He'd spent eight hours pacing the hospital tent floor, running his hands through his hair and talking, talking, to the woman with the French name, while friends watched his baby and Alexis spiraled downward into death.
“How will I tell her mother?” he had asked Simone once in despair, and she had looked at him in surprise.
“You're married?”
“Was married. She was killed in a fire. During the civil war. I was supposed to take care of the girls. She'd always wanted a little girl. Someone to dress up, like a doll. I wanted boys, you know? Kids I could play soccer with.”
“Girls play soccer, too.”
He'd nodded distractedly.
“It doesn't matter. I wouldn't trade my girls now. They're all I have left of Ludmila — she was only twenty-eight when she died. And I loved her.”
He had paused, embarrassed to be talking so freely to this woman, who had hundreds of other children to care for, other parents to hear. But Simone was sitting quite still, her eyes on his face; his confessions hadn't bored her.
“Your wife must have been beautiful,” she had told him. “Your girls certainly are.”
“She named them after movie stars. From an American television show. Dynasty — you know it? She wanted everything for Alexis. Everything she never had. And for a while, we were doing so well. I had my practice, she had her apartment house — she inherited it from her father. Six apartments, six families. None of them survived the fire.”
He had spoken without emotion; he had told this story too many times to feel it anymore.
Simone had risen and gone to a small boy turning restlessly in the cot next to his daughter's.
“How did you escape?”
“I was in Budapest. Attending a constitutional-reform seminar sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department. My mother brought the girls to me for a holiday — she had never been to Hungary herself — but Ludmila couldn't get away. When war broke out, she called and begged me to stay. She wanted the girls to be safe.”
He had looked directly at Simone, his eyes bright as if with fever.
“I never saw her again.”
“But you and your daughters survived.”
“So we could die here” he had retorted. It was the first sign of real bitterness he'd allowed himself to feel.
Simone had ignored it. She pressed a cold cloth against Alexis's forehead.
“You're a lawyer, then.”
“That doesn't mean much in Kosovo. Law has nothing to do with survival.”
“But someday, you'll use what you learned in that seminar. Don't give up hope, Enver.”
Alexis had whimpered in the cot, and Simone felt for her pulse. There were so many children now. One hundred and fifty-three more had arrived at daybreak.
They lay in the tent with barely eight inches between their cots, some on pallets on the dirt floor. They moved into beds when another child died “Why aren't you getting it?” he had asked her abruptly.
“This disease. Why is it just the kids?”
“I don't know. Maybe it doesn't strike adults. Or maybe, if you've had the more common forms of the disease or been inoculated against them, you're immune. We know so little about this strain we don't even know how the epidemic started. Or why the disease strikes boys far more savagely than girls every gland in the boys' bodies is swollen. But a German lab has been studying the virus intensively and has come up with a new vaccine. We expect some German medical teams to fly in any day and begin inoculation.”
“A vaccine? Specifically for this strain? How did they make it so fast?”
“I don't know.” Her eyes met his, and the agony in them was like a lash.
“Enver, I'd urge you to have your youngest vaccinated.”
“Do you think it's safe?”
“I think it can't be worse than what we've got.”
He had thought about it all morning, while Alexis worsened; he had carried the idea of a vaccine back to his shelter when Krystle needed a nap. He had fallen asleep despite his best intentions in the quiet of that room, thinking of mumps, of killing strains. And while he slept, his elder daughter's time had run out.
He took a step now toward Alexis's cot and reached for her hand. It was cold — colder than his own, which was clammy with fear and raw weather. If only she would open her eyes one last time and look at him if only he could hear her say his name... Simone shook her head and removed her stethoscope from Alexis's chest.
He would not look at Simone. He would not let the glass shatter, and with it, all the world —
“I'm so sorry, Ludmila,” he whispered to his dead wife. And buried his face in their daughter's sweat-soaked curls.
Nine
Bratislava, 3 p.m.
In Olga Teciak's apartment, the air grew stale and the hours dragged. Once the videotape was made, Krucevic sent Michael out in a car with Otto as caretaker.
The two men drove across the Danube and into the center of Bratislava, where the U.S. embassy sat next to a massive old hotel in the Soviet mode, a former casino for party apparatchiks. The embassy had once been a consulate; when Slovakia declared independence from the Czech Republic in 1992, its status was upgraded, but an air of unhappiness lingered. Bratislava would never carry the prestige or romance of a Prague posting, and even the buildings knew it.
Michael was behind the wheel. The American embassy was coming up on the right, a block and a half away; early-afternoon traffic snarled the lanes ahead. The key was to crawl along in the right-hand lane, as though intent upon finding a parking space, until the red light ahead changed and the traffic moved freely.
They had gone around the corner twice before this, circling the embassy's position, in an effort to time the signal's changes. Thirty seconds, Michael thought, before red phased into flashing yellow and then blue-green. He was nearly abreast of the embassy door, maybe two yards still to go, when Otto rolled down his window and fired his gun at the lens of the nearest surveillance camera. The lens shattered. The far camera went next, just as it pivoted electronically to sweep the embassy's street front. Two deliberate pops, mundane as a car's backfiring, and the marine guards were suddenly shouting.
The light changed.
Otto hurled the bubble-wrapped videotape at the embassy steps. It skittered across the sidewalk directly in the path of a woman walking an overweight schnauzer; the dog hiccuped hysterically and lunged. One marine leapt forward and shoved the woman to the ground. The other kicked the package back into the street and then fell to the pavement, roaring, “Fire in the hole!”
Michael floored the gas pedal and spun sharply around the corner, rocketing down the side street that ran alongside the embassy building. He dodged one car to the left, careened into the opposite lane, jogged around an oncoming van, and turned left at the next intersection, the flow of traffic being blessedly with him. It was a simple thing now to head for the river.
“Fucking broad daylight.” Otto had rolled up the window and was staring back over his shoulder, intent upon a possible tail. “What the fucks he thinking, huh? That we'll fucking die for him? Just one of those Joes saw our plates — ”
“They didn't see the plates,” Michael said.
“What are you saying? That Mian made a mistake? That he's losing it? I wouldn't let him hear that.”
“What do you know, you useless piece of meat? You got shit for brains. Peas for balls. Next time, I throw you out the window.”
On the pavement in front of the American embassy, nothing exploded. One of the marines got to his feet and studied the package. The schnauzer broke free of its screaming mistress and sank its teeth into the Marine's ankle.