Don't even ask, Mad Dog. If I told you, I'd have to kill you.
The oldest joke in the Intelligence book.
He would have to be hunted, all the same.
She glanced at her watch. Wally Aronson, the Berlin station chief, expected her at the ambassador's residence in an hour. But the Brandenburg Gate lay straight down Ebertstrasse from her hotel in Potsdamer Platz, a brisk walk in the cold afternoon air. She just had time. A police barrier wrapped Pariser Platz like a package, turning the chaos into an apparition of order, the reflexive German impulse. Caroline stood in her jeans and sweater, a bright plaid blazer open to the raw wind, and snapped pictures from the edge of Strasse des 17 Juni, the broad boulevard running straight through the heart of the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond Pariser Platz, 17 Juni became Unter den Linden, the most beautiful boulevard in all of Berlin, with its royal palaces and museums and meandering river Spree. A decade ago, Unter den Linden was closed to the West and Strasse des 17 Juni led only to the Wall — a dead end rather than a gate.
The Brandenburg had been a neoclassical dream, modeled on the Acropolis's Propylaea: six Doric columns surmounted by a plinth and frieze, the figure of Peace drawn by a chariot. Ironic, Caroline thought as she photographed the torso of a shattered horse in the rubble of the Gate. In Berlin, Peace was driven by the engine of war, Peace came at the cost of constant bloodshed. Napoleon had marched his Grande Armee beneath the Gate not long after it was built; Prussia had trained her cavalry in the square; Hitler's Ubermenschen had goose-stepped down Unter den Linden; and East German guards had patrolled within spitting distance of the prancing horses. But it had taken terrorists to topple the chariot to the ground.
She ignored the barriers and the cones and the police and walked insouciantly forward, to the very edge of the bomb crater. The FBI technicians were already there, some of them kneeling on plastic sheets at the edge of the torn earth, others in conversation with what Caroline supposed were German investigators.
One man stood apart, arms folded over a creased tan raincoat. Its very ordinariness screamed Government Official. He was stony-faced and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, but there was something arresting in the stillness of his pose. If he had not been standing inside the official barriers, Caroline would have taken him for a mourner. His face had the self-absorbed potency of grief.
As she looked at him, he turned his head and stared straight at her. No hint of friendliness or curiosity; the look was frankly hostile. He took her for a disaster junkie. She raised her camera and ignored him.
There were television crews, too — an embarrassment of television crews, from every major American network, from the Berlin and Frankfurt and Hamburg stations, from Italy and France and the U.K. and Poland.
This was going to be easy.
Caroline took pictures of chaos: chunks of macadam, twisted cables, the intestines of the city thrown obscenely outward. The construction of the square's new LJ-Bahn station had taken years; now its subterranean walls caved inward. Broken glass shimmered everywhere.
She panned across the square to the embassy door. The shattered platform on which Sophie Payne had stood twenty-four hours ago was still there, one end pitched skyward. Yesterday, pennants had snapped in the breeze. Then bullets, screaming and blood, a gurney wheeled madly to the platform's edge. Eric.
She lowered her camera and studied the building. It was a large embassy, and most of the windows in the facade were smashed, but the walls themselves had held. The blast, then, had been strong enough to destroy the Brandenburg Gate while leaving much of the surrounding structures intact. A surgical bomb, if such a thing could truly be said to exist. A diversion, while the real victim disappeared into the blue.
“Ausgehen She, bitte.”
A police guard, voice harsh with contempt, was advancing upon her, his face obscured by a riot helmet. The federal eagle screamed red and gold across his black shirt — he was one of Fritz Voekl's special troops, the Volksturm. Caroline raised her camera, focused on his face, and snapped.
Taking office on the heels of assassination, the new chancellor had made fighting crime a priority of his first year. Crime, Voekl declared, sprang from the conflict between Western European values and Eastern ones, between Christian and Muslim ways of life. Crime was the product of the Turkish population, in fact; until the Turks were sent back to their own country, all that decent Germans could do was to stand firm against their demands. And the Turks were just the tip of the Muslim iceberg: The trickle of Albanians and Montenegrins, of Kurds and Kazakhs and Georgians and Uzbeks from the east, was alarming in the extreme. Tolerance was a mistake. Acceptance was insanity. Germans, even liberal Germans such as Voekl's murdered predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, were dying in the streets.
The message had played superbly at the polls, particularly among Ossies, the former citizens of the defunct German Democratic Republic, where crime officially had never existed. Now the Ossies were joining Voekl's Volksturm, his national militia, in droves. And as she stared at the policeman's spread-eagle insignia, Caroline had to admit the chancellor's savvy. Voekl had killed one problem persistent unemployment in the east while brilliantly furthering his anti-Turk agenda. And he'd placed throughout the country an army loyal only to him.
“Hinaus!” The truncheon was raised, the black shirt close enough to graze with her fingertips. She felt the man's animosity wash over her like a strong smell.
“Speak English?”
He shook his head aggressively. She stood her ground, focusing her lens, and saw a British television crew pivot to film the encounter. In a minute the cop would take her camera and dash it to the pavement. Deliberately, she leaned around him, pointed her lens at the embassy, and clicked the shutter.
The gurney, it was believed, had come from within a bogus rescue operation staged from the roof. Caroline had watched the videotape of Eric so many times she had the sequence embedded in her mind. The period from explosion to kidnapping had been slight about nine minutes. Therefore, 30 April must have known how to navigate the new building before they'd ever landed the chopper.
That, in itself, was suggestive.
“Halt!” He grabbed her arm and thrust her back from the barrier. Caroline tensed. Then she screamed.
Two American camera crews joined the British one already filming her. The Italians looked interested and started to move.
“Let go of me, you asshole!” She broke free of the policeman's grasp and held her camera behind her back.
“Jesus! Isn't this a free country?”
The guard raised his truncheon obligingly. The film crews filmed. And then a raincoat — clad arm was thrust between them, and someone said, “It's okay.”
It was the man she'd seen earlier, staring at the wreckage. She had time to register sandy hair, a beak of a nose. He said something in German to the Volksturm guard, and the truncheon was abruptly lowered. Then he turned to Caroline. Sharp hazel eyes simmered with anger. And something else. Contempt?
“This isn't the best place for sightseeing, ma'am. We'd appreciate it if you'd move on.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, deliberately rude. “I'm going. Jesus.”
With luck, she'd make the evening news.
With luck, Eric and his friends would be watching.
Seven
Berlin, 1 p.m.
The woman who had stolen Mian Krucevic's vaccine No. 413 — the mumps vaccine that would soon be injected into the bodies of thousands of Kosovo's children — had wasted little time in getting the box of ampules out of the country. At the main counter of Malev Air in Berlin's Tegel Airport, she presented a signed letter typed on the official stationery of the Hungarian Ministry of Health and an equally impressive packet of documentation from a Hungarian lab. She managed the same air of officious irritation that had carried her through her encounter with Greta in the VaccuGen offices, and after one Malev Air attendant pressed her too closely about her mission, she embarked on a furious lecture in geopolitics.