take downs

Caroline thought that he had loved Eric.

It was Scottie who had pulled her husband off his first tour in Kabul, in the middle of the Soviet-Afghan war and sent him to Beirut. After Beirut it was Athens, where Scottie was Chief of Station. Then Nicosia. Then back to the CTC, where Scottie got the director's slot and made Eric his deputy. Only to send him to Budapest twenty months later, a decision that Caroline could barely forgive.

Scottie would not be deceived by long hair and sunglasses.

She tapped twice and waited.

His eyes slid over to hers, slid away.

“Come in and shut the door.”

She positioned herself squarely between the chief and the vague middle distance he was studying and said, “What are you going to do?”

“You've seen the tape?”

“I've seen Eric.”

He smiled grimly. Unlike Cuddy, Scottie didn't bother to question her loyalties.

Thirty years in the butt holes of the world, Scottie would have said, had taught him all he needed to know about loyalty. Either Caroline Carmichael was a terrorist mole or she was a victim like the rest of them. That was a question for the Agency polygraphers to answer.

“How fortunate that you never remarried. Any idea, Mrs. Carmichael, what our fair-haired boy is up to?”

“None whatsoever. Did you set this up, Scottie?”

A faint smile.

“Now that would have been magnificent. But even I cannot come up with a good reason to snatch Sophie Payne. She's too short and too intelligent for my taste.”

“Never mind that. Let's talk about Eric. Why pretend to be dead for more than two years? Why lie to all of us?”

“I don't know.” He pushed himself away from his desk and stood up. “Only Eric can answer those questions, Caroline, and unfortunately he's incommunicado at the moment. Our first duty is to find the Vice President. Everything else is homework.”

He was right, of course; Payne's life hung in the balance. The small matter of a dead man's resurrection would have to be ignored for a time.

“It seems fairly obvious that she's not in a German hospital,” Caroline said.

Scottie shrugged himself into his suit jacket. He favored glen plaid, like a latter-day Duke of Windsor; he must own twenty variations on the theme.

“The White House is beginning to realize that, too. None of the Berlin facilities has admitted her. President Bigelow is screaming for information, and the Germans are giving him squat.”

“Did you hear Payne's speech?”

“I imagine we'll hear it ad nauseam before the day is out. It was impolitic, under the circumstances, but hardly enough to spark a kidnapping. I've watched the footage over and over, Caroline. The bombing, the confusion, the medevac chopper it all took about nine minutes. That argues a fair amount of sophistication and planning. We're dealing with professionals.”

“Of course,” she replied.

“But which ones?”

He held her gaze.

“If you don't know, then I'm certainly not going to guess.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, Caroline, you were married to him. You tell me. Of all the terrorist groups Eric worked, whom did he want to screw the most? Because he's obviously jumped into bed with somebody.”

“Christ,” she muttered.

“I hope to God it's not 30 April.”

“I doubt he'd still be alive if it were.” The statement was hard.

“Krucevic and his kind taste betrayal in their mothers milk. They'd have blown Eric's cover inside of three minutes and killed him in three and a half.”

“He's our only lead, Scottie. To the Vice President. You realize what that means?”

“He's a killer, Caroline, and he's out in the cold. Dare Atwood has asked for a briefing. I'm due right now on the seventh floor.”

“You have to tell her about Eric.” It was half statement, half question; Caroline dreaded the answer.

“I was hoping you might do that,” Scottie said.

Four Langley, 8:40 a.m.

So what am i supposed to believe, Eric? Tell me that.

Caroline follows Scottie's elegant back through the broad corridors connecting New Headquarters with Old. The walls here are mostly glass. The space is arranged as a museum. She inventories pieces of the Berlin Wall and OSS radio transmitters without seeing them. What am I supposed to think? That you're a hero, or a traitor to the cause? A madman or a savior? What's the story this time, Eric?

She has been here before. She knows this tight place between reason and heartache as well as she knows the contours of her bed. Words of caution clamor in her brain, and once — for Eric — she would have flung them to the four winds.

But now there is her training to think of. Her position within the Intelligence community. All the professionalism that is expected of her. And what the hell does she owe the bastard, anyway? Two and a half years, Eric. Alive. And not one word.

Their heels echo on the scarred linoleum, then are swallowed in the rush of other feet thudding from corridor to corridor. The halls of espionage are awash with bureaucrats, with Case Officers and Managers, Technicians and Administrators. Caroline is an Analyst, and has been for years. Well before the word was a job title. When she considers her life — when she attempts to picture it — she sees a loop of unbroken thought, coiled like a strand of DNA. She is comfortable in her head. She observes and judges from a distance. It is a talent she was born with, one that earns her a living. Now work reinforces nature — or perhaps it is nature alone that determines the structure of her days, the cubicle in which she sits, the green light of the Intelligence cables flickering softly in the filtered air. Her Agency job is somehow inevitable, a genetic predestination.

Every day she slips off the George Washington Parkway and slides behind the safe shelter of her desk. She flips on her computer. She downloads the truth. She follows an account, which means she tracks 30 April through the wilderness of news flashes, clandestine reports, transcripts of illicit conversation beamed down from satellites orbiting in space. She follows the shadow of a beast unseen and attempts to describe its height and color. She briefs the Policy-makers — she tells them what has been and what might be — and they trust her enough to listen.

Caroline has earned a reputation for reliability. And when the Policy-makers award her their respectful silence — when they gaze at her steadily, hanging on every word — Caroline glows with a sense of triumph. What the Policy-makers do with her information is their own affair. Her job is beyond policy. She is the High Priestess of Reason, she lives in Objective Thought. It is the deepest safety she has ever known.

Reason can be trusted, reason doesn't let you down. Reason won't leave you grieving without so much as a postcard.

In Caroline's life, betrayal has always come from what she cannot control.

“You have a very high analytic,” her Agency interviewer had said as he flipped through her application all those years ago, “and the introversion is practically off the charts.”

“High analytic?” Caroline repeated. “Is that good?”

He looked up from the file, dark eyes accusing. He was in his late thirties and might possibly have been attractive once, but was running now to fat. His wedding band was smudged, his tie soiled; he smelled mustily of failure. He told her his name, and she assumed that he lied. She decided to call him George.

“Find the company of strangers utterly draining? Parties exhausting? Do you often stay home, in fact, at the last minute?”

“Sometimes. What has that got to do with the job?”

The office had been part of a square and featureless building on the outskirts of Vienna, Virginia. She sat before Georges desk, her skirt suddenly too short for comfort, uncertain what to do with her knees. She was waiting for the bus to the polygraph center, where it was rumored that three applicants were dismissed for every one who survived. In the past ten months, the FBI had unearthed every drama of her college years, every friend she could claim, every joint she might regret. She was twenty-three and on the verge of security clearance. Only the box and the wire, the unconscious guilt that might trip her up, lay between her and the job.

“You're an INTJ, Ms. Bisby,” said George.

This was well before Eric and the name she assumed like an official alias; well before Mad Dog came howling from the underbrush.

“Only four percent of the general population fall into that category. But it's heavily represented among Agency analysts. Almost thirty percent, in fact. You've found your way home. Congratulations.”

“INTJ?”

“Just a classification. In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It means you're rational rather than emotional; that you make swift judgments; that you prefer to work in quiet and solitude.” The murky eyes slid away from her own. “More comfortable, perhaps, with ideas than people, Ms. Bisby. It's not a criticism. Just the classic description of an Intelligence analyst. Your ticket to the job.”

“I see,” Caroline replied.

“So that's a good thing, right?”

Now Scottie is pushing the button for the elevator and Caroline is trying not to replay in her mind that piece of German videotape, Eric's head emerging from the chopper like a fox from its den. Beside her. Cuddy Wilmot rocks on his worn heels, his hands shoved into his pockets. He has retrieved his polyester tie from his desk drawer and scrounged a suit jacket from a friend. It hangs unevenly above his wrinkled khaki pants. Caroline is aware of Cuddy's unspoken sympathy; it clings to him like sweat. But he says nothing. She folds her hands over her stomach and studies the panel of lights above the elevator, tracking the descent. What hooks everybody is the information, the vanished George confides in her ear. Satellite intercepts, foreign news translations, classified reports from controlled agents — more pieces of the puzzle than you ever knew existed, delivered to your desktop with the tap of a finder. Access, Ms. Bisby.

Access gets the High Analytics every time.

There is such a thing, Caroline might reply, as knowing too much. As drowning in all the data the world flings at you.

Eric, she thinks, how the fuck could you do this to me?

When they entered the room, Darien Atwood was gazing through the rain — spattered window at the belt of trees dividing the Agency campus from the George Washington Parkway. Caroline registered beeches and maples, a preponderance of pin oak. The branches wavered and dissolved in sheets of chilling rain. The DCI ignored the three of them, as though concluding some kind of mental conversation; and so they approached her desk in silence, lowly supplicants before an altar. Scottie reached a furtive hand to his perfectly knotted tie.

Caroline had known Dare Atwood for eleven years. Well before she was DCI, Dare had managed the regional office in which Caroline cut her analytic teeth.

Despite the gap in their ages, they were fellow travelers: smart women impatient with mediocrity, demanding of themselves and everyone around them. Dare's progress through the bureaucratic ranks — her ascension to the Senior Intelligence Service and, eventually, to the post of Director of Central Intelligence — had placed a natural distance between them; but if Caroline possessed a mentor in the clandestine world, it was Dare.

She was familiar, through long association, with the small personal tics that betrayed Dare's feelings. She studied the DCI's rigid back and saw that she was enraged.

Dare was a tall woman with a face as lined as a wind fallen apple. Her black wool dress could have graced a Shaker; her smooth gray hair resembled Joan of Arc's.

Her heels were never more than two inches high. She fairly screamed a capable practicality; in another century, she would have commanded a boarding school for young ladies, or ruled a kingdom through the convenience of a husband. The DCI permitted herself two luxuries: a wardrobe of brilliantly colored Hermes scarves purchased through the years in Paris, and a deep topaz stone, cut in a cabochon, that she wore on her middle finger. They seemed revelations of an interior life far richer than her appearance inferred.

Like Caroline, Dare was born an analyst. She, too, was a High Priestess of Reason. Caroline realized she was depending upon that fact this November morning. Dare would find a way out of Eric's labyrinth. It was just a question of time.

“It's three o'clock in the afternoon in Central Europe,” Dare said to the rain beyond her window.

“Berlin was hit at twelve. They've had three hours to get out of the country.”

“In a helicopter,” Cuddy Wilmot amended.

“That means they could be anywhere.”

“If they're intelligent, they'll have ditched the chopper within minutes and switched to cars.” Scottie's voice was dismissive; they all knew that Eric was intelligent.

“They'll assume a few hours' lead time while the dust settles and we're confused about the Vice President's whereabouts. But at this point, the chopper's a dead end.”

“Assume they're in a car, then,” Dare said impatiently.

“Headed where? Toward Switzerland or Poland?”

She was looking now at Scottie, her back to the streaming trees, her arms folded tightly across her chest. Rage, still, in every line of her body; rage completely contained. Toward Eric? The situation? Or Caroline?

“They could've gone to ground in Germany,” Scottie told her.

“Even in Berlin, there are a thousand places they might be hidden.”

“Not with the entire Voekl security force on the loose.” The impatience was scathing now, a personal slap. Dare despised easy answers.

“You've seen CNN. The men in black are turning Berlin upside-down.”

“If I'd gone to the trouble to stage that medevac rescue,” Caroline said, “it'd be for one reason — to divert attention, and buy time. Then I'd get the hell out of Dodge before the borders closed.”

“So you're betting on Eastern Europe.” Dare could have added, Where Eric knows the roads. The thought, unspoken, hovered over all their heads.

“We have no way of knowing where they've gone,” Scottie objected, “until we know who they are.”

“Then let's hear an educated guess,” the Director snapped.

“It's what we're paid for.”

“The German police are claiming that the bomb was set by gastarbeiters,” Cuddy said tentatively, “the legal aliens Chancellor Voekl wants to send back to Turkey.”

“I've seen that report. It's bullshit.” Dare gripped the edge of her desk and eyed the three of them.

“Sophie Payne was not kidnapped by a bunch of disaffected gastarbeiters. At this point, the U.S. is the only friend those people have. They'd be mad to strike against us.”

“The Turks make a convenient scapegoat for the Voekl regime,” Caroline pointed out.

“So convenient, I'd almost believe Fritz Voekl ordered the hit himself.”

“Then he should have done it before Payne opened her mouth.” Scottie frowned.

“That speech can only have been an embarrassment to him.”

“Incitement to riot, in fact,” Dare agreed.

“Next, the Germans will say the Veep brought this whole mess on herself. Then they'll send us a bill for the Brandenburg.” She twisted the topaz on her finger.

“So what are we left with?”

“A presumed-dead case officer on the wrong side of the law.” Scottie, Caroline noticed, was avoiding her eye. The man possessed depths of sensitivity long untapped.

“And with whom is the case officer cavorting?” Dare asked.

“Any ideas, Caroline?”

Too many, in fact. I am drowning in Access. The plane disintegrating, the children like candy wrappers in the updrafts over Turkey — Eric, how the fuck could you do this to me? Access, Ms. Bisby. Gets the High Analytics every time.

Never mind the man like a fox in his den. Assemble the facts. Marshal your arguments. Analyze.

“Eric worked a number of terrorist targets over the years,” she told Dare.

“The PFLP-GC. Abu Nidal. And right at the end, Bin Laden. But he was obsessed with only one — the 30 April Organization.”

“Thirty April.” The DCI traced an intricate pattern on her dark green blotter.

“An East European terrorist group with acknowledged hostilities toward the United States. Neo-fascists, reactionary extremists, the type who hate to see women in power.”

“Sophie Payne and her liberal agenda would push all their buttons.”

“Not my first choice for the Vice President, Caroline.” Dare's voice was harsh.

“They're certifiable.”

“And perfectly capable of pulling off this morning's hit. Ever since the NATO intervention in Kosovo, they've been looking for a way to hurt us.”

“Scottie, what account was Eric working in Budapest?” Dare asked.

“At the time of his death — or what we thought was his death — he was Chief of Station.”

“In other words,” Caroline said, “he wasn't supposed to be working anything.”

“Serving more in the role of grand coordinator of everyone else's targeting, is that it?”

“Eric never really took to management,” Scottie admitted apologetically.

“He couldn't give up the field, Dare. He thought 30 April was too difficult a target for junior CO's. So he tried to recruit within the organization himself.”

“And did he succeed?”

The Counterterrorism chief hesitated.

“I believe he was closer to penetrating them than we'd ever been before.”

Dare took a turn around the room, thinking it through.

“Thirty April bombed a plane that Eric Carmichael was supposed to be on. Is that why the plane went down? Because Eric was on the passenger list? It seems a bit excessive, killing two hundred and fifty — plus people in order to get one man — but we know that Krucevic's boys are a law unto themselves.”

“Or .. .” Scottie said delicately.

“Or Eric Carmichael was working with 30 April well before MedAir 901, and got the bomb on that plane himself. Again, a bit over the top as a means of declaring oneself dead — but who's to argue with the irrational?”

Involuntarily, Caroline shook her head.

“You don't think so?” the DCI challenged.

“How much did you know about your husband's work in Budapest, Carrie?”

I knew about silence. I knew withdrawal. The shrouded figure in the bed each morning, the retching over the porcelain bowl.

“Very little,” she replied evenly. “Eric was always discreet about operational matters.”

“Even with his wife?” The DCI was incredulous.

It was what they all expected, Caroline thought, this collusion of marriage. No possible way to excuse her ignorance. She watched them thinking: What kind of wife were you, anyway? “Eric always protected me,” she attempted. “He told me nothing. I was the person most at risk besides himself.”

Dare snorted.

“Risk! You knew what you were getting into when you married him, Carrie. There were always several Eric Carmichaels. It was a crap shoot which would surface on any given day.”

“Of course.” Caroline bit down on the edge of anger, managed to suggest calm.

“Eric was trained to live a lie. That's what case officers do. And if you're good at your job if you work the hard targets the lies start to seem like the only truth you've got.”

“Hear, hear,” Scottie murmured ironically.

Caroline ignored him.

“Thirty April operates out of Central Europe. It was clear Eric and I had been sent to Budapest for that reason. Of course I put two and two together. But I never knew how close Eric had gotten to them. And when he was killed, I thought he'd failed” “And rather spectacularly, at that.” Dare's tone was brisk.

“How encouraging to learn instead that he succeeded in penetrating the bastards. Now if we only knew why.”

“He wasn't on MedAir 901 when it blew up, obviously. I can't tell you why. I don't know” Her voice rose was she defending Eric? Or herself?

“I don't know how he came to be in Berlin this morning. But I do know that Eric Carmichael had a visceral hatred for terrorists and for 30 April in particular. He would never adopt their methods.”

“We saw him today in that chopper, Mad Dog, kidnapping the Vice President of the United States.”

It was unlike Cuddy to lash her so brutally; he was an analyst, too, he lived by his objectivity. But the anger in his voice was entirely personal. Eric's defection had rocked Cuddy's world.

“Isn't it just possible that once Eric discovered his plane was hit that he was officially dead he decided to stay that way? That he infiltrated 30 April in order to nail them for MedAir 901?”

“Caroline,” Scottie said quietly.

But she persisted.

“For all we know, he showed himself to us deliberately this morning. What if it was the clearest message he could send? You've got a guy on the inside.”

“Whom we wouldn't need if he'd done his job in the first place!” Cuddy again, brittle with exasperation. “We can't know what Eric is doing,” Scottie declared, “or what he might have done two years ago. Whether he thinks he's operating under deep cover or not, the truth is, he's gone completely A.W.O.L.. He's committed an act of terrorism against the U.S. government. Twenty-eight people died this morning. Seven more are in critical condition. Our Veep is missing. We can't cover him on this one, Carrie.”

“A guy on the inside,” Dare repeated thoughtfully.

“Have you considered what President Bigelow is going to say when he learns there was a CIA case officer on that chopper?”

Caroline looked at Scottie. The Terrorism chief did not immediately reply. He merely studied his Director with a frank expression of bemusement, the one he reserved for particularly boring dinner partners. It was obvious that the President would have all their asses in a sling.

“We'll be stripped to our shorts and whipped out of town,” Dare informed them succinctly.

“We'll be hauled before a Congressional investigation to explain something none of us understands. We'll be—”

“Ridiculed and pissed on by every son of a bitch inside the Beltway,” Scottie concluded.

“And we'll be shut out of the Payne investigation.” Caroline's voice was tight.

“When, at the moment, we're the only ones with a lead.”

“We've got no choice,” Cuddy Wilmot protested.

“Haven't we?” Dare shot back.

“Think what you're saying, Wilmot. None of us will be immune when the press gets their knives out. Everything will be distorted: Eric's history, our investigation of MedAir 901, all your work for the past two and a half bloody years. All our efforts to save lives and put these psychos behind bars. Crucified before a television audience of two hundred million.”

“And meanwhile,” Caroline said, “Sophie Payne is still out there. Trying to get home.”

“That German footage?” Dare asked.

“Is it being shown on CNN?”

“Yes.” Scottie reached into his breast pocket for cigarettes, although he had quit smoking months ago.

“And probably the other networks as well.” Dare's dark blue eyes locked on to Caroline's.

“How recognizable is your Eric?”

As a fox in a den, as a shroud among the living. The scent of lemons in the unquiet dark... She did not quite answer the question.

“When the FBI realizes that Payne has been kidnapped, they'll shove that tape under a microscope.”

“They won't be looking for a dead man.” The DCI spoke with decision; she had weighed the options and jumped.

“We have no choice but to stand behind Eric Carmichael. He's our curse and our gift. We blow his cover and we blow our own. But if we let him run for a bit — and follow where he leads — maybe we can salvage something from this travesty.”

“You're suggesting … a cover-up.” The lack of emotion in Scottie's voice betrayed his shock.

“I'm suggesting we admit the truth,” Dare replied.

“With the quality of the videotape and the chaos in the square, which of us can be certain what we saw? Eric Carmichael — or a man who simply looks like him? It would be foolhardy in the extreme to say anything to anyone — much less the President — without more proof.”

“And foolhardy not to follow every lead,” Caroline added.

Dare nodded once.

“Right.”

Cuddy Wilmot shifted uneasily in his chair and studied his hands. Caroline kept her face expressionless and her hope tamped down. Hope for what, exactly? Eric's redemption? He wouldn't thank me.

Scottie steepled his graceful fingers and affected an air of candor.

“Forgive me. Director, but I must object. Anything short of Eric Carmichael's immediate disavowal is far too dangerous, for ourselves and the Intelligence community.”

“We live in a dangerous world, friend.”

“Do you realize what you're asking?” Scottie straightened in his chair and assumed the look of wounded dignity he usually reserved for Congressional Oversight.

“You're asking us to lie”

“I am asking you to do exactly what you pledge to do every day of your lives,” Dare told him crisply.

“Disclose information on a need-to-know basis. Right now, Scottie, nobody needs to know about Eric Carmichael.”

He opened his mouth; she raised one hand, as if under oath. “I may think entirely differently in a few days. Events may so order themselves that a rapid disclosure is inevitable. But I see no reason to rush to judgment now. In fact, I think such a course would prove injurious to the kidnapping investigation and, ultimately, to the survival of the Vice President.”

“You're serious.”

“Never more so.” She held his gaze.

“But I need your commitment, Scottie.”

“Or my resignation. Jesus!”

“You won't resign. You wouldn't throw that woman to the dogs and walk away.”

“But neither do I intend to go to prison. Not for you, Director Atwood, and certainly not for Eric Carmichael!”

“I wouldn't expect you to.” There was a trace of amusement in Dare's voice.

“Give me three days, Scottie. No more. Seventy-two hours of effort behind the scenes. State and FBI will head up the investigation, of course and we'll be expected to scour the world for information. We'll try our damnedest to figure out where the Veep is and how to reach her. And we'll support the President in every possible way short of full disclosure. Full disclosure gets us all screwed. And Payne dead.”

Dare had deliberately raised the ante. No one wanted to be responsible for the Vice President's death. Caroline felt a spark of admiration for the DCI; Scottie was silenced, Cuddy Wilmot overwhelmed. Dare had the guts to manipulate them all. But Caroline clung to her line like a drowning woman.

“For the moment,” the DCI concluded, “we keep all knowledge of Eric Carmichael's survival completely to ourselves. Not one word of what has passed here is to leave this office. End of discussion.”

Five Langley, 9:30 a.m.

When the three of them had left her, Dare sat still for a moment and stared at her hands. The fingers had once been beautiful; now they were crabbed with age and misuse. She touched her cabochon topaz and remembered the man who had given it to her. Then she put her head down on her desk and closed her eyes. She was fifty-three years old-young to command such power, too old to conceive of doing anything else. If the Agency's peril in the present situation was great, so was her own. Never mind that Eric Carmichael had walked on her predecessor's watch.If he was found and exposed, Dare would have to resign.

She was the first woman ever to command the comfortable suite apportioned to the Director of Central Intelligence. They were all behind her, the shadow men, their portraits ranked on the headquarters walls: pipe-smoking Alien Dulles, jaunty unto death; slick-haired Richard Helms, with all the self-possession of an undertaker; gentleman Bill Colby, the perfect dinner partner; and ruthless Bill Casey, whom she'd battled and served. A preponderance of Bills, now that she thought of it — and these men had other things in common. All were entrenched in the old-boy net, the cozy club of prep schools and Ivy League, of wartime service in the OSS, of an age when espionage was sanctified by David Niven in a blue blazer. All would have looked on Danen Joan Atwood as an outrage — a competent secretary, perhaps, but not to be trusted with a table in the executive dining room.

They had bequeathed her this office, a bed and full bath available for use in twenty-four-hour crisis, a conference area with a massive cherry table, an adjoining suite for her personal assistant, and a bevy of secretaries. She had a C-141 Starlifter at her disposal, and an Air Force colonel to fly it. A navy blue armored sedan chauffered by a bodyguard. Even a personal elevator — with a secret access code — that carried her directly from the seventh floor to her private garage.

But what Darien Atwood really commanded was an intricate hierarchy of power. The CIA was only the most obvious borough of her realm, the neighborhood she called home. As Director of Central Intelligence, she held the reins of the entire Intelligence community: the eavesdroppers and decoders at the National Security Agency, the overhead reconnaissance satellite teams, the military-minded missile counters plugging away at the Pentagon. They all reported to their chain of command, of course; but their agency chiefs were in thrall to Dare.

To be a woman in such a position was to invite flak. Dare survived her Senate confirmation hearings on the strength of her record — she had spent twenty-three years as an analyst at the CIA, rising steadily through the bureaucracy, and done two tours of duty on the staff of the National Security Council — but many of the doubts were voiced in private. Was she tough enough? Could she adequately assess the nature of security threats? Would she be snowed by hostile Intelligence forces (the Russians came to mind) posing as newfound friends? Did she, in short, have the balls to do a man's job?

And now, Dare thought, Eric Carmichael would answer that question for all of them. Carmichael's fate, and that of the woman he held captive, would make or destroy Dare's career. She smiled derisively. Either way, there'd be a Newsweek cover in it.

Eric she had already dismissed; there was no road back from the place he had gone. She was taking a terrible risk by suppressing his identity; some would call it criminal. There would be no defense if she failed — only a Congressional hearing and a plea bargain for immunity. But Eric alone might lead them to Payne, and in the Vice President's salvation, Dare read the future of the CIA. What had Abraham Lincoln said?

“I must bury the Constitution in order to save it”? Her present position was precisely like that. The telephone on her desk shrilled a summons. She allowed it to ring once, then picked up the receiver. Jack Bigelow wanted her in the Oval Office.

Six On the Czech-German Border, 3 p.m.

Sophie Payne awoke to the sound of a woman's sobbing. The weeping went on and on, inconsolable, repetitious, maddening beyond belief. She wanted to scream for silence, but, too weak and too detached to part her lips, she submitted to the monotony. At some point she would be forced to open her eyes — forced to take up again the questions she knew were hovering — but for now, it was enough to float in velvet and ask nothing at all.

Until the moment she realized that the sobbing was her own.

They had stuck a needle in her arm. She was coming out of a drugged sleep.

She sat up sharply and slammed her head against a flat surface. I'm under a table, she thought. They left me under a table. But why is it so dark? I can't get the blanket off.

She tried to reach for her face. No good; her hands were tied behind her back.

She struggled to open her mouth, but her lips were sealed shut, probably with tape. The blanket muffling her head was some sort of hood. But she could still hear — the sobbing was proof of that. However blind and mute they had made her, they could not stop her ears. Sophie eased herself to the right, cautiously, and felt another slope of wall.

The same thing to the left. She was conhned in a box about three feet wide and five feet long.

A coffin. She was in a coffin, buried alive.

The horror of it made her panic. Her wrists strained against each other, the tape cutting cruelly into them; the tape held firm. Between the gag over her mouth and the hood over her head, she was suddenly suffocating. She gasped for air, stars exploding before her eyes. Then she sank back, whimpering with self-pity, and tried to breathe through her nose.

And in the silence, she felt it.

The box was moving.

It crept sideways, then ground to a halt. Something — an axle? A brake pad? — squealed faintly. The box slid sideways again. Shuddered to a halt. The squeal of the brake.

She was in the trunk of a vehicle that was barely moving. A car? Were they approaching an intersection? Or just caught in heavy traffic?

Either way, there might be people around.

She sat up and butted her head hard against the trunk lid. Did it again and again, braying through her bonds like a crazed animal, until pain forced her to stop.

No one delivered her.

The car eased forward, slid to a halt. Eased forward again. Perhaps it was a freeway, snarled by an accident, and in the general frustration the rocking trunk went unnoticed. Or maybe the car was filing through a tollbooth.

Then comprehension came like a piercing ray of sun, and in her mind's eye Sophie saw it clearly: a snaking ribbon of stalled traffic tiny as Matchbox cars, the German border crossing far below. She had glimpsed a similar scene the previous day from the privilege of an Air Force chopper, on her way into Berlin.

Or was it two days ago, now? A week?

Terror washed over her again. How long had she been in the trunk? How long had she been missing?

The car eased forward, braked. There was a pause, and then a man's voice said quite distinctly, “Thanks. Have a good day.” He had retrieved his passport from the border control and hailed them in Boston-accented English. She was being kidnapped by an American. What the hell was going on?

Sophie Payne slammed her head against the trunk roof and screamed.

The car gained speed and plunged into another country.

Seven Langley, 11 a.m.

“I'm going to count to three,” Eric says, “then I want you to jump.”

Caroline is sitting alone in the fourth-floor bathroom of the Old Headquarters Building, safely concealed within a locked stall. Somewhere beyond the bathroom door, Sophie Payne is still missing and the work of the CTC continues; but Caroline's mind has fled backward a decade or more, to the heat of a Tidewater spring, the black cloud of no-see-urns hovering before her face, the peculiar smell of sweat when it is generated by fear.

She is crouching in the open doorway of the jump tower. A canvas harness bites into her chest. The white paint of the old wooden struts is flaking away under her moist palms. Forty feet below is a blur of grass and dirt bisected by the rope line she is expected to trust. To her back, unseen but felt, is the mass of others — braver than she, quieter in their panic, knees poised for ascent along the three flights of stairs. She has no choice but to jump.

Eric's hand in the small of her back. The cool pressure of it through the dampness of her fatigues.

“Don't push me,” she mutters.

“I won't. One, two, three—” He sweeps his left arm forward, as though that might release her. She doesn't budge.

“Let's try it again.”

“Would you stop touching me?”

“One, two, three—”

“I said don't push me!”

Eric glances over his shoulder at the waiting line of trainees, looks back at her profile. She will not meet his gaze.

“It's the perfect distance, Caroline,” he says conversationally, into her ear. “Forty feet. That's why they built the tower this high. To make you sweat, to show you the power of your fear. Anything less, and you think you'll survive; anything higher, and you're too remote to care. Nobody knows why. Forty feet. It terrifies us all.”

She swallows, nods.

“Trust the line. Trust me.”

“Just let me jump by myself.”

“It's a little like sex,” he continues, in the same tone. “Some of us need a push now and then. To get over the edge.”

She pivots and stares at him, amazed at his recklessness; but his expression is perfectly neutral. Only a watchfulness in the blue eyes, a shrewd calculation of her response. She glances away, feels the heat flood her face.

She is exactly twenty-five years old. Eric is maybe thirty, a lean and agile man she barely knows. He belongs to the Agency's Special Activities Service, SAS, a paramilitary force designed to be sent at a moment's notice anywhere in the world. He has ruled Caroline's life for the past month, demanding what she once thought impossible. And for Eric, she has tried to do it. She has navigated alone across ten thousand acres, dodging armed Chinooks hunting her by air; she has rappelled off a helicopter skid with an M-16 strapped to her back. The desire for his respect, his grudging acceptance of a woman in a man's world, is like a junkie's need for a drug.

He has begun to invade her dreams with a desire so complete that she awakens wet and shaking in the predawn darkness, crying out for his touch. Sleep for Caroline has become both seduction and purgatory. She will return soon to Langley. Eric will stay in deepest Tidewater. It is unlikely she will ever see him again. The vital thing, the essential thing, is never to let him know the extent of his power. She crouches once more in the tower doorway, knees bent, eyes fixed on the line.

“Give me the count.”

“One, two—” And then she feels his hand shove her ruthlessly off the platform, and she is sailing down the line with her mouth open in a full-throttled yell, half terror, half outrage, the anger surging up with the force of the ground. She rolls and tumbles. Tears off the harness. And turns to shout up at him.

“You asshole! You pushed me!”

But he is already urging the next trainee to jump.

So much, Caroline thinks, for trust.

She begins to feel him watching her, blue stare averted as soon as she looks at him. In the base club he bends low over a pool cue, blond hair grazing his brow.

The click of the balls, the crowing as a shot goes home — they resonate through the clamor of voices like bullets singing across an empty range. He ignores her deliberately, flirts with her friends, waits to see if she has noticed. In the manner of men who toy with desire, afraid of what they want.

Caroline begins to hate him. When she speaks to Eric at all, it is with something like contempt.

The last evening of her paramilitary training, the class holds a farewell dinner. Caroline endures the speeches, the increasing inebriation, only so long.

Then she slips outside to walk the trail along the river, alone in the cooling dark. She considers leaving early, a drive north in silence. Preferable to predawn hangovers and awkward farewells.

There is a footfall behind her, noiseless as a cougar's. A sigh that might be the wind stirs last year's cattails, although the night is windless. She stops short, keenly aware of her isolation, sensing the menace of a predator. To the right, the densest woods. To the left, the blackest water. Somewhere ahead, the Yorktown Bridge twinkles, remote as Brooklyn. A scream would be lost here; to run is suicidal. And she has been trained, after all, in self-defense. She has been taught to kill with a single sharp jab of her cupped hand to the windpipe, although even now she does not believe it.

She turns. Sees the watchful blue eyes, un averted for the first time. He is poised to spring or run, she is uncertain which. “You,” she says.

He takes a step toward her. She retreats, and halts him in his tracks.

“I know it seems safe,” he says.

“The safest place in the world. Guards at the gate and grenade launchers in every corner. But you shouldn't walk alone in the dark by the river.”

“I have never wanted very much to be safe.”

“No.” A flash of teeth in the darkness.

“It's a type of cowardice in your book. You look for risk instead. Why is that, Caroline?”

That's not who I am, she thinks. That's what you've made me.

“You don't join the CIA for job security, Eric.”

“No. You join to sit at a desk and analyze cables all day. To write up your opinions as fact and generate more reports. A numbing dose of computer screens and low-level briefings, day in and day out. The life of reason. Is that what you want, Caroline?”

Reason is safe, she wants to say; reason can't cut the heart out of your bod what you fear, what you pretend and what you hide.

“I know the depth of your strength and your doubt. I even know what you think of me, Caroline.”

She wants to run, she wants to sink down into the grass and take him deep inside her, she wants never to see him again.

The urgency of his mouth is a kind of whip. She feels his hand trace the flesh of her inner thigh, find the heat at its core — and then he releases her so abruptly she nearly falls. In the sudden quiet there is only his breathing, the sound of river water slipping through the weeds. She considers telling him to go to hell. But nothing he has said — nothing he knows — is untrue. And he is staring at her as though she could decide his life with a word.

“What does this have to do with me?” she repeats.

“You're the one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything. You're what I need, Caroline. And I've never needed much.”

She closes her eyes, takes a shuddering breath.

“Let's leave tonight,” she says.

And steps off some inner tower.

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

Caroline paces the bathroom floor and considers her options. Had Eric left her behind deliberately in Frankfurt airport, ignorant and faithful and trusting and stupid, while he set off to remake the world? Had she been his ultimate cover, the grieving widow no one would blame? Or was today's bomb at the Brandenburg an impossible accident, his face in a helicopter a bizarre coincidence, that defied her attempts at rational explanation?

What was she supposed to believe, exactly, in this particular hell?

Belief, like trust, isn't rational, she thought. Belief is blind, a wash of black in a room full of light, a breath suspended at the end of a diving board.

She had loved Eric, but she never trusted him with much. There were parts of his life forever closed to her, regions of his soul she could not navigate. She had gone with her gut when she married him, ignored the advice of family and friends, giddy with all she was not considering.

But the High Priestess of Reason is not easily silenced. Voices had persisted in Caroline's brain. There were the questions she asked, and answers he tried to give; terms they negotiated like peacemakers at parley.

Until the final silence of the Frankfurt airport, and the final explosion.

What are you thinking? Eric asks.

His body is perfectly still in the cratered grass. All around them the Virginia night is thick with pine pollen, with midges, with the musky smell of spent sex; but his skin, where her fingertip traces a rib, is marble cool. Stillness is one of his talents. He keeps the world at bay, he opts out of action, he retreats inside his head where the best secrets always are. Six months at the Farm, in case officer training. And so it begins, Caroline thinks — the life he cannot share. He has traded his fatigues for chinos and oxford cloth, in the classroom he rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie, he looks like a wolf sleeping by a primeval fire, partly tamed but never domesticated. What do they have to teach him, really, these retired CO's pensioned off into training? Six months, and he knows what he has always known: how to watch without being seen.

She feels him watching even while she sits alone in Arlington, a hundred miles away — that silent surveillance like a stroke on her neck. The sense of him burns in her throat as warm as whiskey, and she thinks, He is watching me. Eric's love, Eric's too — intent and narrow-eyed passion, her breath catching thick at his touch.

“What are you thinking?” he asks her again.

“Have I given you that right, too? The inside of my head? You've never given it to me.”

She sounds deliberately amused. Her way of keeping the world at bay.

“That's important, isn't it? What I give and don't give.”

“Only when you want something in return,” she says.

“You try very hard. To love me without conditions. You think that's what I need.”

“Isn't it?”

“You're afraid of losing me. If you build me a cage.” His voice is remote.

She sits up, pulls her bare knees to her chest, the sticky wetness between her legs nothing more than a mess. She reaches for her clothes.

“All right,” she says.

“I'm thinking about loyalty. Whether it's possible to give without thought, without conditions. Blind loyalty.”

His hand closes on her wrist. She stops pulling up her jeans. Slides into the crevice between his side and his arm and lies there, her cheek against the marble skin.

“Blind loyalty is always possible. And it's always a mistake.”

She lets out a little sigh of despair.

“Where are your loyalties, Eric? I'm not talking about love or sex or even myself. I'm curious. About you. What claims your soul?”

A snort.

“You think I've got one?”

She turns away from him. Shoves her foot into a shoe.

He watches in silence. Another man would be smoking now, but Eric gave up cigarettes when he gave up the streets of Boston, gave up his foster family's name, gave up the idea of fairness. He is watching her trying not to notice him watching her.

“You can't do this job without some kind of loyalty,” he says.

“You can't be a marine, a Green Beret, or an Intelligence operative not unless you decide that something matters beyond yourself.”

“Your country?” She tugs a sweater over her head and mutters, “Bullshit. Country is an excuse for wanting to die.”

He thrusts her back into the grass with such unexpected force that she's winded for an instant. She lies there, Eric's weight on her chest, his eyes inches from her own, and stares into the blue.

“Okay. One loyalty drives me, one thing I won't betray. Call it a pact with myself, Caroline, if you're tired of country. A long time ago I said I'd never close my eyes on deliberate evil. That sounds pretty broad, and pretty simple. But it's my brand of integrity. Of keeping the faith. Of an inner standard I walk every day. I may hurt the people around me, I may fail them in ways they never expected but I will not do less than the best job I can with the work in life I've chosen.”

“Which is?”

“Making the world a safer place.”

She moves under him restlessly, an objection forming. He ignores her. “You think that sounds stupid. Or grandiose. Fine. I'm not like other people, Caroline, who dream of a perfect world and try to create it, even if it's just in their own backyards. I pace off the property and find out why it's for sale. I test the broken board in the fence where the fox creeps in, I poke spikes in the rat holes. I name every weed and mark where it grows. It's all I've got, Caroline — this permanent fixer-upper. You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you.”

Caroline stares at herself now in the fourth-floor bathroom mirror. There are lines scrawled at the corners of her eyes, dark blotches under the skin. Her lips are thin and dry. She closes her eyes, waiting for a whiskey rush, for the sense of Eric watching her — but nothing comes across the miles that separate them, no sense of love or loyalty.

You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you. Only she hadn't stopped. She'd been working for years, plugging holes and nailing up fences. And he'd never bothered to tell her he was alive.

Where were you going from Frankfurt, Eric? And why are you hiding in those weeds you marked so carefully?

What exactly am I supposed to believe?

Eight Langley, 11:53 a.m.

Caroline's strongest impulse upon quitting the women's room was to leave the Old Headquarters Building. She could retrieve her car from the acres of asphalt that lapped the campus like a modern-day moat, and drive through the back roads of McLean the high banks of horse fields and elm. In a car, however, she would have no buffer from her raging thoughts. No work to consume her, no colleagues to force the daily pleasantries from her mouth. She turned back into the CTC and strode toward the ranks of gray metal shelves that rose at one end of the room.

She had researched the lives of the men — and they were all men — who made up 30 April. Their stories were presented almost clinically in the Agency's biographic profiles.

These one-page reports were intended for use as briefing aids for government officials. The bios were chatty and informative, riddled with small detail and the occasional sweeping judgment. Text was punctuated with Intelligence controls — U for Unclassified, C for Confidential, 5 for Secret. The most heated debates flared over the use of OR CON information — Originator-Controlled — which signaled that the source was a foreign national, an asset on the payroll of the Directorate of Operations. A secret agent, in the more romantic language of a vanished age.

Caroline pulled out a heavy green file and sat awkwardly on the carpet, high-heeled legs folded as discreetly as her slim skirt would all owe She would start with the apprentice in the group, the youngest of Mian Krucevic's recruits: thirty-year-old Antonio Fioretto.

Fioretto was a computer genius, twice incarcerated for fraud in Italy, where no one is imprisoned for fraud. The funds he'd illegally transferred out of a variety of Swiss bank accounts had never been recovered. He now served as 30 April's main accountant and electronics whiz. The photograph in his biographic profile had been taken from a police mug shot — grainy, unsmiling, curly-headed, and weak-jawed. The hair was blond; he was Milanese. What the photo failed to show was the healed scars of three suicide attempts. Antonio's wrists were hacked to shreds.

She slid his file back into the stack.

Otto Weber. Native of Zurich, recovered heroin addict, an obsessive bodybuilder and martial arts practitioner. He had grown up on the streets, quit school at thirteen, worked episodically as a male prostitute. Weber was rumored to be a confirmed sadist. The 30 April member who enjoyed killing.

Vadav Slivik. A retired captain in the former Czechoslovak Army, Slivik could fly anything with wings and served as 30 April's explosives and weapons expert. A mild-looking man, from his photograph; cynical eyes, a humorous mouth. In 1972, at the Munich Olympics, he had won a gold medal in the pentathlon. He allegedly played cello in his spare time, although public performances were rare of late.

Caroline pulled the fourth file and opened it with unsteady fingers. This one she would read in its entirety.

Mian Krucevic. Leader, 30 April Organization.

No picture for the bio she had written three years before, and updated every six months. Krucevic had never been captured on film.

Perhaps the most ruthless terrorist to emerge from the breakup of Yugoslavia, Mian Krucevic is thought to reside in Germany, although his present whereabouts are unknown. A trained geneticist with advanced degrees from two European universities, Krucevic served as director of a Croat prison camp in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1990 to 1993. He is alleged to have approved the torture and murder of over three thousand Muslim and Serb civilians during his tenure at the prison camp, where he is believed to have used biological agents in human experimentation. He has been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal on nineteen counts of crimes against humanity and is currently a fugitive from justice. (C NF NC) In 1993, Krucevic announced the formation of the 30 April Organization, a neo-Nazi militarist group, with the simultaneous firebombing of seven Turkish guest-worker hostels throughout Germany; sixteen people died in the acts of arson. According to a reliable source with limited access, 30 April is also responsible for the death of Anneke Schmidt, Germany's former Green Party leader, and the kidnapping and murder of Dammar Hammecher, granddaughter of the German federal court judge Ernst Hammecher. The terrorist group is also suspected of orchestrating last year's assassination of Germany's popular Socialist chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. (S NF NC OC) In the 30 April Organization, Krucevic has assembled and trained an elite group of mercenary fighters hailing from several European countries, who are united by their adherence to his ideology. Although Krucevic has allegedly professed anti-Semitic views, his deepest hatred is reserved for adherents to the faith of Islam, which he has declared is on the verge of destroying Christianity. An untested source with good access reports that Krucevic's ultimate goal is the ethnic cleansing of Central Europe. (S NF NC OC) According to a reliable source with limited access, Krucevic fled Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993 and lived under a series of assumed names in Scandinavia and eastern Germany. He is reported to have set up a black-market network for the production and distribution of deadly biological agents.

Krucevic may secure considerable income from a series of legitimate front companies to which he has been tied, but the chief source of 30 April's funding remains unknown. As an avowed enemy of Islam, Krucevic has spurned the usual Middle Eastern patrons of terrorism. The bunk of his funding probably comes from private sources within Europe who support his ideological goals. (S NF NC OC)

We believe that Krucevic is highly intelligent, disciplined, and dedicated.

Although an extremist in his political views and the methods he employs to further them, he is not, in our view, mentally ill. When he kills, it is for strategic or philosophic reasons, rather than as arbitrary acts of sadism. (S NP NC OC) Krucevic demands unquestioned loyalty from others, but is incapable of trust. He does not tolerate dissent within the 30 April Organization; according to an untested source with good access, Krucevic personally shot two of his senior deputies last year in an internal purge. (SNF NCOC) Krucevic, fifty-eight, is the son of a Croat who committed suicide after World War II. He is estranged from his wife of thirteen years, Mirjana Tarcic, but is believed to have custody of their twelve-year-old son, Jozsef. He reportedly speaks Croatian, Serbian, German, and some English. (C)

What the bio did not mention, Caroline thought, was that Krucevic's father was rumored to have been an Ustashe concentration camp commander. The place he might have governed from 1942 to 1945 bore one of the ugliest names in Yugoslav history: Ziv Zakopan, “Living Grave.” But no one had ever found the camp after the war; no witnesses survived to describe its horrors. Only whispers and imprecations remained, the furtive sign against the evil eye, among the children and grandchildren of those who had died.

The CIA was not in the practice of printing rumors.

Four grainy black-and-white photographs were tucked into Krucevic's file.

Caroline studied the first, dated seven years before: a shot of a tenement house in flames, a Turkish woman raising her hands in anguish, keening. At her feet was the blanketed corpse of her small son. The next photo was now famous the world over: a Mercedes limousine creased in its midsection like a metallic boomerang. Gerhard Schroeder's body lay at a bizarre angle across the backseat, his right hand dangling from the open passenger door. The chancellor had been an attractive man before Krucevic crushed his armored car like a soda can.

Caroline's fingers hesitated over the final two pictures. She hated seeing them.

They had been taken in a police morgue, as exhibits in a trial that would never be held. Krucevic's trial for inhuman cruelty, for utter lack of heart. Dagmar Hammecher was three and a half when she was snatched from her nanny at gunpoint. She had bright gold hair that cascaded down her back, and she loved to pose in ballet shoes. Her mother taught in a Hamburg medical school, her father was a banker. But it was Dagmar's grandpa whom Krucevic intended to destroy. Ernst Hammecher was a federal court judge charged with considering the constitutionality of Germany's new alien-repatriation laws.

He had survived the Nazi era, and was no friend to bigots. He was expected to reverse the legislation. Ernst Hammecher received his granddaughter's hand in the mail two days after she had been kidnapped.

Caroline forced herself to look at the police photograph. The childish fingers still curled upward, as they must have done a thousand times in Dagmar's short life — reaching for her mother, her favorite stuffed toy, the curved handle of a juice cup. But the edge of the severed wrist was ragged and black with blood.

They had not attempted to spare her pain.

“Otto,” Caroline whispered. The 30 April member who enjoyed killing.

The final shot was of Dagmar's corpse, dropped on her grandfather's doorstep six days after the child's abduction. The small features were gaunt and pale, too drawn with suffering to be those of the little girl who loved ballet tutus and chocolate ice cream. Krucevic had shaved her head. The wounds of electrodes placed in the child's skull were obvious even in reproduction.

Her throat tightening, Caroline thrust the vicious image face-down against the file folder and read through Krucevic's bio again.

One of the sources she had used in the report — a DO source — had been characterized as untested, with good access. She flipped quickly through the documents attached to the left-hand flap of Krucevic's file. A translated piece from the German newsmagazine Das Bild; another from a Sarajevo newspaper; five State Department cables out of Frankfurt, Bonn, and Belgrade; and three TD's — the classified and sifted reports disseminated by the Directorate of Operations. These were what she sought.

When the DO released clandestine reporting for an Intelligence analyst's use, it always withheld the foreign agent's code name. As an act of kindness, however, the directorate characterized the sourcing. A reliable source was one whose information had proved accurate over time; an untested one offered intelligence that couldn't easily be verified or that was too recently reported to assess. But any source with good access was inherently more valuable than one without.

Unless that access was used to sell false information. Krucevic was certainly clever enough to plant a mole in the CIA's turf; but what had this one actually reported? That the good doctor had shot two of his people in an internal purge.

That he was driven to wipe Islam out of Central Europe. Nothing particularly earthshaking, and hardly worth Krucevic's brilliant effort at deception. A 30 April mole would have been put to better use.

And yet Caroline felt an almost sickening surge of excitement at the thought: A source with good access to 30 April existed. A source who might know where Eric was. A source who could lead them to Vice President Sophie Payne.

His code name and history could be found in one of the DO's asset files, to which Caroline was routinely denied access. She was an analyst, not a case officer; she had no clearance for information that linked a source to his identity, a code name to an address. But Scottie Sorensen and Cuddy Wilmot did.

She checked the report's date and origination. The TD had been disseminated the previous February from the DO's Hungarian branch. Which meant the asset was probably handled by Buda station.

“Hey, Mad Dog, could I see you in my office for a minute?”

She gasped involuntarily, clutching the file to her chest.

“Cuddy, you scared the hell out of me. What's up?”

He grimaced.

“Nothing major. Just an evaluation I'd like you to sign.”

It was a deliberate lie, and Caroline saw with mild shock that they had become a cell within a cell, collaborators in a subterfuge.

“Okay,” she said neutrally, and tucked the Krucevic file under her arm.

“Interesting reading?” Cuddy inquired as they walked toward his office.

“Nothing you haven't seen before. They like to say that leadership analysis is the People magazine of Intelligence, but I don't think People will be running this stuff anytime soon.”

“Let's pray for that, shall we?” He shut the door firmly behind her. He had abandoned his glasses, and the hazel eyes were bloodshot from hours of scrolling through text on a computer screen. The look on his face — self-absorbed, absent, as though he pursued a line of thought only remotely connected to the scene before him — was one Caroline knew well. Cuddy was in the grip of the chase. Until he nailed Sophie Payne's kidnappers, he would abuse his body, his brain, and the people around him.

“You need a cigarette,” she said, dropping into the seat before his desk.

“Or a good long run.”

“And what do you need? A leave of absence?”

“Answers to a lot of questions would be just fine. Or a shoulder to cry on.”

“Why don't you call Hank?”

“Hank's shoulders are a little too well tailored for tears. Besides, I haven't talked to him in nearly a year.”

“Then I'd say it's high time.”

“He never liked Eric, Cud. And what could I tell him? It's all a close hold anyway.”

Hank. His silver-haired profile rose in Caroline's mind, shimmered there like the outline of a perfect knight, an old-world cavalier. The acute gaze, the measured speech. Hank never swerved from the path of reason. He'd taught her everything she knew, and most of what she'd forgotten.

“The DCI would advise me not to talk to my lawyer,” she added. “Even one in my family.”

“Not all Hank's counsel is professional.”

Caroline shrugged in discomfort, and Cuddy dropped the subject. They stared at each other for a few seconds in silence, uncertain what to say. Every topic seemed forbidden.

“Feeling betrayed?” Caroline asked finally.

“Feeling stupid,” Cuddy replied.

“Sometimes they're the same thing.”

“Scottie's asked me to head up the Berlin Task Force. I got the impression I had no choice.”

“This is where I say, “That's why they pay you the big bucks.” Right?”

“Not if you want to survive.” His eyes were unreadable. “I've had just about as much as I can take, Carrie. I've spent thirty months investigating a crash that didn't kill my best friend, and I've just been told by the DCI herself to suppress information critical to the recovery of the Vice President. I don't know why I'm still here.”

“Maybe,” she suggested, “because you think you can fix it. Big mistake. Cud.”

He laughed harshly and looked away.

She felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the man. He was a good person, a faultlessly honest person, who didn't deserve this kind of painful ambiguity.

Never mind that ambiguity was the human condition: Cuddy lived in a happy mess of absolutes. He refused to eat meat, but his fingertips were permanently stained with nicotine. He stood in the rain-filled doorways at the end of the Agency's corridors ten times a day, burning his death ration and hoping to save his lungs later with a three-mile run. He fought the last good fight in the U.S. government tracking terrorists but believed Amnesty International was a front for Communist insurgency. He spoke five languages, all of them well, which was something that most people did not know. Cuddy never advertised.

Each morning, he drove down the Maryland side of the Potomac while Caroline drove up the Virginia. He wore jeans and carried his work clothes in a backpack.

He parked his car on Canal Road and canoed across the Potomac to the Agency's foot. Those last few moments, Caroline thought Cuddy gliding alone through an arrowhead of water were all he could really claim of his day.

“Who's working the task force with you?” she asked him.

“Dave Tarnovsky. Lisa Hughes. Fatima, in case there's a Middle East connection.”

But not Eric's wife. Caroline would be kept at bay, an unknown quantity. There was nothing wrong with Cuddy's team Tarnovsky was an ex-SEAL, an expert on explosives; Lisa Hughes had just completed her doctorate in Middle Eastern studies; and Fatima Bowen was a native Lebanese, one of the dark-skinned, silk-clad, black-haired women who served the CTC as a translator and general cultural referent. She'd married Mike Bowen twenty years earlier, during his last tour in Beirut. When he died in the 1983 car bomb attack on the U.S. embassy, Headquarters had given Fatima a job. Lebanese women with a thirst for revenge were to be prized above rubies.

“Sounds like Scottie is focusing on the Palestinians,” Caroline said neutrally.

“To buy time, I suppose?”

“To divert attention from Eric. Per Atwood's instructions.”

“That might work .. . until 30 April makes contact.”

“And won't we look like idiots if they do.” He glanced at her sidelong. “What was Eric really like in Budapest, Carrie?”

“You visited us in Nicosia,” she said tiredly. “Multiply that by ten. On good days, he was jumping out of his skin. On bad days, he was comatose.”

“Was he close?”

A sudden, sharp memory of Eric's hands roaming over her body. The Mediterranean heat, black olives and lemon. How long had it been since he had touched her?

“Close? Not to me. I suppose it makes sense that he walked away without a backward glance in the Frankfurt airport. I don't know what happened, Cuddy. How he managed to drift so far.”

“Not close to you,” he corrected impatiently. “To penetrating 30 April. Was he jumping out of his skin because of the danger? Or because he'd already turned on all of us?”

“I don't know.” Her throat was tightening despite her best efforts. “I just do not know, Cuddy. He stopped talking.”

“Even to you.” A flat statement.

What kind of wife were you, anyway?

She could not trust herself to reply.

“That's strange,” he muttered.

“Even the polygraphers recognize a case officer's right to pillow talk. They've practically canonized it.”

Pillow talk. From a man who had walked the streets at night, while she tossed alone and restless? Cuddy, Caroline thought, would make a damn good polygrapher himself. He had a genius for posing the brutal question.

“Maybe he wanted to protect me “ She bit off the words. A more credulous woman could go on believing that Eric was protecting her that the whole elaborate lie of the past thirty months had been designed to shield her from terror. But Caroline refused to be credulous any longer. The credulous impaled themselves on swords of their own making.

“Scottie tells me Atwood wants you polygraphed”

She laughed at the abrupt change of subject.

“I suppose it's inevitable. She has to know whether I'm telling the truth about believing Eric was dead. Lets hope the polygraphers keep their questions confined to MedAir 901.”

“I think we can assume they will. Atwood is unlikely to share the fact of Eric's existence with Security. Just keep your mind on the plane crash and forget about Sophie Payne. You'll be fine.”

“Scottie likes to add a column of numbers when he's hooked up to the machine.” Caroline spoke with an effort at lightheartedness she was far from feeling. “He swears it keeps him from reacting to the questions. But I'm lousy at math.”

“Then try spelling. Anything is preferable to nerves. Nerves can look like guilt to the box, and guilt might register as deception.”

“Thanks. You've no idea how comforting that is.”

He studied her, then said, “I wish I could go with you.”

“But some things, as my grandma told me during potty training, we are forced to do alone.” Caroline undipped the clandestine report from Krucevic's file and slid it across the desk.

“Take a look at this, Cuddy. There's a DO asset who's close to 30 April.”

“Hungarian desk.” Cuddy nipped to the second page, brows knit, instantly absorbed. “This guy could be in Buda. Hell, by this time Sophie Payne could be in Buda.”

“Exactly. We've got to send out a tasking cable.”

“And how do we phrase that cable, Carrie?”

“Hey, guys, the official Task Force line is that the Palestinians are responsible for the Berlin bombing, but chat up your 30 April asset and ask whether he's ever heard of Sophie Payne'?”

Caroline frowned.

“I've read weirder tasking cables, thank you very much. Case officers are used to working blind. And with the Veep snatched, Scottie will have every terrorist expert the Agency owns sniffing the ground — the reports will come flooding in. This is a lead, Cuddy—”

Cuddy tossed her the DO report.

“We don't know diddly about this guy, Mad Dog. He's untested. What if he's one of Eric's recruits?”

He was closer to penetrating 30 April than ever before.

“I wouldn't be surprised if he was,” she replied.

“Then think about that. The source would be tainted, wouldn't he?”

“Tainted,” she repeated. “Because he knew Eric?”

“For Christ's sake, Carrie! As of this morning Eric's whole career is suspect. We don't know when he betrayed us or how completely. We don't know what's true and what's crap. Every report, every recruitment they're compromised. And that goes for everybody Eric ever handled.”

“We could find out who recruited this one,” she shot back, tapping the TD.

“The Hungarian desk could tell us.”

“If I called in some favors, maybe. But I'm not sure that'd be a good idea.”

“The TD is barely six months old,” she argued. “This source is still out there, Cud still on our payroll.”

“And you think he could lead us to Eric and, by extension, Payne. Forget it. It's a nonstarter. Don't let Eric screw you again, Carrie, just because you want to believe.”

There was a short and painful silence.

“I think you ought to see something,” Cuddy said. He walked out of the office.

After a second, she followed.

He led her to a computer terminal that Scottie kept reserved for one use only the terrorism database, DESIST.

It was the pride of the CTC, a compilation of over a thousand terrorist groups and organizations. Raw data phone numbers, bank accounts, airline manifests, business cards could be fed into the computer and analyzed for patterns too slight and seemingly random to attract attention. When DESIST went to work, the most amazing connections between utter strangers appeared as if by magic. DESIST could tell you when one man in Belgrade carried the address of another in Zurich, or whose phone number rang in which safe house. It could match passports to false pictures, bring up a myriad of aliases, connect the dots between terrorist groups that the world believed to be enemies: members of the IRA who were friendly with Hizballah; bankers who laundered money for both the Kurdish PKK and the Algerian Jihad. An entire world of uneasy relationships existed in the DESIST data banks, a labyrinth of obligations and mortal mistrust.

“Sit down,” Cuddy said, “and plug in Eric's alias.”

“Which one?” she asked.

He raised an eyebrow.

“I only knew one.”

“In Budapest, he was using "Michael O'Shaughnessy."”

“Try it.”

“But you know there are no Americans listed in this database,” she protested.

“It's illegal for the CIA to track U.S. citizens.” Cuddy shrugged. “Does a dead man have citizenship? Try it, Mad Dog.”

She typed in the name. The computer thought about it for a split second. And then it spat out two words, Mahmoud Sharif, and a phone number. She wrote down the number and plugged it into the database. Nothing. She glanced at Cuddy.

“Try just "Sharif".”

Obediently, she ran the name through the system. An extensive file reeled out. “"Hizballah bomb maker,"” she read, “ "legally resident in Berlin."”

“Sharif is believed responsible for that series of bombs the BKA found last March,” Cuddy told her. The BKA — the Bundesknminalamt — was the German equivalent of the FBI. “He'd wired them into electronics — television sets, stereo components, laptop computers — and stored them in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt.”

“I remember that,” Caroline said. The BKA had confiscated seven of the bombs safely; an eighth had exploded in the act of being defused. Two men had died.

“Why didn't he go down for it?”

“Sympathetic judge. Circumstantial evidence.”

“I see.”

“German Intelligence is convinced Sharif made twelve bombs. So where are the other four?”

“Underneath the Brandenburg?”

Cuddy shrugged.

“Ask Sharif, he'll say he knows nothing about electronics. He's just a carpenter with a German wife and a kid named Moammar.”

“Aren't they all. I guess the phone number wasn't his, or it'd be in the file.”

“The phone is disconnected. I walked down to the Exxon station on Chain Bridge Road twenty minutes ago and dialed it.”

“So if it's not Sharif's .. .”

“It's Michael O'Shaughnessy's. Got it in one.” He pulled up a chair next to her.

“Last August, Sharif was shaken down by Israeli airport security when he tried to fly from Frankfurt to Malta. They pulled his address book, Xeroxed it, and sent the contents here. Somebody — a Career Trainee, probably, who never heard of Michael O'Shaughnessy and couldn't have known it was an Agency alias — entered the name into the database.”

“We don't know how old this information is,” Caroline hedged. “People keep numbers in their black books for years. Maybe Eric made legitimate contact with Sharif years ago. Maybe he targeted him for recruitment.”

“It was a datebook, Caroline. Sharif bought it last January. Nothing in there is less than current. He talked to Eric sometime this year. And that disconnected phone was in Berlin.”

“You think they planned this,” she said. “That Eric was in Berlin and recruited Sharif to build the device that took out the Gate. Why, Cuddy? Why would a Palestinian do anything for a neo-Nazi like Krucevic?”

“Who said it was Krucevic? All I saw was Eric in a helicopter. Anyone could have been flying it, Caroline. You know that.”

“But, Cuddy...”

“It could have been anybody,” he interrupted.

“We won't know who snatched the Veep until they make contact. And once they do whether it's Osama bin Laden or Hizballah or, yes, 30 April the FBI will be in charge of the investigation.”

“You just want this whole thing to go away, don't you?” Her voice was brittle with frustration.

“Of course!” he burst out. “Isn't that what any sane person would want? Or have you had the time of your life today, Carrie, hiding in the women's bathroom?”

“I'm sorry,” she said inadequately.

“Don't hope for good things, Mad Dog. They're just not thick on the ground.”

Nine Prague, 5:52 p.m.

“Mrs. Payne.”

A harsh voice, faintly mocking. Sophie turned her hooded head and groped vainly for a face. A piercing light penetrated the cloth masking her eyes; nothing else did.

“Help the lady out, Michael.”

A firm pair of hands under her armpits, and she was hoisted free of the box in which she had traveled now for unreckoned hours. She groaned at the bruising pain of it; her tethered wrists, pulled obscenely behind her back, had gone numb.

The unseen Michael half thrust, half carried her along a smooth surface, probably concrete. A pathway — toward what, exactly? — cold and pitted under her stockinged feet. She was still wearing the suit she had chosen for the embassy inaugural.

It must be spattered with Nell Forsyte's blood. Sophie's throat tightened, torn between the desire to retch and the need to sob. Nell was dead. She, Sophie, was alive. That should have been comforting — but Sophie was no fool. The men who had abducted her would attempt to bargain for her life. And much as he liked and respected her, the President would never negotiate with terrorists.

The air was sharp and chill. She felt the weak sunlight fade, had a palpable sense of passing indoors. A short, stumbling flight of stairs, a stubbed toe. Her son Peter's laugh rang suddenly in her ears — infectious, still young, the faintest edge of her dead husband in its timbre. What did Peter know other fate? Was he frantically calling the White House, demanding information — leaving New Haven on an afternoon train, with just an ATM card in his pocket?

She was thrust abruptly into a straight-backed chair; they left her that way for an instant. Then the hood was pulled off, charging her hair with static electricity. She looked around, blinking in the ruthless light of bare bulbs. A windowless room, probably a cellar of some sort, with carpeting and a few pieces of functional furniture. Doorways led to who-knew-where-but one of them, certainly, to the outside.

Four men, ranged around the room, gazed at her impassively.

“Mrs. Payne.”

The voice came from behind. She turned and looked into a face she knew could never be Michael's. Michael was the American who had driven the car. This man was not an American.

Black hair, close-cropped as a marine's and balding in the center. A harshly beaked nose, small brown eyes under curved brows. Sallow skin. A frankly sensual mouth. His body was compact and powerful, his hands too large for his wrists. He wore gray flannel trousers and a sweater; without touching it, she knew it was cashmere. She had expected a black turtleneck. Something to go with the handgun he slung casually in his shoulder holster.

He squatted down before her chair. A faint odor of aftershave — sandalwood and lime — and cigarette smoke. A scar like an arrow in the short hairs at his temple. Not a knife wound — a bullet, perhaps? She lacked the experience to say.

“You look relatively unscathed.”

She resisted the impulse to answer. The tape over her mouth could only make her ridiculous. But she kicked upward sharply and without warning, landing a foot directly in his crotch; he fell backward with a cry of pain. Before Michael or one of the others could react, he had rolled to his feet and whipped the gun from its sheath. The barrel bit into Sophie's forehead.

“Mian,” one of the men said in warning.

He stared into Sophie's eyes, completely composed. Then he slid the gun back into its holster.

“Tape, Vaclav.” A middle-aged man with a cherub's face silently produced a roll of black electrical tape.

With infinite care, the man named Mian crouched once more at Sophie's feet. He held her gaze deliberately, daring her to kick him again, while he slid the hem of her narrow skirt up to her thighs. Then he lashed one ankle to the right chair leg with tape, the other to the left.

That quickly, she was exposed, knees sprawled wide, helpless to cover herself.

He had chosen his retaliation well; mere physical violence would have strengthened her. This was a humiliation so casual and calculated it almost made her weep.

“I should have explained something,” he said. “I am difficult to provoke.” He reached for the tape covering her mouth and tore it off. Sophie cried out then looked away, ashamed.

“I should also have introduced myself,” he added, wadding the tape into a compact ball and handing it without a word to Vaclav.

“My name is Mian Krucevic. That will probably mean nothing to you.”

“On the contrary,” she said clearly, “I know a great deal about you, Mr. Krucevic. It's hard to follow the Balkans or terrorism without running into your name. But then, neo-Nazism and its psychotics are particular concerns of mine.”

He rose, still poised between her knees.

“A Vice President who can read. How intriguing.”

Sophie looked up at him coolly.

“You didn't know? And I thought you did your homework.”

“Oh, I have, Mrs. Payne. More than was conceivably necessary. One might say I know everything about you. But then, democracy and its decline are particular concerns of mine.”

“Then you must know that I, too, am difficult to provoke.”

“Perhaps. But I didn't destroy the Brandenburg Gate and kill a number of innocent people merely to provoke you, Mrs. Payne.”

“If you're thinking this will have the slightest impact on Jack Bigelow,” she said, “you're mistaken.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Then it will be the first time in a long life”

“There is always a first time, Mr. Krucevic.”

“Of course,” he said thoughtfully. “But what was your mistake, Mrs. Payne? Coming to Berlin? Or running for public office? Who are you, really, but the sum of your errors and lies?”

He began to pace before her, a professor in front of a half-filled lecture hall.

The four men stationed around the room stood at attention, their eyes following Krucevic.

“We should start, I suppose, with the official dossier. You are forty-three years old, the daughter of German intellectuals. Your parents emigrated to the United States in 1933. Your father was a journalist a clever man with words, educated for a time at Oxford, comfortable in English as well as German. Your mother was the daughter of a wealthy German porcelain manufacturer who lost most of his money after World War One. She was raised, regardless, in an atmosphere of privilege.

“We both know that your father was a Jew who renounced his faith and pretended to adopt your mother's beliefs. He even changed his name from Friedman to Freeman once he got to the United States. But that sort of posturing would never have saved his life, Mrs. Payne, or even your mothers. Had your parents remained in Berlin in 1933, you would not have been born.”

“You're out of your mind.” Whatever Sophie had expected from Krucevic threats, intimidation, even physical harm it had not been this. “My parents were Lutherans. They had friends who died in the Resistance. For years they struggled with guilt thinking they should have stayed in Germany and fought Hitler to the end.”

“That may be what they told you,” Krucevic retorted, “but they lied. Your father was a Jew. His people died in Bergen-Belsen and he did absolutely nothing to save them. I have seen the records, Mrs. Payne.”

“Bullshit,” Sophie spat out.

Krucevic thrust his face mere inches from her own. There was a new malevolence in his eyes, naked pleasure at her subjugation.

“Let's just call that your first mistake.”

He began to pace again.

“After four years at Radcliffe, you did the expected thing: You married a graduate of Harvard Business School, one Curtis Payne, the son of an old Philadelphia family, what your people call “Main Line.” How amusing it must have been to trip down the aisle in Episcopal splendor, a mongrel brat! And when poor Curtis died of cancer during his first term in Congress, you took over his seat and parlayed it into a term in the Senate.” He ticked off the points on his fingertips. “You have never remarried. You have a son named Peter at Yale. How have you managed it so long, Mrs. Payne — suppressing the truth of your past?”

“I suppressed nothing,” Sophie said.

“Liar!”

“It's the tendency of the madman to see his obsession wherever he looks, Krucevic. You know nothing about me.”

He threw back his head and laughed.

“Really! Then what if I tell you your shoe size is 7AA? Your preference in takeout, Thai soft-shell crabs — from a restaurant on Dupont Circle? That you mismanage your money and are chronically late in paying your credit card bills, that you've gone through three lovers in the past eighteen months? I know their names and the ways they made love to you. I know which were sincere and which were interested in fame. I know that one — the Republican senator — wanted to marry you. You declined gently, in part because of politics, and in part from consideration for the feelings of the senator's wife. I should imagine your heart is not easily touched, Mrs. Payne, however available the rest of you.”

He stared pointedly at her spread knees. The stripping sense of exposure. She stared back, hating him.

“There is nothing to tracking a woman like you,” he said softly, “a woman who lives in the public eye. My watchers were simply lost in the crowd. But even in your shower at the Naval Observatory, Mrs. Payne, you were never truly alone.”

A frisson of fear, like a spider crossing her neck.

“So you chose me to kidnap,” Sophie said briskly, as though some sort of deal had been struck. “You spent the money and the time. I suppose this is about revenge for the NATO air strikes against Belgrade. Am I right?”

But Krucevic was staring at his watch; he had already dismissed her.

“Otto — bring in the boy. It's time for his shot.”

One of the silent men — bald, muscular — disappeared through a door behind Sophie.

So he was not Michael, either. That left two possibilities: the curly-haired weasel with the nervous face, or the lean blond with the day-old growth of beard. The latter had kept his eyes trained upon her through most of the interview, and curiously, his watchful stillness had given her strength. He was Michael, she was sure of it. She smiled faintly at him; his gaze shifted to Krucevic.

The door behind Sophie opened again. A child's voice, sharp and high-pitched with fear.

“Please, Papa! Not the needle! I promise I'll be good I promise” Sophie craned her neck around and saw them: the powerful bodyguard, and the boy rigid with apprehension. Unruly dark hair fell like a protective screen over his wide gray eyes; from the frailness of his body, Sophie thought he might be about ten. He had called Krucevic his father, and now the man was reaching for a syringe.

Involuntarily, Sophie strained against her bonds.

“Now, Jozsef we talked about this before,” Krucevic said soothingly. With one hand he stroked the boy's pale cheek; the other held the hypodermic.

“For the good of the cause, remember? You want to make me proud. The thigh, Otto, I think.”

In one deft movement, Otto thrust the boy face downward on the floor and pinned him there. Krucevic sank the needle into the flesh of his son's leg.

Jozsef cried out.

“You bastard,” Sophie hissed. “What have you done to him?”

Krucevic twisted his fingers in her hair and pulled her face close to his own.

“Nothing I wouldn't do to you, Mrs. Payne. Given time.”

Ten Washington, 2:31 p.m

Jack Bigelow's cowboy-booted feet were propped on his broad mahogany desk. Like many men who had come late in life to Texas, he made a point of embracing its eccentricities. But then, Texas had given him the presidency.

“I've got the director of our Federal Bureau of Investigation here, Fritz,” he said, “and a few other folks who'd like to hear what you have to say. So I'm going to put you on the speakerphone. That okay with you?”

“Of course, Jack.” The German chancellors voice sounded remote and disembodied.

Dare Atwood immediately discounted anything the man might say. Someone comfortable with an audience of unknowns, in a room he couldn't see, was hardly planning to bare his soul.

“I have to tell you, Fritz, I'm just sorrier'n I can spit about the mess you've got over there in Berlin,” Bigelow drawled.

“A tragedy,” Voekl replied, “for both Berlin and the German nation. It is our Oklahoma City.” He spoke English too carefully, caressing each syllable before releasing it with regret.

“Any word of Vice President Payne?” Bigelow asked.

“Jack, I regret to tell you that I have no news to offer. None of the hospitals in Berlin has admitted Mrs. Payne as a patient, and the medical helicopter itself has not yet been located. We are doing everything in our power, of course.”

“Sure you are.” Bigelow's shrewd eyes, utterly devoid of their usual warmth, slid over to Dare.

“And you're still goin' with the notion of these Turks, Fritz? As the responsible parties, I mean?”

“Every indication at the bomb site would lead me to believe that the Turks are responsible, yes. We are confident of an arrest very soon.”

“Once our FBI boys get over there excuse me, boys and girls, Fritz, don't want to be sexist if I can help it maybe we'll get a better handle on what's goin' on. We're sendin' out a team tonight, should be there by dawn tomorrow.”

“That is excellent news, Jack.” Voekl said it woodenly.

“You must know, however, that we are very well equipped to manage the crisis. We have been expecting some reprisal from the Turks for some time. They are unhappy with the stringency of our program of repatriation.”

“Naturally,” Bigelow tossed back, as though he had never trashed the German repatriation program on television worldwide, “and when folks are unhappy, Fritz, no tellin' what they'll do. Now let's us just suppose for a minute that we've got a different group of unhappy people runnin' around Berlin. Turks'd make real good whipping boys, wouldn't you say, for anybody else operating in the region?”

“Perhaps. But whether we are talking about the Palestinians or the Islamic fundamentalists or even the Kosovo Liberation Army, Jack, we both know that we are talking about the same thing. Third-world extremists who bring their battles right to the doorsteps of Europe and the United States. We have got to start cutting the ground from beneath their feet. Denying them a platform from which to launch their attacks.”

“Sending 'em back home, eh, Fritz? Well, as we like to say around here, that's just openin' a whole nut her can of whup-ass, now i'n'it?”

“Pardon?”

It was as well, Dare thought, that Voekl couldn't see the joyful malice on the President's face.

“Just an expression,” Bigelow said. “You know how much I deplore the use of terrorism. Jack.”

“Don't we all.”

“But you will agree, I am sure, that a nation without hope may naturally turn to violence to achieve its ends.”

“That's the story of America, Fritz.”

“Yes, well .. . you have publicly stated that the fight to end terrorism will be this century's greatest challenge. I agree I have always agreed and I am ready to help you in your fight. For fifty-five years the German people have stood on the front line of Western civilization. Beyond us, and the protection of our culture, lies all the anarchy of the East. We have already begun to see the destructive tide of Muslim immigrants from Yugoslavia and the disintegrating Central Asian republics. They all end up in Germany eventually, ripe for violence.”

“Not to mention the Palestinians you folks've been harboring for decades,” Bigelow added.

“The policies of my predecessors were lamentably lax. But I know that terrorism will be the twenty-first century's Cold War, Jack and I remember the Cold War better than most.”

“It was the making of you, Fritz, as I recall.”

Before he had founded the Social Conservatives in the former East Germany, Fritz Voekl had been a rising star of the Communist Party. He'd begun public life as the young director of the most efficient munitions complex in Thuringia; he'd parlayed that success into a berth in the Party hierarchy. By 1988, however, it was clear that Voekl found the Party too confining. He publicly denounced Communism and was imprisoned for his pains. That act of defiance instantly made him a local hero. Not to mention a political phoenix. When the Party structure collapsed like faulty scaffolding a year later, bringing the Wall and everyone down with it, Voekl was set free to enjoy the show. He opened champagne amidst the barbed wire, he swung a pickax at Checkpoint Charlie. He had always possessed an exquisite sense of timing and a shrewd ability to read the people's mood.

“So it was,” he said to Jack Bigelow now. “I learned many lessons from my life behind the Iron Curtain. Chief among them is this: The nation that denies a people hope will never win the war. A nation that gives its people hope, Jack, gives them a reason to fight.”

“And you see hope as … ?”

“Money, Jack. Money. If I can pour deutsche marks into the developing economies of my buffer states Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, even Poland with time, I will turn despair into hope. I will deny the terrorists a foothold for their anarchy. And protect those who fall within the German sphere of influence.”

Dare frowned slightly at the phrase “German sphere of influence.” But Bigelow was tired of chatter. He made a lewd gesture in the speakerphone's direction something suggestive of a giant hand job and prepared to sign off.

“Listen, Fritz, we're always glad to know you fellas in the Federal Republic are fightin' the good fight. You get any news of Sophie Payne, you call me right away, y'hear? I'll be sendin' those Bureau boys over to Berlin ASAP.”

“Thank you, Jack.”

“You give that pretty little daughter of yours my best, okay? Bye, now.”

Bigelow snapped off the speakerphone, then glanced around the faces assembled in the Oval Office. There was Matthew Finch, the National Security Advisor, a quiet, bespectacled, kindhearted man with an absolute intolerance for bullshit; Gerard O'Neill, Bigelow's Secretary of State, who was drumming his fingers impatiently on the arm of his chair; Al Tomlinson, the FBI director; and General Clayton Phillips, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Phillips frowned as he studied his notes.

“Hope, my ass,” Bigelow drawled. “Somebody better tell my friend Fritz about Osama bin Laden, terrorist billionaire. Now that's the kind of money gives people hope. Wouldn't you say so, Dare?”

“A chicken and an AK-47 in every pot,” she replied. “One can hardly blame Voekl, Mr. President. He has to be feeling rather stupid right now.”

“He may sound that way, Dare, but problem is, Fritz is no dummy.” Bigelow lifted his boots off the desk and thrust himself out of his chair. “So what's he tryin' to pull, anyway? I call him about Sophie, and I get a stump speech about investment opportunities in Central Europe.”

“Trying to change the subject?” suggested Al Tomlinson, the FBI director.

“Then he's doing a lousy job of it,” said O'Neill, the Secretary of State. “No bunch of disaffected gastarbeiters kidnapped the Vice President. A bomb in Berlin gets them nothing but bad press.”

“I agree.” Dare glanced down at her notes, feverishly thrown together in the past forty minutes by a senior analyst in DI/OREA.

“But the Berlin police have issued a curfew for all Turkish aliens resident in the city and placed a cordon of riot police around guest-worker neighborhoods to deter reprisals. They're also conducting a house-to-house search for the Vice President and her captors. We don't believe they'll find a trace of them in Germany. In our opinion, the terrorists are long gone.”

“I can see Turkish extremists bombing the Gate,” the President said thoughtfully, “but not snatching Sophie in a stolen chopper.”

“They'd be more likely to kill her outright, just to make the German government look bad,” agreed Matthew Finch.

“Or target a German they hate, like Voekl.”

“Who, instead of being dead, now has the ideal excuse to hit the Turks harder. Do me a favor, Dare.” Bigelow wheeled suddenly toward her. “Start snoopin' in Fritz Voekl's backyard, okay? I want to know what time his daughter Kiki's curfew is, who Fritz calls for phone sex late at night, whether he puts whole milk or two percent on his Wheaties in the morning.”

“Done.”

“Fritz Voekl wasn't flying that chopper,” objected Gerard O'Neill.

“No. But he wasn't in the square to take the blast, either, now was he, Gerry?”

Bigelow pinned him with a look.

“Any of your cookie-pushers over in the Bottom of the Fog get a better idea, you be sure an' send 'em to me.”

O'Neill smiled nervously.

“I think we can usefully speculate about the parties responsible,” Dare interjected. “The resident Turks are probably a scapegoat. Both the Voekl regime and possibly several other groups operating in the region would kill to discredit them publicly.”

“Could be Kurdish separatists,” Al Tomlinson said abruptly. “They love it when Turks get egg on their faces.”

“But the PKK has been in disarray in recent months,” Dare pointed out, “since Turkish forces captured their leader.”

“Who snatched all those guys from Beirut in the eighties?” The President glanced around inquiringly.

“Terry Anderson. Bill Buckley. That whole bunch. Who grabbed them?”

“Hizballah.” Dare had spent most of the eighties on the National Security Council, frantically trying to get the CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley, home before he died of torture. She had failed. Jack Bigelow, on the other hand, had spent the eighties reinventing himself from corporate raider to the most trusted man in America.

“If the rag heads were behind it,” snapped Gerard O'Neill, “we'd have heard from ten different terrorist groups by now, all claiming responsibility.”

“Probably true,” Dare conceded.

“And Hizballah has never kidnapped a woman.”

“So who do we blame, Dare?” Bigelow den-landed.

The real question, after all the perambulation. She drew a deep breath.

“We believe the sophistication and timing of this particular hit rule out the lesser Middle Eastern organizations. In our opinion, three groups could be responsible: a German cell trained by the Saudi-in-exile, Osama bin Laden; one dispatched by the Palestinians-Ahmad Jabril or the PFLP-GC; or a group operating under the 30 April Organization.”

“Germany's always been lousy with terrorists,” muttered General Phillips. “They send in kids with student visas, marry them to frauleins, wait for a convenient moment to activate.”

Bigelow sighed. “Sort it out for me, Dare.”

“As I'm sure you're aware, Mr. President, Osama bin Laden has been able to strike the U.S. significantly in the past, despite our constant efforts to monitor his terrorist network worldwide. He's independently wealthy and he works through a variety of front organizations, some legitimate, some less so.”

“I thought he liked to operate outta the third world,” the President said.

“But he may well have established a foothold in the new German capital years ago. You'll remember that bin Laden's father made his fortune in construction. Building contractors of every description have been the most visible commercial enterprise in Berlin for the past decade.”

“And he sure loves taking out U.S. embassies,” muttered Gerard O'Neill. The memory of rubble in Tanzania and Kenya still had the power to enrage him.

Bigelow glanced at his watch.

“I know enough about bin Laden. Go on.”

“Ahmad Jabnl, head of the PFLP-GC,” Dare said.

“An old PLO hand who broke with Yasir Arafat decades ago. Jabril styles himself as an ideologue, a man who offers no quarter while Israel exists. But he likes hits with a lot of public relations value. His men bombed our troop trains in Germany in 1991.”

“Then I'd say blowing the Brandenburg Gate is tame by comparison.” Bigelow's eyelids flickered.

“Why Sophie?”

Dare shrugged.

“Jabril's lieutenant is serving a life term in a German prison. Maybe he wants him released.”

“It's after nine o'clock in the evening over there,” Bigelow said impatiently. “Why the hell don't they give us a call?”

Because Sophie Payne is already dead, and they've got nothing to bargain with now. Dare could have voiced the unspoken thought poisoning the room. Instead, she waited, briefing papers at the ready.

“And the last group, Director?” the President asked.

She felt a flutter of disquiet in her stomach.

“The 30 April Organization.”

Bigelow frowned.

“Neo-Nazis, right? The ones you think assassinated Schroeder?”

“We suspect they murdered Schroeder because he championed NATO air strikes against Belgrade. Mrs. Payne might very well have been next on their list.”

The President stretched painfully. A ruptured disk in his lower vertebrae caused chronic back pain.

“The guy who runs that organization is a war criminal.”

“Mian Krucevic. A Croat biologist. We believe he's operating out of Germany. Here's his bio.”

Bigelow reached for his reading glasses and scanned the document swiftly. Then he thrust it at Matthew Finch.

“I'll have to ask my pal Fritz why he isn't cutting the ground from under this joker's feet.”

“Too much money in pharmaceuticals,” Matthew Finch murmured.

“The German police have tried to snare Krucevic for years,” Dare said, “but 30 April is an organization that leaves few tracks. Rather like our own right-wing militia groups.”

“Who's funding them? Or is this nut case an independent operator?”

“Krucevic never lacks for funds,” Dare told Bigelow. “He shifts money through a variety of numbered Swiss accounts. We think he channels most of it through a front company in Berlin called VaccuGen. It produces and exports legitimate livestock vaccines, although there is strong evidence to suggest it also does a healthy trade in illegal biological agents. Krucevic has a reputation in the gray arms world for concocting deadly bugs. I've placed the company on the NSA's target list. We should have everything that goes in or out of the place fairly soon.”

“Do you have anybody inside?”

She repressed a sharp breath, although Bigelow's question seemed innocent enough.

“Not really, but we've been targeting them for some time.”

Clayton Phillips glanced up from his doodling. He was a kind-looking grandfather of a man, despite the rows of brass gleaming on his uniform. He had raised three girls himself and had a soft spot for the Vice President. Dare detected the marks of strain around the general's eyes; he was chafing at inactivity, at his own sense of uselessness. The word target, however, had caught his attention.

“Could we send in some cruise missiles against their operational base?”

“We'd have to locate it first,” Dare answered.

“Krucevic has a genius for self-protection. His identity and movements are so closely held, we've never even seen a picture of him.”

Matthew Finch fluttered the bio.

“This is picture enough. Krucevic is ruthless, he's efficient, and he's got no compunction about butchering Germans. He's nuts. But why snatch Sophie Payne? If revenge was the point, why not just shoot her in the square?”

“Then we should expect a demand,” the President said sharply. “Krucevic's agenda for Sophie's release. Tit for tat. So what exactly will this asshole want?”

“A Europe cleansed of the non-Aryan races,” Dare replied. “And that, Mr. President, you will never give him.”

There was silence as everyone in the room considered the implications of what she had said. “They killed Nell Forsyte,” Bigelow said quietly. “Shot her in the head. It would take that a direct hit to stop Nell in her tracks. She had a four-year-old daughter.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. President.” Dare folded her hands over her briefing book. The topaz winked and was swiftly covered.

“For Ms. Forsyte and all the others.”

“Mr. President?”

Maybelle Williams, his executive secretary, peered apprehensively around the Oval Office door.

Bigelow folded his reading glasses and smiled at her as chough nothing really bad could ever happen.

“Yes, darling'?”

“The Situation Room just called. Embassy Prague has got a videotape of the Vice President.”

Eleven Prague, 8:15 p.m.

The man Sophie thought was Michael sliced the bonds at her ankles and wrists and hauled her down a corridor to the bathroom. Windowless, like everything in the subterranean compound, it offered no chance for escape. Michael stood in the doorway with a gun poised while she used the toilet. She tried to ignore him, knowing that Krucevic would use this sort of humiliation to wear her down. When at last she stole a look at Michael, she detected only boredom.

He threw a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and some socks at her feet.

“Put those on.”

“Why?”

“Because your clothes are starting to stink.”

She turned her back and stripped off her ruined suit. A red line across her thighs showed where Krucevic had pulled the skirt taut, and a dark blot like the map of Europe stained the fabric. Nell's blood.

Wordlessly, Michael handed her a comb.

For the first time in that extraordinary day, Sophie felt an overwhelming desire to cry. Her hands were shaking.

She dragged the comb through her short black hair and splashed water on her cheeks. Then she dried herself with the front of her sweatshirt, a technique recalled from Adirondack camp days. There was no mirror in the room; perhaps they were afraid she would smash the glass and cut them all to pieces.

She probably looked like shit anyway.

“What in God's name are you doing here? You're American, aren't you?”

The look on his face was half amusement, half contempt.

“I have orders to beat you if you try to talk to me, Mrs. Payne,” he answered in German. “We all do. Don't push your luck.”

He seized her by the arm and pulled her along the passageway, back to the room she already thought of as prison. Halogen lights now hung from the ceiling's steel beams; they flooded Mian Krucevic's face and that of the cherubic Vaclav, who held a video camera. Beyond him stood a gurney.

“Ah, Mrs. Payne. A vision in black.” Krucevics mood had altered subtly, she noticed; he seemed in the grip of subdued excitement, his movements jerky and tense. He nodded to Otto.

“The gurney.”

Before she had time to react, Otto seized Sophie in a fireman's carry and dumped her unceremoniously on the stretcher. She lunged upward. But like young Jozsef, she lost. Otto snapped a belt over wrist and ankle, immediately restraining her.

She thought of the needle, the desperate child, and felt a sickness in the pit of her stomach.

“Is this really necessary? I'm not likely to kick you again.”

“No,” Krucevic said slowly as he settled a newspaper next to her right ear, “I don't think you are. Vaclav?”

He stepped toward them, video camera dangling in one hand.

“Start with a close-up of Mrs. Payne's face, will you? Focus on the newspaper's date. Then pan back until they can see how she's lying. On no account are you to focus on me.”

Strapped down and stripped of her elegant suiting, Sophie was no longer a person to Krucevic. She had become the merest prop, a faceless bundle in black sweats.

She struggled uselessly against the gurney straps, then realized she only looked weaker. As though she was afraid. Panicking. How to seize control of the situation?

She refused to admit that control was completely beyond her. Refusal might sustain her for several days if she survived the next few minutes.

The camera lens came within a foot of her face. If this tape was going anywhere near the United States if there was a chance that Peter might see it she had a duty to remain calm.

“Good evening, Mr. President.” Krucevic's voice came from somewhere in the darkness beyond the floodlights. “Let us state for the record that we have in our keeping one Sophie Friedman Payne, Vice President of the United States and apostate Jew. It is Tuesday, November ninth, somewhere in Central Europe. Observe the copy of the International Herald Tribune you see on your screen; it bears today's date. We are the 30 April Organization, and as Mrs. Payne is familiar with us, I must assume we need no introduction.”

The camera lens retreated several feet, took in the gurney and Sophie's shackled body.

“Do you know, Mrs. Payne, why you are here?”

“Because you murdered my bodyguard and kidnapped me,” Sophie said without hesitation.

“You are here as a token of faith,” Krucevic amended patiently. “Of faith and commitment on both our parts to an enlightened course of action. Have we harmed you, Mrs. Payne?”

“No. You've terrorized and humiliated me. But it takes a great deal more than that to harm me, Krucevic.”

He had walked around the perimeter of the room until he could see her face, although he remained carefully off camera. His arms were folded across his chest, his dark eyes fixed on her own.

“I'm afraid it does,” he said. “Otto? The hypodermic, please.”

Sophie flinched involuntarily as the man approached. His face was now concealed behind a black hood, but his eyes were unmistakable dull with malice and anticipation. In his right hand he held a needle. She jerked convulsively in her bonds.

“It is to Jack Bigelow that I am speaking now,” she heard Krucevic say. “I hope I may call you Jack, Mr. President. I am about to conduct a demonstration. I know you will watch very carefully.”

He nodded. With a sudden, sharp movement Otto plunged the hypodermic into Sophie's thigh. She cried out at the shock of it, the gratuitous pain; behind his mask, Otto smiled. Eight people were assembled in the White House secure video tele-conferencing center, or VTC — a smallish space with an oblong table, twelve chairs, a wide-screen monitor, and a million-dollar array of telecommunications equipment.

With its vaulted door and security panel, the room resembled a steel diving chamber; it might almost survive ground zero. Like all secure facilities, it was Tempest-tested: Any electronic or magnetic signals emanating from the space could be neither intercepted nor recorded by an outside party. There was a secure VTC room now in every major government agency; recently, they had been installed in the principal embassies worldwide. A multi party network of secure voice, image, and data communication could thus be established within seconds.

Thirty April was aware of that.

At 9:07 that evening in Prague, the driver of a passing car threw a package toward the U.S. embassy guardhouse on Trziste Street. The marine guards wasted half an hour assembling a technical bomb team before discovering the package held nothing more than clothing, a used hypodermic, and a videotape. The clothes were later determined to belong to the kidnapped Vice President. And the tape —

The tape was screened by the ambassador, the CIA Chief of Station, and each of their deputies. Four people called from diplomatic dinners, clandestine surveillance, and one very inviting bed. At 10:12 Prague time, the ambassador contacted the White House.

Now they were all watching — Bigelow, Finch, Tomlinson, O'Neill, Phillips, and Dare. They were joined by the President's Chief of Staff and the White House Situation Room's chief Intelligence officer. Bigelow was restless; he sat barely two feet from the screen, beating a tattoo on his right knee with a presidential pen.

As Otto's hand slashed down with the hypodermic, everyone jumped. And then glanced surreptitiously at one another. The air in the VTC room was stale with tension; Dare was sweating in her black wool dress. Mian Krucevic was famous for one thing — biological agents. As everyone in the VTC room was fully aware.

“Mrs. Payne has just been injected with a bacillus your Intelligence people will want to research,” said Krucevic's voice. “I call it Anthrax 3A. My own hybrid of the common sheep ailment, quite deadly in humans. Where the disease normally takes three days to kill, mine can achieve death in three hours. Mrs. Payne should begin to exhibit the symptoms in about thirty minutes. Fever, blood in the stomach and lungs, a systemic infection. If the disease is allowed to progress unchecked, she will hemorrhage and die.

“It is an immensely unpleasant death, Jack. I've tested Anthrax 3A extensively among the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

Bigelow shifted in his chair.

Sophie Paynes eyes, caught in the video lens, widened slightly.

“I don't believe you,” she said to the man off camera. “You're bluffing. There was nothing in that needle.”

“Why?” Krucevic's voice retorted. “Because you're a woman? Because you're the Vice President of the United States? Neither fact is of the slightest importance to me. To me, Mrs. Payne, you are just another Jew. One who should never have been born.”

“Killing me gets you nothing,” she shot back. “If I die, so does your bargaining power.”

“Exactly,” Krucevic replied evenly. “Which brings us to hypodermic number two. Otto?”

The audience in the VTC room had time to notice Sophie Payne's labored breathing, the increasing ruddiness of her cheeks. Fear? Or something more deadly?

And then a hooded figure appeared on camera, a fragile child in his arms.

“You have a son, Mrs. Payne,” said Krucevic's voice.

“You know I do. You probably know his shoe size.”

“You love him dearly, I believe?”

Sophie did not answer.

“I, too, have a son. This is my boy, my Jozsef.”

Bigelow scraped his chair closer to the screen, stared at it intently.

The boy lay limp in Otto's grasp, head thrown back, thin legs slack. Beads of sweat glittered on his forehead. His lips, Dare saw, were flecked with blood.

“Jozsef means everything to me,” Krucevic said. “But for my cause, like Abraham and his Isaac, I would sacrifice even my son. A half hour ago I injected Jozsef with Anthrax 3A. In two hours, his lungs will fill with fluid. In three hours, he will drown in his own blood. Do you believe me now, Mrs. Payne?”

“Jesus,” Bigelow hissed. “This guy's one taco short of a combo platter. Does he really have a son?”

“Yes.” Dare's eyes stayed on the screen.

“Whether it's that poor kid or not, who can say?”

“Sophie seems to think so,” Matthew Finch observed quietly. “She looks like hell.”

But the camera lens had shifted to the hooded figure. He laid the boy on the floor. Something flashed in his hand —

“Otto is holding the one thing that can save Sophie Payne's life,” Krucevic told them.

“An antibiotic developed in my own laboratory specifically to combat Anthrax 3A. This antibiotic will save my Jozsef. But whether it can save Mrs. Payne .. . that depends entirely upon you, Jack.”

The needle slipped into the boy's vein. The plunger went home.

“Dare,” Bigelow snarled over his shoulder.

“You got anybody out at the Agency who knows about this sort of shit?”

“Yes,” she said, “although we need that hypodermic to determine what he's really injected her with.”

Bigelow nodded. His eyes were still locked on the video.

“You know what we stand for,” Krucevic said reasonably. “A single Central Europe, rid at last of mongrel races and their degeneration. A Central Europe free to pursue the highest goals of mind and body without the interference of the United States, a Central Europe founded on a genetically pure population. You, Mr. President, and your democratic policies stand in the way of that dream. You foster miscegenation and export its ideals. It's a clever policy, of course — it allows you to divide and conquer. The United States as world policeman, isn't that the goal? First you create the conditions for civil war, then you fly in and establish martial rule. And it all begins so gently. With gestures of good faith, a McDonalds franchise in Red Square.”

Bigelow snorted.

“Over the course of the next five days, a series of events will occur throughout Central Europe that might normally trigger an aggressive response from the United States. However, in deference to Mrs. Payne, you, Jack, shall not lift a finger to intervene. You will refrain from mobilizing NATO forces. You will placate your allies. You will turn a deaf ear to any appeals for help. “If you do otherwise, Sophie Payne will die an unpleasant death. But if you behave, Jack, we will eventually release Mrs. Payne unharmed. Inform the U.S. embassy in Prague of your decision immediately. If you decide to abandon Mrs. Payne to the needle, raise the flag in the embassy garden only to half-mast. If you accede to our demands, raise the flag to the top of the mast. At that point, Mrs. Payne receives my antibiotic. Should you go back on your promise, however. There is always another needle.”

The camera lens crept closer to the Vice President's face. As the image focused, the watchers assembled in the White House VTC room saw Sophie Payne's lips form three words.

No Jack No.

Twelve Washington, 3:30 p.m.

Jack Bigelow crumpled the front page of the Washington Post and tossed it toward a wastepaper basket. The Oval Office was considerably cooler than the VTC room, but everyone looked uncomfortable. Except the President, From his expression, Matthew Finch thought, Bigelow might be facing a round of golf rather than an international threat.

In twenty-three years, Finch had won cases with Jack, faced bankruptcy with Jack, survived a vicious campaign for the presidency with Jack. The two men had fly-fished Montana, endured Finch's divorce, and attempted Everest together — their least successful undertaking to date. It was popular among the press to describe the President as a genial bear of a man; they played up his good of' boy manners the way they celebrated Julia Roberttss teeth. But Finch's long apprenticeship in the art of Jack gave him a privileged understanding, an ability to read volumes in the slightest sign. Most men betrayed their stress in their bodies. They fidgeted. They ran their fingers through their hair. They might even take a swing at somebody when the situation deteriorated. Jack Bigelow, on the contrary, became more contained. He throve on adrenaline. Everything Mian Krucevic had spit at the video camera had whetted Bigelow's appetite for battle. Sophie Payne was a proxy for both men; from this moment on, their argument was with each other.

“What the hell does he mean, a series of events in Central Europe?” Bigelow demanded.

“Since he went to the trouble to bomb Berlin and kidnap the Vice President of the United States,” Finch replied, “I imagine we can expect fairly serious episodes of terror. Krucevic wants to bring the U.S. to its knees. He specifically instructed us to restrain our allies. That means his moves in the next five days will be bold, destabilizing, and played for high stakes. Sophie's too significant a chip to waste on trivialities.”

Bigelow nodded.

“But where exactly will he land? And what can we do to spike the damage without sacrificing Sophie?”

“May I suggest, Mr. President, that I task the Agency's key country analysts to search for signs of instability in their accounts?” Since viewing the video, Dare Atwood looked older and grimmer, as though the skin of her face had turned from flesh to stamped metal. She was self-possessed as always; she sat in her chair awaiting the President's pleasure; but Matthew Finch felt the sparks of urgency crackling off her frame.

“I could establish a Central European Task Force. Staff it on a twenty-four-hour basis.”

“I s'pose it can't hurt. Dare. And get the NSA to process traffic for those countries on the highest-priority basis.”

Al Tomlinson cleared his throat and glanced uneasily around the room.

“What did he mean, calling Mrs. Payne an apostate Jew?”

No one replied.

“The Bureau did her security clearance,” Tomlinson persisted. “She was raised Lutheran, married Episcopalian.”

Bigelow shrugged.

“He's a neo-Nazi, Al. He sees what he hates everywhere he goes. And Sophie's parents were German.”

“But they emigrated well before the war.” Tomlinson sounded aggrieved, as though his Bureau's background checkers would be held responsible. “Mrs. Payne was born in the U.S. Jake Freeman knew Roosevelt. He wrote columns for the Washington Star”

“It's irrelevant what Sophie might be,” Finch said flatly. “The important thing is what Krucevic believes. He believes she's Jewish. That gives a fascist like him the right to treat her like dirt. He's telling us loud and clear that he has no reason to spare her life.”

“Think he's in Prague?” Bigelow asked abruptly.

“For at least as long as it takes to raise the flag in the embassy garden,” Dare Atwood replied. “Give it an hour. Then they're gone.”

“And you're thinkin' the flag should be raised.” He crumpled another sheet of newsprint, tossed it, missed.

“Regardless of the cost. I can't give this guy a blank check, Dare. Who knows what he might do? Blow up a plane. Or the Hungarian parliament.”

“Or sprinkle Anthrax 3A on all the salad bars in the free world,” finished Matthew Finch.

“Besides which, we have a policy of non-negotiation with terrorist groups.”

“I know what our policy is, thank you very much.”

Finch grimaced; being slammed in public was one of the privileges of a First Friend.

“On the other hand, it doesn't look very presidential to sit on your hands and leave a woman hanging out to dry. Especially one as popular as Sophie.”

“Well, don't that just drop the turd in the punch bowl, Matt,” Bigelow snarled.

“You're supposed to advise, remember? Not confuse.”

“I'd suggest you pursue two courses of action at once.” Finch jotted something on a legal pad and glanced coldly at Bigelow over his glasses.

“Publicly, you state that you do not negotiate with terrorists. Privately, you buy time. At least until Sophie gets that antibiotic.”

“Time.” Bigelow glanced at his watch.

“At least two hours have passed since they made the video. Jesus F. Christ.”

He didn't have to elaborate. If Sophie Payne had actually been injected with Anthrax 3A, she would be in agony right now.

Finch passed Bigelow a sheet of paper. It was the biographic profile of Mian Krucevic that Dare had offered him earlier. He had scrawled at the bottom, Find out who wrote this.

Bigelow looked up.

“Dare, who's handling the 30 April account?”

“A number of people, Mr. President. But that bio was written by a leadership analyst named Caroline Carmichael. She's working the MedAir 901 investigation in the Counterterrorism Center.”

“She seems to have a handle on this guy,” Bigelow said.

“Once you've read this, nothing he said or did today is much of a surprise. Although I'm not sure I'd call him – guy.”

“Perhaps,” Finch suggested, “Ms. Carmichael should be sent to Berlin.”

“These jokers aren't in Berlin, Matt.” The President was impatient. “After that flag goes up, they may not even be in Prague.”

“But they staged a brilliant hit in the heart of the new capital,” Finch persisted.

“Somebody in Berlin knows the 30 April operation. Krucevic must have a network there, something that could be identified and exploited. Where else do we start if not in that square?”

“Caroline is no case officer, Matt,” Dare protested.

He dismissed this with a wave.

“You've got case officers on the ground. Carmichael understands the terrorists' thinking. She knows how to deal with Krucevic. She might even be able to predict where he'll go. Hell, if it ever conics down to negotiation, she'll be invaluable. We need her in Berlin.”

“But she's not accustomed — ”

“Then let's call it a go,” Bigelow interrupted. “Get the girl on the plane.”

In a previous incarnation, Dare Atwood had run the Office of Russian and European Analysis. She had trained Caroline Carmichael and followed her progress through the bureaucratic ranks as an eagle follows the flight of its young. When MedAir 901 exploded thirty-three minutes after takeoff, it was Dare who met Caroline's plane from Frankfurt and broke the news of Eric's death. A cord of unspoken affection rah between the two women that made the present disaster all the more painful.

But as she stared through her office windows at the dismal autumn night, Dare felt something like heartache. Her affection for Caroline was irrelevant now.

She had only one course of action open to her; she would take out the cost in nightmares if necessary.

Alerted by something — a footfall, a shift in atmosphere — she turned an instant before the tap came on her office door. Ginny, her executive secretary, peered around it.

“Ms. Carmichael to see you.”

“Hello, Dare,” Caroline said as she crossed the DCI's carpet for the second time that day. She was one of the few subordinates who still called Dare by her first name. “Am I allowed to ask how it went at the White House?”

“You are. As well as could be expected. Thirty April has made contact.”

Caroline came to a dead halt midway between Dare's desk and her easy chairs. Her pallor was suddenly dreadful.

“You were hoping, somewhere in your mind, that it wasn't Krucevic,” the DCI said softly. “So much for hope. Take a seat.”

The younger woman did as she was told. After an instant, she managed the look of fixed calm Dare remembered from the morning's conference. She doubted it had been evident for most of the afternoon. Caroline had spent the past four hours off campus, in the polygraphers' relentless hands. Four hours of questions and seismic bar graphs, of emotions wildly fluctuating. At one point, the Security report noted, the subject had looked close to tearing the wires from her fingers and walking out. But the infernal machine had eventually given her a clean bill of health.

“I'm sorry to call you back here at this time of night,” Dare told her. It was seven-thirty, late by government standards.

“I'd have come anyway, if only to hold Cuddy's hand. What sort of contact?”

“They dropped a video and the Vice President's clothes at Embassy Prague.”

“Payne is on the video?”

“I'm afraid so.”

Caroline's eyes narrowed.

“She's not ”

“Not dead.” Dare twisted the topaz on her finger. “By now, with any luck, she might even be resting comfortably. But if she's left for long in 30 April's hands, I wouldn't vouch for her chances.”

Caroline nodded, her lips compressed.

“I'd hoped her status would shield her.”

“Status didn't do much for Gerhard Schroeder.” Dare, too, had seen photographs of the Socialist chancellors blasted limo. The mortar that had killed Schroeder was triggered when the car crossed an infrared beam. No smoking gun, no fingerprints, only a crater where a man had once been.

“What I heard today convinced me that Mrs. Payne is in extreme peril,” Dare said. “Which makes me question whether 30 April has any intention of returning her at all.”

The implication hung in the air between them.

Caroline took a deep breath, a swimmer about to plunge.

“Did you see... Eric?”

“No. It was impossible to see anyone. Krucevic was never visible on camera just a voice. The rest of them, maybe three or four men, wore hoods. Krucevic referred to a few by name. Otto, I think ”

“Weber,” Caroline said automatically.

“Did he call anyone Michael? Cuddy thinks it's possible Eric is still using his Agency alias. He found something in desist.”

Dare shook her head.

“But there was a boy. Jozsef. Krucevic claimed he was his son.”

She watched Caroline consider this fact like a cut stone under a spotlight.

“And he offered the kid up to the world of television? I wonder why. He kidnapped Jozsef, you know, from his mother. If we could find her “ She stood and began to turn restlessly before the DCI's desk.

“We could use her,” Dare concluded quietly. “You think like a case officer.”

Caroline laughed.

“I wish. That's what we need a cowboy with a cause. Only whom do we trust?”

“I've always preferred straight thinkers to straight shooters. So think out loud. Krucevic and company were in Prague a few hours ago. Where are they headed?”

“Prague is probably a diversion,” Caroline replied, “but they'll want to stay fairly close to an urban center, in order to use our embassies for contact. Bratislava is an easy jump from Prague. So is Budapest or Vienna. Poland is the wrong direction. If they'd wanted Poland, they'd have started there from Berlin.”

“If they're operating in a linear fashion,” Dare countered. “Don't rule out Poland. These people are byzantine.”

“Serbs are Byzantine,” Caroline corrected her.

“Krucevic is a Croat. He would not consider that a compliment.”

“Caroline, I'm sending you to Berlin on the Bureau's plane.”

The younger woman stopped pacing. Dare said, “You're traveling at the request of the President.”

“I am? Gee. Maybe he'll give me one of those nifty little stickpins with the presidential seal on it.”

“Support the Bureau investigation, Carrie, in any way you can. It'll be headed up by the Berlin Legal Attache, but our station chief a fellow named Walter Aronson should be grateful to have you.”

“I know Wally.”

Of course Caroline knew Wally. He had replaced her husband in Budapest two and a half years ago.

“You're going under State cover,” Dare continued. “Ambassador Dalton has been informed you're coming. Embassy communications are down, and the staff is mainly operating out of Dalton residence. You'll make the best of it, I know.”

“I always do,” Caroline said.

“Travel Section has your itinerary and funds. You can pick them up on your way out of the building. Your dip passport is in order, I hope?”

“Last time I looked.”

Dare glanced in a file.

“And you have a back stopped identity. A Jane Hathaway, resident in London. Still clean?”

“I suppose so. I haven't used her since Nicosia.”

“Will you be carrying a personal weapon?”

“Yes.”

The DCI snapped the folder closed.

“Dare, how much time do I have?”

“The plane leaves Dulles at midnight.”

“Why Berlin? Why not Prague, since that's where the video surfaced?”

“By the time you fly into Central Europe, they'll have left Prague behind. We can't chase a moving target. But if you're on the ground in the midst of the investigation, Carrie, you may figure out where they're headed.”

“I want to go to Budapest.”

Dare went very still.

“Because it was Eric's last posting?”

“Partly.” Caroline hesitated, then shrugged. “Anything can be hidden in Budapest.”

It was not, Dare thought, the real reason. But sometimes we conceal the real reasons even from ourselves. She decided to let it go.

“We both know there are two investigations under way, Carrie, and two types of manhunt. If you can make a case for tracking 30 April in Budapest or Vienna or Krakow, then make it. But start with Berlin. It's what we're expected to do.”

“Yes.” The professionalism had descended again; nothing of Caroline's emotion was visible in her face. “I'd like to see that tape.”

“Not possible. It's a very close hold.”

“What do you really expect me to do in Berlin?”

“Whatever the situation requires, my dear. I don't expect you to single-handedly assault the strongholds of 30 April, but short of that …”

“I'm not a fool, Dare. I know very well I'm being sent out as bait”

“You're being sent at the President's request,” Dare said quietly, “and believe me, he has no thought of baiting anyone. He merely admired your competent analysis.”

“Which you very thoughtfully provided. You manipulated him into asking for me. Don't deny it. I've worked with you long enough to respect the subtlety of your mind. You think I'll draw Eric out of hiding. And then betray him for the good of Agency and country. But I can promise you, Dare, that wherever Eric is and it's not going to be Berlin he doesn't care a rat's ass about me. I've known that since this morning.”

“We know nothing whatsoever of Eries mind.” Dare's voice hardened.

“Much less his heart.” She did not bother to argue with Caroline about her motives or methods; they had both been schooled in the ways of Intelligence. To attempt to deceive each other was childish. “Even if he did give a shit about me, Dare, he'd never place me in danger by contacting me now. He'll head in the opposite direction.”

“That may be true, but we have to try.” She stood up abruptly, signaling that the interview was at an end.

“You'll report back through station channels wherever you are. Use my private slug for routing, and throw in a special channel classification. What would be appropriate? Nothing that might be confused with the Task Force.”

“Who will have access?”

“No one but me.” Caroline took a scrap of paper from Dare's desk and scrawled a word on it swiftly.

“Cutout,” Dare said.

“How appropriate.”

It was the Intelligence term for a go-between. Or a pawn. Somebody used by both sides, for reasons she was never intended to know. Dare folded the slip of paper in precise fourths, then tossed it in her burn bag. It would be incinerated that evening, along with every other compromising detail of that turbulent day.

“You can still walk away, Carrie. You could refuse to go.”

“Not if I want a future.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “I have no option but to attempt to find Eric and, through him, Mrs. Payne. But don't expect much, Dare. Eric was trained by the best.”

“And Eric trained you.” Dare reached for Caroline's hand; it was shockingly cold.

The younger woman smiled faintly.

“I'm not angry, Dare. I'm not confused. I know what I have to do. But I go with few illusions.”

“Then may I say go with God, Caroline.”

“God blew up at thirty thousand feet, Dare, somewhere over the Aegean.”

Thirteen Dulles International Airport, 10:15 p.m.

Caroline had found it difficult to fly lately. The chartered Boeing 777 was scheduled to depart for Frankfurt at midnight. The plane normally held around two hundred and fifty people. Tonight it would carry thirty-eight, most of them employed by the FBI-forensic technicians, bomb experts, people who understood the stress patterns of explosives on metal and concrete. In counterterrorism work, it was common to find Intelligence operatives alongside Special Agents, the one adept at working the networks, the other at clamping on cuffs. Caroline was comfortable with the Bureau people she knew and with joint CIA-FBI operations. But she had never actually flown to the site of a bombing before.

The men and women sharing her airspace tonight were experts of a sort unfamiliar to her.

On the ground in Berlin, they would search for the axle of an obliterated car and hope that it bore a serial number; they would probe the crater at the Brandenburg's foot, shifting stones made ancient by blood and grief. They would sample the soil for chemical residues and put a name to the force that had shattered the Hotel Adion's fine plate-glass windows. And in a barren hall set aside for the purpose — a school cafeteria or a deserted beer garden — they would pick at the sleeves of the victims' coats with exacting and callous tweezers.

In about eight hours' time they would swing into action, Caroline thought, without pausing for sleep or acknowledging jet lag. They would jostle for position with the local police, yell louder in English when they misplaced their translators, and somehow, in the middle of the devastated square, produce a forensic miracle. Forgetting, if they had ever known, that the Brandenburg Gate had once been beautiful.

She nursed her gin and tonic in the V.I.P lounge, one of the offhand perks of crisis travel, her eyes fixed on a rerun of Friends. She had already presented her handgun — a Walther TPH-to airport security, along with the multiple forms required for international clearance. Her photograph, along with her seat assignment, was now posted in the cockpit of the plane, and every member of the flight crew was aware that Caroline Carmichael carried a gun. She imagined she was not alone in this; among the various Bureau personnel represented on the Berlin flight, a handful must be armed. But it was unusual for an Agency analyst. Most employees of the CIA never carried a gun. Dare had generously offered a duplicate set of weapons clearance forms made out in the name of Jane Hathaway — her back stopped alias — but Caroline had refused. Jane was supposed to be a banker living in London. She would never pack a Walther in her Kate Spade purse.

She took another sip of gin. The butterflies were starting to hum and sing in the pit of her stomach. Takeoff was the worst. Takeoff was a shove from a forty-foot platform, the harness in free fall around your waist; takeoff was acceleration without a brake mechanism at hand.

A metaphor for the process of explosion.

She should have told the psychiatrist about her fear of flying. He might have found her ramblings illustrative. But she had been in no mood to illustrate much for Dr. Agnelli this afternoon.

“Let's talk about the period before the crash, Mrs. Carmichael. How much did you know about your husband's past?”

“His past? You mean, like … his childhood?”

“If you will. Parents, friends, early influences. That sort of thing.”

“The man's dead, Doctor. The question of influence is rather moot, wouldn't you agree?”

Had Dare ordered this session in a comfortable chair, the lighting as dim as a bordello's? She must have. An assessment of Caroline's sanity, once her ignorance had been proved by the box with wires. And how much, exactly, did Agnelli know about Eric? The psychiatrist seemed like a gentle man, persuasive, his face scarred indelibly by acne. He held a pen suspended between the tips of his index fingers and stared at her in a fashion that was not unkind. She mistrusted him implicitly.

“My husband rarely talked about his childhood. Doctor. It was not a happy time.”

“Really. Did he ever say why?” A buff-colored file lay closed on his right knee. Hers? Or Eric's? In either case, Agnelli possessed more information than he intended to admit. She had worked with psychiatrists before. She recognized the method. He would not influence her testimony; he would prefer that she indict Eric herself. But to what end? How much had he been told?

She shifted in the chair, tweed upholstery sticking testily to her stockings.

“I'm sure you've seen his personnel file.”

“Mmmm.” Noncommittal.

“He was a foster child,” she elaborated.

“You must know that.”

“I see. And his foster parents were .. . less than ideal?”

“Much less.” She attempted neutrality, as though she were conducting a high-level briefing. Nothing in her voice of the violence that had shaped him.

“The father was eventually imprisoned on a charge of manslaughter, I understand.”

“Yes” Agnelli waited, eyes steady. Caroline stared back. If he knew about the prison time, he knew what it was for.

“And did that .. . episode .. . affect your husband, Mrs. Carmichael?”

“It must have. In some way.” She folded her arms over her chest. “What exactly are you looking for, Doctor? My husband's been gone for years.”

Gone. The word she would use henceforth, conveniently inexact. On the television screen, Monica and her brother were arguing about breast size.

Commercials interceded. Caroline finished her gin and tonic. And then, suddenly, Jack Bigelow's face filled the screen.

“We have confirmed beyond a doubt that terrorists abducted Vice President Sophie Payne from the site of the Berlin bombing this morning.” Bigelow's suit jacket was on, the bags under his eyes accentuated by the press room's glare of lights.

He looked cold and rather deadly, Caroline thought. As though the scripted lines were processed by one part of his brain, while the other the more calculating had Sophie Payne's captors pinned against the wall. She wondered if, somewhere, Eric was watching.

“Everything that can be done to locate the Vice President will be done,” Bigelow continued, “and her kidnappers will be punished to the full extent of the law. But the United States will never be held hostage to the goals or threats of a band of thugs, regardless of the cost. Mrs. Payne knows that. When she consented to serve this country, she accepted that burden of sacrifice. Our hearts and thoughts are with you, Sophie.”

In the split second of silence that fell between the Presidents final word and the storm of questions hurled at him from the assembled reporters, Caroline distinctly saw his fingers tremble. It was a slight movement that came as he gripped the sides of his podium and focused on the TelePrompTer, but it was betrayal of something, all the same. Fear? The rush of crisis? Or simple exhaustion?

Agnelli would have loved it.

“Gone, but hardly forgotten,” the psychiatrist had said this afternoon. “It must have been extremely difficult for you to come to terms with your husband's... loss.”

“I'm not sure that I really have,” Caroline had replied, with the suggestion of frankness. “But you know the old saying, Doctor. “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” Eric understood that Intelligence work posed some risks.”

“You were married .. . how long?”

“Ten years.” Here she was on safer ground. “Is that what this is all about? My grief? How well I'll handle another terrorist bombing?”

Agnelli thumbed the manila file balanced on his knee.

“It says here that Eric knew the man his father killed. Clarence Jackson.” Back to that. The interest in her a blind.

“He was a history teacher at Eric's high school.”

“A teacher. I see.” The pen was slipped into a breast pocket, the fingertips steepled. Agnelli was warming to his subject. “Would you describe Mr. Jackson as a mentor?”

Caroline shrugged.

“I don't know whether Eric would have used that word or not. He liked the guy.”

“And yet his father murdered him.”

“Foster father, Doctor. Eric never knew his own.”

The psychiatrist twitched impatiently, as though her objection were trivial.

“Clarence Jackson was of African-American extraction?”

Caroline gazed at him wearily.

“You're the one with the file.”

“Killed in what amounted to a mob lynching?”

“It was 1972 in South Boston, Doctor. The level of violence was rather high.”

“Mmmm.” He glanced down at his neat pages, no longer feigning indifference. Who had put him on to this?

“I see that your husband was also sentenced in juvenile court, Mrs. Carmichael, and spent several months in a detention center.”

“For vandalism. Not murder.”

“That sort of thing is probably a prerequisite for the Green Berets.” He smiled thinly.

“Not to mention the DO,” she shot back.

“I hear they're recruiting in the JDC's these days.”

Agnelli hadn't enjoyed her little joke.

She supposed there was a picture, for anyone who cared to paint it, of Eric as a trained survivor a man who from birth had learned to trust no one. Eric was too intelligent, of course, for the casual brutality of the foster home; he was charming, he drew people to him even as a boy people like Clarence Jackson, who saw something in the scrappy white kid with the obnoxious parents and had been beaten to death for his trouble. Eric could win hearts, he could manipulate and exploit. It was a different kind of violence.

It was possible to see that particular Eric, the one who lived only in his statistics and files, hovering over Pariser Platz in a stolen helicopter. That Eric had absorbed the viciousness of his childhood. That Eric was fascinated by the people he had been trained to destroy. It was something no analyst worth her paycheck would fail to consider; Dare Atwood certainly had. Caroline had no choice but to consider it herself. The Eric she had loved must be a mirage. Why shouldn't Agnelli's be real?

She asked for another lime and received a second tiny bottle of gin to go with it. The butterflies in her stomach were settling down to sleep, the tension that had knit her joints relaxing inexorably. Takeoff, at this rate, might be nothing more than falling off a log.

There was her boarding call, at last. She rose and felt the blood pound suddenly into her temples. She would regret the gin in what passed for morning.

She gathered up her magazines and paperbacks, her laptop computer and her briefcase. She gave one last glance at the television screen. Chancellor Voekl filled it, his arm around the shoulders of the Czech prime minister. An announcement of German technical assistance and antiterrorism aid, the CNN newscaster said, following the explosion of three pipe bombs in historic areas of Prague.

Bombs in Prague. Where 30 April certainly had been only hours ago. She walked slowly toward the screen, straining for the sound of Voekl's voice above the babble of departure.

He was speaking in German, his words sonorous and deliberate before the translator's text took over. The transfer of Volksturm militia to the Czech Republic underlined the common cultural past and mutual security concerns of the two Central European countries; it heralded a joint commitment to combating the destabilizing influence of outside forces in their societies, and gave notice to those who would threaten peace...

Caroline fought down her frustration. What time had the bombs exploded? And where exactly had they been? Did the Prague police have any idea who was responsible?

The image shifted suddenly from Fritz Voekl's face to that of a suffering child.

Enormous eyes, dark with pain. A hectic flush in the cheeks. With her wispy red hair and her tattered party dress, she was nonetheless an angel. The child thrust her thumb in her mouth and turned her face weakly toward her mothers shoulder. Caroline's heart surged upward in her chest, a prick of unexpected tears under her lids. To hold a child like that the soft floss of her hair, the warm weight “Sixty-three more children died of mumps today in the ethnic Albanian squatters' village on the outskirts of Pristina, in Kosovo,” the newscaster said implacably.

“Thousands of former refugees, who returned to find their villages and housing destroyed by Serb forces during the 1998 Kosovo war, have taken up residence in the makeshift housing constructed from the remnants of bombed buildings. But World Health Organization officials say the strain of mumps virus that struck last week is unlike any on record. Producing severe glandular swelling and excessively high fever, the disease has already claimed the lives of two hundred and thirteen children, a mortality rate that is both unusual and alarming. More ethnic Albanians are sickening daily. Thus far, the deadly mumps virus appears to be confined to the squatter area, but local leaders warn the infection could spread despite stringent efforts at quarantine.”

Caroline turned away from the screen. One more voiceless tragedy in a part of the world that had already given up hope, one more small angel dead by morning in her mother's arms. Disease followed war like morning followed night; it lurked in the ruptured water mains, in the rat-infested rubble. It riddled the dirt where the children played. But the weight of grief in Yugoslavia was impossible to comprehend. The Kosovars had lost their homes, their livelihoods, and now their children the one thing they had fought so desperately to save.

Caroline walked toward the flight attendant, her boarding pass extended, then stopped dead as the German translator's voice picked up where the newscaster had left off. Fritz Voekl was sending German medical teams into Kosovo armed with an experimental new mumps vaccine. Fritz Voekl who had fought NATO involvement in the Yugoslav civil war, who thought the Kosovars were just another bunch of poor-mouthed Muslims looking for a handout. So what if their children were dying? That left fewer to feed.

The teams would begin inoculating ethnic Albanian children throughout the province as soon as they arrived.

Caroline stared at the screen in disbelief as Voekl smiled for the flashbulbs.

She would never have called the chancellor a humanitarian. But refugees stay home, when home is safe and healthy. Maybe Fritz had figured that out at last.

It was unlikely he'd learned to care.