But she could not relent. Relent, and she'd lose him.
“Where's your base, Eric? Tell me and I'll have a team inside of it before dawn.”
He hesitated; he gave it an instant's thought. But the habit of self-reliance ran too deep.
“I need a few more hours, Carrie.”
“Time's up.” Her voice was sharp with contempt.
“Now get out of here before I call the cops.”
“Caroline...”
“Nothing.”
It came out with explosive force.
He stopped, frozen.
“Nothing. You. Say. Will. Make. Any. Difference.” It seemed important to pronounce each word with equal weight, as though he were deaf, half literate, a confused and pathetic foreigner. The small flower of hope that had bloomed in Berlin turned brown within her and died.
“I know I hurt you,” he began. He raised a hand to touch her, and she went rigid.
His eyes Eric's eyes, bluer than the sea and stark with pain stared at her wordlessly. Was he begging her? Her?
Shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap.
One call. That was all. Let him plead to the station if he was so goddamn desperate.
“Get out,” she whispered.
And he did.
Fifteen
Budapest, 11:40 p.m.
“Lady. Lady Sophie — are you awake?”
He was whispering urgently from the hallway. She pulled herself to the edge of her bed and dangled one arm toward the floor. If she could roll off the bed, perhaps she could crawl over and talk to him.. .. She tested her weight, leaning down on one hand, and felt her wrist buckle. The effort made her dizzy with exhaustion.
“Lady Sophie!”
“Yes, Jozsef?” she croaked.
“My father is gone. May I come in?”
Despite the pain cramping deep in her bowels, Sophie smiled. It was like the boy to ask permission.
“By all means. If only I could open the door.”
It slid back soundlessly. She saw his small body outlined against the light of the passage, the remote control in one hand. In the other, he held a hypodermic.
“I have medicine.” He slipped to her bedside still whispering. He was a boy who would probably whisper for the rest of his life.
“You must take it soon, before it is too late. There is not much medicine left. And I have had more than my share.”
“Your father can make more,” Sophie said.
“Not here in Budapest. If he went back to Berlin, maybe, to his lab .. . the Anthrax 3A bacillus is highly secret and very dangerous, lady. Papa does not carry it everywhere.”
“Keep your antibiotic, Jozsef.”
He frowned.
“But you must take it! Do you know what is happening to you? It is very bad, lady. First you vomit blood. Then you vomit your entire stomach. Your heart is eaten away within you. And then at last, in unbearable pain, you die. My father has told me.”
“And is your father always right? Was he right about your calls to your mother?”
He looked away.
“Where did he beat you?”
Wordlessly, he lifted the front of his shirt. His abdomen was a mass of red lines.
Asshole, Sophie thought impotently. He's already bleeding inside.
“No one has the right to keep you from her. She's your mother and she loves you.”
“If she's alive,” Jozsef retorted, “then why hasn't she tried to find we?”
“When your father decides to kidnap somebody, he makes sure they're never found. Don't blame your mother. Look what he's done to the marines.”
Jozsef giggled — a boyish sound, the first she had ever heard him make — and she was transported for an instant back to her old house in Malvern, before Mitch's death, Peter's grubby hands clutching his father's ankle while Mitch dragged him along, pretending not to notice. Rough housing. Wrestling. The tumble of boyhood.
“Do you want to escape?” she asked Jozsef.
The laughter died.
“I could not.”
“Do you want to?”
It was easier to be honest in this darkened room, her voice as relentless as the voice of conscience.
“How? We can't even get out of this compound. We're locked in. The doors are impossible to force. They're electronic. And you're too ill.”
“Then we'll have to make your father give us up.”
Jozsef snorted.
“My father will never do that. You're too important.”
“I don't mean anything to him at all,” she said firmly. “I've served my purpose. But you mean the world to him. For you, Jozsef, he would do anything.”
“Then why does he beat me? If he loved me, he would not beat me.”
“I wish that were true. There'd be far less abuse in the world. But beatings or no, he fears for your life. He fears the illness inside you. That's why he's saving the antibiotic he has for you — and letting me die.”
The boy turned and looked at her piercingly.
“Where did you get that hypodermic?” Sophie asked.
“From the supply room, where he keeps the antibiotic.”
“Do you have the strength to take me there?”
He did not answer for fully fifteen seconds. Then he said: “Don't do this, lady. It will make him angry. Papa cannot control himself when he is angry.”
“I know,” she said.
He shook his head.
“You know nothing at all. I have seen him kill. I know what he can do.”
“Jozsef — do you want to see your mother?”
“More than God Himself,” the boy whispered.
“Then take me to the supplies.”
Anxiously, Bela Horvath scanned the pages of his notebook and then thrust it into the plain black knapsack he carried to the lab every day. It was nearly midnight. The meeting with Vie Marinelli in Varosliget Park was only eight hours away, but he was sweating with fear and nausea. The notebook was the embodiment of his betrayal, the embodiment of his faith. It must not come to harm.
He searched his untidy bedroom, eyes straining in the dark. A light at this hour would be a mistake. He had taken a risk even returning to the house. At the thought of Mian and what he would do if he knew of the notebook — if he knew of the meeting with Marinelli — Horvath's fingers twitched spasmodically. He dropped the knapsack.
He had wanted this meeting, had almost initiated it when the city went up like a torch that afternoon and the laboratory had closed. He had suspected the truth at last tonight, he had tested and retested it out of thoroughness and disbelief, until with a scientist's harsh honesty he understood. Someone had to stop it.
He had bicycled home along the usual streets, crowded with people shouting as they had not done since 1989, since 1956, but those had been questions of politics then — of something worth dying for. This was about money. The ugliness in people's faces depressed him, and he wove in and out among the stalled cars, knapsack tight as a leech against his back, wondering what he hoped to save.
The chalk mark was a red slash trailing haphazardly across a concrete pillar, and for an instant, he was uncertain whether he had actually seen it. He stopped the bike and thrust his glasses higher on his nose, staring at the scrawl on the Vigado concert hall. The signal was supposed to be done this way — but could it be a mistake? Something to do with the rioting? He was supposed to mark the opposite pillar himself, in blue chalk — he carried it always in a knapsack pocket — but the square, he noticed now, was blocked off by police. They were ranked shoulder to shoulder in front of Gerbeaud's, the coffeehouse. Trapped patrons glared through the broad plate-glass windows; others perused their papers, bored. Horvath felt a bubble of laughter shatter inside him: How like the police to protect their pastry!
He had backed away from the Vigado, turned out of Vorosmarty Ter, and pedaled home. When he called Mirjana's answering machine, the message from Michael awaited him. He prayed that by now, Mirjana had safely left town.