the streets.
The message had played superbly at the polls, particularly among Ossies, the former citizens of the defunct German Democratic Republic, where crime officially had never existed. Now the Ossies were joining Voekl's Volksturm, his national militia, in droves. And as she stared at the policeman's spread-eagle insignia, Caroline had to admit the chancellor's savvy. Voekl had killed one problem persistent unemployment in the east while brilliantly furthering his anti-Turk agenda. And he'd placed throughout the country an army loyal only to him.
“Hinaus!” The truncheon was raised, the black shirt close enough to graze with her fingertips. She felt the man's animosity wash over her like a strong smell.
“Speak English?”
He shook his head aggressively. She stood her ground, focusing her lens, and saw a British television crew pivot to film the encounter. In a minute the cop would take her camera and dash it to the pavement. Deliberately, she leaned around him, pointed her lens at the embassy, and clicked the shutter.
The gurney, it was believed, had come from within a bogus rescue operation staged from the roof. Caroline had watched the videotape of Eric so many times she had the sequence embedded in her mind. The period from explosion to kidnapping had been slight about nine minutes. Therefore, 30 April must have known how to navigate the new building before they'd ever landed the chopper.
That, in itself, was suggestive.
“Halt!” He grabbed her arm and thrust her back from the barrier. Caroline tensed. Then she screamed.
Two American camera crews joined the British one already filming her. The Italians looked interested and started to move.
“Let go of me, you asshole!” She broke free of the policeman's grasp and held her camera behind her back.
“Jesus! Isn't this a free country?”
The guard raised his truncheon obligingly. The film crews filmed. And then a raincoat — clad arm was thrust between them, and someone said, “It's okay.”
It was the man she'd seen earlier, staring at the wreckage. She had time to register sandy hair, a beak of a nose. He said something in German to the Volksturm guard, and the truncheon was abruptly lowered. Then he turned to Caroline. Sharp hazel eyes simmered with anger. And something else. Contempt?
“This isn't the best place for sightseeing, ma'am. We'd appreciate it if you'd move on.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, deliberately rude. “I'm going. Jesus.”
With luck, she'd make the evening news.
With luck, Eric and his friends would be watching.
Seven
Berlin, 1 p.m.
The woman who had stolen Mian Krucevic's vaccine No. 413 — the mumps vaccine that would soon be injected into the bodies of thousands of Kosovo's children — had wasted little time in getting the box of ampules out of the country. At the main counter of Malev Air in Berlin's Tegel Airport, she presented a signed letter typed on the official stationery of the Hungarian Ministry of Health and an equally impressive packet of documentation from a Hungarian lab. She managed the same air of officious irritation that had carried her through her encounter with Greta in the VaccuGen offices, and after one Malev Air attendant pressed her too closely about her mission, she embarked on a furious lecture in geopolitics.
Hungary, Mirjana Tarcic reminded the attendant, shared a border with Yugoslavia.
Tens of thousands of ethnic Hungarians inhabited the autonomous Yugoslav province of Vojvodina, just across that border. And since Hungary was now a member of NATO, which had pummeled Serbia from the air for months, tensions in the autonomous province were running high. Who knew when floods of refugees might start spilling into southern Hungary? And what diseases and vaccines might be necessary then? The Hungarian Ministry of Health had determined it should be prepared. If the Malev Air attendant wished to discuss the matter further, she could refer him to her ministry superior.
A tedious twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds later, Mirjana Tarcic carried the sealed carton containing her estranged husband's mumps vaccine onto the Budapest flight. Malev Air magnanimously dispensed with the requirement of security X ray. Radiation might harm the vaccines, and that was the last thing anyone wanted. The cause, as Mirjana reminded them, was a humanitarian one.
She placed the box between her booted feet, halfway under the seat in front of her, and remembered a similar box of vaccines on another flight. She had just copied Mian Krucevic's method for getting a bomb onto a plane. But this time the vaccines were real, and potentially more explosive than the package that had blasted MedAir 901 out of the sky. She hugged her arms across her chest and stared through the window at an approaching baggage train, overwhelmed for an instant by what she had done. If Mian found out, he would hunt her down and kill her.
And she knew him well enough to believe that he would find out.
She read no magazines, she made no conversation with the elderly Hungarian woman seated next to her during the two-hour flight. She kept her sunglasses on. Mian, Mirjana knew, had spies everywhere. To beat him at his game, she must be more vigilant than he, more farsighted, more paranoid. There was nothing like thirteen years of marriage to a psychopath to teach you about survival.
In Frankfurt, Germany, at Headquarters NSA Europe, Patti De Palma sat at a desk in a windowless room that was utterly silent except for a Muzak version of Paul Simon's “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The Muzak was piped throughout the sprawling government complex in the IG Farben building; it was intended to mask office conversation in the event anyone was listening. Patti frankly loathed the tinned tracks — “Memory,” “What I Did for Love,” even the Clash's “Rock the Casbah.” They made her feel like a character in a book by George Orwell. And life as an intercept translator was Orwellian enough.
This morning, however, only an hour into her shift, Patti was spared the bastardized Paul Simon. Her earphones were on. She was listening intently to a conversation in German pulled directly from a rhombic antenna array designed to intercept a wide range of very specific communications. Since Dare Atwood's first conversation with President Bigelow regarding the 30 April Organization eighteen hours earlier, this particular array, made up of diamond-shaped wires scattered over several hundred acres, had been intercepting communications at VaccuGen in Berlin.
And so Patti listened as Greta Oppenheimer sobbed out the story of vaccine No. 413 to Mian Krucevic. From there, it was merely a matter of locating the phone Krucevic had used. And within two hours, Olga Teciak's Bratislava apartment complex was circled in red on a large-scale map of the city pasted on the White House Situation Room's wall.
“Mad Dog! Come on in.”
One of Wally Aronson's hands grasped the ambassador's glossy black door. The other beckoned Caroline almost surreptitiously, as though his password to the clubhouse might expire without notice. A marine guard stood at attention in the hall, his eyes riveted on thin air.
“He's expecting you, but we haven't much time,” Wally told her. “He's due at the chancellor's for cocktails.”
The ambassador's residence was a grand old place in Charlottenburg, with nine-foot windows and chestnut trees that threw heavy shade in summer. A world removed from Pariser Platz. Caroline had taken a few minutes at the Hyatt to dress in business clothes, and was suddenly glad.
“You look great, Caroline.” Wally touched her lightly on the shoulder, a gesture halfway between a salute and an embrace, and that quickly Caroline was back in boot camp, Wally swinging from a chin-up bar with his boot laces dangling.
He was short and lithe with a perpetual smile hovering around his eyes. The goatee had grayed since Caroline had last seen him, two years before. They were old friends from the Career Trainee program and
