The Cutout

One Pristina, 3:45 a.m.

Simone Amiot followed the orange glow of the man's cigarette as he crossed the rutted dirt road and made for her tent — a bobbing spark in the darkness of the wee hours, like a June bug uncertain of its flight. His figure was backlit by a single flaring torch the police guard had thrust into the mud — a bulky, formless silhouette, hands shoved into the pockets of a battered down jacket. His chin was lowered over his chest, as though he were lost in thought or intent upon watching where he put each foot. There was an air of assurance about him, even at this distance; of relaxed accommodation with his squalid surroundings, the uniformed men patrolling at his back. He could not, Simone decided, be a parent.

She removed the earpiece of her stethoscope and folded it briskly in three — then spared a second to lay her cool, smooth fingers on the bare chest of the four-year-old boy lying inert on the cot before her. She did not need her stethoscope for this one anymore. She drew the sheet over his head very gently and allowed her hand to rest on the brown hair, still damp with sweat. Drago Pavlovic. Three days ago he had been playing in the street with a combat fighter made of paper and sticks. He had grinned at her as she walked by, and roared the sound of his engine. Drago was sturdy for his age, with brown eyes and freckles on his nose. He was about to lose his right front tooth.

Drago was number three hundred and twenty-seven. Or was it twenty-eight? At least Simone was spared the job of breaking the news to his mother. The woman had been murdered the previous year.

She rubbed wearily at her forehead, as though she could push aside the burning sensation of tears and futility. Pristina was her third stint with Medecins sans Frontieres — Doctors Without Borders — but it was by far the most difficult. Last year, and the year before that, there had been bullet wounds. Burn victims.

Broken limbs. Dehydration. Horrible in themselves — but things Simone could treat. In Pristina, she was brought face-to-face with the limits of her own power. She had no tools to fight the mumps ravaging the squatter population. And nothing to keep it from spreading.

In the past five days, she had personally held vigil over more than two hundred children. Most were buried now in hastily dug graves on the edge of the squatters' camp, their delicate features dusted with lime. Her years of schooling, her years of practical knowledge, the drugs she had flown in from Toronto — none of them did any good. She might as well have been a woman of the Middle Ages, showering incantations and powdered bat wing.

A handful of Simone's more than two hundred stricken children had actually survived the mumps scourge. One of them, a little girl with bright red hair, was sleeping soundly on a cot in the far corner. Although still weak and far from well, Dailia gave them all hope. When the fever took her, she plunged like the others into delirium and dehydration, but in Dailia's case the IV feeds and ice compresses actually seemed to work. Her mother, whom Simone knew only as Pagusa, sat stoically by the child's bedside for three full days. She sponged her daughter's forehead with a damp cloth, exchanged her soiled nightdress for a clean T-shirt, whispered relentlessly to a mind that wandered far in hectic dreams. She said little; she spoke almost no English. Her husband and brother had been shot by the Serb militia. Her eldest child, a son, was hiding out in the hills with a band of Albanian guerillas. One daughter had been lost on the road and never recovered. A blind grandmother and little Dailia were all that Ragusa had left. At three o'clock in the morning two days before, when the child's fever at last had peaked and broken, settling back down to double digits — when Simone could tentatively declare that the danger was past and the child would live — Ragusa had stared at her, unbelieving. Then she had thrown herself across Dailia's sleeping form, her shoulders shaking with sobs of terror and relief. She had cried aloud in thanks to a God that was not Simone's, a God that had taken other sons and daughters without hesitation or mercy. Simone touched the woman's shoulder, and she turned to seize the doctor's hand. Ragusa had managed to call her child back from the Valley of Death, but she believed it was Simone who had saved her.

Later, as she crossed the muddy tracks that separated the hospital tent from the rest of the camp, Simone saw the woman waiting shyly by the mess tent door.

“Coffee, Ragusa?” she asked, hoping that these words at least were comprehensible.

“Un peu du cafe?”

Ragusa shook her head. She was clutching something close to her frayed coat.

Simone hesitated, uncertain how to bridge the gulf of language, but then the woman seized her hand and pressed her burden into it.

“For you,” she said haltingly.

“Dailia. My thanks. Is all .. .”

It is all that I have, all that I can give you, who have given me back my life.

Ragusa hurried past her. Simone looked down into her palm. The woman had parted with the last few things she possessed: three tampons, their paper covers torn and grubby. Simone placed them carefully in her white lab coat pocket and watched Ragusa retreat across the rutted mire. She could have laughed aloud, or cried. But all she felt was unworthy.

The flap of the medical tent was swept aside, and the orange glow of a cigarette arced to the dirt like a dead-headed flower. The man she had glimpsed in silhouette a moment ago. He had the decency to stamp his tobacco out, in deference to the ailing children.

“May I help you?” she said in English.

“I don't know,” he answered in the same language, surprising her. “It's the middle of the night. But I thought somebody might be here. Could I borrow a thermometer?”

Simone rose from the dead child's bedside and moved toward him.

“Is someone ill?”

He hesitated. The air of assurance faltered a little. In the half-light thrown by her propane lantern, she saw him for what he was: a man torn from sleep, eyes bleary with worry, but determined not to panic.

“It's Alexis. My oldest girl. She's rather .. . hot.”

“I see. I'd better come.”

Simone delayed only long enough to inform one of the nurses about Drago Pavlovic's death. Then she pulled on a jacket over her white coat and jeans, gathered up her medical kit, and followed the man out into the darkness. People were already stirring all over the camp; she heard the clang of coffeepots, caught the flare of fires, the guttural hawking of an old man's throat. A wave of fatigue so powerful it was akin to vertigo nearly knocked her off her feet.

She was not the only doctor in Pristina — there were at least fourteen volunteers from North America and Western Europe — but the epidemic had strained them to their limits. And today would bring a fresh wave of sick and dying.

“I'm Enver,” he said, holding out his hand. “Enver Gordievic. You're the doctor from Canada.”

“Toronto, yes. Simone Amiot.” He had surprised her again. But she was accustomed enough to camps by this time to know that gossip is every refugee's lifeblood.

She kept her hands in her pockets and smiled at him; the casual gesture of shaking his hand was just one more way of passing sickness.

“Do you know Canada?”

He shook his head.

“I've only been to D.C.”

Not “Washington,” not “the United States” — but “D.C.” Simone decided to assume nothing about Enver Gordievic.

He led her to a shelter built out of scraps of lumber, a windowless box the size of a dolls house. It was canted unsteadily on a cinderblock foundation; but it had a door that swung on rope hinges, and when Simone ducked through the opening and stepped inside, she found the interior fairly warm and dry. He had built bunk beds for the children. There were two of them, both girls.

“Alexis,” he said softly — and then, in a language Simone could not understand, added a few more sentences. His hand smoothed the child's golden hair. She raised her head weakly, then let it fall back on the pillow. Even at a distance of five feet, Simone recognized the glassy eyes and flushed cheeks of fever. She drew a quick breath of rage and frustration, then crossed to the little girl's bedside. “She's burning up! Why didn't you bring her straight to the clinic?”

“Because the kids who walk in there never walk out,” Enver said bluntly.

“She has the mumps?”

“Of course. I can tell just by looking at her. The swelling hasn't come out yet, but it will in a matter of hours. It's the dehydration that concerns me. She needs an IV feed, and quickly.”

“No.” He reached for Simone's arm and steered her firmly toward the hovel's door.

“Thank you very much for your time. Dr. Amiot, but all I needed was the diagnosis. I'll take it from here.”

“Are you nuts?” Simone swung on him furiously, then her eyes widened.

“You're planning to get her out of the camp. I can assure you, Mr.” His last name escaped her. “Enver, that the care your daughter will find elsewhere in Pristina is no better than what we can offer her here. If you move her, she'll die.”

“That may be true. But there aren't a hundred other kids lying in beds next to her, competing for attention, elsewhere in Pristina. I'm taking her to my mother.” He bent down and gathered the little girl up in his arms. His face, when he looked at Simone, was deliberately calm; he was a man who knew what he needed and how to get it.

“Will you do me a favor?” he asked her.

“Please, Enver. Don't move the child.”

“Would you watch Krystle for me? The little one? It'll take me an hour to get to my mother's and back.”

Simone turned away from the two-year-old slumbering in her bunk and pulled open the door.

“I can't. I'm sorry. I've got to find Dr. Marx. Perhaps he can convince you to bring Alexis to the tent”

“Don't waste your time.”

“I don't,” Simone said abruptly. “I use every spare minute to save these lives. Your daughter can't leave. She can't set foot outside this camp. As of midnight we were put under strictest quarantine. Surely you've seen the police patrol? The epidemic cannot be allowed to spread throughout the rest of the city, or the province. Try to leave, and the police will beat you silly. Try harder, and they'll shoot.”

“I've got to go to work in the morning! I've got clients!”

“They'll have to wait.”

“How long?”

“I don't know.” Her fingers spasmed on the doorknob.

“Until this is … over.”

He stood there, his daughter in his arms, and Simone watched as his expression changed. The easy assurance fled. What replaced it was a look she had come to know: hunted, desperate, defiant of the odds.

The look of a cornered animal.

Two Georgetown, 4:13 a.m.

Dare Atwood was dreaming of trees: spectral branches writhing like the architraves of a cathedral when one stares at them too long, neck craned backward, the self diminished by an inhuman height. The light under the leaves was cathedral-like, too; dim as clouded glass, smothered with incense. She began to walk through the tunnel of tangled limbs, but the branches were keening, they screamed for sunlight and air. She had never known a tree could grieve — and with her knowledge came an unreasoning fear, so that she turned abruptly in her sleep and repressed a whimper. She must run, must find the road again and the car she had abandoned — but the trees had closed and shut off her path.

I need an ax, she thought, and looked down at her hands. All she held was her Waterman pen.

The shrill cry of a bird in her ear — primeval, ravenous. She jumped, and the trees shattered as though they were painted on glass. The phone was ringing.

The phone.

She struggled upward, heaved back the bedclothes, and groped into the darkness for her secure line.

“Dare Atwood.”

“Director,” came the apologetic voice in her ear, more cordial than primeval birds.

“I'm sorry to disturb you.” It was like Scottie Sorensen to sound collected and urbane at 4:13 a.m. The wee small hours were Scottie's native element; it was the time when hunting was best.

“We've just heard from the CDC — and you had asked to be called.”

“Go ahead,” Dare said tersely. The CDC was the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The hypodermic dropped with Sophie Payne's clothing on the steps of the Prague embassy had been flown there by jet for analysis. Dick Estridge — a twenty-three-year veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, an authority on chemical and biological weapons — had been dispatched to meet the plane. Presumably he and a CDC epidemiologist had worked for most of the night.

“It looks, walks, and talks like anthrax,” Scottie told her.

“So Krucevic wasn't bluffing.”

“No. If this is really the needle that inoculated the Vice President.”

“That's an assumption we have to make.” Dare considered the point, as she had considered it a thousand times since Payne's abduction. The needle and its contents represented a worst-case scenario. If they were merely a bluff, so much the better. If they weren't, then the President and the Agency should be prepared.

“Or don't you agree?” she asked Scottie. “Does the CDC think the needle is a fake?”

“No. From what Estridge tells me, the anthrax bacillus is particularly hardy. It can survive exposure to sunlight for days, and it can live in soil and water for years. The trip to Atlanta in a used hypodermic was nothing. And then there's the blood.”

“Blood,” Dare repeated.

“The President authorized transmittal of Mrs. Payne's medical records from Bethesda Naval to the CDC. Her blood type matches residue found in the hypodermic.”

He was holding something back, Dare knew. Offering her the security of facts before venturing into the unknown.

“What else, Scottie?”

“It's the fact of the hypodermic that has these people concerned. Apparently anthrax is an airborne infection. It's a germ we inhale. Or a spore, as Estridge calls it. It invades the lungs and causes symptoms similar to a chest cold, followed by respiratory shock and death. But Krucevic injected his bug directly into the Veep's bloodstream.”

“Go on,” Dare said.

“So the infection is systemic.”

She frowned into the darkness.

“But he also injected her with an antidote. Or so we hope. That would be systemic, too — wouldn't it?”

“Yes and no. The normal treatment of an unvaccinated patient exposed to anthrax inhalation is a four-week cycle of antibiotics, along with a three-part program of follow-up vaccination. It's damned persistent in the human body. Krucevic claimed that this particular bug is about ten times as virulent. He also claimed to have an effective antibiotic. Something specific to his engineered anthrax strain. But the CDC is highly skeptical. If Krucevic can knock out that deadly a bacillus in one shot, they say, then he's making medical history. They'd like to meet the guy.”

Dare's heart sank.

“They think she's still sick.”

“They think she's going to die in a matter of days,” Scottie said.

“Can we save her? If we get to her soon?”

It was an unfair question, Dare knew — one Scottie could never answer. He avoided it with predictable grace.

“What worries the CDC is the bacillus's tendency to cause ulcers. There's a form of anthrax infection common to livestock workers — they get it from infected sheep — that leaves open sores on the hands and arms. Estridge says the CDC is afraid that a blood-borne infection like Mrs. Payne's could result in secondary ulceration of her major organs. Heart, liver, the lining of the stomach, you name it.. ..”

Dare winced.

“She could be bleeding inside.”

“And completely shut down over the next forty-eight hours. The woman should be in an intensive-care unit.”

“But surely Krucevic would have considered that. He's a biologist himself.”

“Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he never intended for Sophie Payne to survive.”

“But he injected his own son with the stuff!”

“He said that he did,” Scottie cautioned. “But what do we really know, Director?”

“Nothing,” she retorted, “and we don't have to know. All we have to do is assume. We have to project every possible scenario for the Vice President; we have to be prepared to offer solutions. That's why we exist, remember?”

Scottie was silent.

“Get somebody at the CDC working on this bug,” Dare ordered, “because when the Vice President comes home and I mean when, Scottie she'll need a treatment regimen already in place.”

“Got it,” he replied, and hung up.

Dare pressed her hands against her eyes and considered making coffee. Something about trees and an ax fluttered on the edge of her consciousness. She brushed it aside and called the President.

Three The Night Sky, 3:47 a.m.

Caroline Carmichael is soaring across the Atlantic at thirty-nine thousand feet, an arrow shot straight at the heart of Central Europe; but in her fitful dreams, she crouches low in her grandfather's dew-drenched furrows and waits, tensed, for pursuit.

The smell of damp Salinas earth rises from the morning fields and mingles with the dense musk of artichoke leaves, with the flare of garlic flowers from across three hectares, with creosote and diesel fumes from the black ribbon of highway.

It is August 7, 1969, and she is exactly five years old. Her father has been gone for most of her life, gone somewhere in Asia without being dead, in a plane that failed him when he least expected it. She knows his face and name by heart, she knows the outline of his story as another child might know Santa Claus — Bill Bisby, Salinas hero, with the fields of artichoke and garlic in his blood; Bill Bisby, a flyboy at twenty-two, with his finger on the afterburner; Bisby the careless warrior, her daddy. A kind of elf, with his short, dark hair and his open grin, one hand waving forever before the cockpit shield comes down. Bill Bisby, who might just slide down her chimney come Christmas.

Your daddy was a hero, Grandpa whispers in her ear. Your daddy died for his country. Your daddy might be coming back, some day. It'd be just like you to fool us all. You've got to make your daddy proud.

A screen door slams. Caroline cocks her head and watches as Grandma shakes the crumbs from Grandpa's napkin, then turns back into the house without a glance for the warming day, without a hint of Caroline crouching secret in the acrid furrows. Grandma's lips are folded in a line as straight as an ironed napkin edge; her eyelids are red. Caroline bites hard at a hangnail trailing from her thumb.

Her knees are dirty, and one of them bleeds. Her hair has not been combed. She has been up for four hours, up since the last hour of darkness and the irrigation machines rolling like giant spiders across the landscape. She is waiting there among the green leaves, the scent of garlic and artichoke, for a last glimpse of her mother.

Brakes squeal as a truck slows at the crossroads, turning toward Gilroy, its outline shimmering like a mirage in the morning heat. Caroline ignores it. She has heard such things from birth, as common as birdsong and the whisper of surf when the wind blows from the west. Her ankles ache from crouching and she needs to pee, but she stares unblinking at the farmhouse's front door.

And there, thrusting carelessly through it in her worn jeans, blond hair flying, a pack already slung over her back, is Jackie. She clatters down the sagging wood steps. She shoves open the VW van's battered door and hurls her heavy rucksack — army green, probably from a surplus place, the irony of it lost on her — into the back. Then turns and waits for Jeremy. Or is it Dave? Last year it was Phil.

Caroline rubs at her streaming nose with a dirty hand, then wipes it on the skirt of her dress. Grandma would purse her lips and frown; she would think, inevitably, Just like her mother. When Jackie is gone, Caroline will creep into the house and stand furtively before the washbasin, before anyone sees. Have they missed her yet? Are they worried? Do they remember that it is her birthday?

The man with the beard and the long hair, the leather vest and the bell-bottom jeans with heart-shaped patches and peace signs scrawled in ink, avoids the door altogether. He shuffles around the far corner of the house from the direction of the privy, his thin frame curled in an eternal question mark. He stares at his own shoes as he walks. A mongrel dog lopes at his heels, tongue dangling. Its breath reeks of raw meat and decay, the good-natured slobber left in Caroline's lap.

“Carrie!” her mother calls. She cups her hands to her mouth and bellows again.

“Carrie! Shit! Where the fuck did that kid go?” Caroline crouches closer to the earth and tries not to breathe. Jackie turns, impotent and furious, her gaze roaming over the morning fields. Her daughter kneads the soiled cotton of her dress between hot and damp fingers. There was yelling last night, too, when she was supposed to be asleep; shouts and demands and a bitter sobbing that might have been her grandmother's. They would not let Jackie take her away, Grandpa said, cutting off the tears; they owed that much to Bill. And to the child. It was no life for a five-year-old, in the back of a van. It was no life for Jackie.

“Don't tell me how to raise my kid, old man,” Jackie had said.

“Seems to me you ain't raising her,” Grandpa had replied. And then, much later, the scent of pot and her mother's hand in the darkness, smoothing Caroline's hair back from her face. Caroline squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to sleep; she prayed that Jackie would stay all night, while the moon shifted across the face of the clapboard house and the cicadas died down to a murmur. But Jackie rose after a moment and shuffled back up the hall, the tip of her joint a wandering flare.

Now the man who may be Jeremy or Dave or even possibly Phil orders the dog into the back of the van. He slides the door shut with a rumble. Grandma is standing on the front porch, her fingers gripping the rail, her face wiped clean of emotion.

“Where's my kid?” Jackie snarls.

“Where've you put her, Elbe?” Grandma allows herself to blink.

“Nobody puts Caroline anywhere. The child has a way of hiding herself.”

“Right. Convenient. Isn't that flicking convenient, Dave? Christ. Well, let's find her. Carrie!”

Caroline's heart is suddenly pounding in her rib cage; she buries her face in the leaves. She is one second away from racing toward the woman with the blond hair, one second from hurling herself into her mother's arms. She so wants to be wanted. But she remembers, with the sharpness of a child's memory, what it was like being Jackie's girl. She can still smell the stench of her own unchanged diapers, the hunger of forgotten lunch and dinner and then breakfast again, the nights she slept hiding under a blanket in the back of a thousand cars, terrified that Joe or Zane or Eddie might remember she was there.

“Carrie!” The voice hoarse with smoke and rage.

Her grandfather's broken shotgun snaps suddenly to attention. The sound is small in the morning air, almost an indifference, but Caroline's head comes up and her eyes move unerringly to the man standing silent on the front porch, his gun leveled at Jackie. Bill Bisby's dad. The hero's father.

Jackie freezes where she stands, outlined against the waving artichokes, the van at her back. Caroline watches the anger drain from her face, sees her eyes close in bitterness.

“It's time to go,” Grandpa says quietly.

“You go on, girl, and get in that van.”

The blond hair writhes as she turns. She gives him the finger. But she goes.

When the minibus stops for an instant at the end of the dirt drive and hesitates, then lumbers with the pain of hard old age in the direction of Santa Cruz, Caroline rises from the ground. She is suddenly sobbing. She has wet her pants. Her mother is gone, as she has gone every year of Caroline's life. But Grandpa is sauntering slowly through the field, the shotgun barrel broken over his forearm. He is whistling a tuneless little song that might be “Happy Birthday.” He knows exactly where Caroline is; he has found her there before. In his other hand is a present tied in blue ribbon.

They do not hear from Jackie for another three years.

Caroline stirs in the airless dark of a hurtling plane. The gin has left her cotton-mouthed. She is flying toward Eric, who fell off her radar like vanished Bill Bisby — only this time the hero came sliding back down the chimney. It is Christmas in midair, and Caroline is supposed to believe in miracles now, however improvident. What would her grandfather say to all this? What would he think of Caroline's Eric?

He would wonder how she came to be so far from Salinas. “My condolences, Mrs. Bisby,” says the man at the edge of the cemetery as the rain spatters down around them and their pumps sink into the mud.

“Your husband was a good man. He died too young.”

Grandma weeps into her handkerchief. Caroline grips her elbow with one hand and an umbrella with the other. It is February, and Caroline is barely eleven years old — February, and whole sections of the coastline are falling into the sea, Highway 1 is closed. The artichoke fields and the expanse of garlic are drowned in mud. She tries not to stare at the crumbling edge of her grandfather's grave, the way the loamy earth is sliding downward. She tries not to think of him at all.

The rain swept over Caroline's grandfather while he drove south from San Jose in the dark; it dogged him down the curves of the Santa Cruz mountains; it filled his headlights and obliterated his windshield. He steered blindly into the grille of another truck, arms flung up before his face — and so he ended, the hero's father, still believing his boy was coming home.

The silver-haired man standing before them in the Salinas cemetery pries the umbrella from Caroline's hand. He clasps her chilled fingers in his enormous palm. She sighs deeply and, without thinking about it much, buries her face in his black raincoat. He strokes her hair while Grandma weeps.

“I'm Hank Armstrong,” he says. “Jackie's uncle. I've come to take you home, Caroline.”

“Home” turned out to be a duplex on Park Avenue, a house on Long Island, a woman named Mrs. Marsalis who presided over the kitchen in a starched uniform. Home was home for only a few months of the year, because Hank was wise and would never make Grandma an enemy; Caroline's real life was in Salinas, he knew, among the sodden fields. Hank sent Grandma money that year, “to help out with Caroline's upkeep,” and took the child to Paris. He made plans for the following summer; he told Mrs. Marsalis to redecorate a bedroom in Southampton. He rejoiced in this gift of a child to light the winter of his life. He altered his will. For the first time, Caroline flew in a jet plane and tried not to think of falling.

Grandma sold off the fields of artichoke and garlic; she took a pittance for the house her husband had built. She moved north to the city and accepted elevators.

She stood over her sink, where there was no longer a window, and stared unseeing at the wall.

Caroline returned from her travels with Hank. She talked of Manhattan and of the Eiffel Tower. She practiced French. Large boxes of books arrived from New York each week, and Caroline read them aloud to her grandmother in the evenings. She read in bed long after the rest of the lights were doused. Hank paid for her private schooling. She wore a plaid jumper, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a navy blue tie. Hank wrote to her on thick, cream-colored paper, in an elegant blue hand — or perhaps he dictated, and the hand was Mrs. Marsalis's. The news from Park Avenue. Nothing unfit for Grandma's ears. But Caroline did not read his letters aloud. She tied them with ribbon and buried them in drawers.

He was a quiet man, Hank Armstrong, who marshaled his thoughts and chose his words with precision. He loved Caroline without understanding the point of expressing it. When she cried for her grandmother or fell into moping silence on days of relentless rain, Hank invariably offered her a book. It was the only comfort he knew.

He had married and been abandoned by at least three wives. He had no children of his own — just Jackie, his sister's girl, who only called when she was broke.

It was on one of those occasions that Jackie had offered up Caroline, the prize chip in her floating crap game. And Hank had taken the gamble.

“I never understood your mother,” Hank told Caroline once, under the influence of gin and the Hamptons sunset. “But then, I never tried.”

She was supposed to go to law school and join Hank's firm. That was always the plan, from the time she was fifteen — Caroline will go to law school, Hank said, and make him proud. Her intelligence should not be wasted. Her flashes of brilliance, her cunning with words, her shy smile above the private-school uniform all offerings on the altar of good fortune.

What Hank wanted, Caroline knew, was safety. He wanted her life to be free from violence the rage of feeling, the tragedy of wandering, the upheaval of passion and loss. And for the most part Caroline agreed. After all, emotion had never done much for Jackie. But in the end she turned her back on Harvard Law and chose Langley instead.

Hank toured the CIA campus on Family Day. He boned up on foreign policy. He talked of law school as something she had merely deferred. Until Eric Carmichael burst out of the Tidewater and confounded them both completely.

“Caroline is no trouble,” Hank had said proudly when she was seventeen;

“Caroline follows her head, not her heart.” It was inevitable, she thought as her plane descended into German airspace, that the rebellion would come when Hank least expected it. There was something in her blood that was wholly un-Armstrong a hint of Bill Bisby and his wild contrail, a fascination for free fall.

What if she were to call Hank now, to pick up the cabin phone and say, Hank, I need you, I'm scared and I'm lost?

People had a way of betraying you. They died; they dropped off the face of the earth. Or worse, they traded their souls and came back down the chimney like vicious Christmas elves: a familiar face, a stranger's heart, and a load of baggage on his back.

The trick was not to let them see you still cared.

Four Berlin, 8:30 a.m.

Greta Oppenheimer did not look like the sort of person who should be manning the phones in a stylish front office. Greta wore heavy shoes with thick soles and the sort of stockings that were intended to suggest a glossy tan but merely cast a brown pall over instep and leg. Her face was crinkled. She applied a heavy concealer to the dark circles under her eyes each morning, but by ten A.M. the camouflage had worn off, and the smudged sockets peered out at the world with undisguised exhaustion. Greta's clothes were sage green or charcoal gray. They conformed to the fashion of ten years previous, and might even have dated from that ancient period. Her dull blond hair was shot through with silver, unkempt, like a bird's nest abandoned high in a leafless tree. She was a woman formed by hardship; she expected to disappoint. Greta lived alone, and festered in her loneliness. She was thirty-four years old.

Fred Leicester, who worked in the new U.S. embassy on Pariser Platz and contrived to ride the number 8 U-Bahn from Wittenau every morning, although he really lived clear across the city in Dahlem, had a pretty good sense of who Greta Oppenheimer was. He knew that her parents had been poorly educated, that she had grown up in a small village in Thuringia and reported to the local factory at seventeen. He knew that her parents had died playing chicken on a single-lane highway when she was almost twenty, and that she had married and divorced before she was twenty-four. He thought she might be religious, in a private and stricken way. In another era she might have turned ecstatic and raised stigmatized hands in praise of a punishing Lord. But the latest millennium preferred the prosaic. Greta forgot to speak in tongues. She turned receptionist instead.

The convulsive end of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 had carried Greta along like a Popsicle stick in a storm drain; history bewildered and drowned her. Ten years in unified Berlin had failed to improve her lot. Greta lived with one foot on the threshold of the present and her entire body leaning back into the past; she lived in ignorance and suspicion and a moral rectitude as lifeless as dust. She scrupulously saved every spare pfennig, without the slightest notion of what she would ever spend it on.

She was, Fred thought, a perfect target for recruitment. What Greta craved was a new dream, an ambition within her reach. And he was the man to give it to her.

Like most men of his training and background, Fred Leicester believed that women who live alone and who are unhappy should be grateful for male attention. The notion of grateful women and all that they might tell was hallowed in the annals of espionage. Grateful women talk. They make room on their seat in the U-Bahn, sliding heavy buttocks toward the smoke-fogged windows. Their hearts thud painfully beneath their drab sweaters at the prospect of another commute, of Fred Leicester ducking through the train's sliding doorways, his morning newspaper in one hand and a cooling cup of coffee in the other. Grateful women sell out the last man to neglect them without a moment's hesitation, and feel better for the betrayal. It was Fred's hope that with keen eye contact, a few warm smiles, a request for assistance with his stumbling German, Greta would begin to talk. She was his developmental in the middle of Mian Krucevic's empire, his sole prospect for Sophie Payne's salvation. For Greta, Fred had taken the S-Bahn north from Dahlem that morning, switched stations twice, and waited with innumerable cups of coffee for the hour to be ripe. He stood now on the underground platform and looked toward the approaching Wittenau train. She always chose the third car from the front, always sat on the far side of the aisle. It would be easy to raise the subject of yesterday's horror: the rail lines were shattered at Pariser Platz, all the trains were running late. She might express sympathy, perhaps, in view of his nationality; if the car was quite full, they might be forced to hang by the ceiling straps together, jostled by Fate and haphazard politics. The train would go nowhere with great difficulty. Fred would suggest they get off and share a taxi. Or stop for coffee until the crowds subsided. She would agree after an instant's hesitation, an anxious look half cast over her shoulder. It was one of Gretas mannerisms. By this time, he knew them all.

Grit swirled up from the platform, and Fred narrowed his eyes. The train creaked alongside. Fred tossed his half-empty cup in the trash and threw himself into the scrum A human wall of bodies, of rigid limbs denying entry, the doors closing at last behind his back. A mad rush from the waiting commuters; an unseemly jostle at the doors. Were they so desperate for work this morning, these Berliners, for the normalcy of routine after yesterday's bloody violence?

Impossible to know whether Greta was sitting next to a window, her gaze fixed on the middle distance. Fred strained upward on tiptoe, glanced left and right, the length of the carriage. Then he made the survey again.

Greta Oppenheimer was not there.

She had gone to work early that morning, but the call she expected never came.

Greta fixed her eyes on a slight defect in the weave of the industrial carpeting — a pull in the nylon that tufted up like a human eyelash — and knew that the door to the office would not open that day. She would sit in her chair while the clock hand moved with the invisible sun. Other people, their concerns far different, might gather in corridors above and below her; they might stand clustered at their coffee stations or lavatory mirrors, chatting aimlessly.

Greta would be paralyzed with duty. Waiting for the call that meant He needed her.

Even to herself, she could not pronounce His name. It was too powerful and immense, like the Old Testament God. He knew nothing of the way he affected her, how she hoarded the few words He spoke, turning them over in the dusk of her apartment later like scavenged treasure. He did not know that she had kept a scrap of paper merely because it bore His handwriting, that she could close her eyes and bury her face in the desk chair because He had sat in it once. He did not know that she would die for Him.

He did not know she was alive.

A crackle of static from the speakerphone on the desk, and Greta jerked in her chair, the blood throbbing painfully in her temples.

What to do? What was required of her? There was no one else to answer. She must not fail. Another burst of static. Someone was buzzing for access at the street. This was unusual and thus frightening. She reached a trembling finger to the phone's bank of buttons.

“Ja?”

“I have business with VaccuGen,” said a woman's voice in German.

Greta glanced upward at the small television screen that hung in one corner. The woman turned her head. She wore a nondescript coat that looked dark gray and might, in fact, have been any color. Her black hair was shoulder length. Heavy glasses masked her features.

“The offices are closed,” Greta said firmly, and clicked the button off.

More static, insistent, blaring and Greta wished, suddenly, that she had never come into work at all, that she had stayed at home like so many good Berliners, terrified of the Turks.

“What?” she snapped.

“My business is with the lab.”

“Your name?”

“I'm from the Health Ministry. It's about the mumps vaccines. The humanitarian relief.”

Gretas brow cleared. Of course she had known of the vaccine consignment for Pristina; it was the one matter of legitimate business she could expect all week. It was a large shipment ten thousand ampules at least, the first of several scheduled for the refugee population.

“You are familiar with the loading dock?” she asked.

“No”

“Where is your truck?”

“I was told nothing about a truck,” the woman outside retorted.

“I have come for the health minister's personal supply. The minister is to carry it to Kosovo himself tomorrow as a goodwill gesture.” Greta hesitated.

“I was not told,” she said.

“Is there anyone with more authority in the office?” The woman was fumbling in her handbag, searching for her official identification; through the surveillance monitor Greta could sense her impatience. “Anyone who might be able to help me? Greta Oppenheimer, for instance?”

“I am Greta Oppenheimer.” Surprise brought her upright.

“Mian told me to ask for you,” the woman said, and stared directly into the surveillance camera's lens.

Greta's breath snagged in her throat. How could this creature utter the word with such a casual air? As though it were a name like any other? A name you might toss over a dinner table: Pass the cabbage, Mian. No one knew His name, no one but the handful of faithful admitted to His presence. Certainly not this bitch, who had never laid eyes on Him, who could not possibly know Him. Heat surged through Greta's veins and burst in a wave at her cheeks. He had told this woman her name.

“I am Greta,” she repeated.

“Then open the door, you crucifier of Jesus, before I freeze my tits off,” the woman spat out contemptuously.

And Greta obeyed.

“I haven't got much time,” she said briskly, and tugged at the fingertips of her gloves.

Her voice, freed of the speakerphone's distortion, was heavy and coarse. German was not, Greta thought, her first language; but what was? She might be Russian or some other type of Slav. A woman from the East. From His homeland.

“The minister has requested twelve dozen ampules.”

“That's our normal crating quantity.. ..”

“Good. Fetch it.”

Greta glanced over her shoulder. She swallowed nervously.

“I have no access to that vaccine.”

“What?”

The sunglasses were swept off, and a pair of black eyes, heavily rimmed in kohl, stared at her implacably.

“The laboratory is closed,” Greta said. Such a vague word for the battery of electronics that encircled His kingdom, that ensured the unworthy were barred. “I have no access to the storerooms.”

The 'woman's brows came sharply together.

“But this is nonsense! It was expressly approved by Mian himself! What am I to tell the minister?”

Greta stared at her helplessly.

The woman fished a second time in her capacious handbag. Like her clothes, it was black. She might have been dressed for mourning, Greta thought, or an avant-garde play. The only spot of color was at her throat, a white scarf wound tight as a tourniquet.

She held up a piece of paper and began to read from it. “

“Vaccine No. 413. A box of twelve dozen ampules. To be personally called for on November tenth.” I am at VaccuGen, yes? And you are Greta Oppenheimer?”

“Yes.” Who never called Him by His name.

The woman slapped her gloves on the reception desk.

“Then what am I to do? Tell the minister that Mian failed him again? Is the entire shipment locked away somewhere? Because if it is, young woman, I can assure you that the minister will have Krucevic's balls for breakfast. The minister is expected in Pristina tomorrow, and Ernst Schuler is not a man to look ridiculous. Do I make myself clear?”

“The shipment is in the loading bay.”

“And do you have access to that?”

Greta nodded.

“Then for the love of the Savior, take me to it,” the woman snapped, “before I call Mian myself. No one will notice a carton more or less, and it's as much as my life is worth to return to the ministry empty-handed.”

When the woman had scrawled some initials on a notepad and left with the box under her arm, Greta went slowly back to her desk. It was a brief excitement; it had afforded her the sound of a human voice. She was not likely to hear one again that day.

But in this she was wrong. She had not been reseated in the reception area twenty minutes when the static burst out again. She glanced up at the street monitor and saw the figure of a balding, middle-aged man, the collar of his good cloth coat turned up against the cold November day.

“May I speak with Greta Oppenheimer?” he asked.

“I am Greta,” she replied. And was suddenly filled with foreboding. Never had she been requested by name. And now twice in one day “I have come for the mumps vaccine,” the man said.

“Your colleague has already been here,” Greta replied.

“What colleague?”

“From the Health Ministry. For the vaccines. The minister himself sent her.”

“My dear young lady,” said the man, amused, “someone has been having a joke with you. Do you know who I am?”

He turned his face fully into the range of the camera positioned above his head.

Greta stared intently at the monitor; a sickness rose in her throat.

“Ernst Schuler,” she whispered.

The Minister of Health.

Five Bratislava, 10:15 a.m.

As Dare Atwood had predicted, Sophie Payne was no longer in Prague.

Her captors had tried to take her to Hungary, driving out of the city at one o'clock in the morning, after the American flag in the embassy garden had been raised to full mast and the President was known to be cooperating. They had injected her with the Anthrax 3A antibiotic and bundled her into the trunk of Michael's car, heading first east through the night and then, abruptly, when it became clear the Czech border guards were searching everything that approached the Hungarian border, south. They skirted the Tatras Mountains and ended, after many hours, in Bratislava, which had once been called Pressburg and known the glory of the Austrian empire. Now the city was famed for recidivist Communism and thuggish politics, for the Semtex explosives manufactured on its outskirts, for dispirited pottery and rudimentary wine. The ancient vines trailed through the hills like bony fingers, scrabbling for a purchase in the dust.

They had intended to reach Budapest but chose Bratislava by default, because Vaclav Slivik knew a woman in the Slovak State Orchestra. Many years ago, when Olga Teciak was a young woman of twenty-four whose sloe eyes and graceful limbs were utterly bewitching against the prop of her cello, Vaclav had pursued her violently, and she was enough in the thrall of the past to accord him some kindness now. When he knocked on the door at 4:33 a.m. unheralded and unapologetic, she was so disoriented as to let him in.

It was only after the guns appeared that Olga understood what she had done. But by then, her doom was sealed.

Sophie lay now on the woman's cracked tile floor, her hands and feet bound, her mouth gagged. The bathroom smelled faintly septic, an odor of decay unsuccessfully masked with ammonia. Olga's apartment was one of a series of similar faceless cubicles in one of the mass of faceless Soviet-built concrete towers strung across the Danube from the historic heart of old Bratislava. The complex as a whole could boast the highest suicide rate in the country. It looked like an architect's embodiment of despair. And at the moment, Sophie found the mood to be catching. She had crossed yet another border. No one, it seemed, was following.

They had carried her into Olga's home in the early-morning darkness with a hood over her head. Olga was not permitted to glimpse her face. Any ministrations required by the captive were offered through the proxy of young Jozsef, who, like Sophie, had suffered the indignities of Anthrax 3A and thus possessed some inkling of how to remedy them. The first thing the boy was permitted to do was to remove the gag from her mouth; the second was to offer her coffee, the very smell of which turned her sour stomach. He was sitting by her now, knees hunched up under his chin, eyes blazing darkly in his frail white face. He was staring at her, as though struggling to frame her meaning in words he could understand.

Sophie was conscious of his gaze, but she kept her eyes fixed on a patch of damp that had stained Olga's ceiling the color of weak tea.

“You should drink something,” Jozsef said at last.

“Water, maybe?” He said it in German, which was the language his father preferred him to speak. It was also, by happenstance, the language of Sophie Paynes childhood, and she answered him almost without thinking.

“Where is your mother?”

He was silent for the space of several heartbeats. Then, fearful, he hunched himself tighter and whispered, “Belgrade. I think she is still in Belgrade.”

“Does she know where you are?”

He did not answer.

Sophie reconsidered the patch of damp. The iron taste of blood was in her mouth and in her nostrils. Conversation was difficult. Her brain balked at the effort to concentrate. But the issue of Jozsef's mother recurred, as though it might be important.

“Did you want to leave her?”

“He took me. In the night. He held my mother's throat to the knife. He said terrible things to her, terrible. She was weeping. I could not even say goodbye.”

“How long ago?”

“I think it was before Christmas. But we never had Christmas, so I do not really know.”

“It's still November, right? It must be. So you've been gone almost a year.”

Again, he did not answer. The knees stayed hunched under his chin, as though all that kept him alive was the tight grip of hand on wrist.

“You should drink something,” he said again.

“A little water.”

Watching him sway and then recover as he stood up, Sophie remembered that Jozsef, too, had been injected with the bacillus. He would be feeling the same persistent ache in every joint, the pounding at the temples. And looking at the little-boy knees (he wore thin cotton shorts, no socks on his crabbed feet), she remembered Peter at eight, his bare feet filthy from running through the long grass around the Vineyard house, screen door banging in his wake. The sound of his voice, high-pitched as a bobwhite's at dawn, calling across the meadows that ran down to the sea. The memory suffused her with peace and longing; longing not so much for Peter — who had become a singing wire, taut with strain and the life of his own ideas — but for the simple things Sophie had once held like water in the palm of her hand.

“Here,” Jozsef said. He placed the rim of the glass against her lips. She stared into the dark wells of his eyes. This child was as much a prisoner as she was.

But no power and no government would bargain for his release. “What time is it?” she asked.

“Around ten o'clock in the morning.”

He tugged her upright, supporting her with an unexpectedly wiry strength. She drank the tepid water, too thirsty to argue with its taste, and felt the boy's rapid pulse fluttering against her like a bird.

When she escaped Krucevic, Sophie decided, Jozsef must leave with her.

The bathroom door slammed open, the edge jamming painfully against Sophie's leg.

She grunted and spurted water on Jozsef's fingers.

“Mrs. Payne,” Michael said. “You're awake.”

“Yes.”

Jozsef dabbed at her wet face with a wad of toilet paper.

Michael nodded toward the boy.

“Is he treating you right?”

“What a question.”

He slid into the room. With Sophie prone on the floor and Jozsef hunkering by her, there was scarcely space for the man's feet. Michael bent down and untied her hands; when she tried to bring them forward, every nerve ending from shoulder to wrist screamed in protest.

“Okay, Joe, your dad has some breakfast for Mrs. Payne.” Michael, too, spoke in German; it seemed to be the terrorists' lingua franca. “Go get it for us, would you?”

The boy vanished through the doorway.

“I've been instructed to let you use the facilities,” Michael told Sophie. “If you scream or attempt to leave by the window” this was a mere mail slot of a metal frame, incapable of accommodating a three-month-old baby “you will be shot.”

“Fine,” she said wearily. “That sounds like heaven right now.”

“Good girl,” he muttered under his breath in English. “If you can joke about it, you're still alive. And I will not let you die at this man's hands, do you understand?”

Arrested, she stared at him. He stared back. She did not know what to read in his eyes.

Then he raised his handgun to shoulder height, muzzle pointed at the ceiling.

“I'll be just outside,” he said impersonally.

Sophie hobbled to the toilet. She felt suddenly stronger. Mian Krucevic had miscalculated. Or rather, he had found that circumstances were different from his expectations, and he was forced to improvise. He mistrusted improvisation. He had never known anyone including himself to improvise without error. The key to his entire method of warfare was meticulous preparation. And so of course he had a fallback plan.

He had always loathed Slovakia. In the present instance he loathed it even more.

In Olga Teciak's living room there was a laminated plywood coffee table, an olive green couch with worn upholstery, two lamps, and a carved chair that had probably belonged to Olga's grandmother. There was also a very good television.

Krucevic sat in front of the blank screen and considered his options. The Hungarian border was watched. He refused to risk a crossing by car. Therefore, he would have to find a plane. That meant a predawn trip to the Bratislava airport and a break-in at the private aircraft hangar. He hoped to God there were some private aircraft in this miserable country.

He searched his mind for the flaw, the unseen error that could destroy him. He detected nothing, and that in itself was unsettling. Perfection was against the laws of Nature; perfection's appearance was always something to mistrust.

He glanced at his watch: 10:53 a.m. And at that instant his cellular phone trilled. He stiffened. The cell phone was solely for emergencies, the last extreme of need. And then only he would make the calls. No one was ever to call him.

He could let it ring could ignore the caller entirely. But what if disaster overcame him as a consequence? He picked up the phone on the fourth trill and said, “Ja?”

“Mein Herr. I am sorry to disturb you I know it is against the rules “ Her voice was abject with terror.

Greta. He frowned at the phone.

“Is something wrong?”

“A woman, a woman came. Not who she said she was. She took the virus.”

“What virus?”

“The vaccine,” she amended. “No. 413. For mumps. The one for humanitarian relief. She said that she was from the Health Ministry, she had a paper, she was so very angry oh, Herr Krucevic, I am so terribly sorry...”

“No names!” he barked, more loudly than he had intended.

“No names,” he repeated. “Who was she?”

“She did not say.”

“And you allowed her to take the vaccine?”

“She was from the Health Ministry,” Greta bleated pathetically. “She signed her initials to the dock manifest. I cannot make them out. And then the health minister, Herr Schuler, arrived, and he said it must be a joke. A joke!”

She sounded as though she was nearly peeing with terror, on the verge of tears.

You stupid cow, he cursed her silently. You hopeless and sodden piece of human shit. Gently now, gently, before she fainted.

“What did this woman look like?”

“Dark. Black hair, black eyes, black clothes. She spoke with an accent like” She had been about to say, like yours. “Like someone from your country.”

“Anything else?”

“A white scarf. Around her neck.”

Anger flared like bile and flooded his mouth. Zaibal Fucking mother of a whore. She! She had taken it! Then by the bloody cross of King Tomisav, I will find her. And when I do, I will slit her throat as a traitor and a Serb.

“What am I to do?” Greta begged in a whisper.

She was already stupid, but fear would make her dangerous. He must give her something to do, a purpose, before she destroyed them all. Krucevic's mind leapt forward, considered and discarded options.

“Close the office and get to Budapest,” he told her. “I have a job only you can manage.”

“I shall not fail you, mein Herr” She was sickening in her gratitude. He could do with her what he chose. He cut the connection.

His enemies were trying to destroy him. But God was on his side. He had discovered the treachery before it was too late. If only he were in Budapest now! But all movement was impossible before dark. He had roughly one hundred kilometers to travel three hours by road, twenty minutes by air and time was slipping through his fingers. He must be patient. He must not allow rage to make him careless.

A white scarf around her neck.

The error of improvisation.

Krucevic cursed the Czech border guards, cursed Slovakia, cursed Vaclav Slivik and all the women he had ever known. He cursed Olga Teciak with particular virulence. She was the most available object of his hatred.

Olga was a stranger. He distrusted her simply because she was unknown and because she was a woman. She was huddled now in her bedroom with her young daughter cradled in a blanket. Both of them were terrified. Olga had probably figured out who Sophie Payne was; it was no secret any longer that the American Vice President had been kidnapped. Word had gotten out, by newspaper and television broadcast. He had been a fool to follow Vaclav's advice. Teciak could not possibly be trusted.

He required some sort of insurance.

“Mian,” Michael said behind him. “Mrs. Payne is awake and eating.”

It was one of Krucevic's rules that they refer to the woman with courtesy. Courtesy was another form of cruelty. He dismissed his anger, the shadow of fear, and moved on to the next step.

“Good,” he said briskly. “She'll need her strength. It's time to take a picture for the President.”

Jozsef was chewing companionably with Sophie on the bathroom floor, although the meal was quite dreadful: canned orange juice, stale white bread, some sort of processed cheese. She choked on the food and the persistent taste of blood. It must be something to do with the anthrax, she decided. Not everything had an antidote.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked the boy.

“Bratislava, I think. But you should not ask me any questions. About the operation, I mean.”

Sophie smiled faintly.

“Is that what I am? An operation?”

“That is how my father calls it.”

“I see. But we were in Prague a few hours ago. Your father said so, when he was filming me.”

“Yes.” Jozsef's voice dropped apprehensively. “We were not supposed to come here, I think. We changed our route quite suddenly last night, because the guards were searching people. Michael got you through the first crossing — from Germany to the Czech Republic — with his American passport, but Papa did not think it would work this time. And so we turned back.”

Hope stirred in Sophie's heart.

“So it was the Czech guards your father was afraid of. But crossing into where?”

“If you ask me questions, lady, and I talk to you, there will be trouble.”

“My name is Sophie,” she said.

Jozsef turned this over in his mind.

“My mother's name is Mirjana.”

“Do you miss her?”

The fringe of lashes lowered over his eyes. He was rolling sonic-thing rapidly between his fingers.

“What is that?” Sophie asked.

The fingers stilled, then were thrust into his pocket.

“Nothing. Do you want that piece of cheese?”

She shook her head. He seized the cheese immediately. She waited while he ate.

“There is a woman here,” Sophie said. “And a child. The woman's name is Olga, but I do not know the girl's.”

“A girl? How old?”

“She is sucking her thumb still, and she is very frightened by all of us. The woman is frightened, too, although she tries not to show it.”

“So the woman is not one of you?”

“I told you. We were not supposed to come here. The woman is a friend of Vaclav's. That is dangerous for her and probably for Vaclav, too,” he added.

“Dangerous how?”

The boy drew his finger across his throat. The gesture was all the more appalling for its casualness.

“But she's helped you!” Sophie protested.

“She had no choice. And now she will say anything to protect her little girl. Those who are afraid, lady, are like snakes under the heel. They strike as soon as you move.” Sophie was about to argue with him about to utter stupidities about the impossibility of hurting the innocent but the words died in her mouth.

“When I was young,” Jozsef continued, “I had two friends. Brothers. They lived on the street where I lived, and our mothers used to push us along the pavement together in our prams. Our mothers liked to talk. They shared things from their kitchens; they sewed together and drank coffee. When I had a ball or a toy, I shared it with the brothers, and they with me.”

“That's good,” Sophie said encouragingly when he stopped. “It's good to have friends, Jozsef. Have you lived all your life in Belgrade?”

“No,” he said doubtfully, “I do not think I have ever lived in Belgrade, or if I did, it was very long ago. My mother is there now. She is Serb. That is why my father took me from her. We are Croats. And at the time I am speaking of when I was a young boy we lived in Sarajevo.”

“And do you still have friends there? In Sarajevo?”

He shrugged.

“What happened to the boys? The brothers?”

“They were Muslim dogs.” His beautiful eyes met hers. “When the war came, my father knew that their father would kill us if he did not kill him first, and so Papa went in the night and cut his throat. Then he killed the boys one after the other as they lay in their beds, and showed their mother what he had done. He dropped their bodies at her feet.”

Sophie forced herself to speak.

“No one who had a boy of his own could do such a thing. No one.”

Jozsef's black brows came down, puzzled.

“But they were Muslims and we are Croats. If my father had allowed them to live, they would have grown up to avenge their father's death. I would do the same.”

“I cannot believe that.”

“Then you are very foolish, lady. Or you have not seen enough of the world.”

Sophie thought of the endless trips on Air Force Two, the succession of state visits and briefings and prepared speeches.

“Perhaps you're right, Jozsef. And your father? He told you that he had killed your friends?”

“He took me with him that night. I watched what he did.”

The boy's fingers were worrying the object in his pocket again. He drew it out, and she saw that it was a rabbit's foot a triangular bit of dirty white fur, pathetic.

“When she saw them lying dead, lady, their mother fell on her knees and tore at her hair.”

“I suppose your father killed her, too?”

Jozsef tossed his good-luck charm over his shoulder and caught it behind his back in one deft movement.

“A woman suffers more when she is allowed to live, lady. But Drusa that was her name was afraid of the suffering, I think. She twisted her skirt into a rope and hanged herself from the kitchen window.”

Sophie squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, Mian Krucevic stood in the doorway, staring down at her. His son's face was white as a bone.

“Get out,” Krucevic said.

Jozsef scrambled to his feet and darted around him.

“Mrs. Payne.”

She lifted her face and stared back at him. He handed her a newspaper. The headline screamed her own name.

“I require your assistance, Mrs. Payne.”

“Then you will have to unbind my feet.”

“That will not be necessary. Please hold the newspaper below your chin. Vaclav?”

Krucevic stepped back, and a camera lens took his place. Unconsciously, Sophie raised a hand to smooth her hair, and then caught out in a vanity so misplaced it was painful dropped it to her lap.

“This will be sent to your friends at the White House, Mrs. Payne, so I suggest you consider what you say. For the record I would like to state that you are still the prisoner of the 30 April Organization and that, true to our word, we have administered the Anthrax 3A antidote since our last communication. Would you describe your experience, please?”

“I'm still alive.”

“But unfortunately, we have no guarantee that you will remain so.”

“Most of us have to live with that uncertainty,” she said.

This seemed to give him pause. But only for an instant.

“Jack, Jack,” Krucevic said, with all the sorrow of a disappointed parent. “What were you thinking of? Alerting the Czech border guards? For shame. Under the terms of our agreement, you were to refrain from attempting to rescue Mrs. Payne. And yet, mere hours after the flag went up in your embassy garden, you've gone back on your word. Don't let it happen again, Jack. I require free passage throughout the region. I want that message sent to every head of state in Central Europe. And I do not want to be thwarted again.”

It was only a matter of moments, Sophie thought, before he produced another needle. But instead the camera lens zoomed in on her face.

“I won't use a hypodermic this time, Jack. If you fail me again, I will put a bullet in this woman's brain. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot bring people back from the dead.”

Six Berlin, 12:06 p.m.

Caroline Carmichael reached Berlin at ten-thirty Wednesday morning, twenty-two hours after Sophie Payne's kidnapping.

Almost nothing was left of the city she remembered. She had visited twice during her posting to Budapest, when reunification was just a word and the movement of the capital from Bonn still years away. Bulldozers and cranes had taken root everywhere in the vacant lots, profuse as mushrooms after rainfall, and a trip across the city was an exercise in strategy, a meticulous ground campaign waged with map and mental compass. Equipment the color of sulfuric acid, pits that yawned a football field's depth into the earth, the halogen-lit midnights and clouds of exhaust — these were all that one knew of Berlin in the mid-nineties.

The West had decided the past must be regained, and if not regained, then rewritten. A political process, on the face of it; but emotional in its force, perhaps because it was so obvious and so physical. The Wall had divided families and consigned the most glittering of Berlin's neighborhoods — the haunts of kaisers and courtesans, seditionists and strippers — to the shabbiness of memory. The Wall had left places like Potsdamer Platz, once the bustling heart of Berlin, to silence and weeds, its paving stones aching for a footfall.

But Berliners, over time, had grown used to the change. New life had sprung up along the internal border like ground cover after fire. And then the cranes had come, in soaring ranks of red and blue and gold, their arms outstretched to the east.

Caroline drew wide the curtains of her window. The plane full of technicians from Washington had flown into the bomb site so quickly that the embassy, its communications arrays shattered, had received no cable of their coming. The Secretary of State had phoned the ambassador's residence; a harried first-tour officer had spent most of the night finding accommodation for nearly forty people in a frightened city already inundated with visitors. Caroline had drawn the Hyatt, a spanking-new hotel in the middle of the reborn Potsdamer Platz, where the towers of the Sorry Center jostled for position and waves of raw mud still lapped at the foundations. It was rather, she thought, like being the first resident of a space station, one of civilization's outriders. She would have preferred a converted old palace off Kurfurstendamm, where the whoosh of tires on the rain-wet streets was as soporific as surf; but the Hyatt probably offered a good government rate. Even in crisis, economy ranked high among a first-tour officers considerations.

And if she leaned forward now and glanced left, her nose pressed against the window, she could just make out the shattered glass dome of the Reichstag. An ill-fated building, she thought — burned by Hitler, and now racked by damage from his neo-Nazi followers in the blast that had swept Sophie Payne away. Politics had a way of turning violent in Berlin. Whole streets were obliterated, then recast with a different face. This was something Berliners understood: They lived on a volcano. The cranes could do only so much before history would have its way again.

She kicked off her shoes and fell back on the bed. Solid polyester beneath her hair, nothing like the eiderdown smelling faintly of the farmyard in a small hotel off Kurfurstendamm. She felt a sharp pang of nostalgia for old Berlin.

Here at the Hyatt, she might have been anywhere, the trappings of Central Europe consigned to the last century. Except that Eric was within range. He breathed the same coal laden air. Caroline closed her eyes and for an instant felt terrified. She wanted to draw the pillow over her head and smother in darkness. It was unlikely that even a single member of 30 April was still in Germany. Eric must be miles away by now. But she felt the force of his presence play over her like a tracking beam.

Was she mad even to try to draw him in?

That was what Dare Atwood wanted. A trap for Eric, and ultimately for his master.

Caroline, the lure.

Dare had no fucking idea what a marriage was like. How you could love a person without even knowing him. How he could own a piece of you, despite nearly three years of absence and betrayal how he could command some shred of loyalty and give nothing in return. Was it something about the marriage vow? That glancing blow of the sacred?

And in her heart of hearts, Caroline knew that she couldn't summon Eric anymore.

He had no desire to see her. He had chosen, after all, to leave. A trap was not a trap without a lure.

She felt relief flood over her like a kind of peace. Eric might betray her abominably, but she would not be required to betray him.

Absurd.

She was too tired to resolve the questions of love and loyalty, the war between reason and heart. She had a job to do. A Vice President to find, the Agency to protect that vast, imperfect sum of too many parts, that humming hive of secrets, most of them not worth knowing. What did she owe Eric Carmichael, anyway? She had paid enough debts during a decade of marriage.

What would she say if they actually came face-to-face? What would he say if he knew that she was hunting him?

Don't even ask, Mad Dog. If I told you, I'd have to kill you.

The oldest joke in the Intelligence book.

He would have to be hunted, all the same.

She glanced at her watch. Wally Aronson, the Berlin station chief, expected her at the ambassador's residence in an hour. But the Brandenburg Gate lay straight down Ebertstrasse from her hotel in Potsdamer Platz, a brisk walk in the cold afternoon air. She just had time. A police barrier wrapped Pariser Platz like a package, turning the chaos into an apparition of order, the reflexive German impulse. Caroline stood in her jeans and sweater, a bright plaid blazer open to the raw wind, and snapped pictures from the edge of Strasse des 17 Juni, the broad boulevard running straight through the heart of the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond Pariser Platz, 17 Juni became Unter den Linden, the most beautiful boulevard in all of Berlin, with its royal palaces and museums and meandering river Spree. A decade ago, Unter den Linden was closed to the West and Strasse des 17 Juni led only to the Wall — a dead end rather than a gate.

The Brandenburg had been a neoclassical dream, modeled on the Acropolis's Propylaea: six Doric columns surmounted by a plinth and frieze, the figure of Peace drawn by a chariot. Ironic, Caroline thought as she photographed the torso of a shattered horse in the rubble of the Gate. In Berlin, Peace was driven by the engine of war, Peace came at the cost of constant bloodshed. Napoleon had marched his Grande Armee beneath the Gate not long after it was built; Prussia had trained her cavalry in the square; Hitler's Ubermenschen had goose-stepped down Unter den Linden; and East German guards had patrolled within spitting distance of the prancing horses. But it had taken terrorists to topple the chariot to the ground.

She ignored the barriers and the cones and the police and walked insouciantly forward, to the very edge of the bomb crater. The FBI technicians were already there, some of them kneeling on plastic sheets at the edge of the torn earth, others in conversation with what Caroline supposed were German investigators.

One man stood apart, arms folded over a creased tan raincoat. Its very ordinariness screamed Government Official. He was stony-faced and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, but there was something arresting in the stillness of his pose. If he had not been standing inside the official barriers, Caroline would have taken him for a mourner. His face had the self-absorbed potency of grief.

As she looked at him, he turned his head and stared straight at her. No hint of friendliness or curiosity; the look was frankly hostile. He took her for a disaster junkie. She raised her camera and ignored him.

There were television crews, too — an embarrassment of television crews, from every major American network, from the Berlin and Frankfurt and Hamburg stations, from Italy and France and the U.K. and Poland.

This was going to be easy.

Caroline took pictures of chaos: chunks of macadam, twisted cables, the intestines of the city thrown obscenely outward. The construction of the square's new LJ-Bahn station had taken years; now its subterranean walls caved inward. Broken glass shimmered everywhere.

She panned across the square to the embassy door. The shattered platform on which Sophie Payne had stood twenty-four hours ago was still there, one end pitched skyward. Yesterday, pennants had snapped in the breeze. Then bullets, screaming and blood, a gurney wheeled madly to the platform's edge. Eric.

She lowered her camera and studied the building. It was a large embassy, and most of the windows in the facade were smashed, but the walls themselves had held. The blast, then, had been strong enough to destroy the Brandenburg Gate while leaving much of the surrounding structures intact. A surgical bomb, if such a thing could truly be said to exist. A diversion, while the real victim disappeared into the blue.

“Ausgehen She, bitte.”

A police guard, voice harsh with contempt, was advancing upon her, his face obscured by a riot helmet. The federal eagle screamed red and gold across his black shirt — he was one of Fritz Voekl's special troops, the Volksturm. Caroline raised her camera, focused on his face, and snapped.

Taking office on the heels of assassination, the new chancellor had made fighting crime a priority of his first year. Crime, Voekl declared, sprang from the conflict between Western European values and Eastern ones, between Christian and Muslim ways of life. Crime was the product of the Turkish population, in fact; until the Turks were sent back to their own country, all that decent Germans could do was to stand firm against their demands. And the Turks were just the tip of the Muslim iceberg: The trickle of Albanians and Montenegrins, of Kurds and Kazakhs and Georgians and Uzbeks from the east, was alarming in the extreme. Tolerance was a mistake. Acceptance was insanity. Germans, even liberal Germans such as Voekl's murdered predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, were dying in the streets.

The message had played superbly at the polls, particularly among Ossies, the former citizens of the defunct German Democratic Republic, where crime officially had never existed. Now the Ossies were joining Voekl's Volksturm, his national militia, in droves. And as she stared at the policeman's spread-eagle insignia, Caroline had to admit the chancellor's savvy. Voekl had killed one problem persistent unemployment in the east while brilliantly furthering his anti-Turk agenda. And he'd placed throughout the country an army loyal only to him.

“Hinaus!” The truncheon was raised, the black shirt close enough to graze with her fingertips. She felt the man's animosity wash over her like a strong smell.

“Speak English?”

He shook his head aggressively. She stood her ground, focusing her lens, and saw a British television crew pivot to film the encounter. In a minute the cop would take her camera and dash it to the pavement. Deliberately, she leaned around him, pointed her lens at the embassy, and clicked the shutter.

The gurney, it was believed, had come from within a bogus rescue operation staged from the roof. Caroline had watched the videotape of Eric so many times she had the sequence embedded in her mind. The period from explosion to kidnapping had been slight about nine minutes. Therefore, 30 April must have known how to navigate the new building before they'd ever landed the chopper.

That, in itself, was suggestive.

“Halt!” He grabbed her arm and thrust her back from the barrier. Caroline tensed. Then she screamed.

Two American camera crews joined the British one already filming her. The Italians looked interested and started to move.

“Let go of me, you asshole!” She broke free of the policeman's grasp and held her camera behind her back.

“Jesus! Isn't this a free country?”

The guard raised his truncheon obligingly. The film crews filmed. And then a raincoat — clad arm was thrust between them, and someone said, “It's okay.”

It was the man she'd seen earlier, staring at the wreckage. She had time to register sandy hair, a beak of a nose. He said something in German to the Volksturm guard, and the truncheon was abruptly lowered. Then he turned to Caroline. Sharp hazel eyes simmered with anger. And something else. Contempt?

“This isn't the best place for sightseeing, ma'am. We'd appreciate it if you'd move on.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, deliberately rude. “I'm going. Jesus.”

With luck, she'd make the evening news.

With luck, Eric and his friends would be watching.

Seven Berlin, 1 p.m.

The woman who had stolen Mian Krucevic's vaccine No. 413 — the mumps vaccine that would soon be injected into the bodies of thousands of Kosovo's children — had wasted little time in getting the box of ampules out of the country. At the main counter of Malev Air in Berlin's Tegel Airport, she presented a signed letter typed on the official stationery of the Hungarian Ministry of Health and an equally impressive packet of documentation from a Hungarian lab. She managed the same air of officious irritation that had carried her through her encounter with Greta in the VaccuGen offices, and after one Malev Air attendant pressed her too closely about her mission, she embarked on a furious lecture in geopolitics.

Hungary, Mirjana Tarcic reminded the attendant, shared a border with Yugoslavia.

Tens of thousands of ethnic Hungarians inhabited the autonomous Yugoslav province of Vojvodina, just across that border. And since Hungary was now a member of NATO, which had pummeled Serbia from the air for months, tensions in the autonomous province were running high. Who knew when floods of refugees might start spilling into southern Hungary? And what diseases and vaccines might be necessary then? The Hungarian Ministry of Health had determined it should be prepared. If the Malev Air attendant wished to discuss the matter further, she could refer him to her ministry superior.

A tedious twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds later, Mirjana Tarcic carried the sealed carton containing her estranged husband's mumps vaccine onto the Budapest flight. Malev Air magnanimously dispensed with the requirement of security X ray. Radiation might harm the vaccines, and that was the last thing anyone wanted. The cause, as Mirjana reminded them, was a humanitarian one.

She placed the box between her booted feet, halfway under the seat in front of her, and remembered a similar box of vaccines on another flight. She had just copied Mian Krucevic's method for getting a bomb onto a plane. But this time the vaccines were real, and potentially more explosive than the package that had blasted MedAir 901 out of the sky. She hugged her arms across her chest and stared through the window at an approaching baggage train, overwhelmed for an instant by what she had done. If Mian found out, he would hunt her down and kill her.

And she knew him well enough to believe that he would find out.

She read no magazines, she made no conversation with the elderly Hungarian woman seated next to her during the two-hour flight. She kept her sunglasses on. Mian, Mirjana knew, had spies everywhere. To beat him at his game, she must be more vigilant than he, more farsighted, more paranoid. There was nothing like thirteen years of marriage to a psychopath to teach you about survival.

In Frankfurt, Germany, at Headquarters NSA Europe, Patti De Palma sat at a desk in a windowless room that was utterly silent except for a Muzak version of Paul Simon's “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The Muzak was piped throughout the sprawling government complex in the IG Farben building; it was intended to mask office conversation in the event anyone was listening. Patti frankly loathed the tinned tracks — “Memory,” “What I Did for Love,” even the Clash's “Rock the Casbah.” They made her feel like a character in a book by George Orwell. And life as an intercept translator was Orwellian enough.

This morning, however, only an hour into her shift, Patti was spared the bastardized Paul Simon. Her earphones were on. She was listening intently to a conversation in German pulled directly from a rhombic antenna array designed to intercept a wide range of very specific communications. Since Dare Atwood's first conversation with President Bigelow regarding the 30 April Organization eighteen hours earlier, this particular array, made up of diamond-shaped wires scattered over several hundred acres, had been intercepting communications at VaccuGen in Berlin.

And so Patti listened as Greta Oppenheimer sobbed out the story of vaccine No. 413 to Mian Krucevic. From there, it was merely a matter of locating the phone Krucevic had used. And within two hours, Olga Teciak's Bratislava apartment complex was circled in red on a large-scale map of the city pasted on the White House Situation Room's wall.

“Mad Dog! Come on in.”

One of Wally Aronson's hands grasped the ambassador's glossy black door. The other beckoned Caroline almost surreptitiously, as though his password to the clubhouse might expire without notice. A marine guard stood at attention in the hall, his eyes riveted on thin air.

“He's expecting you, but we haven't much time,” Wally told her. “He's due at the chancellor's for cocktails.”

The ambassador's residence was a grand old place in Charlottenburg, with nine-foot windows and chestnut trees that threw heavy shade in summer. A world removed from Pariser Platz. Caroline had taken a few minutes at the Hyatt to dress in business clothes, and was suddenly glad.

“You look great, Caroline.” Wally touched her lightly on the shoulder, a gesture halfway between a salute and an embrace, and that quickly Caroline was back in boot camp, Wally swinging from a chin-up bar with his boot laces dangling.

He was short and lithe with a perpetual smile hovering around his eyes. The goatee had grayed since Caroline had last seen him, two years before. They were old friends from the Career Trainee program and Budapest; now he was Chief of Station, Berlin. It was a plum he'd pulled relatively early in his career — but then, Wally had been born with the soul of a spy. He had probably rifled his mother's love letters as soon as he could read, Caroline suspected, and worn gloves to do it.

He led her past a formal drawing room hung with miles of gray-blue silk, its atmosphere thick with the suspended breath of public spaces. Caroline looked at the purposeful chairs, all elegant line and backache, and imagined the parties — a crush of black velvet and white satin, the haze of cigarette smoke that always amazed Americans and was inescapable in Europe. Wally crossed the wide hall — here there were ceiling frescoes of Venus rising, an abandon of putti — to a set of double doors. The ambassador's study.

But the room, when Wally threw open the doors, was empty.

He crossed the worn Aubusson carpet to the French windows. Beyond them was an expanse of browning grass, lime trees bereft of leaves. A smudge of afternoon sky. A white-haired man lounged in a canvas chair below the terrace, one elbow resting on a card table, thin legs extended before him. He wore a navy blue windbreaker, khaki pants, Top-Siders without socks. A faint breeze stirred a sparse lock of hair, and as he reached back to smooth it, the veins on his hand pulsed blue. Two men, strangers to Caroline, sat at his right and left. In their wool suits and trimmed hair, they resembled models imported for a photo shoot.

“Ah, there you are, Wally.” The ambassador spoke with relish, as though the COS had just brought round the drinks cart. “Good man.”

“Our guest from Washington, Mr. Ambassador. Caroline Carmichael of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Ambassador Dalton.”

Ambrose Dalton stood up. His hand, when Caroline shook it, was dry as vellum. He was a member of an old Connecticut family, a political appointee who had made a fortune in merchant banking. His wife's name was Sunny. She had found her life mission after the Daltons' son broke his neck in a rugby game; now she educated the insensitive about the rights of the physically challenged. The Daltons gave generously to a variety of causes, some of them political. As a couple, they were two of President Bigelow's oldest friends. They were quite well acquainted with Sophie Payne.

“I'm so very sorry, Mr. Ambassador, about the damage to the embassy,” Caroline told him. “You and your staff are well, I hope?”

Dalton took her hand between both of his and patted it, more in sympathy than salutation.

“We lost two of our marine guards. Mere boys. But you know that, I expect.”

She nodded wordlessly.

He studied her face, a calculation flickering in his eyes.

“I understand you're an expert, Ms. Carmichael, on this Krucevic character. Any expertise is, of course, a comfort, but I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Sophie cannot be anywhere in Berlin.”

“Is that what the German police are saying, sir?”

“They say that no Turks could possibly have slipped past their borders, and that the extremists, when identified, will be summarily shot.” Dalton's voice was as dry as his hand.

“Never mind that none of the men filmed with the helicopter was even remotely Turkish,” Wally added, “or that the video dropped in Prague identifies the kidnappers as the 30 April Organization.”

“Our German friends have not been privileged to view the terrorist video,” the ambassador reminded him.

“For that matter, neither have I. I merely read the gisted transcript we received in the diplomatic pouch this morning. You may assume, Ms. Carmichael, that everyone at this table has also read that summary.May I introduce my Chief of Mission?”

“T. Hunter Price.” One of the imported models half rose and nodded, then sank languidly into his seat. Caroline put him down immediately as a cookie-pusher with an attitude. Price would regard the embassy bombing as a State Department affair: He would resent the Agency's involvement.

“And this is Paul Dougherty,” Wally said, his hand on Carolines elbow. “Paul's in the consular section. You owe him your hotel room.”

“Hey, Caroline,” Dougherty said, jumping up and smiling broadly, “I read your stuff last night. Really cool.”

A first-tour Agency officer, no doubt, fresh from the University of Kansas or Georgetown's foreign-service program. Dougherty looked about thirteen. She wondered where Wally's more experienced people were, and then answered the question herself. They were meeting with counterparts in German Intelligence. Or were dressed in white overalls and canvas caps, trolling the streets in plumber's vans, with listening equipment trained on a variety of buildings. Hoping against hope for a sound that might lead them to Sophie Payne.

“There's Tom!” Dougherty chirped, his gaze going beyond Caroline. She turned and saw a rangy man in tweeds loping across the terrace, his hands shoved into his pockets. The newcomer had abandoned the government-issue trench coat for a rumpled oxford cloth shirt, suede bucks, and an old rep tie. One of his shoelaces had broken and been summarily knotted into place. His nose appeared to have suffered a similar fate. And from the appearance of his right cheek which bore a red crease from eye to lip he had recently fallen asleep on someone's sofa with a copy of the newspaper folded under him. Der Zeitung, perhaps. It was shoved into his pocket along with his hands.

“LegAtt,” Wally Aronson muttered under his breath, and then, more audibly, “Caroline, meet Tom Shephard, the FBI's Legal Attache in Berlin. Tom's coordinating our investigation on the ground.”

“We've met,” Shephard said. “At the crater.”

“I walked over to the Brandenburg to take a look around,” she explained to Wally.

“You took more than that.” Shephard continued to study her, as though she were a rare form of plant life he had only just discovered. The hazel eyes were still sharp, but the earlier simmering anger had vanished. “Do you always put your foot in it like that?”

“No,” she replied tersely. “And I usually don't have to be reminded of it, either.”

“Was there some problem?” Hunter Price was the sort, Caroline suspected, who loved to recycle his neighbors' affairs each morning over embassy coffee.

“Mud,” she replied. “Mud was the problem. The Tiergarten is churned to mush, and I definitely put my foot in it. See, Mr. Shephard? I even changed my shoes before this meeting.”

“Let's get started, shall we?” The ambassador slid back into his seat. Caroline set her laptop on the ground unopened; she had brought it with the intention of typing her meeting notes, but the computer's battery had run down and there did not appear to be an electrical outlet in the embassy garden. She drew out a yellow legal pad instead.

“I think we've all read Ms. Cannichael's material and found it quite compelling,” Dalton observed. “Should we ever locate the Vice President and her attendant thugs, we shall be in the proverbial clover with Ms. Carmichael here on board. I hope you will excuse our impromptu picnic, my dear. We cannot entirely trust the acoustics within the residence.”

Caroline frowned.

“You think you're being bugged? In Germany?”

“We sweep the place every week,” Wally broke in, “and we haven't actually found anything. But there have been .. . incidents. Or should I say coincidences?”

“Within six weeks of taking up my post, Ms. Carmichael, I discovered to my astonishment that whenever I presented my objectives to Mr. Voekl's late, unfortunate foreign minister you were familiar with Grafvon Orbsdorff, I presume? he invariably knew what to expect. Either Orbsdorff was a clairvoyant, or he was cheating at the international game. Personally, I plump for the notion of cheating.” Dalton scowled, an honorable schoolboy. “And so I adopted the habit of taking my conferences en plein air. A fresh breeze focuses the mind wonderfully, don't you agree?”

She smiled at him.

“Can anyone summarize for me what we know of the bombing to date?”

“For that, I defer to Wally and Mr. Shephard,” Dalton said briskly.

“Gentlemen?”

“We know that the embassy blueprints were sold to the highest bidder,” Wally began, “probably by the project architect long before construction was completed. Worse, we know that 30 April knew precisely where to hit the internal surveillance equipment. Agency techs have already gone through the building.

Every camera and fiber-optic insert along the gurney's path was shot to hell.”

Eric, Caroline thought. He could have looked at the embassy's blueprints and predicted with certainty where the security equipment would be placed. The realization came to her with a sick sense of disbelief that Eric could have betrayed a U.S. installation so easily to someone like Krucevic. She closed her eyes to shut out the image of the tilted platform, the twenty-eight dead. And thought of something else: If Eric had told his 30 April cronies where to find the cameras and fiber optics, he'd as much as told them about his Agency past. Which meant that they knew everything that mattered.

Did they even know about her?

She felt chilled to the bone.

“So your VTC room is out, as well as cable channels.”

“They'll be up and running in another twenty-two hours.”

“It'll take at least a week to get the building completely secure and operational,” Tom Shephard said. He ran his fingers distractedly through his hair. “It's like these guys had a three-D map of the building downloaded off the Internet, or something.”

So much for her cutout channel. And the ambassador's residence was bugged.

Caroline would have to call Headquarters from a corner pay phone and speak in riddles.

“They certainly hit the embassy fast,” she commented.

“From the news coverage, it looks like nine minutes from explosion to kidnapping.”

“Which means they practiced.” Paul Doughertys eyes were alight, as though he'd awakened this morning to find himself cast in a techno thriller.

With the faintest suggestion of indulging the children, T. Hunter Price drawled, “This is infinitely fascinating, but it has nothing to do with the problem at hand. That being the location of Vice President Payne.”

“Go ahead, Hunter,” said Shephard with studied politeness. “If you know where she is, we'd love to hear.”

“I wouldn't dream of stealing your moment, Tom,” Price replied. “I merely attempted to focus. The ambassador's time is short.”

“Mr. Shephard has clearly profited from the fresh air,” Dalton declared placidly, “and may be allowed to proceed. Tom, tell us what you've learned from the crater.”

“We think the bomb was in a television broadcast van parked right next to the Gate,” Shephard said immediately. “We'll know more once Forensics has cataloged and thoroughly tested the wreckage, but the truck axle has already surfaced and been ID'd.”

“That was quick,” Wally observed.

“Luck.” Shephard shrugged. He was studying the path made by his forefinger as it trailed across the surface of the ambassador's card table. “The truck belonged to Berlin's TV Channel Four. The two cameramen and the reporter who were supposed to be in it were found floating in the Spree last night. They'd been assigned to cover the Veep's speech. They never arrived.”

“So instead of renting a van to park under the Gate, 30 April stole one and killed its occupants. These guys weren't about to leave a paper trail.”

Shephards eyes flicked over to Caroline.

“Multiple murder increased their risks considerably. But it also covered their tracks more effectively. No rental documents, as in the Oklahoma City bombing or the hit on the World Trade Center. And being a real broadcast van, the truck looked far more plausible in place.”

“What about the medevac chopper?” Caroline asked. “Has anyone located that?”

“Possibly.” Shephard focused on his finger again. “Somebody parked a helicopter near the rail lines south of Templehof yesterday that's the old East Berlin airport and set it on fire.”

“Destroying any traces of prints or fibers,” Caroline said.

“Most of them. Yes.”

“Have any of the local hospitals reported a missing medevac pilot?” Wally asked.

“A young woman by the name of Karin Markhof,” Tom Shephard told him. “Still no trace of her. Either Markhof was paid to turn over the bird to 30 April and got out of town fast once the Brandenburg blew or she's lying dead somewhere.”

“She's dead.” Caroline said it without hesitation. “Krucevic leaves nothing to chance.”

“Then let's hope he screws up somewhere down the line. Because that's all we've got.”

Wally stroked his goatee, eyebrows furled like question marks. T. Hunter Price adjusted his tie. Dougherty looked from face to face like an eager puppy.

“Does the station here have any 30 April assets, Wally?” the ambassador inquired.

“A few, sir.”

“What's "a few" Wally? Exactly?”

“Two,” the Chief of Station conceded. “In the developmental stage.”

“Which means you've got squat,” muttered T. Hunter Price.

“We've got a woman who works in the Berlin office of VaccuGen, Krucevic's main front company,” Wally shot back. “She's not on the payroll, which means she hasn't been vetted, and I'm not at liberty to discuss her particulars. But one of my officers has been developing her for months.”

“And?”

“Fred is still trying to make contact.”

Price threw up his hands in mute eloquence.

“What about the other recruit?” Caroline asked.

“He's a different kettle offish. Brilliant, oddball, and an unreconciled Communist. Krucevic wants to own him, but our guy thinks Krucevic is poison. He cracks security systems for a living.”

“So how'd he come to us?” Caroline asked.

“He applied for an embassy job. As a security expert.”

“Fascinating,” bur bled T. Hunter Price.

“You just brought this crook in, I suppose, to discuss your mutually shady pursuits over a glass of Schultheiss. And in the process, you probably gave away the embassy's fiber optics and security installations, Wally, to no less a personage than 30 April's chief safecracker. I congratulate you, friend. I really do.”

“Horse pucky,” the station chief said. “I didn't interview him at the embassy.”

But he had flushed an angry red.

“Have you talked to him since the bombing?” Tom Shephard was rigid with interest.

“Last night. I didn't tell him why we wanted Krucevic.” Wally glanced around the table. “Nobody in Berlin knows for a fact that 30 April did the Brandenburg, much less the Vice President, so I made it a fairly general query. But my guy thinks Mian is headed for Hungary. Krucevic told him to get to Budapest and await instructions. I asked him nicely to keep us informed.”

Budapest, Caroline thought. I'm wasting my time here in Berlin.

“So this asset of yours is working for the terrorists.” Shephard was scowling.

“He's not an asset. He's a developmental.”

“Which means you're not paying him.”

“Not formally. No.”

“But you're considering placing him on your payroll. A borderline criminal who consorts with terrorists.”

“You want a terrorist asset, Tom, you've got to get your hands dirty.”

It was the oldest debate in the counterterrorism game: how to penetrate the organizations you pursued without adopting their methods. Most of the people at the CTC, Caroline thought, would agree that it was impossible. You could trace a terrorist's funds. You could blow up his training camps and operational bases.

But you could not learn his most private thoughts, his most diabolical schemes, without an ear in his private councils. That meant controlling one of his own.

Paying for terrorist treason. And that single fact almost guaranteed that someday, somebody in the halls of Congress or the pages of the Washington Post would accuse you of bankrolling a monster.

“Hungary,” the ambassador said thoughtfully. “It's a big place. But this is good, Wally. It's a start. I suggest you get on the horn to your opposite number in Pest and direct him to work his assets.”

“Yes, sir,” Wally said briefly. He did not remind Dalton that the secure phones were down.

“There must be a 30 April body somewhere in that city,” the ambassador said.

“We must get to him before Krucevic does.”

“Isn't there some way to prevent 30 April from entering Hungary?” Shephard asked. “The borders should have been closed as soon as the bomb went off yesterday.”

“They haven't been, and they won't be,” Dalton told him. “The President undertook to give Krucevic his freedom until Sophie Payne is recovered. Any sign of an international manhunt, we jeopardize her safety.”

“That can't go on indefinitely.”

“As far as our German friends' are concerned, I imagine it could. It serves their ends to admiration. Why close the borders, when the enemy is within? You of all people must know, Tom, that the enemy is the infidel Turk. He lives among us. He is to be punished for 30 April's crimes, while 30 April gets away with murder.”

“Which raises a few questions about Fritz Voekl,” Caroline observed, “and his commitment to fighting international terrorism.”

Dalton smiled at her regretfully.

“There are so many questions about Fritz Voekl, my dear. Questions that even I shall not put to him, I'm afraid. We need more information the kind ofinformadon that can be used to pressure him if we are to proceed from a position of strength. And now, if you'll excuse me,” the ambassador said with a general nod, “I must present my respects to the chancellor and his daughter. It is young Kiki's sixteenth birthday, and Ie tout Berlin will be raising a glass.”

Eight Pristina, 2:13 p.m.

Enver Gordievic was startled awake at the first knock on his shanty's door. His heart pounded. He glanced first at Krystie, the baby, who was napping in the lower bunk; she stirred drowsily and began to wail. Then he looked toward the door. No windows in the hut, no way to know who stood there. But it must be faced. Even if it was Simone.

He took the three steps at a run and pulled open the flimsy piece of wood. The Canadian doctor was framed in the doorway, her face lined with weariness, all her heart in her eyes. Alexis —

“You'd better come,” she said. And he didn't ask any questions, just gathered up the little one in her blanket and raced across the churned mud to the medical tent. Simone was there before him, by the side of the cot where his daughter had lain through the early hours of morning, an IV taped into her small wrist. Her hand was on Alexis's forehead, her stethoscope was searching the little girl's chest. His daughter looked spent; her eyes were closed. She was not, Enver thought, even moving. He waited, holding his breath, for Simone to shake her head, to draw the sheet up over his daughters golden hair — for his world to crack apart like a shattered glass.

He'd spent eight hours pacing the hospital tent floor, running his hands through his hair and talking, talking, to the woman with the French name, while friends watched his baby and Alexis spiraled downward into death.

“How will I tell her mother?” he had asked Simone once in despair, and she had looked at him in surprise.

“You're married?”

“Was married. She was killed in a fire. During the civil war. I was supposed to take care of the girls. She'd always wanted a little girl. Someone to dress up, like a doll. I wanted boys, you know? Kids I could play soccer with.”

“Girls play soccer, too.”

He'd nodded distractedly.

“It doesn't matter. I wouldn't trade my girls now. They're all I have left of Ludmila — she was only twenty-eight when she died. And I loved her.”

He had paused, embarrassed to be talking so freely to this woman, who had hundreds of other children to care for, other parents to hear. But Simone was sitting quite still, her eyes on his face; his confessions hadn't bored her.

“Your wife must have been beautiful,” she had told him. “Your girls certainly are.”

“She named them after movie stars. From an American television show. Dynasty — you know it? She wanted everything for Alexis. Everything she never had. And for a while, we were doing so well. I had my practice, she had her apartment house — she inherited it from her father. Six apartments, six families. None of them survived the fire.”

He had spoken without emotion; he had told this story too many times to feel it anymore.

Simone had risen and gone to a small boy turning restlessly in the cot next to his daughter's.

“How did you escape?”

“I was in Budapest. Attending a constitutional-reform seminar sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department. My mother brought the girls to me for a holiday — she had never been to Hungary herself — but Ludmila couldn't get away. When war broke out, she called and begged me to stay. She wanted the girls to be safe.”

He had looked directly at Simone, his eyes bright as if with fever.

“I never saw her again.”

“But you and your daughters survived.”

“So we could die here” he had retorted. It was the first sign of real bitterness he'd allowed himself to feel.

Simone had ignored it. She pressed a cold cloth against Alexis's forehead.

“You're a lawyer, then.”

“That doesn't mean much in Kosovo. Law has nothing to do with survival.”

“But someday, you'll use what you learned in that seminar. Don't give up hope, Enver.”

Alexis had whimpered in the cot, and Simone felt for her pulse. There were so many children now. One hundred and fifty-three more had arrived at daybreak.

They lay in the tent with barely eight inches between their cots, some on pallets on the dirt floor. They moved into beds when another child died “Why aren't you getting it?” he had asked her abruptly.

“This disease. Why is it just the kids?”

“I don't know. Maybe it doesn't strike adults. Or maybe, if you've had the more common forms of the disease or been inoculated against them, you're immune. We know so little about this strain we don't even know how the epidemic started. Or why the disease strikes boys far more savagely than girls every gland in the boys' bodies is swollen. But a German lab has been studying the virus intensively and has come up with a new vaccine. We expect some German medical teams to fly in any day and begin inoculation.”

“A vaccine? Specifically for this strain? How did they make it so fast?”

“I don't know.” Her eyes met his, and the agony in them was like a lash.

“Enver, I'd urge you to have your youngest vaccinated.”

“Do you think it's safe?”

“I think it can't be worse than what we've got.”

He had thought about it all morning, while Alexis worsened; he had carried the idea of a vaccine back to his shelter when Krystle needed a nap. He had fallen asleep despite his best intentions in the quiet of that room, thinking of mumps, of killing strains. And while he slept, his elder daughter's time had run out.

He took a step now toward Alexis's cot and reached for her hand. It was cold — colder than his own, which was clammy with fear and raw weather. If only she would open her eyes one last time and look at him if only he could hear her say his name... Simone shook her head and removed her stethoscope from Alexis's chest.

He would not look at Simone. He would not let the glass shatter, and with it, all the world —

“I'm so sorry, Ludmila,” he whispered to his dead wife. And buried his face in their daughter's sweat-soaked curls.

Nine Bratislava, 3 p.m.

In Olga Teciak's apartment, the air grew stale and the hours dragged. Once the videotape was made, Krucevic sent Michael out in a car with Otto as caretaker.

The two men drove across the Danube and into the center of Bratislava, where the U.S. embassy sat next to a massive old hotel in the Soviet mode, a former casino for party apparatchiks. The embassy had once been a consulate; when Slovakia declared independence from the Czech Republic in 1992, its status was upgraded, but an air of unhappiness lingered. Bratislava would never carry the prestige or romance of a Prague posting, and even the buildings knew it.

Michael was behind the wheel. The American embassy was coming up on the right, a block and a half away; early-afternoon traffic snarled the lanes ahead. The key was to crawl along in the right-hand lane, as though intent upon finding a parking space, until the red light ahead changed and the traffic moved freely.

They had gone around the corner twice before this, circling the embassy's position, in an effort to time the signal's changes. Thirty seconds, Michael thought, before red phased into flashing yellow and then blue-green. He was nearly abreast of the embassy door, maybe two yards still to go, when Otto rolled down his window and fired his gun at the lens of the nearest surveillance camera. The lens shattered. The far camera went next, just as it pivoted electronically to sweep the embassy's street front. Two deliberate pops, mundane as a car's backfiring, and the marine guards were suddenly shouting.

The light changed.

Otto hurled the bubble-wrapped videotape at the embassy steps. It skittered across the sidewalk directly in the path of a woman walking an overweight schnauzer; the dog hiccuped hysterically and lunged. One marine leapt forward and shoved the woman to the ground. The other kicked the package back into the street and then fell to the pavement, roaring, “Fire in the hole!”

Michael floored the gas pedal and spun sharply around the corner, rocketing down the side street that ran alongside the embassy building. He dodged one car to the left, careened into the opposite lane, jogged around an oncoming van, and turned left at the next intersection, the flow of traffic being blessedly with him. It was a simple thing now to head for the river.

“Fucking broad daylight.” Otto had rolled up the window and was staring back over his shoulder, intent upon a possible tail. “What the fucks he thinking, huh? That we'll fucking die for him? Just one of those Joes saw our plates — ”

“They didn't see the plates,” Michael said.

“What are you saying? That Mian made a mistake? That he's losing it? I wouldn't let him hear that.”

“What do you know, you useless piece of meat? You got shit for brains. Peas for balls. Next time, I throw you out the window.”

On the pavement in front of the American embassy, nothing exploded. One of the marines got to his feet and studied the package. The schnauzer broke free of its screaming mistress and sank its teeth into the Marine's ankle.

“You did well.”

Stoop-shouldered, with a bald spot as decisive as a Franciscan's on the crown of his head, Bela Horvath was peering into a microscope ocular at a sample of vaccine No. 413 — Mian Krucevic's answer to the mumps epidemic. No one else was in the laboratory. Except for the dark-haired woman with the white scarf wrapped like a bandage around her neck. “Can you tell anything?” Mirjana Tarcic asked him.

“For that, we need time. Trials with mice. DNA scans. Assessment and analysis. But this is a start. The best we could possibly have.”

Bela took off his glasses, leaned toward her as she sat on the lab stool in a pool of light from a Tensor lamp, and kissed her cheek.

“You're very brave, you know.”

She flinched as though the praise stung her.

“And then? When you have your analysis? What will you do with it?”

“Tell Michael. He's the one who wants to know.”

She shook her head.

“It's not enough. We have to tell the world.”

“Tell them what?” Horvath smiled at her indulgently. “That the latest Yugoslav terrorist is quite possibly insane? The world will not be surprised.”

“I did not go to Berlin for Michael,” Mirjana said tautly.

“No. And I do not flatter myself that you went for me. Why exactly did you go, Mirjana?”

Wordlessly, she reached her hands to her throat and unwound the scarf. It was as much a part of this woman as her sharp nose, her writhing dark hair. Beta had not seen her throat in at least five years.

The final length of silk trailed away. Her hand dropped to her side, clenched.

He drew a deep breath, steadied himself, and reached trembling fingers to her cheek. She reared back, as though he might strike her.

“Mirjana,” he whispered in horror. “Who did this to you?”

The wound had healed long ago. But the vicious edge, torn and rewoven like the bride of Frankenstein, stared out accusingly from the pale expanse of her neck.

She had been savaged. It was as though a wild animal had gnawed at her flesh, and what remained was carrion for birds.

“Mian?” he asked.

She began to wind the scarf once more around her throat.

“You remember the Krajina?”

The Krajina. A blood bath in Bosnia, Serb killing Croat, Croat killing Serb.

Thousands died.

“We had gone there, Zoran and I, with the boy.”

“Zoran?”

“My brother. Mian had been missing for weeks. We believed he was dead.” Her dark eyes were flat and unreadable, a look Beta knew of old. “Sarajevo was in ruins, our building had been hit. Zoran was mad to join the Serb forces — he was twenty-three, Bela, filled with rage and hatred. I went with him to the Krajina because I had nowhere else to go. Our parents were dead. There was the boy. I thought we might find protection.”

Protection.

“They came in the night, the Croat killers. They tore us from our beds and set fire to the houses, they shot some where they lay. They took the men in a group to the edge of town, and there they butchered them. And I — I hid my Jozsef in a cellar with some women and their babies; he was only seven, Bela, but they would have killed him — and I went after Zoran and the Croats.”

She pointed to her neck.

“This is how they killed my brother, Bela. With a chain saw.”

“Mian?” Bela whispered.

“He kept them from killing me,” she replied, “when they had started. But he did not stop them from raping me four, ten, sixteen times. And he did not save my brother. I watched Zoran die. He screamed, Bela, all the hatred that was in him — useless. It did not save him. But perhaps it kept him from being afraid.

“You call me brave. But you are a fool, Bela. I am afraid every day and night of my life. Afraid of him.”

“I know. That is why I call you brave. Fear does not stop you. You take the plane to Berlin — ”

“He wanted Jozsef, you see,” she went on, as though he had not spoken. “Mian thought I had left the boy with friends in Sarajevo. He thought the pain and fear would make me tell him, that I would buy my life with my Jozsef's blood. But I told him nothing. He had no choice but to let me live. If I died, he would never find his son again.”

“And he did,” Bela said.

“Four years later, in Belgrade. By that time, The Hague had branded Mian a criminal. No one thought he would show his face in Serb territory again. But it was a mistake to think we were safe. Mian came and stole my boy in the night.”

Bela reached over and snapped off the Tensor lamp.

“You went to Berlin for Jozsef.”

She shook her head.

“I will never see Jozsef again. I went to Berlin for revenge.”

Sophie could feel Michael's presence beyond the bathroom door. He stood guard there, ostensibly to keep her within, and yet she felt as though he really kept Krucevic out. This was absurd, of course; in her circumstances, it was a piece of self-delusion so pitiful it was dangerous. It set up a false sympathy. Michael had done nothing to prevent her infection with Anthrax 3A. He had done nothing, if it came to that, to prevent her kidnapping in the first place. So what was his game? Why was he a member of 30 April at all? And what did he truly mean by those muttered words, “/ will not let you die at this man's hands”!

She almost wished he had said nothing. He had created the illusion of hope, and she needed to fight hope as much as despair. In her mind she had erected a wall of vigilance, one that permitted no hint of the fate that awaited her to penetrate inside. The wall assumed her end would be painful and that her only choice was to meet it with dignity. She burned, nonetheless, with questions.

“What do you do all day?” she asked Jozsef. “When you're not standing vigil over the operation, I mean?”

“Sometimes I read books. Sometimes he lets me watch the television. It depends.”

What had Peter done at twelve? He skateboarded. He rode his bike. He spent a lot of time outdoors on baseball and soccer fields. He played Nintendo and computer games and he bragged to his friends and he never, never spent an entire day hunched in the corner of a dank bathroom in a stranger's house.

“Do you ever play games on a computer?”

His head came up at that.

“You saw it? Tonio's computer?”

“No. Does he have one?”

Jozsef nodded.

“Tonio is a genius.”

“I suppose he told you that himself.”

“My father says it. It is why he allows Tonio near him, although Tonio sings American music and is not to be trusted when the liquor is in him. When Tonio is drunk, he sings louder, and my father orders Otto to beat him. But Papa needs Tonio for his genius.”

“Really,” Sophie said, growing more interested. “And what does Tonio do for your father?”

“He can find his way into any computer system anywhere in the world.” Jozsef was proud. “He once found his way into most of the banks in Switzerland, and into the Italian treasury, but for that he went to prison.”

“Not much of a genius, then, if he got caught.”

“Tonio hated prison so much that he tried to kill himself with a razor. He swears he will not go back again. It is why he fights for my father. To get back at all of them.”

“The Swiss banks?”

“And the West. The West is very evil.”

“I thought the West was your father's only hope. He hates the East, right?”

Jozsef frowned.

“It is complicated, I think. Papa hates the East, certainly, because all evil comes from the East; but the West is evil, too. It must be … What is the word? Washed? ... before it is good again.”

“Cleansed,” Sophie murmured, and thought of the mass graves in Bosnia and Kosovo.

“Cleansed.” Jozsef tested the word on his tongue.

“And so Tonio will cleanse the West with his computer. What bank will he break into next?”

But this, it seemed, was far too direct a question. The boy retreated into himself, once more the guardian of the operation, his fingers worrying the fur of his good-luck charm.

“Who gave you the rabbit's foot?” Sophie asked.

A swift look, pregnant with apprehension.

“Its never out of your hands.”

“I found it.”

“That's probably what you tell your father. It's not the truth.”

He glanced over his shoulder, then leaned toward her.

“My mother gave it to me. For luck during the war, when she was afraid that a sniper's bullet would take me.”

“My son has a good-luck charm,” Sophie lied. “Not a rabbit's foot, but a ring from our naval academy. His father gave it to him before he died. Peter wears it on a chain around his neck, and it never leaves him.”

“His father was a naval person?”

“Curt was a jet pilot a long time ago. In the American navy.”

“Ah.” Jozsef's eyes darkened. Too late, Sophie remembered what American jets had done to Belgrade.

“The ring. It has brought your son good luck?”

Peter's face so much a blend of Curt's and her own that she could no longer see where one began and the other left off flashed briefly before her eyes, then was gone. She felt a pain so sharp she could not speak for several seconds, and then said, “Yes. I think it has brought him luck. Except for his father's death, of course.”

“His father was shot?”

A commonplace question for a terrorist's son.

“He died of cancer.”

“Then perhaps your son forgot to wear his ring that day” Jozsef said with unconscious cruelty. “I have never lost my rabbit's foot, and until I do, I shall be safe. I know that with certainty, so help me God.”

“Is that why you keep it secret? So that the luck won't fade?”

He hesitated and again looked over his shoulder. She knew then that the reason was Mian Krucevic.

“It is all that I have left of my mother,” the boy whispered. “If my father knew where it came from, he would take it away. And what would happen to Mama then?”

“You have to keep her safe, too,” Sophie said with sudden comprehension.

There was a knock on the door and it opened.

“Jozsef,” Michael said. “You're wanted.”

The boy's hand clenched on the scrap of dirty white fur. Then, looking at Sophie, he held his finger to his lips in the age — old gesture for silence. She lifted her finger in return.

Ten Berlin, 5:07 p.m.

Caroline would have loved to raise a glass with Ie tout Berlin herself. Or a bowl of steaming lentil soup at Café Adler, the small bar that still sat opposite what had once been Checkpoint Charlie. Years earlier John Le Carre, a mere David Cornwell employed by the British secret service, had watched the Cold War begin from one of the café's ringside seats. Checkpoint Charlie had been replaced now by something the Germans called an office park; but the Adler was unchanged, smoky with the romance of mittel Europa. It was time, she thought, to retreat into yellow lamplight and scattered tables, to nurse her jet lag with tea and silence. And consider her next move.

Wally refused to let Caroline wander off, however, and he had no intention of returning her to the Hyatt unfed. They drove through the barricaded streets in his brand — new Volvo, zigzagging around the yawning pits of construction that bisected every boulevard. The early darkness of Berlin's autumn had fallen like a theater scrim over the city; rain lashed against the windshield. Caroline's jet lag was so profound she had begun to shake.

“God, it's good to see you, Mad Dog,” Wally said. “What's it been — two years?”

“More. How did you like Budapest?”

“Nice town. But not my best work. It's a thankless job to replace Eric Carmichael. You can't replace him. You just show up and exit stage left as soon as possible.”

He was trying to make her feel good. The truth was, few people in the Agency could recruit or handle agents as effectively as Wally. He was everybody's hometown buddy the boy who'd never had a date to the prom, the one who held your hand late at night in a thousand seedy bars. With his worn wool suits and his graying goatee, Wally was genuine, Wally was sympathetic, Wally was a stand-up kind of guy; and before you knew it, Wally had slipped you some money and a contract and you were spilling your guts to the CIA.

“So I suppose they gave you Berlin as a way of easing you down gently, right? You're one step away from a Bronze Intelligence Star and a comfortable retirement in upstate New York.”

He grimaced at the windshield.

“I look plausible and I can bullshit up the wa zoo Carrie, but I'm not Eric. What he wouldn't do with this mess, huh? Wouldn't he be in his element right now? A rescue plan for the Vice President of the United States. The ultimate cowboy operation. Of course, if Eric had been around, the hit would've never happened. He'd have rolled up 30 April long ago.”

“Except that they rolled him up first,” Caroline said. And added Wally to the list of people Eric had betrayed.

He glanced at her.

“You any closer to pinning these guys for MedAir 901?”

“No. And that investigation is now on the back burner. Sophie Payne has to take precedence.”

“We'll get 'em,” Wally said positively. “We always do. Even if it takes ten years.”

Caroline had breathed, drunk, and slept MedAir 901 for the past thirty months.

Now the mere mention of the plane made her skin crawl. If the investigation continued if Cuddy Wilmot delved deeper into the truth, like a child picking at a scab what exactly would they learn? That Eric had deliberately killed two hundred and fifty-eight people in order to fake his own death? That as far back as the Frankfurt airport a farewell kiss in a crowded concourse she had not the slightest idea who her husband really was?

“There's something I have to ask you, Wally.”

“Yeah?”

“Eric's handling of the 30 April account. In Budapest. Before he died. You must have walked into a nightmare when you took over.”

“How so?” Wally swerved to avoid a jaywalker suddenly illuminated in the headlights, and cursed into the darkness. “From what I remember, Eric was pretty close to penetrating the organization. He had a recruit in Krucevic's inner circle. Or so I thought.”

“In Budapest?”

Wally wasn't trying to stonewall her. He was simply searching his memory for operational matters that belonged to another posting he'd left six months ago.

Then his eyelids flickered and he down shifted for a turn.

“That'd be DBTOXIN,” he said.

Caroline's breath nearly caught in her throat. A code name to attach to her untested source, a piece of the denied DO file. Wally was trusting her with operational Intelligence. She had better take it in stride.

“DBTOXIN?”

“The last fish Eric reeled in. A biologist in Buda. Trained with Krucevic at the university in Leipzig during the old Cold War days. They're pals from way back.”

“Think they're pals still?”

Wally considered.

“Maybe I should get on the horn to Buda and set up some tasking. See whether TOXIN knows where Krucevic is headed.”

“I sure as hell would.”

“Wonder if the guys still on the payroll.”

“So he wasn't blown when Eric died?”

“TOXIN? No way.” Wally glanced at her. “Is that what you've been thinking? That Eric's last recruit betrayed him? And that's why Krucevic blew up his plane? Disaster's not that personal, Carrie, even in this business.”

Time to change the subject.

“Speaking of personal,” she said, “hows Brenda?”

Brenda was Wally's wife. She was a California native, a vegetarian, and a massage therapist. He had met her during language training in Monterey. She was the last person anybody expected to fall in love with Wally, but the hometown — buddy routine had apparently worked. “Brenda left Berlin about a month ago, right after Voekl came to power. Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors, Caroline. She's not sticking around to see whether Fritz is sane.”

“He's never been overtly anti-Semitic, Wally.”

“No German politician can be and survive. Voekl says the right things. But the language is a sort of code, Caroline. Attack the outsider even if it's the Muslims this time and sooner or later, you'll catch up with the Jews.”

Caroline winced.

“Did she take your kids?”

He nodded, gaze fixed on the wet asphalt rippling in the headlights.

“The apartment's like a mausoleum.”

Brenda was important to Wally, but his two boys were his reasons to live.

“That must be tough,” Caroline said.

He shrugged.

“We call each other a lot. And my tour's up in eighteen months. Look, I'm starving. Why don't we grab something and head back to my place?”

“Something” turned out to be wurst from a kosher deli in the Scheunenviertel, the old Jewish quarter of Berlin where Wally had an apartment in a converted nineteenth-century town house. They ate brown bread, dense and nutty, and soft German cheese with the wurst. Wally drank dark beer. They sat on a faded velvet sofa in his high-ceilinged living room and talked of inconsequential things people they knew and hadn't seen in months, recipes for a true Hungarian gulyas, Brenda's practice in the Maryland suburbs. And when the insistent edge of Caroline's hunger had been muted, she wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and sat back to enjoy Wally's wine.

“So do you sweep this place?” she asked, casting her eyes up to the ceiling.

“Every day, with the best possible broom,” he replied. “It's clean. As far as I can tell.”

“No coincidences?”

“None that are more than coincidences. You can talk, Mad Dog.”

“Where do I start, Wally?”

He held her gaze impassively.

“First, tell me why you're here.”

Her pulse throbbed. Don't look like you've got something to hide, she thought.

Wally always knows. Wally was born a spy. She forced a rueful smile. “I'm here because Jack Bigelow is desperate and I happened to write a bio he actually read. The President seems to think a mere analyst can pull Sophie Payne out of a hat. I can't begin to tell you what I'm expected to do. I don't know myself.”

“Then I propose you sit back and watch Tom Shephard.”

“The LegAtt?”

“He's in charge on the ground. You monitor his moves and wait for information. That seems to be what analysts are most comfortable with. Watching and waiting.”

Caroline's smile deepened.

“How you cowboys despise us!”

“Not me,” Wally protested. “I've got nothing but respect for the Headquarters won ks It's just not who I am. I need… to make decisions faster. I need to act. Even if what I do turns out to be wrong. You analysts demand so much certainty, you know? Before you're willing to move off a dime.”

Certainty, Caroline thought. It had nothing to do with the shadow world of Intelligence. Intelligence was predictive. Intelligence was fact spurred by instinct, a wing flying on a prayer. Wally was right. Analysts were too damn obsessed with their own security. Too concerned with getting it right to say anything at all.

But time and facts were two things she lacked in the midst of Eric's disaster.

She'd have to clutch at the puzzle pieces before they materialized, trust her gut as well as her brain.

“Not that I mean you, Caroline,” Wally amended, “I remember Mad Dog. I know what you're capable of. A threat and a grenade, right when it counts. Now that's, moving off a dime.”

Mad Dog. A trickle of adrenaline, recalled from the past, floated down Caroline's spine. Had she ever been quite so reckless, so determined, so insane as her nickname would suggest?

She had. She had never forgotten what drove her during the months of counterterrorism training, nor how the momentary madness had felt. That knowledge was like an uneasy knife pricking at her brain. The force she could not control. Her demon.

She shook off Wally's words and said, “Who've you got working the terrorist account?”

“In the station? Fred Leicester. You know Fred?”

“The name. We've never crossed paths.”

“He was out trolling the streets today in the hope of turning up a lead.”

In a plumber's van full of electronics, probably. Leicester had gone through six months of tradecraft training at the Farm with Eric, tailing unsuspecting tourists through the streets of Williamsburg, Virginia. What she knew of Fred took about twenty words to say: He was a well-meaning putz. He believed the CIA was the free world's last, best hope. And his tradecraft was shit. Fred was persona non grata waiting to happen, the worst fate that could be visited on a case officer's career. When you were PNG'd, the world took notice. Your diplomatic immunity was stripped and you were exposed as a spy in your host country's newspapers. You went home in disgrace, your cover permanently blown. And in most cases, you never worked abroad again.

“Fred is the one developing our girl in the VaccuGen office,” Wally said. “And he follows the local Palestinians. There's always a floating crap game where the rag heads are concerned. Paul — the kid you met today — does a few jobs now and then. Dead drops, brush passes .. . It'll never be Berlin in the Cold War, but its good experience.”

“So you've got some terrorist assets here.”

“Not a whole lot to speak of.” Even with Caroline, Wally operated on a need-to-know basis. “Most of that stuff, frankly, has been handled out of Bonn and the Frankfurt base up until now. Mad Dog, what are you looking for?”

“Mahmoud Sharif.”

“Sharif?”

“Yeah. Palestinian. Bomb tech. Internationally known criminal. He wouldn't happen to be a volunteer, would he?”

“A controlled asset? Sharif? Are you crazy?”

“Just curious.”

He shook his head.

“Not that it wouldn't be the coup of coups to recruit him, don't get me wrong. But Sharif'd probably slit his own throat before he'd betray Allah.”

“A true believer, huh?”

“Well, there are true believers and then there are fanatics. Mahmoud's not dumb enough to blow himself up for the glory of the jihad, Mad Dog. He just makes the bombs and lets the fanatics smuggle 'em on the planes.”

“How unsporting. By karmic law, every bomb maker should be required to self-destruct with one of his own devices.”

“Sharif's been on pretty good behavior lately. Works his carpentry business during the day, runs a sculpture gallery over in the Tacheles by night.”

“The what?”

“Tacheles.” Wally said it with relish. “Isn't that a great word? Yiddish, for 'let's get down to business.”

“Mahmoud Sharif works in a place with a Yiddish name? Jesus.”

“It's the abandoned building on Oranienburger Strasse. You've seen it size of a shopping mall, derelict ever since the war. Cafes, experimental art, nightclubs tres nouveau, tres hip, even for hip Berlin. The concerts in summertime practically blow this whole quarter away.”

“And he owns a sculpture gallery. That's got to be a front. I bet he's running arms or drugs out of there.”

“He's a reformed individual, our Mahmoud. He's got kids to consider.” Wally's voice was heavy with sarcasm. “But why the interest in Sharif, Carrie? He can't be involved with the Payne kidnapping. No Palestinian would do a job for Mian Krucevic.”

“His name turned up in DESIST.” Wally set down his beer bottle.

“Turned up how?”

“I don't know. Cuddy Wilmot said his Berlin phone number tracked with 30 April.”

Wally whistled.

“Hizballah and the neo-Nazis. I don't believe it, Caroline. Sharif did not take out the Brandenburg.”

“Some link must be there. The computer found it.”

“Then the computer's wrong. It's happened before.”

“But somebody with knowledge and skill made the Gate's device, Wally. This was a surgical hit. Most of the surrounding buildings are intact. You don't get that with a barrel of fertilizer and kerosene.”

“No. You don't. But neither do you walk up to Mahmoud and say, "Hey, brother, done any jobs for the infidel lately?"”

“There are subtler ways of gathering information.”

“Maybe you should run this by Shephard. He's got good ties to the BKA the Bundesknminalamt, the German federal police. Maybe they could tap Sharif's phones. They can do it legally now, did you know that?”

Caroline nodded. For five decades the German constitution had forbidden wiretaps, a reaction to the Gestapo persecution of the Nazi era. That had changed a few years ago, when German prosecutors voiced their frustration at being denied the routine evidence a hundred other countries collected on suspected criminals.

Wiretaps.

With a surge of vertigo, Caroline felt the broad plank floor of Wally's living room careen upward. She'd just handed Wally Mahmoud Sharif — whose phone lines might lead directly to Eric. Stupid, stupid.

Dare would never forgive her. She pressed a hand to her forehead, willing the exhaustion of jet lag to recede.

“Are you sure you want to share this stuff with the BKA?” she asked.

“You mean DESIST? We probably won't. We can offer up Sharif for other reasons. But I'll let Tom handle that. He's pretty used to working liaison. Which reminds me. You'll see Tom tomorrow at the Interior Ministry. Bombing meeting. I'll pick you up at the Hyatt at ten-thirty.”

“You might want to check with Scottie Sorensen first,” Caroline suggested feebly.

“About the wiretapping, I mean. Just to be sure. I wouldn't want to end — run Scottie's authority.”

“Okay.” From the sound of Wally's voice, he was humoring her and trying not to feel annoyed. It was rare for an analyst to second-guess the station chief. “What exactly is worrying you, Mad Dog? The BKA are pretty good at intercepts, believe me. Makes you wonder how often they practiced under the old law.”

The floorboards steadied, her vertigo receded.

“Who are they tapping these days? Gastarbeiters?”

He laughed brusquely.

“Don't need wiretaps for them. Guest workers have no citizenship rights. Under the Voekl program of repatriation, you just frame 'em and deport 'em as fast as you can.”

“You really don't like the chancellor, do you, Wally?”

“What can I say, Carrie? I don't trust Voekl's politics. And he's a dangerous man.”

“Dangerous how?”

Wally took a pull on his beer.

“You're the leadership analyst.”

“I follow terrorists, not mainstream politicians.”

“Well, then maybe you should broaden your scope.”

She studied him over the rim of her wineglass.

“What are you saying?”

“Sometimes the boundaries between the state and the fringe aren't so clear. Look at Arafat. One day he's a guerilla hero, next he's a virtual head of state. Or Syria's Assad. How many nut sos with a gun did that guy fund from the presidential palace, huh? I won't even mention Qaddafi.”

“You think Voekl is funding terrorists?”

“Maybe not terrorists. I would never go so far as to suggest he's behind 30 April. He's not that stupid, Carrie. But there's been a rash of hate crimes throughout Central Europe. We think that Uncle Fritz's party is bankrolling some of them.”

“You think?”

Wally tossed his bottle in the trash.

“I know, I know — I need the evidence. All that certainty you analysts love. I'm working on it.”

“What kind of hate crimes? Guest workers? Petty stuff?”

“Not entirely.” Wally suddenly looked uneasy.

“If it were domestic incidents alone, we'd be inclined to sit back and bide our time. Chancellors come and go.

But this stuff is bleeding into other people's backyards. Take the Cafe Avram, for instance.”

“Café Avram.”

“Jewish revival place in old Krakow. Ever been to Krakow?”

Caroline shook her head.

“It's about three and a half hours due east as the crow flies. Eleven hours, if you're lucky, by the Polish roads. I drove over right after we landed here, back in early August. I wanted to see Auschwitz, or rather Brenda did. Some of her people died there.” He leaned forward, hands clasped idly between his knees.

“The camp and the rail yards are sitting right there in the middle of this gorgeous farmland, Carrie. Rolling hills, gnarled old trees, a man walking behind a horse — drawn plow, straight out of War and Peace. Some of the farmers were burning leaves. The essence of autumn, right? Only you draw it in with your breath and you can't help but think, the smell of burning. Ashes and burning. Everybody in that countryside must have smelled the ovens, and they went right on plowing.” He paused abruptly.

Caroline prompted, “Café Avram.”

“Right. The old Jewish quarter of Krakow is beautiful. Spielberg filmed Schindler's List there, you know? Café Avram had become a sort of cultural center. Jewish music, kosher food. A tourist mecca. Anyway, three months ago, somebody torched it. The owners slept over the shop. Both were killed by the fire. And their three kids.”

“And you think Voekl's party was behind the arson?”

“The Warsaw station is looking into it. They cabled us for information.”

Caroline frowned.

“But you said that no German politician can afford to be anti-Semitic. And why would a German party be operating beyond its borders?”

“All politics is local, Caroline. It's just the money that's international.”

“You actually suspect that the Social Conservatives are funding hate crimes in neighboring countries? But Wally, the potential for blowback is immense!”

“The Social Conservatives are funding local chapters of their own German party in small towns throughout the region,” Wally said tensely. “The SC is in Poland, its in Slovakia, it's even showing up in poorer sections of the Czech Republic and Hungary. It's a party that feeds on economic disaffection, Caroline, and there's plenty of disaffection in Central Europe. Communism destroyed their industry; now democracy is destroying their markets. Nothings easier for these poor bastards than to pick a leader who will blame the outcast of the moment and voila, everyone has a target for their anger.” He glanced at her.

“And there's a lot of anger, Carrie. I'm telling you, it scares the hell out of me.”

“So in Krakow, the outcasts were eating at Café Avram?”

“Sure. It takes one to know one. Jews have been the gastarbeiters of Poland for four hundred years.”

Caroline set down her wine. The alcohol was blurring her senses.

“Nobody likes Voekl, nobody trusts him .. . and yet here he is. Running the damn country. How did that happen, Wally?”

“There was a convenient death.”

Gerhard Schroeder. And 30 April had murdered him.

“Voekl was there to take advantage of it,” she said. “He'd amassed a considerable amount of power first.”

“Which means that your premise is wrong, Caroline. Somebody likes Voekl very much indeed. And they voted en masse.”

“More economic disaffection?”

“Maybe. Among the Ossies. Voekl comes from the east, you know. His claim to fame was running the best explosives plant in the GDR. He was an old Party hack before he was the face of the New European Union. But it's more than that. He's charming. He's plausible. He's telegenic in a media age.”

“If you like your men in jackboots.”

Wally laughed.

“Come on, Carrie! The man's a wet dream of Aryan motherhood! Silver hair, blue eyes. The Italian suits, the flashing white teeth. You've got to look beyond the furious rhetoric. Germans like their rhetoric delivered in a fist-pounding fashion.”

“He's been married three times.”

“So he gets out the women's vote. And that kid of his Kiki is like a poster child for family values. She's cute, she's sweet, she's as blond as they come. Go into any hausfraus kitchen, from Kiel to Schleswig-Holstein, and Fritz Voekl's picture is hanging somewhere near the stove. Half of Germany is in love with him.”

“Half of Germany was in love with Hitler.”

“Then we've got to place our hope and our covert funding with the other half,” Wally said bluntly. “A remarkable Resistance sprang up here during the Nazi years. It got zero help from outside, and it was brutally suppressed. But there was no CIA then.”

The CIA: Last, Best Hope for the Free World. Right. There were still some people in Operations who believed it. Caroline considered Wally and all those nights of sympathy wasted in a thousand badly lit bars, his hometown-boy routine threadbare and compromised, and felt a surge of affectionate pity. Thank God there were still people like Wally around to do the Agency's shit work people with integrity. Otherwise, how would the world know what to betray?

Wally knew. He had figured out right and wrong years ago and chosen his side.

Caroline only hoped he'd chosen well.

“The world has changed,” she told him.

“Voekl could never be as obvious as Hitler. Europe won't let him.”

“Voekl's not interested in Europe.” Wally flicked away her objections as though they were gnats.

“He's interested in power at home. And to shore it up, he needs a new enemy.”

“The Turks?”

“The entire Islamic world, Mad Dog. According to Voekl, Islam has torn apart the Balkans, the Central Asian republics, North Africa, the Middle East. And who's to argue? It's pretty tough to find an Arab apologist these days.”

“Some campaign platform,” she muttered.

“Listen.” Wally raised a forefinger and shook it under her nose.

“People said that about the National Socialists in 1930. By 1933, the Nazis had their hands around Germany's neck. Never underestimate the lure of the Big Lie.”

The Big Lie.

Like the one she was living herself. Otto was snoring on Olga scrounging for food in the kite, Otto was snoring on Olga Teciak's couch. Vaclav was scrounging for food in the kitchen. Tonio was bent over a laptop computer, absorbed in the numbers he was crunching;

Michael stood guard before the bathroom door. Mian Krucevic pulled the carved antique chair close to the television screen and watched the evening news. A restless anger fretted at his entrails.

The lead story was Vice President Payne's disappearance. The White House refused to release any information about her captors or their demands, citing the sensitivity of the issue, but media speculation was rife. Most of the world's terrorism experts had deconstructed the Brandenburg hit and concluded it was entirely engineered to mask the political abduction. The FBI was analyzing footage of the helicopter's occupants to determine their identity, but the German police maintained that the terrorists were Turkish. An intensive interrogation of Berlin's resident alien population was under way. A curfew had been imposed on Turkish neighborhoods. The image shifted to the Brandenburg Gate, where police guards in black and red and gold surrounded the bomb crater.

Tourists crowded to the international lens, and the Volksturm looked hostile.

Eleven Bratislava, 6:37 p.m.

“Michael,” Krucevic said over his shoulder. “Bring Jozsef. He should see this. Hurry, before the footage ends.”

It was important that the boy understand the effects of violence the political as well as the actual. What Krucevic had caused to be done in Berlin was a direct challenge to every Berliner's comfort. Krucevic had brought fear into all their lives; he had returned them to the state of nature, when every day survived must be considered a form of victory. Jozsef should be made to understand what power truly was.

“Look at that,” he said, sensing the boy behind him.

No response.

He looked around and saw his son's white face, Michaels hand on his shoulder.

Both were staring at a blond woman whose camera was pointed at a Volksturm guard; the guard was screaming at her in German. In another instant the uniformed man might snatch the camera away.

“Americans,” Krucevic said bitterly. “They behave like children wherever they go.”

He moved to turn off the set, but Michael said, “Wait.”

It sounded oddly like an order. There was a set expression on his ashen face, an expression Krucevic had seen only once before, when Michael was on the verge of killing a man. Looking at him, Krucevic forgot to be insulted and said quickly, “What?”

“Bombs in Prague. There were bombs in Prague after we left.” The fixed look wavered and vanished.

“The Czechs called for German assistance. Could be why the border was tight.”

Krucevic considered this. It would be beyond Fritz Voekl's control, of course, what the Czechs actually did. But a miscalculation nonetheless.

“Would you like to fly tonight, Jozsef?” he asked the boy playfully. “A small plane, something Vaclav can manage? If you're very good, I'll let you take the controls.”

His son gave him a look so dark and glassy with fever that he was appalled.

Krucevic rose to his feet, hand outstretched, but the boy's eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the floor.

“Get him to the woman's bed,” Krucevic snapped at Michael. “He's sick. Can't you see that he's sick?”

Without a word, Michael scooped up the child and carried him away. Fear jangled in Krucevic's brain. He bit back a curse and went in search of his antibiotics.

The little girl named Annicka was huddled in a corner of the bedroom with a blanket, murmuring to a doll. Olga hovered in the doorway, one hand clutching the neck of her robe tightly, as though the men might rape her. It was ludicrous, Krucevic thought as he bent over his unconscious son. Whatever beauty the woman had once possessed, whatever had attracted Vaclav Slivik, was long since gone. She was too thin, too tired. Too beaten in spirit to be anything but abysmally depressing. He slid the needle into Jozsef's vein and sent a small prayer with it.

Olga came to stand silently beside him.

“What do you want?”

She swallowed nervously. Jozsef moaned and his head turned once on the pillow.

He was still unconscious. If the anthrax had re surged … if the antibiotic wasn't working .. . But it must be working. He, Krucevic, had designed it himself.

“Well?” he asked Olga.

“I want to send my daughter to my sister's.”

“No.”

“But Annicka goes there whenever I work!”

“You're not working tonight.”

Her head drooped like a condemned woman's.

“Mian,” said Vaclav from somewhere behind her. “There will be talk. Olga has a concert tonight. If she does not appear, the phone will start ringing. There will be knocks on the door, explanations — ”

“Yes, yes,” Krucevic snapped. “When is the performance?”

Hope flared in her eyes.

“Eight o'clock. I usually leave at six-thirty.”

He rose from the bedside and studied her face. Olga's fingers clutched at the robe convulsively. He reached out, irritated by the terror, and took her icy hand in his.

“Then go,” he said. “Do everything you normally would. Except for the child. She stays here until you return. Understand?”

“But my sister — ”

“Tell her Annicka is sick. Tell her you have asked a neighbor to sit with her. Tell her anything but the truth.” His grip tightened on Olga's wrist. “If you tell the truth — to your sister or anyone — your little girl dies.”

Olga's eyes dilated, then shifted imploringly to Vaclav's face. Krucevic released her hand.

“Get dressed,” he said.

Sophie lay alone on the tile floor of the bathroom and stared at the ceiling.

The patch of damp she had seen upon first waking had darkened with the failing light. It seemed to have grown, too — it was growing still, as she watched, like a visible manifestation of some inward cancer, the edges creeping remorselessly into the dull gray plaster.

A wave of heat rolled over her. Was her mind betraying her? Was she getting delirious? The point was to focus on something other than herself, something beyond her fever, beyond the room. She searched her brain for a safe finger hold a pit in the rock she might cling to.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Then something, something — twilight and black night .. .

In me thou see' st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie

As the death-bed whereon it must expire

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

She shuddered, coughed. And tasted blood.

The door opened.

“Mrs. Payne.” Krucevic's face bobbed and swam in the dim light; the door frame he leaned against wavered like a snake.

“Where is Jozsef?” she asked.

“Jozsef is ill.” Did she imagine it, or was his voice less in command? He held aloft a hypodermic needle.

“And so, I imagine, are you.”

“Don't touch me!”

“I have no choice.” There it was, the strain behind the words, faint as a ghost.

The man was afraid.

“This is medicine, Mrs. Payne. You require it.”

She began to struggle, but a great weight had pinned her legs, her arms were like lead, her sight was reeling. Krucevic is afraid. He grasped her wrist and thrust the sweatshirt sleeve upward.

He is afraid.

The pinprick of a needle in her vein.

He had not expected this, then. The fallibility of modern science. The spiking of his own power. Not just Sophie Payne was at risk now — not just the hated hostage — but his own son.

This thou perceive st which makes thy love more strong

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Twelve Bratislava, 6:45 p.m.

Olga Teciak fled from her apartment with her cello case dragging behind her like a corpse. She fled with her blood pounding in her veins and tears welling in her eyes. In all the years of her life, years when Slovakia was a police state and years when it was a democracy in name only, she had never felt the depth of terror that animated her at this instant. The police state had never threatened her child.

She tossed the cello into the back of her car and drove out into the night, through the chasms of ugly concrete buildings, all of them alike. Rain lashed down, and a dark gray service van — electricity? plumbing? — blundered heavily into a puddle ten feet away and sent a sheet of water slapping against her windshield. She jerked backward, as though the dirty brown stream had struck her in the face. The van shouldered past. It went on, the driver glancing neither to right nor left.

Olga sped over the bridge that spanned the Danube. She did not spare a glance for the houseboats pulled up along its banks. She ignored the floodlit ramparts of Bratislava Castle; the fortress had never saved her from anything. She drove toward the city's heart, debating within her mind what exactly she should do.

“Mian,” said Vaclav Slivik quietly. He was positioned at the window, staring through a slit in the drawn drapes. A pair of high-powered binoculars hung around his neck. Behind him, the lights were doused. With the coming of night and Olga's release had also come caution; they would post a guard until she had returned, until they could leave.

“What is it?”

Vaclav held a finger to his lips and with his other hand motioned Krucevic to his side. The two men stared down at the darkened parking lot. Vaclav pointed.

On the curb opposite the building's main drive, the dark gray van was almost invisible in the night; Krucevic could make out nothing but a broad, square hump. An apparently deserted hump. The hairs rose along the back of his neck.

The listeners had arrived. They had tracked him through Greta Oppenheimer's phone call; soon they would be searching the building with electronic ears for the voice that matched their profile. Criminal stupidity. Why had he waited for darkness? He should have gone when he had the chance.

They would not find him immediately. But in a matter of minutes, the building would be surrounded. The roof, a landing pad for commandos. And he had let Olga Teciak go.

“The fire escape,” Krucevic murmured in Vaclav's ear. “There must be one. Take the car and find that woman while you still can. Then meet us tomorrow in Budapest. Go!”

The Slovak State Orchestra was performing that evening in the opera house, not far from the U.S. embassy, where even now, the CIA station chief was in communication with the team in the dark gray van. Olga Teciak looked at her watch. She had twenty-seven minutes until curtain time, which was in fact no time at all. At this very moment, she should be pulling into her parking space, unloading the cello, and tuning her strings amidst the gabble of her section's voices. She drove past the opera and the Carlsbad Hotel (where the Soviet-era casino lights gleamed red and white in the darkness), past the U.S. embassy building with its invisible guards. Rain pelted her windshield, rain that held the promise of snow, and she mopped frantically with her bare hand at the steam clouding the underside of the glass. Unable to come to a decision.

They did not simply let you walk into the embassy, of that she was certain. It was United States territory, after all, and no one could merely walk into the United States. You required powerful friends, influence, a great deal of money or the proper kind of blackmail. Olga's life was too ordinary for these.

She drove aimlessly, her vision clouded by the fog on her windshield. Then she swerved abruptly and brought the car to a halt at the curb. She fumbled in her purse for a token.

A dash through the rain in her high heels and long dress, the coat pulled willy-nilly around her, no protection at all. The icy rain streamed through her chignon and down her neck as she reached the pay phone. Her hair would be ruined now, the hem of her formal gown splashed with mud. Impossible to appear on-stage even if she threw down the receiver and drove back like a maniac. She willed her numbed fingers to thrust the token through the slot. Her die was cast. She asked for the number of the U.S. embassy.

The operator gave it to her in a neutered voice. The operator had no conception of what it was like to leave a terrified little girl in a house full of violent men, to leave your only child because you had no choice. The operator did not know what this phone call would cost.

“Embassy of the United States,” said a woman in abominable Slovak.

“Please,” Olga said, the tears suddenly crowding her throat, “you have got to help me and I have not much time. I must speak to your ambassador.”

“The ambassador is engaged this evening.”

“But the woman you are looking for is in my house, and they are going to kill her. They are going to kill my daughter, they are going to kill me...”

A hand slammed down abruptly on the phone's cradle, cutting the connection. The line went dead.

Olga gasped. Vaclav Slivik stood behind her, a quizzical smile on his face. She must look wild, and pathetic, Olga thought: wet snarls of hair about her forehead, mascara streaming.

“You're soaked, my dear,” he said. “That will never do for the performance. What are you thinking of?”

“I — I needed to call a friend,” Olga said.

She replaced the useless receiver, her fingers clenched as though she could not bear to relinquish hope.

Vaclav grasped her arm.

“You're in no condition to drive. It has been a long day.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then perhaps I should take you to the opera.”

His fingers tightened around her coat sleeve; she was a rabbit in a snare. She stumbled at the curb. Rainwater drenched her shoes. Vaclav pulled her upright without a word and steered her toward his car.

It was parked a few feet behind her own, and in his haste to reach her, Vaclav had left the headlights on. They flooded the backseat of Olga's car and the cello case huddled there like a third person. Vaclav didn't bother to fetch the instrument. They both knew she would never need it again.

Otto Weber ignored the fire escape — no one who intended to appear innocent before the eyes of a dark gray van would consider climbing by stealth down the back of the building. Otto walked out the front door, in a drab old raincoat borrowed from Olga's closet, with a serviceable black nylon briefcase slung over his shoulder. He wore a knit cap on his shaved head. And for the first time in a long time, he looked possessed of a certain decency.

He strolled casually down the drive, head bowed in the rain, his eyes on the puddles forming at his feet. His gloved hands swung idly at his sides. He seemed oblivious to gray vans and their questionable occupants, although he was making directly for their position at the curb.

He went up to the blue car sitting two spaces behind the van and groped in his pockets for keys. They would be studying him in the rearview mirror now, ready to drive on at a moments notice. He let his eyes drift indifferently over the bulky old vehicle, its lettering scratched and the bumper eaten with rust, and then his expression changed to one of joyful interest. He had need of an electrician himself. He had been meaning to call one today. He sauntered up to the driver's window and tapped on the glass with one large knuckle, grinning foolishly at the guy behind the wheel.

They were polite to a fault, these Americans.

When the window slid down, Otto put a bullet in the driver's brain. His companion died reaching for a gun.

Thirteen Berlin, 9:17 p.m.

Wally called a taxi for Caroline and gave the driver instructions to take her directly to the Hyatt. But the moment the lights of Sophienstrasse dwindled in the distance, she tapped on the man's window and told him in passable German to pull over. She handed him some marks and set off alone, on foot, into the darkness of the Jewish Quarter. She was looking for Oranienburger Strasse and Mahmoud Sharif.

The abandoned building that Wally had called the Tacheles was really the remnant of a much larger structure that had been mostly destroyed by Allied bombs. It rose five stories above the street and consumed most of a city block. Neon lights and clouds of steam punctuated the Berlin darkness. She stopped in front of Obst und Gemiise, a restaurant across the street, and studied the wreck of a building from a safe distance. It was the sort of structure a giant might assemble as a play toy, all tumbled blocks of concrete, jagged frames where there had once been windows, a few massive Art Nouveau figures still poised on the ends of columns. Arches that trailed away into nothing. An elevator shaft exposed to sky. Most of the windows were boarded up or bricked over; the scorch marks of intense heat still flickered up the walls. Derelict pipes and the remains of a refrigerator were scattered on the ground, found art. And from within came the sounds of laughter, a racking cough, the current of voices.

The helmeted Volksturm guards were there, of course, pacing along the broken sidewalk with machine guns raised. But the policemen seemed less menacing against a backdrop of smoky light and laughter. It was remarkable, Caroline thought, that they even allowed the Tacheles to exist. It looked like the kind of building the Fritz Voekis of the world tore down.

There were several entrances punched in the building's side. She chose one, hitched her purse higher on her shoulder, and dashed across Oranienburger Strasse.

A rusted iron door, standing ajar. She slid inside and paused an instant, allowing her eyes to adjust. Before her, a corridor tunneled into the Tacheles, bare bulbs swinging from an outlet in the ceiling. She followed it until it dove right and presented her with a flight of stairs; then she went up, heels clattering on the bare iron treads.

The second floor was less claustrophobic. A gallery ran around the open stairwell, with doorways opening off it. Some were dark, some glaringly lit. A jangle of guitar chords floated through one yawning entry; Caroline peered inside.

A man stood before a table, blowtorch raised. He wore a steelworker's metal helmet and canvas overalls, but his arms were bare; a hammer and sickle was tattooed on his right bicep. Before him on the table was a mass of metal; beyond it, entirely nude, a woman posed in a chair. A boom box played at maximum volume — German techno rave — and the man was shouting his own lyrics, enthusiastically off-key. A window was open to the night, cold enough to raise gooseflesh on the model's thigh; her teeth, when she glanced at Caroline, were chattering.

Caroline turned to go, but the woman in the chair barked an unintelligible word, and the man wheeled, thrusting his visor skyward, and shouted in her direction.

Caroline stopped in the doorway. The blowtorch was switched off. Another word in broken German, and his bloodshot eyes were staring at Caroline from a face streaming with sweat.

She managed a few sentences. She was looking for an artist — a man who worked in wood. Did he know someone named Mahmoud? He jerked one thumb over his shoulder, toward the other end of the building, and then pointed at the floor. Downstairs.

The naked woman in the chair lit a cigarette, as though it might keep her warm.

Caroline followed the thread of a Billie Holiday song filtering into the corridor, followed it down another flight of steps, the darkness viscous like fog against her face. Bye, bye, blackbird, Holiday sang, her voice as plaintive as midnight rain. And then Caroline glimpsed the door to the café.

It was named, incongruously, America.

A yawning hole, a botte de nuit, dense with conversation and smoke. The ceiling was very high and painted black. So were the walls. Against them, canvases of massive figures sprang to life, more vivid than the people ranged around tables below. A woman with red hair and blue fingernails tapped cigar ash into her wineglass. Caroline was sharply aware of loneliness. Of herself, poised on the threshold of a place not her own. And of the pulse in her head, beating faster now.

There was an empty stool near the corner of the bar. She made her way through the tables, her shoes sticking to the spilled beer on the floor.

“What can I get you?” the bartender asked in German.

“Radeburger,” she replied. A Dresden beer she remembered Eric ordering.

He nodded and slapped a glass on the counter. Poured the beer with precision, as only a German can, until the head was two inches thick. She was afraid to lift the glass, afraid of making a fool of herself, and so she smiled at him and laid some money on the counter. He took it without a word and punched some buttons on the register, his eyes scanning the room beyond. All his movements were quick and thoughtless; he was a man who knew his own mind. He was also a careful man.

The cash register faced outward and there was a mirror over the bar, so that on the rare occasions when he had to turn his back, he could see what needed to be seen. Was the fear of crime so universal in Berlin despite the Volksturm parading on the sidewalk, despite the heedless woman sitting naked upstairs or was the caution habitual, something to do with this man's life?

“Do you speak English?” she asked. He shook his head, unsmiling.

“You're from the States,” he said, in German again. “American girl.”

Caroline nodded.

He whistled tunelessly under his breath, eyes roving. As she followed his gaze in the mirror over the bar, she realized he was watching the helmeted police.

“Do you know a man named Mahmoud Sharif?”

The whistling died away, and his eyes slid back to her face.

“Mahmoud? Why do you want Mahmoud?”

“You know him?”

He turned away from her without a word and disappeared through a doorway to the left of the bar. Caroline found the courage to lift her beer. After her first sip, she gained confidence. After the second, an older and much larger man was standing where the bartender had been.

“You're the lady who asked about Mahmoud.”

This time, the words were in English.

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“Do you?” The man was white-haired, with an enormous mustache curling up at the tips and muddy brown eyes swimming in false tears.

“I weep for you,” the walrus said: “I deeply sympathize.” He wore a dingy shirt with a soiled collar. A brown apron spattered with grease. Was he a short-order cook or the café owner?

Caroline sat a little straighter and set the beer glass down in front of her.

“Mahmoud and I have a friend in common. This friend asked to be remembered to Mahmoud.”

The man regarded her steadily, as though her next words were preordained. And so she said them.

“Could I leave a message?”

“A note, perhaps?”

“That would be fine.”

Without taking his eyes from her face, the Walrus pulled a pad of paper from the pocket of his apron and a pen from behind his ear.

“There. You write it, I'll see that he gets it.”

“When?”

He shrugged.

“If time were unimportant, I could find Mahmoud myself tomorrow.”

“When time is important, it is also very expensive,” the Walrus said.

She handed him a five-hundred-mark note.

He pocketed it without a glance.

“I will deliver your message tonight.”

Caroline wrote:

I am Michael Shaughnessy's cousin from London. I have come in search of him on urgent family business. Michael has told me that you know where he may be found.

I will be waiting in Alexanderplatz by the base of the television tower tomorrow morning at 8:00.

She signed the name Jane Hathaway. Her back stopped Agency identity.

She folded the piece of paper precisely in two and handed it to the Walrus. He tucked it without comment into the capacious apron pocket and vanished through the darkened doorway. In an instant, the younger man had reappeared, his face impassive, his eyes still roaming over the café.

She left the Radeburger unfinished on the counter.