“When she saw them lying dead, lady, their mother fell on her knees and tore at her hair.”
“I suppose your father killed her, too?”
Jozsef tossed his good-luck charm over his shoulder and caught it behind his back in one deft movement.
“A woman suffers more when she is allowed to live, lady. But Drusa that was her name was afraid of the suffering, I think. She twisted her skirt into a rope and hanged herself from the kitchen window.”
Sophie squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, Mian Krucevic stood in the doorway, staring down at her. His son's face was white as a bone.
“Get out,” Krucevic said.
Jozsef scrambled to his feet and darted around him.
“Mrs. Payne.”
She lifted her face and stared back at him. He handed her a newspaper. The headline screamed her own name.
“I require your assistance, Mrs. Payne.”
“Then you will have to unbind my feet.”
“That will not be necessary. Please hold the newspaper below your chin. Vaclav?”
Krucevic stepped back, and a camera lens took his place. Unconsciously, Sophie raised a hand to smooth her hair, and then caught out in a vanity so misplaced it was painful dropped it to her lap.
“This will be sent to your friends at the White House, Mrs. Payne, so I suggest you consider what you say. For the record I would like to state that you are still the prisoner of the 30 April Organization and that, true to our word, we have administered the Anthrax 3A antidote since our last communication. Would you describe your experience, please?”
“I'm still alive.”
“But unfortunately, we have no guarantee that you will remain so.”
“Most of us have to live with that uncertainty,” she said.
This seemed to give him pause. But only for an instant.
“Jack, Jack,” Krucevic said, with all the sorrow of a disappointed parent. “What were you thinking of? Alerting the Czech border guards? For shame. Under the terms of our agreement, you were to refrain from attempting to rescue Mrs. Payne. And yet, mere hours after the flag went up in your embassy garden, you've gone back on your word. Don't let it happen again, Jack. I require free passage throughout the region. I want that message sent to every head of state in Central Europe. And I do not want to be thwarted again.”
It was only a matter of moments, Sophie thought, before he produced another needle. But instead the camera lens zoomed in on her face.
“I won't use a hypodermic this time, Jack. If you fail me again, I will put a bullet in this woman's brain. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot bring people back from the dead.”
Six
Berlin, 12:06 p.m.
Caroline Carmichael reached Berlin at ten-thirty Wednesday morning, twenty-two hours after Sophie Payne's kidnapping.
Almost nothing was left of the city she remembered. She had visited twice during her posting to Budapest, when reunification was just a word and the movement of the capital from Bonn still years away. Bulldozers and cranes had taken root everywhere in the vacant lots, profuse as mushrooms after rainfall, and a trip across the city was an exercise in strategy, a meticulous ground campaign waged with map and mental compass. Equipment the color of sulfuric acid, pits that yawned a football field's depth into the earth, the halogen-lit midnights and clouds of exhaust — these were all that one knew of Berlin in the mid-nineties.
The West had decided the past must be regained, and if not regained, then rewritten. A political process, on the face of it; but emotional in its force, perhaps because it was so obvious and so physical. The Wall had divided families and consigned the most glittering of Berlin's neighborhoods — the haunts of kaisers and courtesans, seditionists and strippers — to the shabbiness of memory. The Wall had left places like Potsdamer Platz, once the bustling heart of Berlin, to silence and weeds, its paving stones aching for a footfall.
But Berliners, over time, had grown used to the change. New life had sprung up along the internal border like ground cover after fire. And then the cranes had come, in soaring ranks of red and blue and gold, their arms outstretched to the east.
Caroline drew wide the curtains of her window. The plane full of technicians from Washington had flown into the bomb site so quickly that the embassy, its communications arrays shattered, had received no cable of their coming. The Secretary of State had phoned the ambassador's residence; a harried first-tour officer had spent most of the night finding accommodation for nearly forty people in a frightened city already inundated with visitors. Caroline had drawn the Hyatt, a spanking-new hotel in the middle of the reborn Potsdamer Platz, where the towers of the Sorry Center jostled for position and waves of raw mud still lapped at the foundations. It was rather, she thought, like being the first resident of a space station, one of civilization's outriders. She would have preferred a converted old palace off Kurfurstendamm, where the whoosh of tires on the rain-wet streets was as soporific as surf; but the Hyatt probably offered a good government rate. Even in crisis, economy ranked high among a first-tour officers considerations.
And if she leaned forward now and glanced left, her nose pressed against the window, she could just make out the shattered glass dome of the Reichstag. An ill-fated building, she thought — burned by Hitler, and now racked by damage from his neo-Nazi followers in the blast that had swept Sophie Payne away. Politics had a way of turning violent in Berlin. Whole streets were obliterated, then recast with a different face. This was something Berliners understood: They lived on a volcano. The cranes could do only so much before history would have its way again.
She kicked off her shoes and fell back on the bed. Solid polyester beneath her hair, nothing like the eiderdown smelling faintly of the farmyard in a small hotel off Kurfurstendamm. She felt a sharp pang of nostalgia for old Berlin.
Here at the Hyatt, she might have been anywhere, the trappings of Central Europe consigned to the last century. Except that Eric was within range. He breathed the same coal laden air. Caroline closed her eyes and for an instant felt terrified. She wanted to draw the pillow over her head and smother in darkness. It was unlikely that even a single member of 30 April was still in Germany. Eric must be miles away by now. But she felt the force of his presence play over her like a tracking beam.
Was she mad even to try to draw him in?
That was what Dare Atwood wanted. A trap for Eric, and ultimately for his master.
Caroline, the lure.
Dare had no fucking idea what a marriage was like. How you could love a person without even knowing him. How he could own a piece of you, despite nearly three years of absence and betrayal how he could command some shred of loyalty and give nothing in return. Was it something about the marriage vow? That glancing blow of the sacred?
And in her heart of hearts, Caroline knew that she couldn't summon Eric anymore.
He had no desire to see her. He had chosen, after all, to leave. A trap was not a trap without a lure.
She felt relief flood over her like a kind of peace. Eric might betray her abominably, but she would not be required to betray him.
Absurd.
She was too tired to resolve the questions of love and loyalty, the war between reason and heart. She had a job to do. A Vice President to find, the Agency to protect that vast, imperfect sum of too many parts, that humming hive of secrets, most of them not worth knowing. What did she owe Eric Carmichael, anyway? She had paid enough debts during a decade of marriage.
What would she say if they actually came face-to-face? What would he say if he knew that she was hunting him?