boy in the night.”
Bela reached over and snapped off the Tensor lamp.
“You went to Berlin for Jozsef.”
She shook her head.
“I will never see Jozsef again. I went to Berlin for revenge.”
Sophie could feel Michael's presence beyond the bathroom door. He stood guard there, ostensibly to keep her within, and yet she felt as though he really kept Krucevic out. This was absurd, of course; in her circumstances, it was a piece of self-delusion so pitiful it was dangerous. It set up a false sympathy. Michael had done nothing to prevent her infection with Anthrax 3A. He had done nothing, if it came to that, to prevent her kidnapping in the first place. So what was his game? Why was he a member of 30 April at all? And what did he truly mean by those muttered words, “
She almost wished he had said nothing. He had created the illusion of hope, and she needed to fight hope as much as despair. In her mind she had erected a wall of vigilance, one that permitted no hint of the fate that awaited her to penetrate inside. The wall assumed her end would be painful and that her only choice was to meet it with dignity. She burned, nonetheless, with questions.
“What do you do all day?” she asked Jozsef. “When you're not standing vigil over the operation, I mean?”
“Sometimes I read books. Sometimes he lets me watch the television. It depends.”
What had Peter done at twelve? He skateboarded. He rode his bike. He spent a lot of time outdoors on baseball and soccer fields. He played Nintendo and computer games and he bragged to his friends and he never, never spent an entire day hunched in the corner of a dank bathroom in a stranger's house.
“Do you ever play games on a computer?”
His head came up at that.
“You saw it? Tonio's computer?”
“No. Does he have one?”
Jozsef nodded.
“Tonio is a genius.”
“I suppose he told you that himself.”
“My father says it. It is why he allows Tonio near him, although Tonio sings American music and is not to be trusted when the liquor is in him. When Tonio is drunk, he sings louder, and my father orders Otto to beat him. But Papa needs Tonio for his genius.”
“Really,” Sophie said, growing more interested. “And what does Tonio do for your father?”
“He can find his way into any computer system anywhere in the world.” Jozsef was proud. “He once found his way into most of the banks in Switzerland, and into the Italian treasury, but for that he went to prison.”
“Not much of a genius, then, if he got caught.”
“Tonio hated prison so much that he tried to kill himself with a razor. He swears he will not go back again. It is why he fights for my father. To get back at all of them.”
“The Swiss banks?”
“And the West. The West is very evil.”
“I thought the West was your father's only hope. He hates the East, right?”
Jozsef frowned.
“It is complicated, I think. Papa hates the East, certainly, because all evil comes from the East; but the West is evil, too. It must be … What is the word? Washed? ... before it is good again.”
“Cleansed,” Sophie murmured, and thought of the mass graves in Bosnia and Kosovo.
“Cleansed.” Jozsef tested the word on his tongue.
“And so Tonio will cleanse the West with his computer. What bank will he break into next?”
But this, it seemed, was far too direct a question. The boy retreated into himself, once more the guardian of the operation, his fingers worrying the fur of his good-luck charm.
“Who gave you the rabbit's foot?” Sophie asked.
A swift look, pregnant with apprehension.
“Its never out of your hands.”
“I found it.”
“That's probably what you tell your father. It's not the truth.”
He glanced over his shoulder, then leaned toward her.
“My mother gave it to me. For luck during the war, when she was afraid that a sniper's bullet would take me.”
“My son has a good-luck charm,” Sophie lied. “Not a rabbit's foot, but a ring from our naval academy. His father gave it to him before he died. Peter wears it on a chain around his neck, and it never leaves him.”
“His father was a naval person?”
“Curt was a jet pilot a long time ago. In the American navy.”
“Ah.” Jozsef's eyes darkened. Too late, Sophie remembered what American jets had done to Belgrade.
“The ring. It has brought your son good luck?”
Peter's face so much a blend of Curt's and her own that she could no longer see where one began and the other left off flashed briefly before her eyes, then was gone. She felt a pain so sharp she could not speak for several seconds, and then said, “Yes. I think it has brought him luck. Except for his father's death, of course.”
“His father was shot?”
A commonplace question for a terrorist's son.
“He died of cancer.”
“Then perhaps your son forgot to wear his ring that day” Jozsef said with unconscious cruelty. “I have never lost my rabbit's foot, and until I do, I shall be safe. I know that with certainty, so help me God.”
“Is that why you keep it secret? So that the luck won't fade?”
He hesitated and again looked over his shoulder. She knew then that the reason was Mian Krucevic.
“It is all that I have left of my mother,” the boy whispered. “If my father knew where it came from, he would take it away. And what would happen to Mama then?”
“You have to keep her safe, too,” Sophie said with sudden comprehension.
There was a knock on the door and it opened.
“Jozsef,” Michael said. “You're wanted.”
The boy's hand clenched on the scrap of dirty white fur. Then, looking at Sophie, he held his finger to his lips in the age — old gesture for silence. She lifted her finger in return.
Ten
Berlin, 5:07 p.m.
Caroline would have loved to raise a glass with Ie tout Berlin herself. Or a bowl of steaming lentil soup at Café Adler, the small bar that still sat opposite what had once been Checkpoint Charlie. Years earlier John Le Carre, a mere David Cornwell employed by the British secret service, had watched the Cold War begin from one of the café's ringside seats. Checkpoint Charlie had been replaced now by something the Germans called an office park; but the Adler was unchanged, smoky with the romance of mittel Europa. It was time, she thought, to retreat into yellow lamplight and scattered tables, to nurse her jet lag with tea and silence. And consider her next move.
Wally refused to let Caroline wander off, however, and he had no intention of returning her to the Hyatt unfed. They drove through the barricaded streets in his brand — new Volvo, zigzagging around the yawning pits of construction that bisected every boulevard. The early darkness of Berlin's autumn had fallen like a theater scrim over the city; rain lashed against the windshield. Caroline's jet lag was so profound she had begun to shake.
“God, it's good to see you, Mad Dog,” Wally said. “What's it been — two years?”
“More. How did you like Budapest?”
