“You did well.”
Stoop-shouldered, with a bald spot as decisive as a Franciscan's on the crown of his head, Bela Horvath was peering into a microscope ocular at a sample of vaccine No. 413 — Mian Krucevic's answer to the mumps epidemic. No one else was in the laboratory. Except for the dark-haired woman with the white scarf wrapped like a bandage around her neck. “Can you tell anything?” Mirjana Tarcic asked him.
“For that, we need time. Trials with mice. DNA scans. Assessment and analysis. But this is a start. The best we could possibly have.”
Bela took off his glasses, leaned toward her as she sat on the lab stool in a pool of light from a Tensor lamp, and kissed her cheek.
“You're very brave, you know.”
She flinched as though the praise stung her.
“And then? When you have your analysis? What will you do with it?”
“Tell Michael. He's the one who wants to know.”
She shook her head.
“It's not enough. We have to tell the world.”
“Tell them what?” Horvath smiled at her indulgently. “That the latest Yugoslav terrorist is quite possibly insane? The world will not be surprised.”
“I did not go to Berlin for Michael,” Mirjana said tautly.
“No. And I do not flatter myself that you went for me. Why exactly did you go, Mirjana?”
Wordlessly, she reached her hands to her throat and unwound the scarf. It was as much a part of this woman as her sharp nose, her writhing dark hair. Beta had not seen her throat in at least five years.
The final length of silk trailed away. Her hand dropped to her side, clenched.
He drew a deep breath, steadied himself, and reached trembling fingers to her cheek. She reared back, as though he might strike her.
“Mirjana,” he whispered in horror. “Who did this to you?”
The wound had healed long ago. But the vicious edge, torn and rewoven like the bride of Frankenstein, stared out accusingly from the pale expanse of her neck.
She had been savaged. It was as though a wild animal had gnawed at her flesh, and what remained was carrion for birds.
“Mian?” he asked.
She began to wind the scarf once more around her throat.
“You remember the Krajina?”
The Krajina. A blood bath in Bosnia, Serb killing Croat, Croat killing Serb.
Thousands died.
“We had gone there, Zoran and I, with the boy.”
“Zoran?”
“My brother. Mian had been missing for weeks. We believed he was dead.” Her dark eyes were flat and unreadable, a look Beta knew of old. “Sarajevo was in ruins, our building had been hit. Zoran was mad to join the Serb forces — he was twenty-three, Bela, filled with rage and hatred. I went with him to the Krajina because I had nowhere else to go. Our parents were dead. There was the boy. I thought we might find protection.”
Protection.
“They came in the night, the Croat killers. They tore us from our beds and set fire to the houses, they shot some where they lay. They took the men in a group to the edge of town, and there they butchered them. And I — I hid my Jozsef in a cellar with some women and their babies; he was only seven, Bela, but they would have killed him — and I went after Zoran and the Croats.”
She pointed to her neck.
“This is how they killed my brother, Bela. With a chain saw.”
“Mian?” Bela whispered.
“He kept them from killing me,” she replied, “when they had started. But he did not stop them from raping me four, ten, sixteen times. And he did not save my brother. I watched Zoran die. He screamed, Bela, all the hatred that was in him — useless. It did not save him. But perhaps it kept him from being afraid.
“You call me brave. But you are a fool, Bela. I am afraid every day and night of my life. Afraid of him.”
“I know. That is why I call you brave. Fear does not stop you. You take the plane to Berlin — ”
“He wanted Jozsef, you see,” she went on, as though he had not spoken. “Mian thought I had left the boy with friends in Sarajevo. He thought the pain and fear would make me tell him, that I would buy my life with my Jozsef's blood. But I told him nothing. He had no choice but to let me live. If I died, he would never find his son again.”
“And he did,” Bela said.
“Four years later, in Belgrade. By that time, The Hague had branded Mian a criminal. No one thought he would show his face in Serb territory again. But it was a mistake to think we were safe. Mian came and stole my boy in the night.”
Bela reached over and snapped off the Tensor lamp.
“You went to Berlin for Jozsef.”
She shook her head.
“I will never see Jozsef again. I went to Berlin for revenge.”
Sophie could feel Michael's presence beyond the bathroom door. He stood guard there, ostensibly to keep her within, and yet she felt as though he really kept Krucevic out. This was absurd, of course; in her circumstances, it was a piece of self-delusion so pitiful it was dangerous. It set up a false sympathy. Michael had done nothing to prevent her infection with Anthrax 3A. He had done nothing, if it came to that, to prevent her kidnapping in the first place. So what was his game? Why was he a member of 30 April at all? And what did he truly mean by those muttered words, “/ will not let you die at this man's hands”!
She almost wished he had said nothing. He had created the illusion of hope, and she needed to fight hope as much as despair. In her mind she had erected a wall of vigilance, one that permitted no hint of the fate that awaited her to penetrate inside. The wall assumed her end would be painful and that her only choice was to meet it with dignity. She burned, nonetheless, with questions.
“What do you do all day?” she asked Jozsef. “When you're not standing vigil over the operation, I mean?”
“Sometimes I read books. Sometimes he lets me watch the television. It depends.”
What had Peter done at twelve? He skateboarded. He rode his bike. He spent a lot of time outdoors on baseball and soccer fields. He played Nintendo and computer games and he bragged to his friends and he never, never spent an entire day hunched in the corner of a dank bathroom in a stranger's house.
“Do you ever play games on a computer?”
His head came up at that.
“You saw it? Tonio's computer?”
“No. Does he have one?”
Jozsef nodded.
“Tonio is a genius.”
“I suppose he told you that himself.”
“My father says it. It is why he allows Tonio near him, although Tonio sings American music and is not to be trusted when the liquor is in him. When Tonio is drunk, he sings louder, and my father orders Otto to beat him. But Papa needs Tonio for his genius.”
“Really,” Sophie said, growing more interested. “And what does Tonio do for your father?”
“He can find his way into any computer system anywhere in the world.” Jozsef was proud. “He once found his way into most of the banks in Switzerland, and into the Italian treasury, but for that he went to prison.”
“Not much of a genius, then, if he got caught.”
“Tonio hated prison so much that he tried to kill himself with a razor. He swears he will not go back again. It is why he fights for my father. To get back at all of them.”
“The Swiss banks?”
“And the West. The West is very evil.”
“I thought the West was your father's only hope. He hates the East, right?”
Jozsef frowned.
“It is complicated, I think. Papa hates the East, certainly, because all evil comes from the East; but the West is evil, too. It must be … What is the word? Washed? ... before it is good again.”
“Cleansed,” Sophie murmured, and thought of the mass graves in Bosnia and Kosovo.
“Cleansed.” Jozsef tested the word on his tongue.
“And so Tonio will cleanse the West with his computer. What bank will he break into next?”