The Cutout

One Budapest, 3:14 a.m.

The American Vice President had seen enough of 30 April's hangouts to recognize a legitimate operational base. The one in Budapest was no improvised effort, no apartment borrowed from a cast-off lover. This was a nerve center, Sophie knew, entirely windowless, possibly underground. It had a private garage with cameras and infrared detection devices mounted almost invisibly above the doors; it had comfortable furniture, beds, showers, a sound system, a supply of food and clothing, a weapons arsenal, and an impenetrable security cordon ensuring that a klaxon would sound throughout the complex if she attempted escape.

With the prison came a certain amount of freedom. She was allowed to move about her bedroom and bath — nothing in either room could be used to effect escape or suicide. She lay on the bed and stretched her hands toward the ceiling. And felt the surface pressing down. In such a place it was impossible to guess the hour of day. Whether it was raining out or not. Whether the world believed she was already dead.

“You will be comfortable?” Jozsef asked her anxiously. The bruises under his eyes were painful to see. Sophie's fever had abated; she was weak, she ached for sleep, but her thoughts no longer rippled like silk through a liquid brain.

“Comfortable enough,” she answered.

He smiled the swift, tentative look she'd come to recognize and turned away.

“I will bring you breakfast in a little while. Not like in Bratislava. Real food. And coffee.”

There was the sound of running water, an oddity in the muffled underground atmosphere; it seemed to come from within the wall. And something else: a voice.

She turned.

“Michael,” Jozsef explained simply.

“He talks to himself in the shower. Your bathroom is next to his.”

Sophie nodded.

“I think I may shower myself.” How long had it been? Two, three days? How long since the explosion in the square? Was anyone in the United States doing anything?

“If you need me, press the button.” Jozsef pointed to a panel near the bed.

“The black one, not the red. The black is an intercom, and you can ask for help. Or for a book. Whatever you need.”

“A newspaper would be nice.”

The boy hesitated.

“That is a little difficult.”

Because it would tell her too much? Or because one of the men would have to leave the compound to buy it?

Jozsef took a remote control from his pocket. The door to her room slid back, then slid shut behind him. She was entombed.

She forced herself to move and went into the bathroom. Michael was still talking. She sat down on the toilet seat and leaned her head against the tiled wall.

It was never possible that we would let her go, Jozsef's voice whispered in her brain. The woman named Olga and her child were dead. With them had died Sophie's final hope.

She had seen my father's face.

Sophie, too, had seen Krucevic. She could describe him and his men. Whatever the dance of negotiation that went on above her head whatever Jack Bigelow was prepared to do or say she would never be released.

And so the knot of grief like a clenched fist. Grief for the unknown woman and her daughter, of course, but grief, too, for the stupid hope that had sustained her. She had fabricated a dream that Michael could be trusted, that he was a traitor buried deep in the Krucevic camp. She knew now that he was as brutal as the man he served.

He was still talking to himself on the other side of the bathroom wall. Sophie closed her eyes and listened.

Caroline awoke, as she always did when adjusting to European time, in the middle of the night. She lay in the sterile darkness of the hotel room and listened to the whoosh of an elevator shaft, the rumble of ice from a machine in the corridor. She was twenty-three floors above the streets of Berlin; she might have been anywhere. She had laid down the first planks in a trap meant for her husband, without knowing exactly what to do if he happened to fall into it. She had exhibited herself to television networks; she had asked the Walrus to contact Mahmoud Sharif. She had set a process in motion; and for an instant, alone in the hotel room dark, she felt a shaft of panic. What if that process spun out of control? What if Eric came headlong when she least expected him?

As though she had willed it, the telephone rang at her bedside.

She groped for the receiver.

“You're a difficult woman to find.”

She could not speak. Then her pulse, which seemed to have stopped for an instant, throbbed wickedly through her veins.

“This is the fifth hotel I've called,” Eric said, “and it's not easy for me to use a phone.”

She sat up.

“Jesus God, where are you?”

“In the bathroom. Hear the water?” He must have held the cell phone up to a shower head; she had the dizzying sensation of being run through the wash.

“I have a habit of humming to myself in here. It masks a host of ills. Monologues, tirades, illicit phone calls. Particularly at three a.m. when everyone else is asleep.”

“Eric, where the hell have you been for the past two years?”

“Two years, six months, and thirteen days, Mad Dog. I think you know. I've been with him. The guy you're looking for. And he's been all over the map.”

“Christ,” she breathed. “You sure do take this shit in stride.”

“I killed a child today, Mad Dog.”

Caroline tightened her grip on the receiver. “She was six years old. Her name was Annicka. She was frightened and alone and I took her into the back room and comforted her. I rocked her in my arms and sang a song in English she could never have understood.”

“Where's Sophie Payne, Eric?”

“I told her that everything was going to be all right, that she would see her mama soon.”

“Don't tell me this. I don't want to hear this.”

“And while she buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed, I put a silencer to her temple and I pulled the trigger.”

“You should have put it to your own head first.”

“I considered that.”

Anguish and love and rage welled up in Caroline's throat, choking the words she might have said.

“Welcome to Berlin, Mad Dog.” He sounded faintly amused affectionate, even but it was the voice of a stranger in Eries mouth. Dare Atwood had miscalculated.

She had sent Caroline out to bring the rogue agent home but Caroline could not tempt Eric any longer.

“How did this happen to us?” she whispered.

“I imagine we chose it.”

“Bullshit,” she retorted. “You chose, and the rest of us trailed along me, Sophie Payne, that little girl you shot to death. Why, Eric? Why not be a hero for once and turn the gun on Krucevic?”

“Because getting him for the kidnapping of Sophie Payne isn't enough, Mad Dog.”

His voice had dropped to a whisper, difficult to pick out against the background of rushing water.

“I want to get him for everything. I want the plans, the network, the proof of complicity at the highest levels. I want Fritz Voekl's balls in a sling.”

Fritz Voekl?

“And how many more children will you kill?” For an instant, she expected him to hang up. Nothing but the sluice of water pouring over the damned.

“Her mother was already dead,” he told her.

“And Annicka could describe Krucevic if anyone asked. He could not allow her to live.”

“Then let him pull the fucking trigger.”

“It was me or Otto. I couldn't put Annicka into Otto's hands.”

“Eric, tell me where you are.”

“Get out of this, Mad Dog. While you still can.”

“Eric”“ But he was gone.

After that, she didn't pretend to sleep. She turned on all the lights, even the ones in the bathroom, and sat propped in bed with the covers pulled up to her armpits, shivering uncontrollably.

How many people had Eric murdered? Not terrorists, whom she could dismiss as so many bodies in a war — but how many men and women? How many little girls? She'd thought of the dead in Pariser Platz as blood on Mian Krucevic's hands, not her husband's. She knew now that she had been comforting herself with a lie.

She reached for the phone at her bedside and punched in an Agency number. He answered on the first ring.

She imagined him sitting there, silk tie loosened, hand to his salt-and-pepper brow. There would be beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, the result of malaria endemic in his bloodstream. It would be dinnertime in Virginia. He'd be thinking of Kentucky bourbon, neat. She closed her eyes in relief.

“Hey, Scottie.”

“Caroline.” A glance at his Rolex, swiftly calculating the time difference.

“I just heard from our fair-haired boy.”

“How?” He was instantly alert.

“Phone call.”

“Change your hotel, Carrie, and watch your back. Did you get his location?”

“Are you kidding? He wasn't calling on business. He'd just killed a child and needed to justify it.”

“If he calls back — ”

“Scottie,” she interrupted, as though he couldn't possibly have understood the terrible thing she had just said. “Scottie, have you ever killed anyone?”

“Aside from Athens, I've never even carried a gun. Caroline, did you ask him how our missing friend was doing? Did he say anything that might help us find her?”

“No. He shot the breeze and told me to go home.” There was a creak as Scottie shifted in his desk chair.

“He gave you nothing.”

“Squat,” Caroline agreed. “But he'll make contact again. He'll have to. I'll make myself a nuisance.”

“The call was a warning, Caroline. Your next contact could be a bullet in the brain.”

“Scottie,” she cried. “How did this man we both love turn out to be someone we never even knew? Can you tell me that? Have you got a clue?”

“Carrie, remember the open line,” Scottie urged her softly.

She drew a shuddering breath and raked her fingers through her hair.

“This isn't your fault,” he said. “It's not my fault. Neither of us can fix it. So concentrate on what you can fix. Okay?”

“It's part of the training,” she said through her teeth. “You tell these guys that working for the enemy is the ultimate betrayal of their friends, their country, themselves. And at the same time, their job is to convince other people to do exactly that: to sell out everything that matters.”

“The line, Caroline,” Scottie repeated.

“Who can live with that kind of paradox? No wonder people go nuts.”

“Its the nature of the game.” His reproof was like a slap. “Do as we say, not as we do. Cynics handle it best or idealists. People who can live with an inherent contradiction. The others quit after their second tours. Or drink heavily and stay.”

“So which was our fair-haired boy? Cynic? Or idealist?”

“He's out there murdering children, Caroline.”

The truth, inexorable. But she tried one last time.

“Let's say he wants the Big Man. And all the marbles. To do that, he'd have to close his eyes to a certain amount of evil. But that wouldn't necessarily mean that he was evil himself, would it?”

“The ends justify the means? I have heard that sentiment so many times in my life, Caroline, and it still sounds infinitely attractive. And false. We saw the means in Berlin two days ago. No ends justify so much spilling of blood.”

Now who had forgotten the open line?

“He wants you to feel sorry for him. He'll use that against you. He has no right, Carrie. He cut you out of his life, remember? He cut both of us out. And I for one don't give a shit about his reasons.”

But Caroline did. Caroline wanted to know why, more than anything in the world.

As though knowing the reasons for deception and betrayal might negate the horror of what had happened, might put her life back into the neat little box in which she had lived. Bitterness flooded her mouth.

“Are you telling me to avoid all contact with him?”

“Have all the contact you like. Do drinks. Do dinner. Take a walk among the autumn leaves. But if our golden boy refuses to give up the goods our missing friend, in perfect condition then shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap. Understood?”

All too well.

“Now get some sleep.”

“Thanks, Scottie,” she told the dead line. Then she cradled the receiver and sank back against her pillows. Somewhere in Central Europe, Eric was stepping out of a shower. Cynic or idealist? Did the answer matter anymore?

She thrust back the covers. To find Sophie Payne, she would first have to find Eric. And if luck was with her, Mahmoud Sharif would know exactly where he was.

Two Berlin, 7:30 a.m.

Caroline wore black knit leggings and a black tunic for the Palestinian bomb maker. A black swing coat that skimmed above her knees. Black cashmere gloves and a red beret perched on her bobbed dark hair. The hair was a wig and it went with her back stopped identity, the passport in the name of Jane Hathaway she had brought from Langley. She wore red lipstick to match the beret, and a pair of black Chanel sunglasses.

Eric's voice murmured with the sound of tap water in her ear, relentless, caressing, the voice of conscience and nightmare. All that he had said looped endlessly in her mind, a refrain she could not banish. He stood behind her as she drew on her clothes; he lifted her hair from the nape of her neck. She moved now under the glare of his gaze — and wondered briefly who had set the trap for whom.

He called me in the night. He knows where I am. Because Sharif already got to him? Because he saw my face on a newscaster's screen? Eric. That little girl.

Jesus, Eric.

Her fingers trembled as she applied her makeup; trembled with anger and longing.

At this rate, she'd jump sky-high when Sharif tapped on her shoulder. She briefly considered carrying her snub-nosed Walther TPH in a thigh holster concealed by the swing coat, then rejected the idea. Palestinian bomb makers might consent to meet with the anxious cousin of an underworld acquaintance, but they would be certain to search her thoroughly first. Jane Hathaway spent her days banking in London; she was unlikely to carry a piece with her on holiday.

The concierge at the front desk looked at her blankly as she passed. Caroline pushed jauntily through the revolving door, as though she had nothing more than shopping on her mind.

She purchased the Herald Tribune at a sidewalk kiosk and scanned the headlines as she walked. Sophie Payne had not been found. The LJ-Bahn in Potsdamer Platz was tempting — she could read as she rode — but the distance was short and the morning air, the Berliner luft, a gift to the sleep-deprived. She strode east along Leipzigerstrasse and then north along Grunerstrasse, marveling at the new life springing up amid the careworn avenues of the Mitte district. And rising before her as she walked, more alien with every step, was the Communist television tower's steel needle, like a hypodermic piercing the sky. A hypodermic. Everything reminded her of Sophie Payne.

Alexanderplatz, where Prussian and Russian troops had once drilled to defeat Napoleon; where the streetcar lines of the Bismarck era converged in raucous confusion; where prostitutes and lorry drivers and clerks convened in a hundred different bars, until the Allied bombs of 1943 leveled the square and, two years later, the Soviets marched in to “liberate” the city. It was a vast and chilly emptiness still, several football fields in size. Grunerstrasse plunged beneath it, to emerge on the other side as Neue Konigstrasse; there were very few approaches by car. He would have to walk up to her, or drive by to the northeast, on Karl-Marx-Allee. She took up a position at the television tower's base, facing the Allee, and proceeded to study her newspaper. It was hard on eight o'clock.

Standing there in the middle of the drab morning, Caroline fought back a persistent sense of the ridiculous. IfMahmoud Sharif could even remember the name of Michael O'Shaughnessy from a telephone call made months before, he was unlikely to risk his neck because of it. Why drive out early in the morning for the sake of a woman he had never seen? She turned over the front section of the Herald Tribune (the same edition Mian Krucevic had placed under Sophie Payne's chin the previous day) and found a picture of herself, snapped in Pariser Platz by an enterprising news photographer. The Volksturm guard she had confronted was holding his truncheon high, and Caroline's mouth was open in a scream. She stared at the image, fascinated. She had never seen herself in newsprint before. Was it this, rather than the television footage, that had triggered Eric's phone call?

At the thought of him, her mind winced and leapt away.

A dirty white Trabant — a pitiful putt-putt the size of a golf cart — drove slowly past on Karl-Marx-Allee. Caroline's eyes flicked up, considered it, then looked down at her paper. It was for Sharif to broach the question.

Eight-fourteen. More cars passed. She'd read the news that mattered, and was killing time with feature stories. The white Trabant again, traveling in the opposite direction. Only one person behind the wheel, too distant to be clearly seen.

“I think that perhaps you are Ms. Jane Hathaway,” said a quiet voice at her shoulder.

Caroline did not jump. She folded her newspaper deliberately and tucked it under her arm.

He was a compact and neat person in a black leather jacket and tweed pants. Dark skin, eyes the color of espresso, black brows and mustache.

“I am,” she said. “Are you Mahmoud Sharif?”

“Please come with me,” he said by way of answer.

When she hesitated, a second man materialized behind her. He placed a persuasive hand on her elbow.

“Very well,” she said coolly, and went without a backward glance.

They bundled her into a steel gray Mercedes, Caroline in the middle of the backseat with a man on either side. A third man drove. She felt a moment of panic, a wave of claustrophobia. She subdued it with effort. It would not do to betray a fit of nerves. She was merely a friend's cousin.

The first man who had approached her drew a length of white cloth from his pocket.

“It is not permitted to see where you are going. I must beg to cover your eyes.” If they were kidnapping her, Caroline thought, they would hardly have been so polite. They would have shoved a wad of cotton in her mouth and forced her head down to her knees if they hadn't stowed her in the trunk first.

She removed her sunglasses and placed them in her purse. Then she inclined her beret toward her escort, praying that her wig was secure. The hands came up behind her head, a ceremonial gesture. And he covered her eyes.

At first they drove at what seemed a normal pace, darting in and out of Berlin traffic with the occasional pause for a right or left turn. Then Caroline heard a few words flung back from the front seat, something brief and explosive in Arabic. The driver was swearing. Her companion's fingers tightened on her arm.

“Who should be following, Jane Hathaway?”

“Following me? No one. I know no one in Berlin.”

The Mercedes lurched forward, picking up speed, and swerved violently to the left. Caroline slid against the man beside her, and he grunted.

“There is a white Trabant behind us. My friend who is driving is certain it has been behind us some time. Who do you know with a white Trabant?”

“No one. I'm a stranger here. But if it's a Trabant, it won't be behind you long. They've got no power.”

“That is not the point,” the man said sternly. “We cannot take you to Sharif if we do not know who is following. You are with the police, perhaps?”

“Of course not! I told you. I'm from London. I don't know anybody in Germany. Maybe it's one of your friends.”

He did not reply. The car swerved again, accelerated, made a series of abrupt turns.

Wally. Plausible, sympathetic, endearing Wally. Had he set her up with the story about Sharifat the Tacheles and then watched to see what she'd do?

Or was it someone else from the station someone deputed by Dare Atwood, perhaps, to keep tabs on her?

Dare knew what Jane Hathaway looked like.

When you're under surveillance, Mad Dog, said Eric's voice in her mind, never, never let your tail know you see him. If you do, he'll suspect you're worth following. But Sharif's men had never learned Eric's lessons.

Bore him to tears. Change your plans if necessary. Abort the meeting or the dead drop or the safe-house visit. And when you lose him, do it so casually he never sees it coming. Never with a high-speed car chase through a crowded city, where the cops might decide to get involved.

As the Palestinians were doing now.

But no cops were interested in a gray Mercedes careening through eastern Berlin.

All the cops in the city, it seemed, were standing guard around the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate.

Fingers fumbled at the cloth around her eyes.

“You may get out now, Jane Hathaway.”

He was already standing at the open car door, one hand politely extended. She placed her own within it and allowed him to help her out of the car. Arab courtesy, she thought. There would probably be a plate of dates and figs in the room beyond.

What she found, however, was a space as deliberately innocuous as an Agency safe house. Whatever their problem with mobile surveillance, the Palestinians had absorbed some form of tradecraft.

Three windows, blinds drawn. One couch, quite characterless, and two armchairs at correct angles beside it. A coffee table with an ashtray in the event that she smoked. Beyond this, a small cubicle that was probably a bathroom.

No family photographs, no magazines with address labels, no books that might reveal a personal taste. No telephone. No television. She was certain she would find the windows and front door locked.

She took off her coat and threw it over a chair.

“Which of you is Sharif?”

The tidy man in the leather jacket smiled slightly.

“None of us, Jane Hathaway. You may call me Akbar.”

The names of the other two were not for her keeping, it seemed.

“How did you hear of this .. . Mahmoud Sharif?” Akbar asked her.

She frowned, as though puzzled.

“From my cousin Michael, of course. Michael O'Shaughnessy. He's done some favors for Sharif in the past.”

“Sharif is beholden only to Allah,” he replied.

“Then perhaps the obligation was my cousin's,” Caroline suggested graciously. “But Michael told me that if I ever needed to reach him, Mahmoud was the one man in Europe who would know where he was.”

Akbar perched on the arm of the sofa and studied Caroline. She continued to stand, her back to the wall and her eyes on the door.

“Why is this Michael so difficult to find?” he asked.

“Aren't most of Mahmoud's friends?”

“But no.” He spread his arms out wide to include the silent pair ranged behind him. “We are as you see. Present when you required us. Without even the demand of a proof or a demonstration of good faith”

“Other than the little matter of a blindfold,” Caroline pointed out.

His expression did not change.

“Why do you wish to see Mahmoud?”

“I told you. I need to find my cousin. His father has just died. There was no way to contact Michael, and I need to speak to him about the family.”

“Perhaps a message could be passed.”

“Perhaps. But I don't think that's for you to say, Akbar. Unless you really are Sharif.”

Mirth flooded the dark eyes. It was gone before Caroline had a chance to interpret it.

“And now I must beg to examine the contents of your purse, Jane Hathaway.”

It was a large black leather shoulder bag in the shape of a backpack. It fairly screamed Knightsbridge. She handed it to him wordlessly and sank down onto the couch.

He carried the purse to the bare table and shook out its contents. Caroline could have recited them in her sleep.

The sunglasses, on top.

A red leather wallet, with about one hundred and fifty-three marks in bills and small change, a Visa card, a Harrods credit card, a British driver's license, and a long-distance calling card.

A picture of Eric from Nicosia.

A U.S. passport with the usual navy blue cover, bearing the name of Jane Hathaway and an address in London. The picture had been taken at the Agency; it was a good likeness, despite the wig. Three Chanel lipsticks, all of them well used.

A pen and pencil in a case.

A matchbook from last night's bar at the Tacheles.

A cell phone.

A small hairbrush, with several black hairs from the wig wound around its bristles.

A few phone numbers (London exchange) and jottings on crinkled slips of paper, some of them receipts from Jane's favorite pub in Hampstead.

“And what is this?” Akbar inquired, his index finger thrust through an olive green metal ring. He held it up and twirled it slightly around his knuckle. A single rod about an inch long swung from its middle.

“Don't you know?” Caroline asked him blandly. “It's a grenade pin.”

The black brows lifted.

“A curious item for a lady's purse, surely?”

Caroline smiled.

“My cousin Michael gave it to me years ago. He was a Green Beret.”

Akbar twirled the pin once more around his finger, thoughtfully this time, then set it down beside the lipsticks.

“Saleh will remain with you, Jane Hathaway. I shall go for a time and return. You must be patient. Sharif is a busy man.”

He thrust her things back into the bag and, with a curt bow, turned for the door.

Three Budapest, 9 a.m.

“How are you feeling this morning, Mrs. Payne?”

He always spoke to her in English, although the others used German. Sophie suspected that he thought her unworthy of his adored tongue. The electronic door had slid back so noiselessly that she had had no warning. He leaned there against the jamb with a newspaper in his hand. She sat up in bed and stared at him.

Sophie had not been sleeping. She had been studying the ceiling in an effort to detect whether it had any stains on its surface, and if so, whether they would start to move. This might, she thought, be an indication of the recurrence of her illness. But for all her vigilance, the effects of anthrax would probably surprise her. As had Krucevic.

“Considering the past twelve hours,” she said in answer to his question, “I'm fine.”

It was a patent lie, but she had no intention of rewarding him with the truth.

The mad surge for the door, her head bound in a blanket, her mouth stuffed with somebody's socks, her mind screaming with vivid, shaming panic. An arm belted around her waist. The jolting dash down echoing stairs. No one speaking, the sensation of cold and wet in the pelting rain. The child lying murdered on her mother's bed.

Sophie was placed on the floor of a truck between Otto and Michael, sightless and mute, with a raging desire to weep burning in her nostrils. She suppressed it viciously, willing the grief to turn to hatred, a passion that would sustain rather than destroy her.

“You have remarkable resilience,” Krucevic said now.

“It's one of the great American secrets. We endure. Jack Bigelow has resilience, too. I wonder if he has more than you.”

Krucevic smiled.

“If you're suggesting this is a test of wills, Mrs. Payne, I'm afraid you romanticize the matter. This is not an affair of honor between two gentlemen, with yourself as the prize. Neither of us values you that much.”

“I'm not concerned about myself. Except inasmuch as my life or death affects the fate of my nation.”

“How admirable. And how difficult to believe. Do I detect a trace of hypocrisy, Mrs. Payne? Is it so important to consider yourself a martyr? I suppose it lends a certain style to death. If one cares about such things.”

He threw her the phrases the way another man might toss potato chips to a dog, his mind entirely on other matters. The tension that had turned him rigid in Bratislava was gone; he seemed at ease, at home with himself, impervious to concern. Sophie fought with despair. If Krucevic could stand in her door without a care in the world, events must be turning his way.

“What are you really after?” she asked.

“Why should I tell you, Mrs. Payne?”

“Because when you get what you want, you'll kill me. And before I die, I'd like to know why.”

He studied her.

“Have you so little faith in your government? Jack should have saved his time and money. That failed raid will have cost him something in respect.”

“What raid?” she asked sharply.

“The one that drove us out of Bratislava last night. Drove us, I might add, in a U.S. government-operated mobile listening post. Otto killed the agents and shot up their electronics before we loaded you in the back.” He pushed himself away from the wall and walked toward her.

“Your people found you, Mrs. Payne. And no doubt they meant to rescue you. But in a lamentably half-assed manner. I had expected better of Mr. Bigelow. A Huey or two, at least, on the building's roof. But no.”

That accounted for his air of superiority. He had outwitted the U.S. government.

Sophie bit back disappointment and thought, They're on my trail. They'll get him soon.

“So let's take it as a given that I won't be rescued. Tell me what you're up to. Is it revenge? For the NATO air strikes in '99?”

“The allied bombs destroyed Belgrade,” Krucevic said indifferently. “I despise Belgrade as much as the United States. I'm a Croat, Mrs. Payne, although I don't expect you to comprehend the significance of that fact.”

“You are far more than a Croat, Mian Krucevic. You are an unreconstructed Ustashe fighter. You're a throwback to the fascist midnight of 1939. We'll agree that you enjoyed seeing the Serbian republic devastated by war. That you spared no tears for the Kosovar dead. A dozen mass graves here or there mean nothing to you. So what's the point? Why strike out against the U.S.?”

He sat down on the bed next to her. She refused to flinch.

“I know that you see me as a Croat nationalist, Mrs. Payne. That is an understandable mistake. I fought for my fellow people in Bosnia because if I had not, the Serbs and the Muslims would have overwhelmed them and the mass graves you speak of would have held only Croats.” He lifted his hand and waved it gently, in farewell to the past.

“That is done. Bosnia is a nation torn in three. The rifts will never heal. What the 30 April Organization attempts to ensure, Mrs. Payne, is that the plight of the Balkans will never become the plight of Europe.”

Viewed this closely, the scar at his temple revealed itself as the work of a bullet. Someone had once tried to kill him.

“You're working for peace?” Sophie asked sarcastically. “That's why you bombed the Brandenburg and kidnapped me?”

“I am working to eradicate a cancer,” he replied impatiently. “Do you know that is the most common Serb image applied to ethnic Albanians? I would go further and apply it to the entire Islamic world. Adherents of the Muslim faith are the most ignorant and uncultured peoples in existence. They bring strife, fanaticism, darkness, and violence wherever they breed. And they breed, Mrs. Payne, as no people has ever bred before. Their children are their deadliest weapon. The numbers are against the Aryan peoples of the West, Mrs. Payne. You must know that. It is happening in your own country. The people of northern Europe have two or three children, while your blacks and Hispanics have a dozen each. In time, democracy will be overwhelmed in their cesspool.”

He gazed at her piercingly, the brown eyes devoid of all emotion.

“This is the great Achilles' heel of the American elite. You invite the mongrels of the world to attend your universities and eat at your exclusive tables. Well, Mrs. Payne, the mongrels of the world will savage the hand that feeds them. I do not intend to let that happen in Europe.”

“I don't understand,” Sophie said. “How does holding me hostage affect the population of Europe?”

“It buys me time. A decent interval without U.S. or NATO intervention.”

“Intervention in what?”

“The reconquest of an entire continent,” he said baldly, “without armies, warfare, or trials in The Hague. And then I will set about the process of cleansing”

“The world will never allow another Final Solution. If the air strikes against Belgrade taught you nothing else, they should have taught you that.”

He shrugged.

“Milosevic lacked finesse. It was not his fault — he's a crafty manipulator, a ruthless executive, but his tools were limited. So were Adolf Hitler's, Mrs. Payne. Did you know that Hitler wasted valuable time throughout the first years of the war in an effort to perfect his nerve gas? Like all great masters of innovation, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before. We intend to do it right.”

“You mean, you and the four guys in the other room?”

She had succeeded in nettling him; the dark eyes narrowed with malice.

“Do you think the strength of the Aryan nation sprang forth only at Hitler's command?” he barked. “It has always been there. It always will be. And heroes emerge from time to time to lead the fight for freedom.”

It was then that Sophie finally understood the passion behind Krucevic's careful facade, the inferno beneath his extraordinary self-possession. Like a Crusader from a vanished age, he had God and Destiny on his side. And at once she was afraid — deeply and coldly afraid of what would eventually happen to her. She could expect no mercy from this man. To survive, she would have to destroy him on his own ground.

How? For the love of God, how?

“Do you know why the Serbs killed the Kosovars and drove them out of their kingdom?” he asked her.

“"Their kingdom"?”

Even if she could somehow seize a gun and figure out how to fire it, it was not enough to kill him. She had to put an end to whatever her abduction had unleashed. How?

“Because the Serbs have never forgotten that the invading Turkish hordes slaughtered their men on the Field of Black Birds at the battle of Kosovo.”

“That was in the fourteenth century,” Sophie said distractedly.

“In 1389, to be precise, and for more than six hundred years, that Serb defeat has been Serbia's most hallowed holiday. In the United States, you celebrate victory. You parade down your village streets on the Fourth of July wrapped in your American flag. Serbs have never known what victory is. They sanctify the hour of their worst humiliation. What happened recently in Kosovo the Serb butchering of ethnic Albanians was a vengeance six hundred years in the making.”

“Glorify it any way you like,” she retorted, “but it was still an unprovoked atrocity on a massive scale.”

To fight him is useless; it'll only get me killed. There were four men she knew of perhaps more in the compound alone, men who were armed and ruthless. And then there's Jozsef... I can't leave Jozsef alone. But were all four of the other terrorists against her? What if Michael could be persuaded to help?

“The Serb cleansing of Kosovo was the attempt by one people to eradicate another,” Krucevic said, unperturbed, “and in my opinion, it was unforgivably crude.”

“I'm glad to hear it.”

Even with Michael's help if I can get Michael's help an escape won't put an end to Krucevic's plans. It's not enough to kill him and run. He has to be held accountable for the Brandenburg Gate. I owe Nell Forsyte that much.

“I am trained as a biologist, Mrs. Payne,” he confided with an air of frankness. “I tend to conceptualize in medical terms.”

“Really,” she replied noncommittally.

What is he talking about? And then she remembered the fear. The cold stink of anxiety, of fatal error, that she'd detected in him when her fever soared. Krucevic, the biologist, had been surprised by the recurrence. It had frightened him. Why? My survival is immaterial to him. So he must be afraid for his son.

She snatched at the thought, she hid it deep in a closet in her mind. She had found it. Krucevic's one vulnerability, Jozsef.

“If you discover that a cancer is multiplying in your body,” he went on, “if you see that the sickened cells are destroying the healthy ones, you have two choices. You can cut off the limb where the cancer feeds, and bury it deep in the ground. Or you can systemically poison the cells within and negate their ability to multiply.” He held up his hands like a successful magician. His own brilliance, the rabbit in his hat.

“With patience and subtlety, Mrs. Payne, the sick cells will die. The healthy will prevail. Your body will be cancer free.”

Mute, she stared at him. What he had just said was important, she knew. It was strategy, not just politics. He had told her exactly what he meant to do. He had handed her 30 April's operational agenda. But the sense of it eluded her, like a Rubik's Cube that failed to turn.

He reached his right hand to her cheek. Instinctively, she jerked away from him.

The hand slid down to her neck and gripped it cruelly. His other palm caressed her forehead.

“I am checking you for fever, Mrs. Payne.”

“I'm fine.” She was rigid under his hands. “Don't trouble yourself.”

“You lie. Already you feel less well than you did when our conversation began. In a little while, you will feel even worse. That is exactly as it should be.”

He rose and moved to the door. She followed him with her eyes. Was he bluffing? Or was her mind about to melt with fever?

“I want our friend Jack Bigelow to see the consequences of his ill-advised raid,” Krucevic told her. “A videotape, I think, is in order. We'll wait a few hours while the bacillus gains in strength.”

Four Berlin, 9:27 a.m.

Caroline spent forty-two minutes in the Palestinian safe house while the smoke of Saleh's Turkish cigarettes gradually clouded the room. She was puzzled by the fact of tobacco — wasn't it blasphemous for a follower of Islam to use it? — but Arab culture wasn't her strong suit. Maybe the prohibition centered on alcohol.

Or maybe a fellow dedicated to the jihad was immune from the restrictions applied to ordinary mortals. Regardless, the smoke was remarkably pungent. She would have to send her clothes to be cleaned before she checked out of the Hyatt.

If she made it back alive.

Saleh kept a curious sort of handgun on the table in front of him, with a free-floating barrel and an ergonomic handgrip. A Hammerli, Caroline guessed. It probably had electronic trigger action, variably weighted. Which meant it could fire if Saleh so much as grazed the table leg. A two-thousand-dollar gun in a world of five-hundred-dollar competition. The carpentry business had been very good to Mahmoud Sharif.

Saleh caught her assessing his piece. He held her gaze and did not blink. A garden — variety banker such as Jane Hathaway should look intimidated, Caroline thought — not as though she were calculating the speed of his draw. She folded her arms protectively across her chest and hunched slightly as she paced. No point in getting cocky.

She was expected at the Interior Ministry in less than an hour. When she failed to show up, Wally might be worried. Unless it was he who had tailed her from Alexanderplatz in the white Trabant.

What would Mahmoud Sharif do if he suspected she was not who she claimed? Was he likely to torture a woman? Or just shoot her in the back of the head and dump her body where no one would look for it?

Caroline glanced again at Saleh. He was studying her with unconcealed interest, eyes narrowed against the smoke.

The front door — the one she had supposed locked — swung back on silent hinges.

Akbar stood there, his face devoid of expression. He took a step back, deferential now.

The man who entered was taller than the others by a good foot and broad in the shoulder, with glittering black eyes and a clean shaven face. His nose was so sharply hooked it might almost have been a caricature, and an angry red scar bisected his right cheek — the trail of shrapnel, Caroline thought. He wore black jeans and black leather boots and a dress shirt of raw silk. He smelled, ever so faintly, of freshly sawn wood. She imagined his children, running to greet him at the end of the day and being lifted high on a cedar-scented shoulder. Wood chips in his hair. She looked instinctively at his hands.

Fine-boned, sensitive, adept at the manipulation of small parts. Had he constructed the device that brought down MedAir 901? Made floating candy wrappers of all those children high above the Adriatic?

“Miss Jane Hathaway,” he said, and inclined his head. “I am Mahmoud Sharif. You wished to speak to me.”

What was the protocol? Should she extend her hand? Would he take it if she did?

She nodded back at him instead.

“I appreciate your willingness to see me. I know you are a busy man.”

“For the cousin of my friend Michael I would do much,” Sharif said impassively, and gestured toward the sofa.

Caroline sat down. Sharif took one of the armchairs; Akbar, who still stood by the door, snapped his fingers. Saleh crushed out his cigarette and joined him. And that quickly, she was alone with Mahmoud Sharif and the gun his man had left on the table before her.

It occurred to Caroline that there were at least a thousand questions Scottie Sorensen would have liked Sharif to answer, but posing a single one of them would destroy the perilous balance of this meeting.

“Your false passport is excellent, Miss Hathaway, and the details that support it rather extraordinary.”

She cocked her head and studied him as though she could not quite follow his meaning.

“I particularly admired the pub receipts from Netting Hill Gate, and the British charwoman who answered the phone in what was supposed to be Hampstead,” he continued. “I studied in England many years ago; I could not have told your housekeeper from a native. But then, your organization has vast resources, does it not?”

Caroline frowned.

“I'm not sure I understand. Is there a problem with my passport?”

“None at all,” Sharif assured her with a gleam of amusement in his eyes. “And for that I commend you. A great number of such documents pass through my fingers, you understand, and rarely have I seen one so accomplished. Unless, perhaps, it was Michael's.”

He waited for her reaction.

“This is all very entertaining,” she said. “The blindfold, the gun on the table, the cool-your-heels-in-the-back-parior-whileI-run your-numbers treatment. But I have an appointment in less than an hour, Mr. Sharif, and I'd appreciate some candor.”

“Candor,” he repeated. The gleam of amusement had vanished. “And would your appointment happen to be with the CIA?”

“If I thought they knew where Michael was, I wouldn't be here” “I, too, had hoped for candor, Miss Hathaway. But you have not even trusted me with your true name. I have no inclination to help you. Indeed, I waste my time here.” He got to his feet.

She decided to take a risk.

“I don't think you even know where Michael is, Sharif.”

“Michael O'Shaughnessy does not exist, Miss Hathaway. We both know that. Therefore he can never have possessed a cousin. Now tell me why I should help you.”

“I'm here because Michael's father has died!” she burst out. “Someone has to tell him. I'm the only one in the family he still trusts.”

“I detest this sort of subterfuge. Miss Hathaway. It is demeaning to us both.”

She was suddenly at a standstill. When you don't know what to say, Eric whispered in her ear, don't say anything at all. Impulsively, she decided to ignore him.

“He's in trouble, Sharif.”

The man actually laughed.

“Aren't we all?”

“This time he could die.”

“But then, he's done that before.” Sharif's dark eyes flicked shrewdly up to her own. He took a small silver knife from his pocket and began to pare his fingernails. “Are you in love with him?”

Contempt in the words.

“Not anymore.”

He set the knife down.

“I know the man you are looking for. I even know his real name. I also know that he was once employed by the CIA and that they fabricated the papers he is presently using. Your papers, Miss Hathaway, are remarkably similar.” The eyes raked over her.

“So if you are not in love with him — if that is not why you wish to see him — then I am forced to conclude that Michael is in difficulties with his government. And that you have been sent to me in the hope of finding him.”

“Now I think it is I who waste my time.” Caroline reached for the handbag he had left on the table.

Sharif gripped her wrist.

“I have not the least intention of delivering him up to you.”

She stared at him implacably.

“In fact, in other circumstances I might be moved to interrogate you more harshly, and for a longer period.”

“I don't scare easily.”

His fingers — the delicate, sensitive fingers — were suddenly around Caroline's throat.

She gasped, gulping for air, fighting the impulse to battle back. You must not show fear. And yet fear flooded her like a wash of warm water, moist between her thighs, rising hotly to her rib cage; a dull thud of heartbeat, the blood panicking inside her. Stupid, she thought bitterly. You stupid bitch. What were you playing at?

“I could ask you any number of questions.” The Hammerl'i's muzzle kissed her temple. “Over the course of a week, or a year. I could find out whatever I needed to know, Jane Hathaway, if I wished to spend the time. Whether you scare easily or not is a matter of indifference. What is important is how much pain is required to break you.”

Her breathing now was nothing but a hiss. She kept her hands clenched tightly in her lap, a pathetic attempt at dignity. He watched her with the appearance of detachment, as chough he were watching TV. The gun, hair-trigger, explicit in the hollow above her ear. Her lungs were screaming for air, and for an instant, she believed he would throttle her that she would die clawing at his wrist in desperation. Anger knifed through her.

“One thing intrigues me,” he said idly. And laid the gun down on the table. His other hand still gripped her throat. She could not croak the question he seemed to expect. He dangled the grenade pin before her nose.

“This thing intrigues me. A keepsake, Akbar says. Something you treasure of Michael's.” He snorted derisively.

“A grenade pin?”

She could no longer see for the black dots dancing before her eyes. In a second she would pass out. She reached up with both hands and dug her nails into his wrist. His eyelids flickered, but otherwise, he regarded her steadily. The pressure of his thumb against her windpipe increased. Flames flared inside her head. Panic imploded like a screaming child. Her fingers went slack.

And then he released her.

“I confess I do not comprehend the grenade pin at all.”

Caroline drew a shuddering breath.

“People .. . attach importance to all kinds of things.”

“Women, in my experience, attach none whatsoever to the instruments of war.”

“Then you and I know very different sorts of women.”

“Perhaps. But even if we allow for the differences between Western and Arab women, Miss Hathaway even if we suppose for an instant that any number of bankers in London carry such things in their purses even then, the grenade pin does not fit. You were sent by your organization to discover this man's whereabouts. Correct?”

Caroline did not reply.

“An organization such as yours does not think in subtle terms. It offers up the sentimental things: a high-school ring, a cherished love letter. It does not make a keepsake of a grenade pin.”

“Then perhaps, praise be to Allah, your assumptions about me are false.”

“My assumptions are never false,” Sharifsaid softly. “The day that I am wrong is the day that I shall die.”

The bomb maker's margin of error.

“So,” he said briskly, “I must conclude that there is more to this matter than appears to the eye. You are unable or unwilling to be truthful; I cannot force you to be otherwise. But you know something more of this Michael than merely his false name. I will not tell you where he is. That I cannot do for anyone. But because of this — because of the grenade pin — I shall undertake to pass a message.”

“Thank you,” Caroline said faintly.

“It will not be this silliness about the dead father,” Sharif continued. “We both know that Michael was raised by vermin.. .. Do you stay in Berlin long?”

“In a day or two I will go to Budapest.”

“Then I shall inform Michael that he may find you — Jane Hathaway of the cunning and unlikely grenade pin — at the Budapest Hilton. You know it?”

“Yes.” She had had afternoon tea there once. The ruins of a monastery were built into the walls. The hotel, however, was anything but ascetic, and quite beyond a State Department stipend.

“Very well, then. We are done. Akbar! The blindfold!”

They drove her to the Spandau S-Bahn station and left her at the foot of the platform stairs. They returned her purse and her belongings, so that she was able to purchase a ticket from one of the automated machines. The next thing, of course, was to mount the stairs and await the train; but she knew that if she attempted the steps, her legs would fold up beneath her, and all her delicate subterfuge would come to an end.

But for a grenade pin — She had never felt so callow, so outmaneuvered. So goddamn stupid.

The steps rose up before her. A man in a black felt hat edged around her with a curious look, hastily averted, and clattered up to the platform. She had less than ten minutes to reach Potsdamer Platz and her hotel. She would have to change out of her clothes and wig before meeting Wally Aronson. And yet she lacked the will to move.

It was as she was standing there, surveying her ticket, that a white Trabant pulled up to the curb a few feet away.

“Hiya, doll,” said Tom Shephard. “Need a lift?”

Five Berlin, 10:15 a.m.

“You,” Caroline said briefly.

“I might say the same,” Shephard replied, “only I'd be lying. Who are you trying to be, anyway? Liza Minnelli does Sally Bowles?”

“You were following me.”

“Right again. Boy, you Agency broads are quick.”

She didn't move.

“Oh, for crying out loud, get in. We're due at the Interior Ministry in fifteen minutes, and unless you want to sing “Cabaret' for all of Voekl's boys — which I don't think is politically correct, frankly — you're going to have to change your clothes. Which means we have no time at all.”

Caroline got in.

Shephard peeled away from the curb, leaving tire tread in his wake. Not bad for a Trabant.

“So explain this to me.” She was controlling her anger with difficulty. “You just happened to be driving by Alexanderplatz this morning and knew in an instant that the dark-haired woman reading the paper by the television tower was in fact me. Is that what I'm supposed to believe?”

“You're not supposed to believe anything. I'm not as devious as your employers. I'm quite happy to offer you the truth.”

“You know the bartender at the Tacheles.”

He shot her a glance.

“The Tacheles? You do get around. The only bartender I know runs a dark little hole near my house in Dahlem.”

“How, then?”

“I stopped by the Hyatt this morning to invite you to breakfast,” he replied. “I thought we could talk about the Brandenburg Gate without the entire embassy listening in. I wanted to hear what you had to say about 30 April. Guesstimate where they might be headed.”

Caroline studied him.

“You've hit a wall, haven't you? The bomb crater isn't giving up its secrets.”

“Not a wall,” he corrected, “a minor plateau. Nothing we couldn't surmount given a normal pace of investigation. But normal doesn't apply to this baby. Normal is when the Veep is having breakfast in bed in D.C. instead of in somebody's trunk. The entire weight of Washington is sitting on my shoulders right now, and I need a lead worse than a drunk needs detox.”

“You should write this stuff down. It's pure Hammett.”

He ignored her.

“It was clear from your cloak-and-dagger getup that you were already booked this morning. As I was pulling up to the hotel, you were walking out.”

She glared at him.

“You can change your hair and you can change your clothes, darling', but the walk's a dead giveaway. Some legs I don't forget.”

The anger fused.

“What in the hell were you doing following me? And don't give me that bullshit about hoping for a lead”

“I thought I was doing you a favor,” he said piously.

“A favor? You nearly got me killed. Shephard, you can't even surveil somebody discreetly. My friends spotted you the minute you pulled out behind them.”

“Your friends, as you choose to call them, would think a day without surveillance was like a day without sunshine. They'll get over it, believe me. And I had no intention of being discreet. That would have destroyed the purpose.”

“Which was?”

He swerved to avoid a furniture van parked in the middle of Grunerstrasse.

“I wanted them to know you were being tailed. Maybe they'd think twice before they killed you.”

“Oh, right,” Caroline said dryly. “Thanks.”

“Now, if you're done having a hissy fit,” he continued, “it's my turn. Why the clandestine meeting with a bunch of rag heads? Does Wally Aronson know about this?”

Shephard, Caroline noticed, had yet to mention Sharif's name. He had no idea whom she had met with, or why.

She began to relax.

“Should Wally know?”

“That's not for me to say. I'm not exactly in the Agency loop.”

“How true. End of interrogation.”

“Look.” He pulled the Trabant over to the curb and slammed on the brakes. Now he was angry.

“I enjoy the repartee, Carmichael, as much as anyone. It helps me hone my dating skills — ”

“What skills?”

“But I haven't slept in thirty-six hours, and I've had about enough of the attitude. I'm the head of this investigation.” Shephard's hand was on her arm. “The Vice President is missing. You fly in as the 30 April expert. And next thing I know, you're wearing a wig and getting into a car with three men of Arab extraction. I don't think it was a social call. I think it was an agent meeting. And I'm certain you're holding out on me.”

“I'll see you at the Interior Ministry,” Caroline said, and shook him off. She reached for the door.

“I have their license plate number, you know,” he shot back as she got out of the car. “All I have to do is call one of my friends in the Berlin police, and I've got an ID.”

“Call away, Shephard.” She slammed the door shut and leaned through the open window. “I'll be making a few calls myself. The Bureau might wonder why you wasted two hours trailing an Agency colleague this morning instead of supervising the crater.”

“Oh, I'm scared,” he deadpanned.

“Well, I'm not,” she said, and walked away.

“Good morning, Mr. Aronson.”

Christian Schoettler, the Interior Minister, was a trim man in his late thirties. He rose from his desk chair and offered his hand to Wally.

“I see that Mr. Shephard is late, as usual.”

“We were hardly on time ourselves,” Wally replied apologetically. “The traffic today — ”

“Yes, yes, it is because of the curfew. We have had the very devil of a time enforcing it, I'm afraid. Most of the Turks have been sensible and remained at home. But a few extremists thought to test the government's resolve.”

He spoke English, Caroline noticed, with a British accent. An old Oxonian.

“May I present my colleague from Washington, Caroline Carmichael?”

“Ah, yes.” Schoettler gave her a smile that failed to reach his eyes. “The Department of State's terrorism expert.”

“Merely one of them, I'm afraid,” she told him.

“But the one they chose to send here,” Schoettler pointed out. “That must mean a great deal. Please have a seat.”

The door behind them burst open under the force of Schoettler's harried male secretary.

“Herr Bundesminister, Herr Shephard is arrived.”

“So I see,” the minister said as Tom Shephard swung into the room. “How are you, Tom?”

“Just fine, Christian. Could use a little coffee, though.”

“Georg, a cup for Mr. Shephard, if you would be so good.”

“Did you hear the news?” Shephard asked the room in general. “We nearly found the Veep.”

Schoettler looked up. It was the first sign of animation Caroline had glimpsed in him.

“Where?”

“Bratislava,” Wally broke in.

“The raid failed. We lost two embassy officers. Bullets in the head.”

“My deepest sympathies, Wally,” Schoettler said.

Caroline's mind was racing. Where had Eric called from last night? Not Bratislava. He had killed the child in Bratislava before leaving for somewhere else. Had he sung a lullaby to the embassy watchers before he shot them, too?

“They traced 30 April to an apartment complex,” Shephard explained, “and were trying to locate the actual place where Payne was held. But — ”

“But Krucevic moved first,” Wally concluded abruptly.

“So we're back where we started. With the bombing. Christian?”

There was a short silence. Then Schoettler's aide appeared in the door with a coffee cup, and the minister said, “Why don't you sit down, Tom?”

Shephard took the coffee and the last available chair.

Schoettler pulled a dark blue file across his desk and opened it.

“The Brandenburg bombing. One of the few cases in recent memory to be so quickly solved by the Berlin police.”

“Solved.” Shephard scowled and hunched forward.

“That's news to me.”

Schoettler tossed his file across the desk.

“Four Turkish suspects seized in a raid last evening have confessed to the murders of the television crew and the theft of the van. They have confessed to loading that van with a mix of fertilizer and gasoline and parking it did near the Brandenburg Gate. They have even confessed to detonating the bomb in the midst of Vice President Payne's speech. In a matter of hours, they will be charged with all three crimes.”

“But that's crap,” Shephard burst out. “The chemical residue found in the crater is from a batch of Semtex plastic explosive. We've isolated that much. You can't just — ”

“I'm afraid you must have isolated the wrong thing, Tom,” Schoettler interrupted coldly. “Whatever it is, it did not destroy the Brandenburg Gate. The suspects have confessed, you see.”

“Fuck the suspects!”

“Tom — ”

Wally Aronson half rose from his chair and laid a restraining arm on Shephard's shoulder. Caroline noticed that the station chiefs manner had altered subtly since Schoettler's speech. He was at once watchful and completely at ease, like a snake basking in the sun.

“Let's have a look at the file, shall we?”

He flipped it open and studied the Berlin police report.

“I see that all four Turks have previous records.”

“Yes.” Schoettler nodded. “Known anarchists.”

“But none of them has admitted to involvement in the Vice President's kidnapping.”

The Interior Minister shrugged.

“I understand another terrorist group has claimed responsibility for that.”

“And you think 30 April just seized the opportunity of the explosion,” Shephard interjected sarcastically, “to swoop down on the embassy and snatch our Veep?”

“You know quite well, Tom, that it is irrelevant what I think.” Schoettler's face hardened, and the quick brown eyes slid away. “We shall probably learn with time that the Turkish anarchists were in league with the kidnappers.”

“I'm sure we will,” Shephard retorted. “But you're better than this, Schoettler. How can you stand to eat this kind of shit every day?”

The Interior Minister rose. He extended his hand to Caroline.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Carmichael. I regret that you have come all this distance for nothing. Perhaps you can take the opportunity to see something of Berlin while you are here — ”

“That's it?” Shephard was on his feet now, squared off across the desk from Schoettler. His face was pale with fatigue, the eye sockets ghastly. “That's the meeting? You don't even want to hear what the Bureau techs have learned from the crater?”

“That reminds me, Tom.” Christian Schoettler touched his forefinger to his temple and frowned. “Now that the suspects have confessed, we no longer require the Bureau's assistance. The crater has been closed to your technicians as often o'clock this morning.”

“The hell it has!” Shephard retorted.

“Please accept our deepest thanks for your hard work, and the work of your Bureau colleagues.”

Shephard snatched the blue ministry file from Wally's hands and tossed it toward Schoettler's trash can.

“You can't do this, Christian. It's a violation of international law. American citizens died at the Brandenburg, and the Bureau is required to investigate crimes against Americans anywhere in the world. You can't bar us from the bomb site.”

“That is a point of law I am hardly qualified to address,” Schoettler said with one of his brief smiles. “But as we at the ministry understand it, the Bureau's jurisdiction is investigatory only. All responsibility for the collection of evidence rests with the host country.”

“Thank you for your time, Herr Bundesminister,” Wally said, and extended his hand. Schoettler shook it.

“It doesn't end here, Christian.” Tom Shephard's eyes blazed. “As soon as I walk out that door, I'm calling Washington.”

It took both Caroline and Wally to steer Tom Shephard out of the Interior Ministry and into the backseat of the station chief's waiting car. The LegAtt was no longer shouting by the time they reached the street, but from the venomous look on his face, Caroline knew Shephard was unreconciled.

“What exactly is the Bureau's jurisdiction?” she asked.

“It's exactly what the good man said,” Wally replied. “Investigatory only. We take what we can get in foreign crime scenes and hope for cooperation. Tom can threaten all he wants, but he's walking on thin ice.”

“I get the impression he does that a lot.”

“Like a Zamboni at full throttle.” Wally shot Tom a glance; the LegAtt wasn't biting.

“Believe it or not, Schoettler's one of the good guys. He's an SPD holdover from the Schroeder era. He's trying to work for Voekl without completely compromising his job.”

“Well, he just failed today,” Shephard snarled.

“Schoettler's back is to the wall,” Wally mused.

“I wonder what that means.”

“A truckful of fertilizer didn't blow the Gate,” Shephard fumed. “The device was strategic. It was targeted. It was plastic explosive with a battery and a timer, for God's sake, packaged in an acutely calibrated amount. Given a little time in the crater, we could have reassembled the device. Do you know what that could have told us?”

“Who made it,” Caroline answered, and thought of Mahmoud Sharif.

“So forget Schoettler,” Wally said briskly. “Forget the crater for a minute, and think. If Schoettler's stonewalling, then the Voekl government came down hard on the Ministry of Interior. Why would they do that?”

“They despise the Ministry of Interior,” Tom retorted. “Voekl works around it entirely, through the Volksturm guards. They're Hitler's Gestapo all over again.”

“That's why Schoettler has been permitted to stay.” Wally returned patiently to the point. “He's wallpaper. He makes Voekl look good. But this time, Voekl needed Schoettler's ministry to shut us down.”

“Which must mean,” Caroline said slowly, “that the chancellor is afraid of what the FBI will find in the crater.”

Tom Shephard pulled his eyes away from the window and stared at Caroline intently.

“We've already found evidence that contradicts their suspects. What else is there?”

Proof of complicity at the highest levels, Eric's voice muttered in her brain. Fritz Voekl's balls in a sling.

“Isn't it obvious, Tom? Something that connects Voekl to 30 April.”

Six Budapest, 10:30 a.m.

Anatoly Rubikov was a man of few words, which is why he was still alive.

He crushed out the remains of his cigarette in the twist-off cap of his bottled beer, and immediately lit another. He smoked filtered cigarettes because Marya worried about his lungs and wanted him to quit. The filter was a bone he threw her, although filters meant nothing when a man smoked as much as he did.

Cigarettes were Anatoly's solace — an addiction, yes; a weakness, of course; but so much a part of his biological imperative that to abandon them now would be to poison himself with fresh air.

And the air of Budapest, when he thought about it, was scarcely clean anyway.

He smoked absentmindedly, the way other people breathed, his eyes fixed on the snowy television screen mounted behind the bar. Everything was murk — the air of the place, the yellow lights, the expression in the eyes of the waitress with bright orange hair and laddered stockings. The murk comforted him, and so he delayed the inevitable accounting, the walk out into the raw cold of the streets, the phone call he would have to make. It was ten-thirty in the morning. The television broadcast was in Hungarian, a language he had never understood.

He continued to stare at the screen, his beer drained to the faint tracings of foam, waiting for the face.

Could it be possible that no one had found him?

Anatoly closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the rim of the empty beer bottle. How could no one have found him?

The Hungarian National Bank occupied a building on the green swath of Szabadsag Ter, next to the embassy of the United States and across the way from Magyar TV headquarters. At this hour it should have been swarming with bankers and secretaries and clerks and factotums, all going about their legitimate business, and the man with the hole in his temple and the pool of blood under his neck should have been found by now. His picture should have flashed up on the television screen — not the man as he looked dead, but sleek and repellent in the full flush of power.

Perhaps they were keeping the mess under wraps, Anatoly thought. Assessing the damage. Deciding what could be told. If they waited much longer, Krucevic would take matters into his own hands.

And if I wait much longer, Krucevic will think too much about what I saw. He'll decide that a bullet keeps the best secrets.

The short, curling hairs at the back of his neck began to rise of themselves.

He crushed out the second cigarette and tossed a hundred-forint note on the counter. The orange-haired waitress followed him with her eyes as he left.

He placed the call in the Keleti train station, barely seven minutes before the Berlin train.

“Aronson,” he said thickly when the receptionist answered.

“Mr. Aronson is not in. Would you like to leave — ”

He hung up.

Aronson would want him to stay in Budapest. He would want him to shadow Krucevic, find out where he kept the woman, turn informer, and thus seal his death warrant. Aronson would want him — Anatoly Petrovich — to risk his life for someone he knew was as good as dead. He turned, trailing smoke from his splayed fingers, and sought the protective cover of the train.

He cased it from front to back and took a seat at the very end of the last car — a smoking one, of course — folding himself into a corner near the half-open window in the six-person compartment. Otherwise, it was empty. He read his paper and pretended to ignore what he was actually studying frantically, the passage of other travelers along the corridor. Travelers who might be sent to kill him.

The train gave a lurch, compartment doors hissed shut. In a moment, the conductor would ask for his ticket. He closed his eyes again and saw the dead man's face.

Anatoly had never liked killing. He had done it when necessary — in the army, during his first tour in Afghanistan — but the mujahideen were wolves, rabid with violence. Killing them was a matter of survival. He had never watched a man consider his own death before — had never watched the knowledge come with all the inevitability of rain after a stifling day. When the pistol grazed his temple, Lajta's eyes had widened slightly, like a dog's when you pull hard on its ears.

It was the only sign of fear the banker had shown.

The compartment door slid open, and a youngish woman — tired face, raincoat smelling dankly of the streets — shoved a bulky suitcase inside. Its zipper was broken, and she had been forced to tie the lid shut with string. Everything about her suggested a weary struggle against respectable poverty — her dark stockings, her thick-soled shoes. Hair as dry and tousled as an old bird's nest.

She gave Anatoly a furtive glance and took the seat farthest away.

Did he look menacing? Or like a man in terror for his life?

The woman drew a paperback from her purse and opened it. Idly, Anatoly glanced at the cover: something in German. She was going home, then, as he was. Her head drooped, absorbed in words; suddenly, the platform began to slide backward.

Anatoly did not trust himself to gaze out the window.

He was an expert at cracking security systems. The KGB had trained him, and he had worked all over the world, lifting the locks on office doors in Khartoum and Valletta and Santiago and Manhattan. He had defected fifteen years ago during his last tour, in Rome, when he'd been sent to bug the building directly next door to the U.S. embassy — a simple affair of attaching a remote fiber — optic device to one of the ancient pipes running between the walls of the two buildings.

Anatoly had never been a man of politics. He was not much of a man for morality, either, or for debating the finer points of loyalty. The KGB had been good to him. He had been good to the KGB. But it was time for their paths to part.

He had fallen in love with a translator at the Rome embassy, and the last few weeks of her tour were up. Anatoly was moving on to Kabul; Marya was returning to Moscow. He tried to buy time, a transfer, a change in Marya's assignment. The system proved inflexible.

And so, on that night nearly fifteen years ago, he discarded his cigarette, told his partner to take a hike, ignored the placement plan for the listening device, and instead disarmed the American embassy. Then he broke the glass in a ground-floor window at the back of the building, a window that should have been barred. He thrust himself through, grunting as his leather jacket snagged on the ledge — it was a coolish night in February, even the ubiquitous Roman cats gone to ground — until his sneakered feet touched something springy and soft. A tumbledown couch in a minor bureaucrat's office.

Anatoly stretched himself out on the cushions and went instantly to sleep.

In the morning, an extensive debriefing, the Soviet listening device like a peace offering on the table.

Forty-eight hours later, he and Marya were on a plane for Washington.

He spent eighteen months telling the CIA everything he knew about security installations throughout the Soviet empire, and about the hostile listening devices and fiber optics planted in the walls of a hundred U.S. installations.

Then the Soviet empire began to crumble and the KGB heads themselves fled to Washington, and Anatoly decided to look for other work. Two years later he was a freelancer in Hamburg, Marya was thriving, their baby was on its way. He had four employees and a reputation for discretion. The difficult jobs — the problems of access or of imaginative design, the jobs that still made his blood race — he took on himself. That was when he met Krucevic.

The man came to Anatoly with a bunker in mind. Something entirely controlled by computer, with infrared detection zones, motion sensors, video surveillance inside and out. Krucevic wanted his own phone lines monitored, he wanted cellular communications routinely tapped, he wanted the hard drives of his computer systems armed to self-destruct at the first sign of penetration. What he wanted, Anatoly decided, was to live like a villain in a Dick Tracy comic strip.

Anatoly drew up plans. Krucevic paid him and took the blueprints away. Anatoly thought that was the end of it. If the security measures were ever installed, he was not to know.

He had little idea then that he was dealing with the devil. That knowledge came later. After Krucevic had visited a third and even a fifth time, walking into the offices in Hamburg unannounced. He came, always, on the nights Anatoly worked late over the bookkeeping. His knowledge of Anatoly's movements was the least disturbing thing about him.

He began to trade on loyalty. He began to assume complicity. He began to threaten, to presume he owned Anatoly and his office and his pretty house in the suburbs with two children growing in it.

And at last, Anatoly had gone to Berlin, as a penitent goes humbly to confession, and had sought the good offices and advice of the man named Wally Aronson. He had come to know Aronson years before, during the long months of debriefing in Virginia, and while he doubted that Aronson had brilliance or cunning or even great courage, Anatoly believed that the man had no evil in him.

And all the power of American Intelligence at his back.

Sitting now in the drab car of the MAV train while the telephone wires of Hungary dipped and soared like swallows beyond the window, Anatoly prayed that Intelligence might still mean something.

Aronson had told Anatoly that two options were open to him. The first was to throw himself on the mercy of old friends and allow them to relocate his family safely to the United States. He would lose most of what he had built in Hamburg; he would start over again a pauper in a land of wealth. But the Agency might offer some work. Or, Aronson said, Anatoly could take a risk: He could play Krucevic like a fish, tell Aronson everything he learned of Krucevic's movements, and be compensated handsomely. The house in Hamburg, the office with four employees, Marya's contentment in her settled life — all could remain. And he would win the undying respect and gratitude of the United States.

Anatoly was, by nature, a taker of risk. And he liked the freedom he had won for himself; he liked meeting Wally Aronson as an equal, with something to give rather than everything to beg. It made him feel less desperate.

When Krucevic called, he was ready with his overnight bag and his ticket to Hungary.

His instructions were to await instructions.

They came at four a.m., with a ring of his bedside phone and the order to be on the pavement in front of his hotel in ten minutes.

He was there, a small kit of tools resting on the sidewalk at his feet, when the car pulled up. Krucevic sat alone in the back. Otto was at the wheel. Beside him sat another man Anatoly did not recognize but who he later learned was named Tonio. For an instant, he hesitated — the only free space in the car was next to Krucevic, and he instinctively hated the proximity of the man — then slid into the backseat. And kept his tools secure between his feet.

They drove swiftly through the empty streets, a yellow nimbus of rain in the predawn streetlights. Anatoly's hands were sweating. Tonio chattered nervously, high-pitched and annoying, until Otto reached out and cuffed him, hard, across the face.

Otto drove to the rear of the central bank, to the electronically controlled entrance reserved for employees and armored trucks. The massive steel gate was a system beautiful in its impregnability, and Anatoly would have approached the problem with delicacy and reverence had Krucevic not been sitting silently in the rear. Anatoly struggled to control his breathing, to defuse the set of rear doors and then Lajta's office itself with an economy of movement. By that time they had pulled Lajta out of the trunk of the car, his hands bound and his mouth gagged, and shuffled him upstairs through the dimly lit halls.

Where were the security guards? Had Krucevic bribed them all? The important thing, Anatoly decided, was not to show fear. Krucevic scented fear like a dog, and Anatoly knew that he reeked of it now.

He wanted no part of what they were planning. He would have liked to leave then, with the doors wide open and the deed still undone. But Krucevic expected him there to the finish, so that the security devices could be reinstalled. By that time it was five A.M.” still dark, and Tonio was bent over the keyboard of the personal computer in the finance minister's office, his concentration focused on the monitor like a beam of light. Lajta huddled on the floor, bewildered and malevolent. Slumped in a chair, Otto yawned with boredom.

Whatever Tonio was doing took very little time — less than fifteen minutes — but the tension in the room sang through their veins like a pitch just beyond the range of hearing. Anatoly's fingers were ice cold. And then Tonio stopped clicking the keys and glanced at Krucevic with a grin.

“Cazzofottuto, boss, we're in.”

“Good,” Mian said easily, as though Tonio had mentioned the weather.

“Now get back out and let's go.”

The clicking of the keys recommenced. Anatoly expelled a breath. He avoided the eyes of the man on the floor.

Then Tonio stood up and Krucevic nodded at Otto.

Lajta was hauled to his feet. At gunpoint, Otto led him to the desk. The Minister of Finance was forced to sit down, and then his bonds were loosened.

The gun was pressed in his right hand, and raised, with cruel precision, to his right temple. Otto waited an instant before he pulled the trigger — he looked directly into Lajta's eyes as they widened with terror, and smiled — and at that point, Anatoly could no longer watch.

He restored the security devices, praying he would not vomit. They drove him back to his hotel and left him on the sidewalk.

“I know you will say nothing,” Krucevic told him, “because you are a man who loves his wife. And those little girls — beautiful, the pair of them. I would not want Otto to know where such lovely girls live.” The rain would give way quite soon to snow, Anatoly thought as he stared through the train window; it was probably snowing in Moscow now, had been snowing already for weeks. The women would be shuffling through the Arbat in ill-fitting boots, their faces muffled to the eyebrows.

He lit his eighth cigarette. The woman opposite closed her paperback, and with it, her eyes. Smoke had placed a scrim between them that softened the deep weariness of her expression. He felt for her suddenly an abyss of tenderness, a desire to keep her safe. To do what he could no longer do for Marya and their children.

In Washington, it hardly snowed at all. But to get there —

Where, in God's name, could he go?

Seven Berlin, 1:19 p.m.

“A connection between Fritz Voekl and 30 April,” Tom Shephard repeated. “Do you realize what you're suggesting, Caroline? That the chancellor of Germany organized a terrorist hit in his own capital. A hit that killed twenty-eight people, seventeen of them Germans.”

“You think I'm nuts,” Caroline observed.

Shephard shook his head.

“I think you're dangerous. I think if you said that in public, you'd get a Volksturm bullet right between the eyes.”

“That doesn't mean it isn't true.”

“If we can prove it,” Wally said, “we'd bring down the government.”

A look akin to joy — if joy could ever be so vicious — suffused Tom Shephard's face. What was incredible in Caroline's mouth was gospel in Wally's, apparently.

That quickly, Tom was sold.

“So what's the link? Where do we look for it? Not in the bomb. It was made of Semtex.”

“The terrorist's material of choice. You assume that means it came from Slovakia.” Not for nothing had Caroline followed a bombing investigation for thirty months. She knew more than she'd ever cataloged about explosives. “But what if it's a Semtex-like material from a different source?”

“Forensics could pinpoint exactly where it came from, given some time and a bit more residue.”

“Or maybe it's a problem with the device itself,” she added. “A piece of broadcast equipment left in the bomber's van that carries incriminating fingerprints. Prints belonging to somebody the Voekl regime doesn't want connected to the Brandenburg Gate.”

“Or maybe it's the bomb's timer,” Wally threw in. “That's how we nailed the perps in Pan Am 103. The timer they used to trigger the bomb was one of only twelve made by a single Swiss firm for a single client — Moammar Qaddafis brother-in-law.”

“Or maybe it's a body.” Tom Shephard sounded morose. “The famous extra leg, from Oklahoma City. Or maybe Mian Krucevic himself was blown up in the van, with a love letter from Fritz Voekl in his breast pocket. But it doesn't matter, does it, if we can't get to the fucking crater.”

“You give up too damn easily,” Caroline said.

The scarred embassy on Pariser Platz was once again open for business. A mere two days after the bombing, the marine guards were back at the entrance, black armbands prominent on their biceps. Windows were boarded over where they had not already been replaced. A tattered flag flew at half mast, and concrete blast posts linked with chain blocked the building's exterior — or had they been hidden before, Caroline thought, by the ceremonial platform erected for the dedication?

The posts were designed to keep a vehicle filled with explosive from parking near the door; they had been powerless against commandos on the roof and shock waves traveling across the street. But perhaps they offered the illusion of safety to the people inside — people who knew, as she did, that if someone wanted to kill them enough, he would probably succeed.

Volksturm guards patrolled the streets leading into Pariser Platz, and barricades were everywhere. Wally abandoned his car on a side street and led them through a series of alleys to the embassy. The pavements were slick with the first flakes of snow.

As they turned into the square, Tom Shephard stopped short. Uniformed Volksturm surrounded the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate like a cordon of honor; but behind them, bright mustard against the blackened stone, reared the shovel of a front-loader. As the three of them watched, it swiveled and disgorged a twisted load of metal into the body of a truck.

“Fucking shit!”

Shephard took off at a run. Wally and Caroline tore after him. A few feet from the Volksturm cordon, they caught him and pulled him back.

“Fucking idiots!” He was struggling to break free and hurl himself at the nearest black shirt. “Get that fucking truck out of there!”

“You can't do anything about it.” Caroline's voice was urgent, her fingers straining at his coat sleeve. “Tom — you'll only make it worse.”

He shook her off.

“Do you realize what they're doing?”

“Yes.”

“They're destroying evidence!”

“Of course they are.”

The bright front-loader bent, primal as a dinosaur, to devour a lamppost. Stone, metal, dust, and a few scraps of clothing clung to its jaws. The figure inside at work on the levers appeared to be whistling, oblivious to the spectators, the rolling news cameras, the enraged Shephard.

“Holy God,” he burst out. “There could be human remains in there. What in Christ's name are they thinking?”

“Come on.” Wally steered him gently around. “Let the press deal with it. They always do.”

The Volksturm had massed near the consular section's door. There a long line of Berliners and tourists had assembled in hope of visas; most of them, Caroline noticed, were Turks. They stood in silence, eyes averted from the armed men in black; but there was an ugliness in the air, powerful as the stench of cordite.

Wally pulled her toward the embassy's main entrance. Between the two of them, Carrie and Shephard, he looked like a policeman making an arrest.

“I've got to call the Bureau,” Tom muttered as they flashed IDs at the marine guards and hurried down the main corridor. “This is un-fucking-believable. Do you realize what those bastards are doing?”

“Yes, Tom, I think we all realize,” Wally said patiently. He took the broad central staircase two steps at a time, turned left at the sec and floor, and strode down a corridor. Caroline barely had time to register a team of technicians mounted on ladders, busily rewiring the embassy ceiling, when Wally stopped in front of an office.

“Mrs. Saunders!” he said gaily to the middle-aged woman behind the desk. “Meet Caroline Carmichael, otherwise known as Mad Dog”

“Mad Dog?” muttered Shephard.

Caroline extended her hand; Mrs. Saunders clasped it.

“Mrs. Saunders is the station's nerve center,” Wally told them. “Although she has worked for an Intelligence organization for most of her life, none of us has ever learned her first name.”

“It's Gladys, if you can believe,” said the woman. “My mother was Welsh. Just call me Mrs. Saunders. Everyone does. You have an action cable from Headquarters, Wally” — she looked at him severely over her half-glasses, which were tethered to her head with a black cord — “and Vie Marinelli has been on the phone from Budapest. He wants you before COB today.”

“Station chief,” Wally told Caroline. “I put in a call to him this morning about DBTOXIN. So the cable system's up?”

“No. We used carrier pigeon. Also” — Mrs. Saunders glanced at her notes — “somebody throaty and Russian called. At least, I think he was Russian. Real hush-hush. A bad case of secret-agentitis, if ever I heard one. He hung up when I asked for his name.”

Wally stood stock — still in front of the secretary's desk, considering this.

“When?” he asked.

“Maybe ten, ten-fifteen.”

“Could it have been our developmental?”

“Old what's-his-acronym? I don't know. Heavy smokers all sound the same to me. Particularly when they're foreign.”

“Long-distance call?”

“Either that or our line's bugged. Lousy connection.”

Wally whistled tunelessly under his breath while his fingers riffled the papers in Mrs. Saunders's In box.

“Where's Fred?”

“He and Young Paul are out in the van, per your instructions.” Mrs. Saunders sat back in her desk chair and smiled nastily. “It's so nice to see Fred working again. He managed to get rid of That Girl, you know. Gone home to see her mother.”

Wally looked up.

“That Girl, Mrs. Saunders, is his wife.”

“She'll get him PNG'd one of these days,” Mrs. Saunders predicted darkly. “Absolutely no discretion. Thinks it's a hoot that her husband's a spy. Hasn't the faintest clue spying's still a crime to the host country. How's McLean, sweetie?” This to Caroline.

“Congested,” she managed. “I've got a nice little house in Arlington. Keep it rented. God help me if I ever go back.”

Wally disappeared through the office's inner door, a vaulted one, thrown open to Mrs. Saunders's view. Tom and Caroline followed him inside.

It might have been a gentleman's study — if the gentleman was a little paranoid.

There were no windows: The Agency had long ago discovered that electronic emissions, even the tapping of fingers on a computer keyboard, bounced off glass and could be picked up by anyone remotely handy. Three workstations with computers and a motley collection of files dotted the space. The floor was carpeted in crimson pile that further deadened sound; the walls were lined with bookshelves. Within the walls, multiple layers of steel prevented electronic penetration. There was a document shredder, a combination safe, a few plants dying under fluorescent light, and a silver-framed picture of Brenda on Wally's desk.

“The developmental wouldn't be your 30 April safecracker, would it?” Caroline asked.

He raised an eyebrow at her, looking for all the world like a satanic Puck.

“Do you need to know?”

“I'd like to know. If he's calling from Buda and hanging up in a hurry, maybe he's on to something.”

“Maybe he is,” Wally said smoothly. “If that was the developmental. But it's not like Anatoly to be spooked by Mrs. Saunders. We'll just have to wait until he calls back.”

“What time is it in Washington?” Shephard demanded. He was, Caroline saw, still obsessed with stopping the destruction of evidence in the street below.

“I don't think it matters, Tom.” Wally turned on his computer terminal. “You're not calling. Shut up and start thinking for once.”

To Caroline's surprise, Shephard submitted to the abuse. He slumped into a chair and fixed his eyes on his shoes.

“You need a car and a good driver.” Wally stuck his head into Mrs. Saunders's province.

“Oh, Gladys?”

“Yes, Walter?” she replied acidly. “Any of the FSNs report for duty?”

FSNs — Foreign-service nationals — were local folk who served as support staff for the U.S. embassy.

“There's Ursula.”

“Ursula would stick out like a sore thumb at a construction dump. Get me Tony.”

“Tony was killed in the bombing, dear,” said Mrs. Saunders imperturbably.

Wally was silent for a moment.

“Okay. How about Old Markus?”

“Old Markus it is.” She leaned on an intercom button and buzzed.

“Old Markus is perfect,” Wally told them.

“You're sending him out after the dump truck,” Shephard said.

“Why not? Got a better idea?”

“And then what — he sifts through the debris in the dead of night?”

“I doubt he'd know what to look for.” Wally took off his suit jacket and reached for a cable.

“You're the forensics nut, Tom. You've got all those Bureau teams twiddling their thumbs over at the Hyatt. Why not put 'em to work?”

“It might be considered against the law.”

“German or U.S.?” Wally tore the cable in half and stuck it in a burn bag. “But I see your point. Whereas if I got involved, it'd still be against the law, but you'd feel better, right?”

Shephard said nothing. Wally smirked at Caroline.

“There it is in a nutshell, Mad Dog. The Agency avoids evidence like the plague, because evidence is admissible in court, where sources and methods never go. But we love to help other people find evidence. It makes our little day. And are they grateful?”

“Once in a while,” Shephard muttered.

“Not often enough.”

“Okay, Wally,” he said in exasperation. “I'm grateful for Old Markus. Let him follow the damn truck, and we'll decide later how to deal with whatever he finds.”

And at that moment, the secure phone rang.

“Suicide,” Wally said in disbelief. He sank down into his chair, fingers gripping the receiver. “Why commit suicide if you've just embezzled the nation?” His eyes were fixed on Caroline's face, but there was no expression in them; he might have been looking at a featureless wall.

“All right, Vie. I understand. I'll get back to you tonight.”

He hung up.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Vie Marinelli, from Budapest.”

“And?”

“Istvan Lajta committed suicide last night. Or early this morning.”

Shephard looked up.

“The Hungarian Minister of Finance?”

“Lajta killed himself?” Caroline was shocked. “But he's young — a rising star in the Liberal Party! People talked about him as a future prime minister.”

“His assistant found him this morning. One bullet through the temple, gun lying on the floor.” Wally grimaced. “His wife identified it as Lajta's.”

“He had a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago,” Shephard protested.

“Even that, it seems, is no shield against bullets.”

“They're sure it was suicide?” Caroline persisted.

“There was a note — or a confession, I guess — typed on the guy's computer screen.”

She snorted.

“Anybody can type, Wally. What'd Lajta confess to?”

“Embezzling the Hungarian treasury.”

Shephard whistled.

“That includes at least a hundred million in IMF loans. The ministry is scrambling to sit on the news and trace the funds.”

“So they called Vie Marinelli.” Caroline immediately understood. The CIA's Chief of Station was usually declared to a friendly host country, and depending on the relationship, he could serve as a governments sounding board in times of crisis.

“Vie has asked for Secret Service assistance. The Treasury guys are pretty good at chasing down electronic transfers.”

“But why?” she asked, working it out. “Why put a bullet in your brain if you've just pulled off the heist of the century?”

“Remorse?”

She groaned.

“Oh, come on, Wally.”

“He was murdered,” Tom Shephard said brusquely.

Caroline caught his meaning and threw it back. “The only reason to kill Lajta —”

“Is if he didn't do it,” Tom finished. “Whoever stole the cash left Lajta holding the bag.”

“Vie seemed certain it was suicide,” Wally objected, “and he's not stupid. The building hadn't been broken into—” He stopped short and went very still.

“Your friend Anatoly,” Caroline said grimly. “No wonder old what's-his-acronym hung up on Gladys.”

Wally didn't reply. Instead, he reached for the phone and dialed a number. But before it rang, he slammed down the receiver.

“If Lajta died sometime during the night, Anatoly won't even be back in Hamburg yet. Shit. I've got to get to him —”

“Before Krucevic does.” Caroline picked up a silver letter opener and studied the engraving a message of thanks from one of Wally's previous postings. “Do you seriously think Krucevic will let him go?”

“I don't know.” Wally sank back into his chair, defeated.

“Why would 30 April steal from the treasury?” Tom Shephard asked. “If you're going to rob a bank, rob one in Switzerland. Not Hungary. I don't get it.”

But Caroline did.

“Fritz Voekl doesn't want Switzerland,” she said. “Switzerland is clean and well ordered and more efficient than ten Germanys. Fritz wants a reason to clean up the wrong side of the tracks.”

“What are you saying?”

“Voekl needs a cause. A crisis. He wants a plausible reason to send German troops throughout the neighboring countries. The countries that can't stop the Muslim hordes from invading the German sphere of influence. Voekl wants an invitation to take over.”

“The reconquest of the Third Reich?” Shephard was dismissive.

“Yes,” Caroline retorted. “What else is so risky it requires a hostage Vice President and a hamstrung U.S.?”

She drove the letter opener deep into the soil of Wally's wilting plant.

“The chancellor is attempting something so enormous so barefaced that only the most desperate measure can sustain it. Voekl wants Jack Bigelow to stand aside while he annexes Central Europe.”

“First he's funding terrorists, now he's Hitler. That's ridiculous”

“Is it? He's already got people in Prague. A couple of bombs and a pat on the back managed that one. Now Hungary. When news of the treasury heist gets out and it will, no matter how tightly they hold a lid on it fortunes will be lost. The currency destabilized. We'll see blood in the streets. And I guarantee you that Voekl's Volksturm won't be far behind.”

“I can't believe you're saying this. Ask anybody in Germany, they'll tell you the Reich was an aberration.”

“If it happened once,” Caroline argued, “it can happen again. Only more subtly this time, while nobody's looking. It'll happen with money and friendship and technical assistance and some brilliant political maneuvering on the side.”

“Not in our lifetime,” Shephard insisted. “We wouldn't allow it.”

“We just did,” Caroline said.

Eight Berlin, 2:45 p.m.

Young Paul, as Mrs. Saunders had called him, pulled his plumber's van to the curb in front of the children's playground on Kolmarer Strasse in Prenzlauerberg. It was a wonderful playground, famed throughout Berlin, filled with toy mills, large pumps, a variety of pulleys and chutes — an industrial wonderland for city children. Mahmoud Sharif's small boys, ages four and two, loved it. They lived only a hundred yards away, in an apartment building on the corner of Knaackestrasse.

Paul was driving a serviceable white van in the Agency's possession, a van whose sides proclaimed in correct German lettering that he was a plumber of distinction. He eased along Kolmarer Strasse until, from the vantage of his driver's seat, he had an unobstructed view of Sharif's building. It was five blocks and a world apart from the safe house Sharif had used that morning.

Paul's sleek blond hair was covered with a white cap, and he wore canvas overalls in place of his usual Italian suiting. Behind him, in the body of the truck, sat Fred Leicester and thirty thousand dollars' worth of electronic equipment.

Paul turned off the ignition and delved into a paper sack of lunch. It was well after the German workman's usual hour for eating, but perhaps the plumber of distinction had been preoccupied earlier with an emergency. He brought forth some bread and wurst and a bottle of pilsner and proceeded to gaze enraptured at the horde of youngsters screaming among the iron cages of the play structure. It was a working-class neighborhood; Prenzlauerburg had always been so, under the kaiser and the Nazis and then the Communists and now the West. Lately it had submitted to a rage for gentrification. But many of the young faces were dusky and exotic, the hair uncompromisingly black.

Paul ate slowly. Inside the van, Fred fiddled with buttons and winced at the whine in his earphones.

In the building on the corner of Knaackestrasse, Mahmoud Sharif cleared his throat and flushed a toilet. The four-year-old slapped his brother and stole a toy. A woman named Dagmar — spiky blond hair, beautiful eyes rimmed in kohl — picked up the baby and carried him into the kitchen. She spoke to him in German, her voice husky with smoke.

Paul took a swig of beer. Fred listened, and waited for a call.

“Wally?”

The COS looked up from the sandwich he was eating and said, “Yes, Gladys?”

She glared darkly but let it slide.

“The boys just called in. They're in position outside Sharif's apartment.”

“Thank you, Gladys.”

“Oh, will you stop?” Her head disappeared.

Caroline's nerves fluttered to life.

“Would that be Mahmoud Sharif?”

Wally reached for a napkin.

“Paul and Fred are out trolling. Just in case Sharif has anything to say.” He glanced at Tom Shephard, who remained slumped in his seat.

“Tom, you Bureau guys ever follow this clown?”

“Not on my watch. Palestinian bomb maker, right?”

“Hizballah's finest.”

“I thought he'd reformed.”

“So did I. But Carrie tells me that Headquarters picked up Sharif's name in connection with 30 April.”

“Really.” Tom sat up and twisted to gaze at Caroline. He was thinking, she knew, of the black wig and the gray Mercedes he had followed that morning.

“A Palestinian in bed with the neo-Nazis … I suppose there have been stranger things. Like the reconquest of the Reich.”

“They have a common cause,” Wally observed. “Killing Jews.”

“So you think Sharifmade the bomb that blew the Gate?” Tom whistled softly.

“I can see why that would make him interesting to Sally Bowles.”

“Who?” Wally asked around a mouthful of ham.

“Cabaret,” Caroline supplied. “Berlin in the thirties. Sally Bowles in a top hat and fish nets Or should I say Liza Minnelli? Tom seems to think I look like her.”

“But you're blond.”

“And I can't sing.”

Wally gave it up. Tom continued to study her coolly, but to her relief he said nothing of rag heads or Alexanderplatz. She made a mental note to request a new identity when she got back to Langley. Jane Hathaway was as good as blown. And as for Michael O'Shaughnessy...

In all ignorance, with haphazard luck, Wally was on Michael's trail. Sharif could lead the station right to Eric's door. And if he did? Disaster. For Sophie Payne, for the Agency, for Eric —

No, not her fault if Eric met disaster. He had brought that on himself.

All the same, anguish surged thick in her throat. She had done exactly what Cuddy Wilmot had warned her against: She had handed Eric's contact to the bombing investigation. And now Dare Atwood must be told, before events spiraled out of control.

“Can I use a secure phone, Wally?” she asked. “I'd like to call Headquarters.”

Sharif surfaced about an hour after Paul parked the van in front of the playground. By that time, Paul had exhausted his wurst and finished the beer and moved on to the examination of a German soccer magazine, as though plumbers of distinction had nothing better to do than kill a Thursday afternoon. When the phone call came, he and Fred were almost caught unaware — because Mahmoud Sharif had kissed his wife and muttered something in Arabic to his children and had left the apartment on Knaackestrasse completely.

He swung into view for the briefest instant: a dark-haired, tall man in a black leather jacket, peering intently at the corner. His eyes passed over the plumber's van, the seething play structures.

Paul was absorbed in reading about a test match with Liverpool, parsing out the difficult German sports jargon he had never been taught at Langley.

Satisfied, Sharif unlocked the door of his gray Mercedes and slid behind the wheel.

Fred vaulted into the van's passenger seat, cursing, and screamed at Paul to follow the Benz.

They lost a few seconds. That was a good thing, actually, because Fred calmed down and Paul was prevented from dashing out after the gray Mercedes like the inexperienced and overeager first-tour officer he was.

Fred speed-dialed a number on his cell phone.

“Wally, we're following the subject. In case he decides to make a few calls on the road.”

“Where's he headed?” Wally asked.

Fred studied the car in front of him.

“West,” he said. “On Elbinger Strasse.”

“Think he'll pick up the highway?”

“Don't know.”

“Keep me posted.”

The Mercedes abandoned Elbinger Strasse for Osloerstrasse, found Highway 100 and then Highway 110, and appeared, for all the world, to be heading for Tegel Airport. But just as Fred had decided that Mahmoud was taking off for a little R and R in that terrorist playground of choice, the island of Malta, the steel gray car shot past the airport exit. It headed north.

He led them straight to the forest in the middle of Reinickendorf. Here the Schloss Tegel rose like a neoclassical dream above the turgid waters of its lake. It had once belonged to the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, one the founder of Berlin University, the other a scientist and explorer. Not the usual haunt of a Hizballah bomb maker.

“What the hell do I do now?” Paul asked desperately. He had come to a standstill, the van well back from the castle's parking lot. They were screened from their quarry's view by a well-trimmed hedge. But Sharif's black hair and leather jacket were just visible.

At this hour and this season, the castle was deserted: no schoolchildren skipping stones at the swans; no swans, for that matter. Only the avenue of lindens, a deserted gravel walk. The car park was virtually empty. Sharif let the Mercedes idle near the single other car — a long black Daimler sedan with a uniformed driver — and got out.

Fred patched in the station.

“Wally? You there?”

Silence.

“Wally!”

“Yeah,” said Aronson.

“We're at Schloss Tegel. God knows why. Sharif must have picked us up.”

“Can you get close to him?”

“He's standing thirty yards away. There's one other car, a limo. Sharif's tapping on the window.”

“Think it's a date?”

From this distance, Fred could make out nothing of the car's interior. The Daimler might hold an entire chorus of dancing girls. Then again, it might be empty. He studied the chauffeur. The man was probably in his sixties, a loyal old retainer; he looked at Mahmoud Sharif as one might assess an underbred dog.

“Shouldn't we go someplace less obvious?” Paul whispered urgently at his elbow.

As if echoing his thought, Wally's voice came over the line.

“You can't hang out in the parking lot. Find a side street on Sharif's route home. Pick him up when he goes past. Okay?”

“Shit.”

“You lost this one, buddy.”

“Wait,” Fred said urgently.

“The driver's opening the limo's trunk. He's pulling something out. Sharif's helping. Jesus, it looks like… a body...”

The chauffeur carried the reclining woman to Sharif's Mercedes. She was too large to fit in the trunk; Sharif wedged her across the backseat instead.

“Shit! A piece of fucking sculpture,” Fred burst out in disgust.

“Now I've seen everything.”

“Pack it up and come home,” Wally ordered him. There was the faintest hint of amusement in his voice. “I guess the guy really has gone straight.”

But as the limo driver turned his Daimler and drove away, past the idling plumber's van and the sighing lindens, Mahmoud Sharif pulled out his cell phone.

When Caroline dialed his secure line, Cuddy let it ring five times before he picked up. He was probably absorbed in reading Intelligence traffic, she thought, his mind deep in the clandestine maze.

“Your money or your wife.”

“Mad Dog! What's happening?”

“Nothing good. I blew it, Cud. Berlin station is bugging Mahmoud Sharif.”

“Carrie, I told you to drop it. Do you realize what happens if Wally picks up Eric's voice?”

“I know. I'm sorry. Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe they've had a falling-out.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

“I thought Dare should have a heads-up.” Caroline forced herself to sound calm.

“So she can contain the problem if it goes public.”

“Right,” he said with a brittle laugh. “And I get to tell her.”

Caroline was silent.

“Anything else?” he demanded harshly.

“Voekl's closed the crater.”

“I know. It was on CNN.”

“We think he's running scared. That he's deep-sixing evidence because it incriminates him.”

“Maybe we should start a rumor in the Washington Post. "Intelligence sources suggest..."”

“That should keep Dare occupied. Cuddy — ”

“Yeah?”

“What do you know about Hungary?”

“They're dead broke. And there'll be hell to pay.”

“So the news is out.”

“I got it in a cable from Buda thirty minutes ago.”

“Think it's possible Lajta was murdered?”

He considered this an instant.

“One of a series of events in Central Europe?”

She smiled involuntarily at the phone. In Cuddy's world, the reconquest of the Third Reich was completely plausible. He knew, unlike Shephard, that she wasn't crazy.

“I'll start watching the corporate accounts,” he told her.

Which meant the VaccuGen accounts. Cuddy had been tracing them for months now, through all the blinds and front companies and usual sleights of hand. He had a map of clandestine flows of cash, an electronic trail that branched like a monstrous bloodstream through DESIST's memory boards. Cuddy had pieces of operations he could grasp, micro bytes of proof. If a hundred million dollars suddenly appeared on Cuddy's screen, the Hungarian treasury was as good as found.

The movement of Krucevic's money sketched a tantalizing tale. It was VaccuGen, Cuddy suspected, that broke the peace in Belfast; VaccuGen that nurtured militia camps in Montana and Khmer Rouge bases in Laos.

Wherever a nationalist cause could thrive, there went Krucevic's money. Cuddy could map the flow of funds, but he lacked names for the networks and hard proof of what Krucevic bought.

“You work on the Sharif problem,” he told Caroline now. “Keep the lid on Eric's existence any way you can. I'll fire up the database.”

The database. Where all the dirty secrets lived.

Access, Ms. Bisby. It's what gets the high analytics every time.

Caroline felt suddenly afraid of all that Cuddy might find.

Nine Budapest, 3:15 p.m.

Mirjana Tarcic heard the news of Istvan Lajta's death while driving over the Szechenyi Lanchid, the Chain Bridge, one of Budapest's most beautiful landmarks.

At night it was illuminated by a blaze of white lights, linking Buda and Pest, so that first-time travelers to the city on the Danube immediately thought of Paris. But today the bridge seemed ugly, a steel scrawl against the muddy brown river and the rain-washed towers of the lower city. It looked like what it was, an aging feat of engineering, its curvilinear heights a perfect platform for the launching of suicides.

Mirjana was stuck in traffic. She eased forward a few feet, braked, and closed her eyes. Istvan Lajta had been a young man. Younger than herself. What kind of despair drove a person to fire a bullet into his own brain? Even in the deepest valleys of her shadowed life, Mirjana had never considered suicide. Death was an abyss. She could not steel herself to peer over the edge.

The constant brutality of her years with Mian had taught her a stubborn survival, if only to disappoint him. She'd clung to the edge of the cliff with her fingernails, and when Mian approached to kick her hands from the edge, she'd clawed another hold. Lajta had left two children. The fool. The self-obsessed, ambitious young fool.

No one should abandon a child.

Mirjana's heart lurched, and with it the car. She had taken her foot off the clutch and the engine stalled. Behind her, a man at the wheel of a late-model blue Mercedes leaned on his horn and gestured rudely at her rearview mirror. A Mercedes. They were everywhere in Buda now, silver hood ornaments rising like latter-day coats of arms for a new governing class. She scowled at the man, at his perfect Italian suiting and his silk tie, and struggled with the ignition.

Jozsef. Had she abandoned Jozsef as utterly as Istvan Lajta had deserted his two sons? She had lied to Bela Horvath. She did live in hope of seeing Jozsef again.

Hope was a fever that burned deep in the heart of her silent nights, her sleepwalking days. Hope was almost as scalding as her thirst for revenge.

She drove on, diving toward the neat squares of the administrative district farther up the river. Beyond them was Bela's lab. She badly wanted to know what he had learned about vaccine No. 413.

But she had not gone four blocks before her way was barred.

People milled around the square in front of the old Hungarian Stock Exchange building; they were shouting and chanting in front of the National Bank, where Lajta's body had been found. A line of police, outfitted like astronauts uncertain of the atmosphere, presented riot shields and helmets to the crowd.

Mirjana rolled down her window and tugged at the sleeve of a protester sprawled across her bumper. The man glared at her through the windshield.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“It's a protest. About that swine, Lajta.”

“Istvan Lajta?”

“The szarhazi senki ripped off the treasury. And where's the money gone, I'd like to know! Where's my life savings?”

Szarhazi senki. The shithouse nobody. Istvan Lajta had fallen far from his days of glory at the University of Chicago.

The enraged protester pushed himself off Mirjana's hood and scrabbled for a paving stone.

“Forget these pissing sods,” she shouted back. “Get to your bank and withdraw your money before it's too late.”

“I already tried.” The man ran forward to join a surging mass near a shop window. The glass strained under the pressure of too many bodies; an unseen hand hurled a beer bottle; the plate glass shattered like ice. The looting had begun.

Mirjana leaned on her horn. The car in front of her was submerged in a wave of protesters. And as she stared past its terrified driver, a slender woman in the tired uniform of the working class-cheap raincoat, cheaper shoes-clubbed a policeman with the pointed end of her bright red umbrella. The policeman raised his nightstick and slammed it down on his attacker's head. The woman crumpled, openmouthed, at his feet. There was an instant's pause in the crowd's roar — then the bodies surged forward like a herd of wildebeest on stampede. They flung themselves at the helmeted line, and the billy clubs rose and fell. Mirjana's heart thudded painfully in her chest. It would be a matter of seconds before tear gas and rubber bullets filled the square.

She threw her car into reverse and glanced over her shoulder. And what she saw sickened her.

A band of construction workers had pulled open the door of the blue Mercedes.

One was smashing the windshield with a rock. Two others attempted to roll the vehicle on its side. And the rest — three men and a woman — had the driver down on the ground. He screamed as the steel-capped boots thudded brutally against his ribs. Mirjana reached over to the car's glove compartment and pulled out her handgun. She would not endure a pack of wolves.

She thrust herself out of the car, whispering a prayer that it would not be engulfed by the milling crowd, and pushed her way through the grunting workers.

They had moved from kicking their victim to punching his face. It was a mask of blood. He looked, Mirjana thought, unconscious. Or perhaps he was already dead.

“Stop it, you sons of bitches, before I blow your heads off!” she screamed, and fired her gun in the air. No one looked up. She fired again.

The sound brought riot police on the run. The attackers turned to fight them, and instantly Mirjana was caught in the furious crush. She fought it, gasped, lost her gun and her footing, and went down.

Paul Dougherty parked the plumbers van in the garage of an Agency safe house in Spandau twenty minutes after leaving Schloss Tegel. He and Fred changed back into their suits behind the living room's drawn blinds, then left by the rear door and caught the S-Bahn into town.

Caroline, Wally, and Tom waited for them in the station vault. They pulled up chairs and prepared to listen to Mahmoud Sharif's phone call the call he had made while smoking a cigarette in the deserted parking lot of Schloss Tegel.

“I called the head of our Berlin Task Force an hour ago,” Caroline told Fred.

“He has a lead on Sharif's bona fides.” It was a patent lie, but Cuddy had told her to hold the lid on the Sharif problem any way she could. Bona fides, as everyone in Intelligence knew, were passwords you threw at your opposite number to test whether he was legitimate.

“He may use the names Michael and Jane.”

“Good,” Wally said briskly. “We've got fun with Mike and Jane. Let's roll.”

Fred had attached the tape recorder to a small device that translated electronic pulses into numbers; within seconds, they would know exactly where Sharif had dialed. Fred pushed the play button. Caroline's mouth went dry.

Two rings, and then a woman's voice, prerecorded. Sharif had reached an answering machine.

“What language is that?” Shephard asked Caroline.

“Something Slavic, I think.”

Sharif's amplified breathing filled the room. They waited for the beep. When it came, the bomb maker said in English, “This is a message for Michael.”

Wally leaned closer to the box.

“Thanks for asking after the children. They're all fine, particularly our little girl.”

“Bastard hasn't got a little girl,” muttered Fred.

“Shush”

“She would love to visit whenever you're ready for her. Speaking of visits, I saw your friend Jane this morning. Jane Hathaway,” Sharif repeated, with emphasis. Shephard scribbled the name on a legal pad.

“Jane sends her love. She will be at the Budapest Hilton if you want her, Michael, but I advise you to take extreme care. Once these women get their claws into you, it is as much as your life is worth to break free. Look at me! Go with God, brother.”

And then he broke the connection. Fred tossed a slip of paper at Wally.

“The number's in Budapest. Registered to the name of Tarcic. Is that Hungarian?”

“No,” Caroline said numbly, “it's Serbian.”

“Tarcic,” Wally repeated.

“Isn't that — ”

“The name of Krucevic's ex-wife? Yes.”

“I thought those two hated each other. Why would Sharif use a contact number manned by Mirjana Tarcic?”

In a blaze of hope and disbelief, Caroline suddenly understood. Because Mirjana's not working for Mian Krucevic. She's working against him. For Eric.

“There could be a hundred different women in Budapest with that name, Wally,” she said carefully. “It may have nothing to do with the ex-wife.”

“Oh, right.” He rolled his eyes.

But even she didn't believe it. Of course the two women were the same. Forget the years of loss, the unspeakable betrayal, the pain and the anger; Caroline knew how Eric's mind worked. He was adept at manipulation. He instantly sensed weakness and turned it to advantage. If Caroline had seen the possibilities of Mirjana Tarcic — how the woman could be used, targeted against her husband — it was obvious that Eric would be ten steps and at least two years ahead of her.

“Maybe the breakup is false,” Wally muttered. “A cover operation for something else.”

“That might explain why she let Krucevic take the kid,” suggested Tom Shephard. “Because she's been seeing him all along.”

“Fred,” Wally said, “get Budapest on the line. We need to find this woman now”

A bubble of panic rose in Caroline's chest. The net is tightening. Find Mirjana and you find Eric. But most important, you might find Vice President Payne — and that was the job she had been sent out to do. No choice, no possible way to save them both. Her throat was throttled with unspoken words. She had laid the trap, and he was walking into it.

“Who the hell is Jane Hathaway?” Shephard asked. “Sharifs contact with Krucevic? Is Krucevic using the name Michael?”

“The names don't mean anything.” Wally was impatient. “Sharif just worked them into the message. I'd say the point of the call was the Budapest Hilton.”

He took the phone Fred Leicester offered. “Vie? How're things on the ground? .. . That bad? It's what you signed up for. Listen I've got a number you need to trace. The woman's a suspect in the Payne kidnapping. And put a team on the Hilton, okay? We think it's where 30 April is meeting”

It was out of Caroline's hands now. The Budapest station would run with the recorded number. They would find Mirjana Tarcic's house. They would have Tarcic arrested on a trumped-up charge, a favor from the Hungarian police or surveil her in the belief she could lead them to Krucevic. And they would certainly find Eric. Unless Caroline got there first. Did she want to? Did she want to learn the whole truth about her marriage the lies, the gross deceptions, the misplaced trust?

Wally cradled the receiver.

“Marinelli's signaled a meeting with DBTOXIN for the morning. News of the Hungarian bank crash has hit the street, Carrie. People are rioting.”

She had no choice but to go forward, whatever she would find.

“Wally, is there a night train to Budapest?”

“Its a sixteen-hour trip.” He regarded her grimly. “Take a plane, Carrie, and stay at the Hilton. The President will spring for it.”

Ten Pristina, 4:30 p.m.

The children had been waiting patiently in line for seven hours now, ever since the German medical teams had arrived on the ground in Kosovo and set up their assembly-line vaccination. The trail of parents and toddlers snaked through the main street of the squatters' village, several thousand strong, and it moved with surprising efficiency. The young men and women — medical students, many of them, and all volunteers — had thrown themselves into the task. And while the children in the quarantined squatters' camp were vaccinated, another team had set up shop elsewhere in the city of Pristina. Fear of the spreading epidemic had knifed through the entire province of Kosovo.

Simone Amiot had not yet had a chance to speak to many of the German volunteers — the numbers of sick and dying exceeded a thousand now, and all her time was spent in the medical tent. She managed to snatch two or three hours of sleep each day. Never enough. She found herself nodding off in the midst of examinations; she moved through fatigue as though it were deep, deep water, and waited for some tide to turn. For the epidemic to peak, for the numbers to recede. Perhaps the vaccines would make a difference.

“They seem to know what they're doing.” Stefan Marx was peering through the tent flap next to her. He was the head of their volunteer group, a veteran of Doctors Without Borders. A kind man who had left a thriving medical practice in Stuttgart to spend his time in the hellholes of the world.

“Now, if only we knew what they were pumping into those kids' veins.”

Simone looked up at him swiftly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that this vaccine can't possibly have gone through clinical trials. I only hope to God it's not worse than the disease. But I ask you — ” He gazed angrily around the crowded tent, the faces of the suffering children.

“Do we have a choice?”

Enver Gordievic apparently thought so.

Throughout the day, Simone had looked for him among the waiting parents. She had hoped against hope that he would be there, with little Krystle on his shoulder.

Because she dreaded the moment when she might look up and find him standing in the 0 1 0 medical tent with another feverish child. Simone had learned from bitter experience that only one in twenty children survived this disease.

Stefan Marx laid his hand on her shoulder and smiled into her careworn face.

“You should take a break,” he said.

She opened her mouth to protest, to insist that she was just fine — but he'd already gone to help a nurse lift a boy from a pallet on the floor. Simone pulled on her jacket and stepped out into the early twilight of late fall. The medical teams would vaccinate under spotlights if they had to. No one wanted to turn these people away.

She hesitated, uncertain which direction to take — then found herself striding toward Enver's shelter. She had not seen him since his daughters body had been carried from the medical tent for burial.

The small, crazily canted shack was silent as she approached. Simone stepped up to the door and knocked tentatively. And the flat panel of wood swung open under her hand.

At first she could pick nothing out of the shadows. Then her eyes adjusted, and Krystle's fair baby hair gleamed in the last bit of daylight. The child was lying on the floor, hands flung wide like a snow angel's. Enver's arms were around her. They might almost have been asleep. Then Simone saw the neat round bullet holes in each of their temples and the pool of blood shining wickedly on the floor. She saw the pistol lying spent where Enver's hand had dropped it. He had found a third way, then a path between sickness and untested vaccines. He had taken his girl home to her mother.

“Enver,” Simone whispered. And her voice broke on his name.

Eleven Berlin, 7:15 p.m.

Caroline paced the concourse at Tegel Airport, careful where she set her feet.

She had cleared her weapon with Hungarian airport security; the forms had been filed, the flight crew notified. All that remained now was to wait. The sense of vertigo she had attributed yesterday to jet lag was back with redoubled force — but tonight, it sprang from fear. She was flying to Hungary on pure gut, she lacked most of the pieces of the puzzle, and her mind bucked and surged with panic. Was Eric really in Hungary? And was Sophie Payne with him? Or had she clutched at the wrong straw out of desperation and hope?

You analysts just demand so much certainty, Wally's voice muttered in her mind, before you're willing to move off a dime.

She had tried to think as Eric would: as a case officer in the field. She had tried to work from instinct. But the terrain was unfamiliar, like the interior of a house navigated by dark; she was terrified of hitting walls where corridors should be. If she was wrong, Sophie Payne could die.

The airport concourse swayed. Vertigo. She stopped short and took a steadying glance at a television monitor. The evening news flickered across the screen. She understood German poorly — it was a language that had never taken, somehow — but the images were clear.

Uniformed riot police, a man's bloodied, twisted face, a bottle exploding in midair. Shattered windows along the boulevards of Pest. Hungary was in turmoil.

“I guess the news got out,” someone said behind her; she turned to see the battered raincoat, the five o'clock shadow along his jaw-line.

“Shephard,” she said stupidly.

“I think I'm seated next to you.” He fished in his pocket for a ticket and scowled down at it. “Ten-B. That means I'm in the middle seat, doesn't it? Damn Mrs. Saunders! I suppose the old bat gave you the window.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Following Sally Bowles to Buda.”

The implication was obvious: She had deceived him in the matter of Mahmoud Sharif, and he wasn't about to lose sight of her now. She almost snapped his head off in annoyance, but then Shephard shrugged as though nothing much mattered and said, “The investigation on this end is dead.”

“What about Old Markus and the dump truck?”

“The stuff's going to a landfill,” he said bleakly. “Wally's agreed to lead a Bureau forensics team in there after dark. Wanna bet they find zip?”

“With that as an alternative, I'd get out of town, too.” She forced a smile.

He nodded toward the chaos on the television screen.

“I hope you don't expect to use your ATM card while we're in happy Hungary. Stock market plummeted. The banks have frozen their assets.”

“I've got cash. What do you expect to do there?”

The hazel eyes flicked back to her face.

“The Secret Service requested me. For the Lajta embezzlement probe. I'm the Central European LegAtt, remember?”

“Of course. Sorry to be so dense. I'm a nervous flyer. I should have a drink or something.”

To her surprise, he produced a flask from his coat pocket.

“Here. Have a swig. Or do women sip?”

“I've never actually seen one of these.” It was a dull silver, polished smooth from countless pockets. Someone had engraved his initials.

“What's in it?”

“Single-malt Highland whiskey from a distillery I can't pronounce.”

“Is this legal?”

“Come on. It's Berlin.”

On the TV screen overhead, a woman screeched; Caroline could recall enough Hungarian from her Budapest days to understand the obscenities. Az anyadi Your mother. Lofasz a Seggedbe! A horse dick up your ass. She tipped the neck of Tom's flask into her mouth and felt the Scotch burn down her throat. Bassza meg.

Fuck it.

“Thanks. I have no idea what that actually tasted like — but thanks.”

He laughed.

“Why the nerves?”

There was no reason he should know, of course.

“Unexpected turbulence,” she lied.

The plane, as it happened, sat two to a row on the left side of the cabin, so that Mrs. Saunders's good sense was redeemed and Tom Shephard's long legs were thrust out into the aisle. Once they were airborne, Caroline passed him the sports section of her newspaper. She was thankful for a quarter hour of silence.

The news was rife with speculation about the Vice President's kidnapping but mentioned nothing of the economic chaos in Hungary — so there had been no hint, then, of the “series of events” in Central Europe. Nothing an analyst could point to, no sign of a chink where the dam would give way. She flipped through the front section and found a picture of Pristina. Rank upon rank of Kosovar children, lined up for German vaccines. Twenty-three hundred kids were now sick.

Another thousand dead. And the numbers were climbing. Vaccines — Caroline's thought was interrupted by a flight attendant with a drinks cart. She asked for a gin and tonic. Shephard got a beer. In all the business of napkins and ice, the newspaper was set aside and her time for solitary thought was done.

“Wally let me read your stuff. You seem to have a handle on Krucevic,” Shephard told her.

“Whether it's the right handle is the question.”

“How do you research your personality assessments, Carrie?” His tone was careful, but she heard a judgment lurking somewhere. He didn't buy the psychobabble.

“When I haven't got the guy on a couch, you mean? I use his date of birth and consult an astrologist. Krucevic was born in Saturn with Mercury rising. I don't have to tell you how bad that is.”

He cracked a smile.

“No, seriously.”

“I use everything I can find, Tom. International police reports, foreign and domestic press, State Department reporting .. .”

“Psychiatric evaluation?”

“I usually collaborate with a staff psychiatrist, yes.”

“And they think Krucevic is sane.”

“Mian Krucevic has never betrayed the least sign of mental instability. You can't call a man nuts just because he kills people.”

“Haven't you ever wanted to?” he asked her searchingly.

“Call Krucevic nuts, or kill people?”

“I mean, what's it like to follow this guy for years, Caroline? Knowing he murdered your husband?”

She felt a spark of anger toward Wally. Impossible to have a private life in the Intelligence community.

“Are you asking whether I'm on a personal vendetta?”

“Let's just say you have a variety of motives for whatever you're doing. It didn't take all that talk of the Third Reich to tell me that. I saw your clandestine getup this morning. I doubt even Wally knows about Sally.”

Caroline sipped her drink and decided to ignore that particular probe.

“Tom, my personal life has undoubtedly affected my analysis. Let's take it as a given that I'm prejudiced against 30 April. We all are.”

“But some of us more than others,” he pointed out. “I may want to put Krucevic out of business, I may want to save the Vice President but I'm not motivated by revenge. That has to make a difference.”

Revenge. Caroline's spine tingled at the word. Was it revenge that drove Eric? Did he burn with desire to see Krucevic suffer, so that nothing not even Sophie Payne, or the little girl he'd killed, or Caroline's pain weighed in the balance? She could not comprehend the depth of such emotion. Even in her worst moments of rage and despair, vindictiveness was beyond her. But she knew it was within Eric's grasp. Revenge, to Eric, would look like justice.

“Revenge, if it's done right, makes you thorough,” she told Shephard brutally. “It makes you own the enemy. It forces you to live inside another person's brain and think like he does. And that may be just what Sophie Payne needs right now. Nothing less than obsession will save her.”

“Are you obsessed?”

She glanced away from him, toward the night beyond the plane window. The wing lights were flashing blue and white.

“I dream of Krucevic, Tom, and I don't even know what he looks like. I feel him like a violence in my sleep.”

He nodded wordlessly.

“Tell me about Eric. If it's not too painful.”

She almost laughed. Since Eric's phone call the previous night that ruthless shot in the dark Caroline had been tortured by every moment of loss and confusion endured in the past thirty months. But his voice had aroused her sleeping love, the love that had persisted, beyond terror and a false grave.

She had flown to Berlin on rage. Rage was gone now; but she could not define what had taken its place.

“Eric was a cowboy,” she told Tom Shephard. “An ex-Green Beret with a lot of physical courage, the kind of person you'd want at your back when things got rough. The CIA used to be full of them.”

Shephard grinned.

“Now the cowboys are all day traders, one inch away from financial ruin.”

“I suppose.”

“I find it .. .” He hesitated.

“Hard to see me with someone like that? Cowboys aren't Sally Bowles material? If I remember correctly, she preferred Yale men with failing courage.”

“So what was it? Opposites attracting?”

Why had she loved Eric? Why did she love him still?

“He made me feel alive,” she attempted, as though telling Shephard might explain it for herself. “More alive than I'd ever felt before. Like a pulse was beating right under my fingertips. Eric never thought about his next step he just took it. There's a huge freedom in that kind of life.”

“And terrible consequences.”

“Yes but it's not how I live at all.” She glanced at him. “I live in my head. Loving Eric was reckless and intoxicating and risky. It had nothing to do with careful consideration. It was complete emotional surrender.”

Like a shove off a jump tower from forty feet, fear and exultation rising with the ground.

“I've never felt anything like it before or since.”

“And you miss it. Miss him. So I guess you were happy.”

“Yes and no.” She thrust aside the memory of sex like a hand at the throat, sex as ruthless as hunger, sex that cast her up on the sands of morning a bleached and whitened bone.

“Eric was difficult. Moody, hard to reach sometimes he took his work very seriously. But he had a great deal of charm. And a sense of humor. He was intelligent without being well educated; he had a canniness that was pure gut.”

Gut. It was carrying her to Budapest.

“A man's man,” Shephard mused.

“Entirely. But he was often afraid sick with fear, churning inside. Fighting it gave him a sense of purpose, I think. Aside from a love of good beer and Jack Nicholson, I don't know what else to tell you.”

“How long were you married?”

“Just over ten years. How about you? Ever married?”

“Yes.” His face tightened.

She thought of the initials engraved on the hip flask and the fact that he carried it everywhere.

“Divorce?”

“Breast cancer.”

“Ah,” she managed.

“You know what it's like to lose someone.” His eyes were now fixed on the plane bulkhead.

“We went back to the States last posting, thinking she'd get better treatment.”

“Strange, isn't it, how you learn that you can't change what's going to happen? That you can only endure it.”

“You remind me of Jen,” he said simply.

“With blond hair or black?”

It was the wrong thing to have said; she felt it acutely the moment the words were out, but she had done it and now would have to live with the adjustment in his expression, the closing offoffeeing. She realized a moment too late that the glib impulse had been self-protective. Tom Shephard was getting under her skin.

He was contentious and irritable and he shot from the hip, but Caroline sensed that what drove him was a fund of caring. He was brutally honest. His gaze was too piercingly intent, his questions too unswerving; he wore his heart on his soiled trench-coat sleeve. Tom was as transparent in his prickly defenses as Eric was opaque. She was afraid she might even be able to trust him.

He reached into his briefcase for a paperback novel and said with deliberate casualness, “Are you going to Marinelli's meeting tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“You think TOXIN will just hand you the Veep?”

“Not without persuasion. Then we follow him into the enemy camp with as much firepower as we can beg, borrow, or steal.”

And enough time for Eric to escape. Because if Eric is ever taken by U.S. forces, Dare's precious Agency is screwed.

“I'm beginning to understand your nickname. Mad Dog,” Shephard said. And flipped open his paperback.

Caroline sank into her seat and looked firmly out the window. A man as good-hearted as Shephard could not possibly comprehend the violence that had won her the name, or the limits to which she could go. But she was very much afraid that he would discover both before their teamwork was done.

Last night's broken sleep was catching up with her; her eyes burned with exhaustion. She could pick out lights now in the darkness below, and a wide black band that might have been a road or a great wall but which she recognized as the river. The plane window was freezing against her cheek. It would be colder in Buda than in Berlin, and the air would be sulfurous with smoke from the cheap brown coal they still burned all over Central Europe. For an instant she could almost taste it, the damp Hungarian winter of her failed marriage.

Twelve The Night Sky, 8:12 p.m.

It is November again, almost four years ago, November and her feet are scuffling through the dead leaves in Varosliget Park, They are strolling idly along the winding path around the artificial lake. The fall afternoon slips sadly between boating season, just ended, and ice-skating, which is yet to come; the lake is forlorn and deserted under the brooding metal sky, a cup filling steadily with sodden leaves. Scottie is at Eric's left, and Caroline is on his right. Scottie sports a jaunty tweed jacket — green and brown with flecks of plum in it, as though he has jetted in direct from the Highlands for a country-house weekend.

They have tried to rise to the occasion his clothes suggest; they have attempted to make their life in Buda appear an expatriate's dream. For Scottie, they window-shop for Herend porcelain, they compare notes on gulyas, they sip strong Turkish coffee amid velvet cushions while a Translyvanian fiddler plays. Now this walk through the park, a prelude to dinner, and a foil for Scottie's handling. Because Eric has become his developmental, Eric is his latest hard target.

Scottie has thirty-six hours to give, between a stop in Berlin and a flying visit to Istanbul. He is charming and yet uncomfortable in Caroline's presence; his eyes slide perpetually to Eric's face. She suspects that what Scottie craves is a little private conversation with his main man, the guy he put straight into the hot seat; but Eric's conversation these days is minimal. He has locked some demon so deeply within himself that speech is something to hoard, speech alone might show his hand. He plays the Chief of Station to Scottie's Headquarters Dignitary; he pulls out the stops and hits all the bells and whistles; but he is scrupulous in keeping Caroline by his side.

Scottie will not go operational in Caroline's presence. She sees that Eric is using her as a shield, without understanding why. Her position is painful; she has always admired Scottie, after all — he is the father Eric never had, his best friend in the clandestine world. Years later, when Eric is gone and Scottie has abandoned hope, he will turn to Caroline for unconscious comfort; but here in Budapest, on this November afternoon, Scottie eyes her like a delegate from a hostile service. She has turned his Joe.

Scottie is at sea. He hunts perpetually for landmarks, he trolls for intelligence. Beneath the mask of high spirits and bonhomie is a creeping anxiety. He is worried about Eric and all Eric knows; he is afraid that Eric will snap one day like a camel overburdened with straws. A different man might make Caroline his confidante, might break down and ask for explanation — but Scottie knows Caroline for his enemy. She wants to fold up the tent and go home.

She wants Eric to quit the Agency.

Eric can no longer say whether home ever existed.

Scottie sees the rifts in marriage before they heave, before the land slides out underfoot; he blames Caroline for Eric's distance.

The folly of Vajdahunyad Castle towers above them like a bit of Disney plunked down on suspect terrain. Caroline fingers a coin in her left pocket. She answers ScOttie when he offers a word; she tosses the ball of conversation over Eric's head as though they are conspirators, communicating across a garden wall. Eric, as always, has retreated within. His feet find the path of their own accord. His head is sunk into the collar of his coat. He is searching for threats, mapping out protective cover, his eyes are moving constantly. Caroline is on the verge of screaming, Talk to me, God damn it, talk or let me go — but Scottie is admiring the baroque wing of the architectural folly. She outlines the history of Vajdahunyad for his particular edification, she maps whole centuries with one finger in the air. In Washington the breeze would be sharp with wood smoke, a festive smell that quickens the appetite and sings of winter holidays;

but in Budapest the air is yellow and rotten with burning coal. Presently they will put the lake to their backs and turn toward the zoo in the park's northwest corner, not from any desire to see the sad-eyed elephants or the desperate cats pacing in their cages, but because the city's best restaurant, Gundel's, is there in its Art Nouveau palace, and today is cause for celebration.

“How many years has it been?” Scottie asks them now.

“Eight,” Caroline says. “Our eighth anniversary.”

“You kids.” He rests one hand casually on Eric's shoulder, but Eric is staring past him, at a dark patch in the woods.

“I don't think even one of my marriages has lasted that long. But I hope you've got years together. Really. I do.”

While Caroline was dreaming with her head against the window, Shephard stirred in his seat. He banged his tray table, dropped his book in the narrow space between the rows of seats, and swore under his breath. Caroline never moved.

Exhaustion shadowed her eyes; her mouth was parted slightly with deep and even breathing. The plane was starting into its descent. He had to know who Sally Bowles was.

He bent down to retrieve the paperback, and flipped open the leather flap of Caroline's purse. It would be a civilian passport with a blue cover, not her official black diplomatic one.

He riffled delicately through the contents of the purse with his fingertips, tension prickling the back of his neck. There was a zippered compartment. He eased it open with his forefinger, mentally cursing his clumsiness. And felt the folded edge of something.

A matchbook. He thrust it back and felt again — The two-by-two snapshot was of the woman in the black wig. And the name in the data field was one he had heard only three hours before, on the lips of a wiretapped Palestinian.

Jane Hathaway.

What was the other name Sharifhad used? Michael?

Shephard tucked the fake passport back in its compartment and straightened in his seat. His pulse accelerated. Caroline was working with a Palestinian terrorist. Sharif had put her in contact with 30 April. And Wally Aronson clearly had no idea. He drew a sharp breath and ran his fingers through his hair. The plane was steadily losing altitude, and even the flight attendants were strapped in. Was Caroline a terrorist mole in the heart of the investigation? Would she betray them all? Or was she operating under instructions from Washington that no one not even the Agency's own station chiefs was privileged to know?

Shephard closed his eyes. He had gone behind her back and been rewarded with dangerous knowledge. He had chosen this sudden mistrust, this creeping sense of treachery. He would have to live with it now.

And watch Jane Hathaway's every move in Budapest.

Thirteen Budapest, 9:30 p.m.

A cramping pain curled in Sophie Payne's bowels, making her writhe like a creature possessed. For the second time this night, she vomited blood.

From the wall behind her head came pitiful wails, the voices of delirium. She buried her face in the damp pillow.

The sound of a belt slicing down on exposed skin. A squeal of pain, pathetically suppressed. Jozsef was no coward.

“What did you tell her?” Harsh words, in fluent German.

“I never said anything, Papa! I haven't spoken to her in months!”

“You lie!”

The belt. An agonized whimper.

“You lie!”

The blows were raining fiercer now. The boy would be scarred with weals, the blood bright on his translucent skin.

“For the love of God, stop it .. .”

Sophie whispered.

“You have been talking to your mother,” Krucevic muttered viciously into the dark. “Telling her everything. How else could she know? How else could she find Greta and convince her to give up the vaccine? You gave her the information. You betrayed me, Jozsef! Do you know the damage you've done? We must find her! You must tell me before it is too late!”

“I thought you killed her long ago!” A cry of loss and hatred.

“Killed her?”

“You must have. Why else would she leave me here?”

So it had mattered to Jozsef, this year of abandonment. Sophie thought of his draggled rabbit's foot, the last, pathetic talisman of a normal life. A child's hope against hope that his mother was alive.

“Because she's a coward,” Krucevic spat out. “Your mother is too much of a coward to come after you, Jozsef. She would not dare to face me”

“Where is she, Papa?”

“You tell me. You're the one who has been talking to her on the sly. Sneaking around, taking my phone in the middle of the night, calling Belgrade. Do you think I don't get the bills? Do you think I don't recognize that number?”

“I did call! I have called her every week since you took me away! But never once have I heard her voice. Never once, the least word. She is not in Belgrade. She is not anywhere. I do not know where she is!”

He broke down into a terrible weeping. Sophie's heart burned for the boy, for the lost and fragile child in the room beyond her wall, his thin shoulders spasming with grief. The sound was magnified in her delirium; it swelled, consuming her air, her sight, until the walls vibrated with bitterness and she choked on Jozsef's tears herself. What kind of monster was his father? Didn't he comprehend at all what it was like to be a pawn, a token between two warring parties, one the mother who nursed you and the other the father who demanded your will? Could he see nothing of how the boy was torn? Jozsef was dying for lack of the mother he loved. But he would also die, Sophie felt sure, before he would betray Mian Krucevic.

The belt sliced down again; the boy cried out.

“That will teach you to take my phone,” his father said.

From the moment Mian Krucevic had learned of Mirjana's intrigue — of the brazen theft of his drugs in broad daylight — he had been convinced that Jozsef was the source of 30 Aprils leak. It was entirely like his bitch of a wife to milk the boy for information. Jozsef was young, he was not yet tough, he could be manipulated by his emotions. That was one reason Krucevic had taken him from his mother. He would not have Jozsef spoiled by a Serbian whore.

But he had beaten the boy almost senseless, and the story had never changed.

Jozsef was not the source of Mirjana's information. And what a lot of information she possessed.

Mirjana had known how to find VaccuGen. That could be explained. It was, after all, a private corporation that conducted legitimate business. VaccuGen vaccines ensured that livestock the world over — particularly in developing nations — would not fall prey to a host of diseases. But how had the zaiba known Greta Oppenheimer's name? How had she known exactly which vaccine to steal?

There was only one answer. Someone within 30 April had betrayed him. And Krucevic had a very good idea who that person was.

He glanced at his watch. Almost dinnertime. Like Christ at the Passover supper, he would break bread with the man who had sold him for thirty pieces of silver.

And afterward, he would crucify him.

The airport taxi carried Tom Shephard and Caroline Carmichael through boulevards of screaming sirens, around squares of massed police. They passed checkpoints and blockades and forced their way across bridges thronged with people. The false stone facades of the nineteenth-century buildings flickered against a backdrop of flame.

Hungary's Houses of Parliament were burning.

Caroline stood at her hotel room window and watched. The glorious old buildings were ablaze with light, like something from an Impressionist painting, the crimson and gold flames mirrored in the black of the Danube.

“The government fell an hour ago,” Shephard said from her doorway.

The flames rippled, reflected, in the black water.

“And the Volksturm land in the morning,” she replied.

Tonio shivered beside Michael in the passenger seat, the latest of Krucevic's videos resting on the console between them. He had been whistling a tune something by U2, a B-side recording, he knew them all but not even rock and roll could comfort him tonight.

“Jesus .. . who'd have thought they'd riot over money?”

“Krucevic,” Michael answered. “That was the point of the plan, Tonio. Mian needed an excuse to get the Volksturm into Hungary, and you certainly gave it to him.”

“I just do what I'm told.” Tonio was defensive. “I just work the keys.”

They were close to the city now, and the sky above Budapest glowed like a blast furnace. Tonio shivered.

“From the look of that, the place'll be crawling with cops. Cazzofottuto” He crossed himself, the scars on his wrist livid in the light from the dashboard.

The Italian prison system had not been kind to Tonio.

He jabbed at the car stereo buttons; a czardas filled the car, some guttural words.

“They've got shit here for music, you know that? Like their language. And their economy. Pure shit.”

Michael reached over and snapped off the radio.

“Why don't you sing? A little Paul Simon always works in the darkness.”

“I could use a drink,” Tonio said.

“It's not much farther.”

“There's bound to be roadblocks. Detours. Police barricades. Maybe we should just go back. Tell him we couldn't get close”

“We'll get close.”

Tonio glanced at him.

“You know this place, huh? You've been here before?”

Michael looked over his left shoulder, signaled, and moved into the fast lane.

Tonio hadn't really expected him to answer. Michael said less than any man he'd ever known any man without a bullet in his brain.

“Did you know that Mian is following us?” he asked Tonio conversationally.

“Following us?” Panic, pure and deadly, flooded through his body.

“Or at least Vaclav is. He's driving. I picked him up about fifteen minutes out of the bunker. Otto's in the passenger seat. He looks happy.”

Nobody liked it when Otto looked happy.

“Why would they be following us?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's a test.”

Tonio swallowed hard on the fear that filled his throat.

“What kind of test?”

“For Mian, there's only one kind.”

Michael was right. A year ago, Tonio had watched the boss put a gun to the heads of two men he'd known and liked.

“What the fuck have you done, Michael?”

“Me? All I did was shoot a little girl when Mian asked. What have you done, Tonio, with your magic fingers? Have you looked somewhere in Mian's computer that you shouldn't?”

“No! I swear it on the Virgin!”

Michael raised an eyebrow.

“Then I guess we've got nothing to worry about. Sing. With any luck, we'll lose them.”

He exited the Ml abruptly, well to the west of Buda, snaking the car through the traffic of the side streets and heading downhill toward the bridges over the Danube. They were in the eleventh district now, Gellerthegy, the neighborhood behind the castle's heights, and the broad expanse of Villanyi Ut was ominously deserted. Then, in the headlights, the plaza that was Moricz Zsigmond Korter and the police checkpoint.

“Merda,” Tonio muttered. He huddled lower in his seat, a furtive rodent beneath a mop of blond curls. “Turn around.”

“Absolutely not. We're going ahead.”

“Why?”

“Because Mian never will,” Michael answered implacably.

He slowed the Audi to a stop and rolled down the window. An officer approached.

Incomprehensible language, and then Michael nodding.

“Get the registration,” he told Tonio.

“What?”

“It's in the glove compartment.”

There was a gun in the glove compartment, too at the bottom, where a casual observer would never suspect, and for an instant, Tonio saw Michael's plan. But the Hungarian cop was staring at him, his cap visor very correct across the brow, and under the weight of those flat dark eyes Tonio could not move, could not seize the gun and shoot the man in the forehead. He had watched while Otto had killed the finance minister, Lajta, he had watched a score of deaths in the past few months, but he could not bring himself to murder now.

Besides, there were other police waiting beyond the headlights, their uniform pants picked out in a halogen glare.

Michael reached across him and took a packet of papers from the glove compartment. Another few words in halting Hungarian.

The cop nodded, nipped through the documents, and then returned them. He barked a word.

Michael produced his passport.

“Tonio?”

“What? Santa Maria what?”

“The officer would like your passport.”

His brown eyes widened, and he drew a quick breath. Did he have it? Or had he left it in the bunker? Madonna, but Krucevic would kill Michael. What if their names were already on a list somewhere what if these cops followed them, saw the videotape tossed out a window, gave the registration to the Americans The cop held out his hand. Tonio reached inside his jacket. His fingers brushed the textured butt of his gun. A few seconds, a flare of light, and Michael could wheel the car up Villanyi Ut before the others thought to follow.. ..

What then?

He pulled his passport out of his breast pocket.

The cop glanced at it indifferently and then handed them both back.

Michael's window slid closed.

Blindly, Tonio grabbed one of the passports with shaking fingers and stuffed it into his jacket.

“What the fuck did you say back there?” he snarled.

“The car's registered to VaccuGen.” He turned left into Bartok Bela Ut, still heading downhill.

“We're traveling salesmen from Berlin. We know nothing about riots.”

“Salesmen.”

“We know nothing about curfews. We're looking for the Gellert Hotel. It's a few blocks from here.”

“Dio, I need a drink.”

The floodlit facade of the hotel loomed before them, an Art Nouveau confection hard by the Chain Bridge, and suddenly, Michael pulled right and then left, into Budafoki Ut. He was still humming “Graceland.” Now Tonio would have the goddamn tune in his head for the next thirty days.

“Here.” Michael jerked the Audi into a space at the curb and killed the engine.

“You're in no shape for this.” He reached into his pocket and handed Tonio some deutsche marks.

“What are you doing?”

“That's Libella.” He gestured toward the bar.

“Last time I checked, a pretty decent place. You'll like the music. They'll take your deutsche marks gladly and rob you blind in the process, but so what? Money's tight these days in Buda.”

“What about the video?”

“I'll deliver it,” Michael said curtly. “I should go on foot anyway. It's safer.”

“But Mian — ”

“Mian turned back at the police checkpoint. Mian will never know. I'll find you in an hour. Two, at the outside. If I'm later than that, take the car and get out.”

Tonio swallowed nervously. He could never leave without Michael — not and expect to see morning.

His eyes flicked to the dull gold light pouring from the bar's windows. How long had it been since he'd had a drink? Mian hated drink like he hated women. He would have to be careful.

Michael was already a block away, heading for the bridge, a shadow under the flame-torn sky.

He waited until he stood on the Pest side of the water before pulling out his cell phone. The number he dialed was one Wally Aronson would recognize. For the past four hours, it had been bugged by the Budapest station.

The click of Mirjana's machine. He dialed his access code and waited for the messages. Then Sharif's voice filled his ear.

He listened, the pace of his heart rising slightly as he understood. Then he hung up. His breathing was audible, less perfectly controlled, and he stared intently across the Danube at the distant mass of the Hilton as though he might see her form backlit in a window. The sight of her face on a television screen had been enough to risk a call in the night. Now, knowing that she was here — A klaxon screamed somewhere behind him. He turned away from the river and strode swiftly toward the rioters on Szabadsag Ter. They had coalesced, he knew, in front of Magyar Television and the National Bank — one across the square, the other just next door to the embassy. It would be impossible to approach the place without a fight.

U.S. installations throughout Europe should be on alert, their marine guards dying to catch a tourist with the key to Sophie Payne's whereabouts stuffed tight inside his jacket. The embassy was out of the question. Where, then?

For an instant, memories of that other Budapest — of the nighttime surveillance, Caroline beside him, the conversation unwinding as it had always done through the relentless grid of streets-filled his mind. There was the ambassador's residence — he knew it well, a nineteenth-century petit palace in a residential quarter of the city, ringed with a sizeable garden. The marines standing vigil there would concentrate on points of egress, not bushes and flower beds. He could toss the tape over the wrought-iron palings and disappear before he was detected.

But first, another call. He slid into the darkened doorway of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and pulled out his cell phone.

“It's me,” he said after the beep. “We're in town. Tell Bela to watch his back. And for Christ's sake, be careful.”

Fourteen Budapest, 10:53 p.m.

Caroline sat on the floor of her hotel room, drapes pulled wide to the glowing sky over Pest. She couldn't sleep. Sleep would be an insult to the ugliness of what was happening in this city, akin to picnicking on the fringe of battle. How had the British slept during that long spring of 1940? Or the Dresdeners gone to bed with carpet bombs? Did exhaustion take over, relentless? Or did you simply grow accustomed to the mutter of unrest, the flare of violence against the night sky?

She swallowed some whiskey from a diminutive bottle, pulled at random from her generous minibar. Violence. She had taken it to bed with her amid the Hilton's hushed opulence; it patrolled the corridors and stairwells and banks of elevators. Violence had Eric's alias on a piece of audiotape it smelled his ruin in the smoke roiling off the Danube. She supposed she had Vie Marinelli to thank for the nondescript man reading newspaper after newspaper in a hard chair in the lobby, or the young woman with owlish glasses who spoke earnestly into the phone. Marinelli was Chief of Station, Budapest. It was his job to send out the best, to place a sympathetic face behind the front desk, a hulking bruiser among the valet parkers. It was a kind of game for Caroline to play, betting the silent odds on exactly who was who. The Agency's net ringed her round with smiling faces, it strangled her with helping hands. If Michael and Jane ever dared to meet, the two of them were as good as bagged.

Yes, she had Marinelli to thank for the last bars of this cage — but only herself to blame. She had not been able to leave Sharif and his friends alone.

She tipped her whiskey bottle up, let the sweet flame flicker along the lining of her throat, and stared at the orange glow across the river until her eyes burned. She could be honest with herself now. She could tell herself the truth.

She wanted Sophie Payne alive and bound for Washington on a C-130 transport. But she wanted Eric to walk away clean — free of Krucevic and Agency and Caroline alike.

It was a paradox she could not reconcile. She was Jane Hathaway, bona ride in a box; she was Caroline Carmichael, the baited wife. Her whiskey was gone. She tossed the bottle toward a wastepaper basket under the desk, and at that moment her telephone rang.

She froze. Eric. Talking in the dark. And Marinelli would have the hotel phone lines hugged.

She almost didn't answer. Then, as though it moved of itself, her hand grasped the receiver.

“Caroline,” he said.

“Scottie .. .” She felt a knife edge of relief — and disappointment.

“Did I wake you?”

“No” — she glanced at the clock — “its only eleven.”

“How's Buda?”

“Pretty hot. People aren't hurling themselves out of windows yet — but then, most of the windows are already smashed. The Volksturm arrive tomorrow.”

“Ah,” Scottie said with understanding. “Then we can put the Hungarian republic in the chancellor's column.”

So Scottie believed it, too. The Third Reich rising like a phoenix from half a century of ashes.

“What's next?”

“If I knew that, you'd be on a plane home. Caroline, you heard about our mess in Bratislava?”

“Yes. I'm sorry.” She kept her voice neutral, her words vague, in deference to the open phone line. There was a rustle across two continents as Scottie shuffled paper.

“It's not a complete loss. We traced a phone call to the Big Man himself. And the conversation was extremely interesting. His VaccuGen secretary had to tell him about a delivery that went awry.”

Delivery. Caroline pushed herself upright in bed. Had Krucevic planned to dump Sophie Payne?

“Somebody's prescription got into the wrong hands,” Scottie continued. “The Big Man was quite upset. We're crying to figure out why.”

“Was this medicine intended for our missing friend?” she asked.

“We don't think so. But she may not be doing too well. The specialists on this end are worried about her prognosis.”

Caroline's heart sank. Careful as Scottie might be, the message of his last words was unmistakable. Sophie Payne was dying.

“And the secretary? The one who made that call? Could you find her?”

“That's been tried. She's left work under something of a cloud. The Big Man was rather angry, to judge by his tone of voice. Surprised and rattled, even. As though a fly had devoured all the ointment.”

“I see. What do you want me to do, Scottie?”

“I may need you to fly to Poland. I'll call you tomorrow if it's necessary.”

“Poland?”

“Our friend Cuddy has spotted some activity there. In the accounts he's monitoring.”

VaccuGen's corporate accounts. He'd fired up DESIST and found a financial trail.

Caroline's heartbeat quickened.

“New money?”

“Lots of it. Cash is flooding into a certain German party organization — and from there to friends in Poland. We find that .. .”

“Ironic,” Caroline replied. “Given the state of coffers here.”

“Well, one market's bear can be another's bull,” he retorted lazily, as though he enjoyed this game of charades.

But Caroline was sick of it.

“You think our missing friend has gone to Poland, too?”

“Possibly. But she's running out of time.” His voice changed.

“Have you heard again from the fair-haired boy?”

“No. But I've changed cities. Even he might need some time to adjust.”

Which showed how poorly she'd judged Eric.

She had closed the drapes against the fading glow of the ruined Houses of Parliament and was almost asleep when the knock came on the door.

Shephard, she thought, and had the impulse to hide under the covers. There was something in the way he looked at her now that made her uneasy. The LegAtt's eyes were too intense, too probing; somewhere in the air between Berlin and Buda, they had lost a professional distance. Perhaps, Caroline thought, it was because she reminded him of his dead wife. She preferred Shephard caustic and uncommunicative; it made him less threatening.

Another knock, louder this time.

She crossed the room and looked for a peephole. There was none. She slid the chain into the bolt and cracked the door four inches, peering out into the hallway.

Whatever she had intended to say died on her lips.

“For the love of God, get me inside before somebody sees me,” Eric muttered.

She pulled the chain hurriedly out of the bolt.

He slipped through the door and shut it behind him. He was wearing a white busboy's coat; the dining trolley he'd abandoned in the hall.

Employee entrance, she thought; and a kitchen computer listing all the guests, for room service.

“You shouldn't have come here. The station's all over the place.”

“How did I know you were going to say that?” he asked, and took her in his arms.

The shock of his hands moving over her in the darkness of that room was too much. Dead hands, she thought. How many lost nights in the last two and a half years had she cried for Eric's touch, for the solid span of his shoulders beneath her fingertips, the warmth of his face skimming hers? She allowed herself an instant of indulgence and breathed deep of his scent. He smelled of cigarettes and of sulfurous brown coal, of dead leaves and city rain; he smelled of human skin and human hair and the lingering hint of floral-scented soap. He smelled of Budapest and Nicosia and Tidewater, Virginia, of years and heartache and sex and longing. He smelled of life, a life lived without her; a band of pain tightened around her chest.

She had mourned the loss of his body as much as his soul — this body, strong and controlling, almost feral in the darkness. She shuddered and closed her eyes, feeling his hands on her rib cage, her shoulder, the lobe of her ear. His touch stung her skin with so much rippling life — and for an instant, she wanted to cry aloud with joy, she wanted to forget every unbearable moment of her days without him, she wanted to cradle his head and thank God that he was alive. It was what she had prayed for so uselessly during the long nights of grief: a life returned. A second chance. And her prayer had been answered.

But with what vicious reckoning.

This man was no miracle. He was a walking lie.

The rage of the past two years boiled hotly to the surface, so that her own mouth tore back at his, a savage thing that wanted to hurt him. Through the busboy's coat he wore she could feel the thud of his heart, too fast, and the tension in his body, as though he were coiled to spring. But then, Eric was always a predator. She gripped his arms tightly and thrust him away.

“Where is Sophie Payne?”

He was breathless, a diver mad for air.

“I can't tell you that. Not yet.”

If he refuses to give up the goods, Scottie muttered in her brain, shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“You're here,” he said baldly, and took a step toward her again.

“I'm here to find the Vice President. Your death made me an expert on 30 April, Eric.”

“Caroline — ”

“Tell me where she is. That's all I want from you.”

“I need more time.”

“You've had too much time, you son of a bitch!” Tears of rage pricked at her throat — rage at his insouciance, at the way he had walked back into her life as though he expected her to be there, her arms wide open — She was terrified, suddenly, of breaking down. Rage was her friend. Rage was a tool. Let him believe she was stronger alone than she had ever been in his shadow. Let him fear the High Priestess of Reason.

She moved toward him, her hand punching hard into his chest with each step.

“One call to the lobby, Eric, and I shut you down! One call”

“You won't do that.”

“Give me a good reason!” She had one already: Bring Eric in, and he'd damage the Agency irrevocably. She cared little for bureaucracies creaking roughshod over the world, but Dare Atwood, Cuddy, Scottie Sorensen — they were all the people Caroline loved, the only ones left to protect.

“Don't you understand? It's over. No more vendettas, no more little girls with bullets in their brains. No hijacked VP's.” It ends lie re He gave way, a bewildered expression on his face.

“Much more is at stake than Sophie Payne. You need Krucevic, Caroline. More than that, you need everything he runs — the bank accounts, the networks, the points of liaison worldwide. You've got to roll him up. That's what I've been working for. Not just Krucevic's life, but everything he's built.”

“So work with we,” she den-landed. “Give me the route to his base here in Hungary. Give me the Polish operation. Anything, Eric, that might help.”

“You know about Poland?”

Caroline laughed harshly.

“What did you think — that only you could do this job? We've all been doing it while you were dead and buried. I wish to hell you'd stayed that way.”

“No, you don't,” he whispered. His face was stark in the orange glow flooding the room from across the river. The light made a death mask of the sharp planes of his face, and she saw how much the past few years had aged him.

But she could not relent. Relent, and she'd lose him.

“Where's your base, Eric? Tell me and I'll have a team inside of it before dawn.”

He hesitated; he gave it an instant's thought. But the habit of self-reliance ran too deep.

“I need a few more hours, Carrie.”

“Time's up.” Her voice was sharp with contempt.

“Now get out of here before I call the cops.”

“Caroline...”

“Nothing.”

It came out with explosive force.

He stopped, frozen.

“Nothing. You. Say. Will. Make. Any. Difference.” It seemed important to pronounce each word with equal weight, as though he were deaf, half literate, a confused and pathetic foreigner. The small flower of hope that had bloomed in Berlin turned brown within her and died.

“I know I hurt you,” he began. He raised a hand to touch her, and she went rigid.

His eyes Eric's eyes, bluer than the sea and stark with pain stared at her wordlessly. Was he begging her? Her?

Shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap.

One call. That was all. Let him plead to the station if he was so goddamn desperate.

“Get out,” she whispered.

And he did.

Fifteen Budapest, 11:40 p.m.

“Lady. Lady Sophie — are you awake?”

He was whispering urgently from the hallway. She pulled herself to the edge of her bed and dangled one arm toward the floor. If she could roll off the bed, perhaps she could crawl over and talk to him.. .. She tested her weight, leaning down on one hand, and felt her wrist buckle. The effort made her dizzy with exhaustion.

“Lady Sophie!”

“Yes, Jozsef?” she croaked.

“My father is gone. May I come in?”

Despite the pain cramping deep in her bowels, Sophie smiled. It was like the boy to ask permission.

“By all means. If only I could open the door.”

It slid back soundlessly. She saw his small body outlined against the light of the passage, the remote control in one hand. In the other, he held a hypodermic.

“I have medicine.” He slipped to her bedside still whispering. He was a boy who would probably whisper for the rest of his life.

“You must take it soon, before it is too late. There is not much medicine left. And I have had more than my share.”

“Your father can make more,” Sophie said.

“Not here in Budapest. If he went back to Berlin, maybe, to his lab .. . the Anthrax 3A bacillus is highly secret and very dangerous, lady. Papa does not carry it everywhere.”

“Keep your antibiotic, Jozsef.”

He frowned.

“But you must take it! Do you know what is happening to you? It is very bad, lady. First you vomit blood. Then you vomit your entire stomach. Your heart is eaten away within you. And then at last, in unbearable pain, you die. My father has told me.”

“And is your father always right? Was he right about your calls to your mother?”

He looked away.

“Where did he beat you?”

Wordlessly, he lifted the front of his shirt. His abdomen was a mass of red lines.

Asshole, Sophie thought impotently. He's already bleeding inside.

“No one has the right to keep you from her. She's your mother and she loves you.”

“If she's alive,” Jozsef retorted, “then why hasn't she tried to find we?”

“When your father decides to kidnap somebody, he makes sure they're never found. Don't blame your mother. Look what he's done to the marines.”

Jozsef giggled — a boyish sound, the first she had ever heard him make — and she was transported for an instant back to her old house in Malvern, before Mitch's death, Peter's grubby hands clutching his father's ankle while Mitch dragged him along, pretending not to notice. Rough housing. Wrestling. The tumble of boyhood.

“Do you want to escape?” she asked Jozsef.

The laughter died.

“I could not.”

“Do you want to?”

It was easier to be honest in this darkened room, her voice as relentless as the voice of conscience.

“How? We can't even get out of this compound. We're locked in. The doors are impossible to force. They're electronic. And you're too ill.”

“Then we'll have to make your father give us up.”

Jozsef snorted.

“My father will never do that. You're too important.”

“I don't mean anything to him at all,” she said firmly. “I've served my purpose. But you mean the world to him. For you, Jozsef, he would do anything.”

“Then why does he beat me? If he loved me, he would not beat me.”

“I wish that were true. There'd be far less abuse in the world. But beatings or no, he fears for your life. He fears the illness inside you. That's why he's saving the antibiotic he has for you — and letting me die.”

The boy turned and looked at her piercingly.

“Where did you get that hypodermic?” Sophie asked.

“From the supply room, where he keeps the antibiotic.”

“Do you have the strength to take me there?”

He did not answer for fully fifteen seconds. Then he said: “Don't do this, lady. It will make him angry. Papa cannot control himself when he is angry.”

“I know,” she said.

He shook his head.

“You know nothing at all. I have seen him kill. I know what he can do.”

“Jozsef — do you want to see your mother?”

“More than God Himself,” the boy whispered.

“Then take me to the supplies.”

Anxiously, Bela Horvath scanned the pages of his notebook and then thrust it into the plain black knapsack he carried to the lab every day. It was nearly midnight. The meeting with Vie Marinelli in Varosliget Park was only eight hours away, but he was sweating with fear and nausea. The notebook was the embodiment of his betrayal, the embodiment of his faith. It must not come to harm.

He searched his untidy bedroom, eyes straining in the dark. A light at this hour would be a mistake. He had taken a risk even returning to the house. At the thought of Mian and what he would do if he knew of the notebook — if he knew of the meeting with Marinelli — Horvath's fingers twitched spasmodically. He dropped the knapsack.

He had wanted this meeting, had almost initiated it when the city went up like a torch that afternoon and the laboratory had closed. He had suspected the truth at last tonight, he had tested and retested it out of thoroughness and disbelief, until with a scientist's harsh honesty he understood. Someone had to stop it.

He had bicycled home along the usual streets, crowded with people shouting as they had not done since 1989, since 1956, but those had been questions of politics then — of something worth dying for. This was about money. The ugliness in people's faces depressed him, and he wove in and out among the stalled cars, knapsack tight as a leech against his back, wondering what he hoped to save.

The chalk mark was a red slash trailing haphazardly across a concrete pillar, and for an instant, he was uncertain whether he had actually seen it. He stopped the bike and thrust his glasses higher on his nose, staring at the scrawl on the Vigado concert hall. The signal was supposed to be done this way — but could it be a mistake? Something to do with the rioting? He was supposed to mark the opposite pillar himself, in blue chalk — he carried it always in a knapsack pocket — but the square, he noticed now, was blocked off by police. They were ranked shoulder to shoulder in front of Gerbeaud's, the coffeehouse. Trapped patrons glared through the broad plate-glass windows; others perused their papers, bored. Horvath felt a bubble of laughter shatter inside him: How like the police to protect their pastry!

He had backed away from the Vigado, turned out of Vorosmarty Ter, and pedaled home. When he called Mirjana's answering machine, the message from Michael awaited him. He prayed that by now, Mirjana had safely left town.

The sound of breaking glass from the front of the house brought his head up sharply. The back door — He crept out of the bedroom, turned left in the darkened hall, and saw the gloved hand snake through the shattered living-room window. They would have it open in seconds.

He sidestepped into the kitchen — and there, backlit in the alley streetlight, was the silent shape of a man. He was surrounded.

Horvath looked about wildly. He saw the too-obvious cupboards, the pathetic tray of cold supper his cleaning lady had prepared, the broom closet smelling sharply of vinegar and ammonia. He thrust the black knapsack behind a damp pail at the closet's rear just as Krucevic entered the kitchen. “Mhn,” Horvath said breathlessly, his back to the closet door.

“Did you have to break my window?”

Krucevic smiled.

“There are broken windows all over Budapest today. Besides, you didn't answer my knock.”

“I never heard it,” he said. That was certainly true; he had been lost in a fever of his own making. Horvath gestured toward the tray, the limp slices of meat and the tepid vegetables covered in plastic.

“I was just about to eat.”

“At midnight?”

“As you see. I... I was working late.”

“Poor Bela,” Krucevic said slowly. “Always the desperate grind. You should get away for a while. Take a break from all this.” He glanced at one of his men a malevolent-looking bruiser with a shaved head who stepped forward and took Horvath by the arm.

“You haven't said you're glad to see me, Bela.”

“I was just surprised, Mian, that's all. You're well?” The thug's hand was like an iron cuff above his elbow.

“Strange,” Krucevic mused. “I'd have said you weren't surprised at all. In fact, you looked like you were expecting me. Perhaps you'll tell me why while we drive.”

“Drive?”

“To your lab. I'm afraid, Bela, you took something that does not belong to you. And now I want it back.”