Nine
Bratislava, 3 p.m.
In Olga Teciak's apartment, the air grew stale and the hours dragged. Once the videotape was made, Krucevic sent Michael out in a car with Otto as caretaker.
The two men drove across the Danube and into the center of Bratislava, where the U.S. embassy sat next to a massive old hotel in the Soviet mode, a former casino for party apparatchiks. The embassy had once been a consulate; when Slovakia declared independence from the Czech Republic in 1992, its status was upgraded, but an air of unhappiness lingered. Bratislava would never carry the prestige or romance of a Prague posting, and even the buildings knew it.
Michael was behind the wheel. The American embassy was coming up on the right, a block and a half away; early-afternoon traffic snarled the lanes ahead. The key was to crawl along in the right-hand lane, as though intent upon finding a parking space, until the red light ahead changed and the traffic moved freely.
They had gone around the corner twice before this, circling the embassy's position, in an effort to time the signal's changes. Thirty seconds, Michael thought, before red phased into flashing yellow and then blue-green. He was nearly abreast of the embassy door, maybe two yards still to go, when Otto rolled down his window and fired his gun at the lens of the nearest surveillance camera. The lens shattered. The far camera went next, just as it pivoted electronically to sweep the embassy's street front. Two deliberate pops, mundane as a car's backfiring, and the marine guards were suddenly shouting.
The light changed.
Otto hurled the bubble-wrapped videotape at the embassy steps. It skittered across the sidewalk directly in the path of a woman walking an overweight schnauzer; the dog hiccuped hysterically and lunged. One marine leapt forward and shoved the woman to the ground. The other kicked the package back into the street and then fell to the pavement, roaring, “Fire in the hole!”
Michael floored the gas pedal and spun sharply around the corner, rocketing down the side street that ran alongside the embassy building. He dodged one car to the left, careened into the opposite lane, jogged around an oncoming van, and turned left at the next intersection, the flow of traffic being blessedly with him. It was a simple thing now to head for the river.
“Fucking broad daylight.” Otto had rolled up the window and was staring back over his shoulder, intent upon a possible tail. “What the fucks he thinking, huh? That we'll fucking die for him? Just one of those Joes saw our plates — ”
“They didn't see the plates,” Michael said.
“What are you saying? That Mian made a mistake? That he's losing it? I wouldn't let him hear that.”
“What do you know, you useless piece of meat? You got shit for brains. Peas for balls. Next time, I throw you out the window.”
On the pavement in front of the American embassy, nothing exploded. One of the marines got to his feet and studied the package. The schnauzer broke free of its screaming mistress and sank its teeth into the Marine's ankle.
“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
