detected only boredom.
He threw a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and some socks at her feet.
“Put those on.”
“Why?”
“Because your clothes are starting to stink.”
She turned her back and stripped off her ruined suit. A red line across her thighs showed where Krucevic had pulled the skirt taut, and a dark blot like the map of Europe stained the fabric. Nell's blood.
Wordlessly, Michael handed her a comb.
For the first time in that extraordinary day, Sophie felt an overwhelming desire to cry. Her hands were shaking.
She dragged the comb through her short black hair and splashed water on her cheeks. Then she dried herself with the front of her sweatshirt, a technique recalled from Adirondack camp days. There was no mirror in the room; perhaps they were afraid she would smash the glass and cut them all to pieces.
She probably looked like shit anyway.
“What in God's name are you doing here? You're American, aren't you?”
The look on his face was half amusement, half contempt.
“I have orders to beat you if you try to talk to me, Mrs. Payne,” he answered in German. “We all do. Don't push your luck.”
He seized her by the arm and pulled her along the passageway, back to the room she already thought of as prison. Halogen lights now hung from the ceiling's steel beams; they flooded Mian Krucevic's face and that of the cherubic Vaclav, who held a video camera. Beyond him stood a gurney.
“Ah, Mrs. Payne. A vision in black.” Krucevics mood had altered subtly, she noticed; he seemed in the grip of subdued excitement, his movements jerky and tense. He nodded to Otto.
“The gurney.”
Before she had time to react, Otto seized Sophie in a fireman's carry and dumped her unceremoniously on the stretcher. She lunged upward. But like young Jozsef, she lost. Otto snapped a belt over wrist and ankle, immediately restraining her.
She thought of the needle, the desperate child, and felt a sickness in the pit of her stomach.
“Is this really necessary? I'm not likely to kick you again.”
“No,” Krucevic said slowly as he settled a newspaper next to her right ear, “I don't think you are. Vaclav?”
He stepped toward them, video camera dangling in one hand.
“Start with a close-up of Mrs. Payne's face, will you? Focus on the newspaper's date. Then pan back until they can see how she's lying. On no account are you to focus on me.”
Strapped down and stripped of her elegant suiting, Sophie was no longer a person to Krucevic. She had become the merest prop, a faceless bundle in black sweats.
She struggled uselessly against the gurney straps, then realized she only looked weaker. As though she was afraid. Panicking. How to seize control of the situation?
She refused to admit that control was completely beyond her. Refusal might sustain her for several days if she survived the next few minutes.
The camera lens came within a foot of her face. If this tape was going anywhere near the United States if there was a chance that Peter might see it she had a duty to remain calm.
“Good evening, Mr. President.” Krucevic's voice came from somewhere in the darkness beyond the floodlights. “Let us state for the record that we have in our keeping one Sophie Friedman Payne, Vice President of the United States and apostate Jew. It is Tuesday, November ninth, somewhere in Central Europe. Observe the copy of the International Herald Tribune you see on your screen; it bears today's date. We are the 30 April Organization, and as Mrs. Payne is familiar with us, I must assume we need no introduction.”
The camera lens retreated several feet, took in the gurney and Sophie's shackled body.
“Do you know, Mrs. Payne, why you are here?”
“Because you murdered my bodyguard and kidnapped me,” Sophie said without hesitation.
“You are here as a token of faith,” Krucevic amended patiently. “Of faith and commitment on both our parts to an enlightened course of action. Have we harmed you, Mrs. Payne?”
“No. You've terrorized and humiliated me. But it takes a great deal more than that to harm me, Krucevic.”
He had walked around the perimeter of the room until he could see her face, although he remained carefully off camera. His arms were folded across his chest, his dark eyes fixed on her own.
“I'm afraid it does,” he said. “Otto? The hypodermic, please.”
Sophie flinched involuntarily as the man approached. His face was now concealed behind a black hood, but his eyes were unmistakable dull with malice and anticipation. In his right hand he held a needle. She jerked convulsively in her bonds.
“It is to Jack Bigelow that I am speaking now,” she heard Krucevic say. “I hope I may call you Jack, Mr. President. I am about to conduct a demonstration. I know you will watch very carefully.”
He nodded. With a sudden, sharp movement Otto plunged the hypodermic into Sophie's thigh. She cried out at the shock of it, the gratuitous pain; behind his mask, Otto smiled. Eight people were assembled in the White House secure video tele-conferencing center, or VTC — a smallish space with an oblong table, twelve chairs, a wide-screen monitor, and a million-dollar array of telecommunications equipment.
With its vaulted door and security panel, the room resembled a steel diving chamber; it might almost survive ground zero. Like all secure facilities, it was Tempest-tested: Any electronic or magnetic signals emanating from the space could be neither intercepted nor recorded by an outside party. There was a secure VTC room now in every major government agency; recently, they had been installed in the principal embassies worldwide. A multi party network of secure voice, image, and data communication could thus be established within seconds.
Thirty April was aware of that.
At 9:07 that evening in Prague, the driver of a passing car threw a package toward the U.S. embassy guardhouse on Trziste Street. The marine guards wasted half an hour assembling a technical bomb team before discovering the package held nothing more than clothing, a used hypodermic, and a videotape. The clothes were later determined to belong to the kidnapped Vice President. And the tape —
The tape was screened by the ambassador, the CIA Chief of Station, and each of their deputies. Four people called from diplomatic dinners, clandestine surveillance, and one very inviting bed. At 10:12 Prague time, the ambassador contacted the White House.
Now they were all watching — Bigelow, Finch, Tomlinson, O'Neill, Phillips, and Dare. They were joined by the President's Chief of Staff and the White House Situation Room's chief Intelligence officer. Bigelow was restless; he sat barely two feet from the screen, beating a tattoo on his right knee with a presidential pen.
As Otto's hand slashed down with the hypodermic, everyone jumped. And then glanced surreptitiously at one another. The air in the VTC room was stale with tension; Dare was sweating in her black wool dress. Mian Krucevic was famous for one thing — biological agents. As everyone in the VTC room was fully aware.
“Mrs. Payne has just been injected with a bacillus your Intelligence people will want to research,” said Krucevic's voice. “I call it Anthrax 3A. My own hybrid of the common sheep ailment, quite deadly in humans. Where the disease normally takes three days to kill, mine can achieve death in three hours. Mrs. Payne should begin to exhibit the symptoms in about thirty minutes. Fever, blood in the stomach and lungs, a systemic infection. If the disease is allowed to progress unchecked, she will hemorrhage and die.
“It is an immensely unpleasant death, Jack. I've tested Anthrax 3A extensively among the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
Bigelow shifted in his chair.
Sophie Paynes eyes, caught in the video lens, widened slightly.
“I don't believe you,” she said to the man off camera. “You're bluffing. There was nothing in that needle.”
“Why?” Krucevic's voice retorted. “Because you're a woman? Because you're the Vice President of the United States? Neither fact is of the slightest importance to me. To me, Mrs. Payne, you are just another Jew. One who should never have been born.”
