“Your colleague has already been here,” Greta replied.
“What colleague?”
“From the Health Ministry. For the vaccines. The minister himself sent her.”
“My dear young lady,” said the man, amused, “someone has been having a joke with you. Do you know who I am?”
He turned his face fully into the range of the camera positioned above his head.
Greta stared intently at the monitor; a sickness rose in her throat.
“Ernst Schuler,” she whispered.
The Minister of Health.
Five
Bratislava, 10:15 a.m.
As Dare Atwood had predicted, Sophie Payne was no longer in Prague.
Her captors had tried to take her to Hungary, driving out of the city at one o'clock in the morning, after the American flag in the embassy garden had been raised to full mast and the President was known to be cooperating. They had injected her with the Anthrax 3A antibiotic and bundled her into the trunk of Michael's car, heading first east through the night and then, abruptly, when it became clear the Czech border guards were searching everything that approached the Hungarian border, south. They skirted the Tatras Mountains and ended, after many hours, in Bratislava, which had once been called Pressburg and known the glory of the Austrian empire. Now the city was famed for recidivist Communism and thuggish politics, for the Semtex explosives manufactured on its outskirts, for dispirited pottery and rudimentary wine. The ancient vines trailed through the hills like bony fingers, scrabbling for a purchase in the dust.
They had intended to reach Budapest but chose Bratislava by default, because Vaclav Slivik knew a woman in the Slovak State Orchestra. Many years ago, when Olga Teciak was a young woman of twenty-four whose sloe eyes and graceful limbs were utterly bewitching against the prop of her cello, Vaclav had pursued her violently, and she was enough in the thrall of the past to accord him some kindness now. When he knocked on the door at 4:33 a.m. unheralded and unapologetic, she was so disoriented as to let him in.
It was only after the guns appeared that Olga understood what she had done. But by then, her doom was sealed.
Sophie lay now on the woman's cracked tile floor, her hands and feet bound, her mouth gagged. The bathroom smelled faintly septic, an odor of decay unsuccessfully masked with ammonia. Olga's apartment was one of a series of similar faceless cubicles in one of the mass of faceless Soviet-built concrete towers strung across the Danube from the historic heart of old Bratislava. The complex as a whole could boast the highest suicide rate in the country. It looked like an architect's embodiment of despair. And at the moment, Sophie found the mood to be catching. She had crossed yet another border. No one, it seemed, was following.
They had carried her into Olga's home in the early-morning darkness with a hood over her head. Olga was not permitted to glimpse her face. Any ministrations required by the captive were offered through the proxy of young Jozsef, who, like Sophie, had suffered the indignities of Anthrax 3A and thus possessed some inkling of how to remedy them. The first thing the boy was permitted to do was to remove the gag from her mouth; the second was to offer her coffee, the very smell of which turned her sour stomach. He was sitting by her now, knees hunched up under his chin, eyes blazing darkly in his frail white face. He was staring at her, as though struggling to frame her meaning in words he could understand.
Sophie was conscious of his gaze, but she kept her eyes fixed on a patch of damp that had stained Olga's ceiling the color of weak tea.
“You should drink something,” Jozsef said at last.
“Water, maybe?” He said it in German, which was the language his father preferred him to speak. It was also, by happenstance, the language of Sophie Paynes childhood, and she answered him almost without thinking.
“Where is your mother?”
He was silent for the space of several heartbeats. Then, fearful, he hunched himself tighter and whispered, “Belgrade. I think she is still in Belgrade.”
“Does she know where you are?”
He did not answer.
Sophie reconsidered the patch of damp. The iron taste of blood was in her mouth and in her nostrils. Conversation was difficult. Her brain balked at the effort to concentrate. But the issue of Jozsef's mother recurred, as though it might be important.
“Did you want to leave her?”
“He took me. In the night. He held my mother's throat to the knife. He said terrible things to her, terrible. She was weeping. I could not even say goodbye.”
“How long ago?”
“I think it was before Christmas. But we never had Christmas, so I do not really know.”
“It's still November, right? It must be. So you've been gone almost a year.”
Again, he did not answer. The knees stayed hunched under his chin, as though all that kept him alive was the tight grip of hand on wrist.
“You should drink something,” he said again.
“A little water.”
Watching him sway and then recover as he stood up, Sophie remembered that Jozsef, too, had been injected with the bacillus. He would be feeling the same persistent ache in every joint, the pounding at the temples. And looking at the little-boy knees (he wore thin cotton shorts, no socks on his crabbed feet), she remembered Peter at eight, his bare feet filthy from running through the long grass around the Vineyard house, screen door banging in his wake. The sound of his voice, high-pitched as a bobwhite's at dawn, calling across the meadows that ran down to the sea. The memory suffused her with peace and longing; longing not so much for Peter — who had become a singing wire, taut with strain and the life of his own ideas — but for the simple things Sophie had once held like water in the palm of her hand.
“Here,” Jozsef said. He placed the rim of the glass against her lips. She stared into the dark wells of his eyes. This child was as much a prisoner as she was.
But no power and no government would bargain for his release. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Around ten o'clock in the morning.”
He tugged her upright, supporting her with an unexpectedly wiry strength. She drank the tepid water, too thirsty to argue with its taste, and felt the boy's rapid pulse fluttering against her like a bird.
When she escaped Krucevic, Sophie decided, Jozsef must leave with her.
The bathroom door slammed open, the edge jamming painfully against Sophie's leg.
She grunted and spurted water on Jozsef's fingers.
“Mrs. Payne,” Michael said. “You're awake.”
“Yes.”
Jozsef dabbed at her wet face with a wad of toilet paper.
Michael nodded toward the boy.
“Is he treating you right?”
“What a question.”
He slid into the room. With Sophie prone on the floor and Jozsef hunkering by her, there was scarcely space for the man's feet. Michael bent down and untied her hands; when she tried to bring them forward, every nerve ending from shoulder to wrist screamed in protest.
“Okay, Joe, your dad has some breakfast for Mrs. Payne.” Michael, too, spoke in German; it seemed to be the terrorists' lingua franca. “Go get it for us, would you?”
The boy vanished through the doorway.
“I've been instructed to let you use the facilities,” Michael told Sophie. “If you scream or attempt to leave by
