Hungary, Mirjana Tarcic reminded the attendant, shared a border with Yugoslavia.
Tens of thousands of ethnic Hungarians inhabited the autonomous Yugoslav province of Vojvodina, just across that border. And since Hungary was now a member of NATO, which had pummeled Serbia from the air for months, tensions in the autonomous province were running high. Who knew when floods of refugees might start spilling into southern Hungary? And what diseases and vaccines might be necessary then? The Hungarian Ministry of Health had determined it should be prepared. If the Malev Air attendant wished to discuss the matter further, she could refer him to her ministry superior.
A tedious twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds later, Mirjana Tarcic carried the sealed carton containing her estranged husband's mumps vaccine onto the Budapest flight. Malev Air magnanimously dispensed with the requirement of security X ray. Radiation might harm the vaccines, and that was the last thing anyone wanted. The cause, as Mirjana reminded them, was a humanitarian one.
She placed the box between her booted feet, halfway under the seat in front of her, and remembered a similar box of vaccines on another flight. She had just copied Mian Krucevic's method for getting a bomb onto a plane. But this time the vaccines were real, and potentially more explosive than the package that had blasted MedAir 901 out of the sky. She hugged her arms across her chest and stared through the window at an approaching baggage train, overwhelmed for an instant by what she had done. If Mian found out, he would hunt her down and kill her.
And she knew him well enough to believe that he would find out.
She read no magazines, she made no conversation with the elderly Hungarian woman seated next to her during the two-hour flight. She kept her sunglasses on. Mian, Mirjana knew, had spies everywhere. To beat him at his game, she must be more vigilant than he, more farsighted, more paranoid. There was nothing like thirteen years of marriage to a psychopath to teach you about survival.
In Frankfurt, Germany, at Headquarters NSA Europe, Patti De Palma sat at a desk in a windowless room that was utterly silent except for a Muzak version of Paul Simon's “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The Muzak was piped throughout the sprawling government complex in the IG Farben building; it was intended to mask office conversation in the event anyone was listening. Patti frankly loathed the tinned tracks — “Memory,” “What I Did for Love,” even the Clash's “Rock the Casbah.” They made her feel like a character in a book by George Orwell. And life as an intercept translator was Orwellian enough.
This morning, however, only an hour into her shift, Patti was spared the bastardized Paul Simon. Her earphones were on. She was listening intently to a conversation in German pulled directly from a rhombic antenna array designed to intercept a wide range of very specific communications. Since Dare Atwood's first conversation with President Bigelow regarding the 30 April Organization eighteen hours earlier, this particular array, made up of diamond-shaped wires scattered over several hundred acres, had been intercepting communications at VaccuGen in Berlin.
And so Patti listened as Greta Oppenheimer sobbed out the story of vaccine No. 413 to Mian Krucevic. From there, it was merely a matter of locating the phone Krucevic had used. And within two hours, Olga Teciak's Bratislava apartment complex was circled in red on a large-scale map of the city pasted on the White House Situation Room's wall.
“Mad Dog! Come on in.”
One of Wally Aronson's hands grasped the ambassador's glossy black door. The other beckoned Caroline almost surreptitiously, as though his password to the clubhouse might expire without notice. A marine guard stood at attention in the hall, his eyes riveted on thin air.
“He's expecting you, but we haven't much time,” Wally told her. “He's due at the chancellor's for cocktails.”
The ambassador's residence was a grand old place in Charlottenburg, with nine-foot windows and chestnut trees that threw heavy shade in summer. A world removed from Pariser Platz. Caroline had taken a few minutes at the Hyatt to dress in business clothes, and was suddenly glad.
“You look great, Caroline.” Wally touched her lightly on the shoulder, a gesture halfway between a salute and an embrace, and that quickly Caroline was back in boot camp, Wally swinging from a chin-up bar with his boot laces dangling.
He was short and lithe with a perpetual smile hovering around his eyes. The goatee had grayed since Caroline had last seen him, two years before. They were old friends from the Career Trainee program and Budapest; now he was Chief of Station, Berlin. It was a plum he'd pulled relatively early in his career — but then, Wally had been born with the soul of a spy. He had probably rifled his mother's love letters as soon as he could read, Caroline suspected, and worn gloves to do it.
He led her past a formal drawing room hung with miles of gray-blue silk, its atmosphere thick with the suspended breath of public spaces. Caroline looked at the purposeful chairs, all elegant line and backache, and imagined the parties — a crush of black velvet and white satin, the haze of cigarette smoke that always amazed Americans and was inescapable in Europe. Wally crossed the wide hall — here there were ceiling frescoes of Venus rising, an abandon of putti — to a set of double doors. The ambassador's study.
But the room, when Wally threw open the doors, was empty.
He crossed the worn Aubusson carpet to the French windows. Beyond them was an expanse of browning grass, lime trees bereft of leaves. A smudge of afternoon sky. A white-haired man lounged in a canvas chair below the terrace, one elbow resting on a card table, thin legs extended before him. He wore a navy blue windbreaker, khaki pants, Top-Siders without socks. A faint breeze stirred a sparse lock of hair, and as he reached back to smooth it, the veins on his hand pulsed blue. Two men, strangers to Caroline, sat at his right and left. In their wool suits and trimmed hair, they resembled models imported for a photo shoot.
“Ah, there you are, Wally.” The ambassador spoke with relish, as though the COS had just brought round the drinks cart. “Good man.”
“Our guest from Washington, Mr. Ambassador. Caroline Carmichael of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Ambassador Dalton.”
Ambrose Dalton stood up. His hand, when Caroline shook it, was dry as vellum. He was a member of an old Connecticut family, a political appointee who had made a fortune in merchant banking. His wife's name was Sunny. She had found her life mission after the Daltons' son broke his neck in a rugby game; now she educated the insensitive about the rights of the physically challenged. The Daltons gave generously to a variety of causes, some of them political. As a couple, they were two of President Bigelow's oldest friends. They were quite well acquainted with Sophie Payne.
“I'm so very sorry, Mr. Ambassador, about the damage to the embassy,” Caroline told him. “You and your staff are well, I hope?”
Dalton took her hand between both of his and patted it, more in sympathy than salutation.
“We lost two of our marine guards. Mere boys. But you know that, I expect.”
She nodded wordlessly.
He studied her face, a calculation flickering in his eyes.
“I understand you're an expert, Ms. Carmichael, on this Krucevic character. Any expertise is, of course, a comfort, but I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Sophie cannot be anywhere in Berlin.”
“Is that what the German police are saying, sir?”