mind screaming with vivid, shaming panic. An arm belted around her waist. The jolting dash down echoing stairs. No one speaking, the sensation of cold and wet in the pelting rain. The child lying murdered on her mother's bed.
Sophie was placed on the floor of a truck between Otto and Michael, sightless and mute, with a raging desire to weep burning in her nostrils. She suppressed it viciously, willing the grief to turn to hatred, a passion that would sustain rather than destroy her.
“You have remarkable resilience,” Krucevic said now.
“It's one of the great American secrets. We endure. Jack Bigelow has resilience, too. I wonder if he has more than you.”
Krucevic smiled.
“If you're suggesting this is a test of wills, Mrs. Payne, I'm afraid you romanticize the matter. This is not an affair of honor between two gentlemen, with yourself as the prize. Neither of us values you that much.”
“I'm not concerned about myself. Except inasmuch as my life or death affects the fate of my nation.”
“How admirable. And how difficult to believe. Do I detect a trace of hypocrisy, Mrs. Payne? Is it so important to consider yourself a martyr? I suppose it lends a certain style to death. If one cares about such things.”
He threw her the phrases the way another man might toss potato chips to a dog, his mind entirely on other matters. The tension that had turned him rigid in Bratislava was gone; he seemed at ease, at home with himself, impervious to concern. Sophie fought with despair. If Krucevic could stand in her door without a care in the world, events must be turning his way.
“What are you really after?” she asked.
“Why should I tell you, Mrs. Payne?”
“Because when you get what you want, you'll kill me. And before I die, I'd like to know why.”
He studied her.
“Have you so little faith in your government? Jack should have saved his time and money. That failed raid will have cost him something in respect.”
“What raid?” she asked sharply.
“The one that drove us out of Bratislava last night. Drove us, I might add, in a U.S. government-operated mobile listening post. Otto killed the agents and shot up their electronics before we loaded you in the back.” He pushed himself away from the wall and walked toward her.
“Your people found you, Mrs. Payne. And no doubt they meant to rescue you. But in a lamentably half-assed manner. I had expected better of Mr. Bigelow. A Huey or two, at least, on the building's roof. But no.”
That accounted for his air of superiority. He had outwitted the U.S. government.
Sophie bit back disappointment and thought,
“So let's take it as a given that I won't be rescued. Tell me what you're up to. Is it revenge? For the NATO air strikes in '99?”
“The allied bombs destroyed Belgrade,” Krucevic said indifferently. “I despise Belgrade as much as the United States. I'm a Croat, Mrs. Payne, although I don't expect you to comprehend the significance of that fact.”
“You are far more than a Croat, Mian Krucevic. You are an unreconstructed Ustashe fighter. You're a throwback to the fascist midnight of 1939. We'll agree that you enjoyed seeing the Serbian republic devastated by war. That you spared no tears for the Kosovar dead. A dozen mass graves here or there mean nothing to you. So what's the point? Why strike out against the U.S.?”
He sat down on the bed next to her. She refused to flinch.
“I know that you see me as a Croat nationalist, Mrs. Payne. That is an understandable mistake. I fought for my fellow people in Bosnia because if I had not, the Serbs and the Muslims would have overwhelmed them and the mass graves you speak of would have held only Croats.” He lifted his hand and waved it gently, in farewell to the past.
“That is done. Bosnia is a nation torn in three. The rifts will never heal. What the 30 April Organization attempts to ensure, Mrs. Payne, is that the plight of the Balkans will never become the plight of Europe.”
Viewed this closely, the scar at his temple revealed itself as the work of a bullet. Someone had once tried to kill him.
“You're working for peace?” Sophie asked sarcastically. “That's why you bombed the Brandenburg and kidnapped me?”
“I am working to eradicate a cancer,” he replied impatiently. “Do you know that is the most common Serb image applied to ethnic Albanians? I would go further and apply it to the entire Islamic world. Adherents of the Muslim faith are the most ignorant and uncultured peoples in existence. They bring strife, fanaticism, darkness, and violence wherever they breed. And they breed, Mrs. Payne, as no people has ever bred before. Their children are their deadliest weapon. The numbers are against the Aryan peoples of the West, Mrs. Payne. You must know that. It is happening in your own country. The people of northern Europe have two or three children, while your blacks and Hispanics have a dozen each. In time, democracy will be overwhelmed in their cesspool.”
He gazed at her piercingly, the brown eyes devoid of all emotion.
“This is the great Achilles' heel of the American elite. You invite the mongrels of the world to attend your universities and eat at your exclusive tables. Well, Mrs. Payne, the mongrels of the world will savage the hand that feeds them. I do not intend to let that happen in Europe.”
“I don't understand,” Sophie said. “How does holding me hostage affect the population of Europe?”
“It buys me time. A decent interval without U.S. or NATO intervention.”
“Intervention in what?”
“The reconquest of an entire continent,” he said baldly, “without armies, warfare, or trials in The Hague. And then I will set about the process of cleansing”
“The world will never allow another Final Solution. If the air strikes against Belgrade taught you nothing else, they should have taught you that.”
He shrugged.
“Milosevic lacked finesse. It was not his fault — he's a crafty manipulator, a ruthless executive, but his tools were limited. So were Adolf Hitler's, Mrs. Payne. Did you know that Hitler wasted valuable time throughout the first years of the war in an effort to perfect his nerve gas? Like all great masters of innovation, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before. We intend to do it right.”
“You mean, you and the four guys in the other room?”
She had succeeded in nettling him; the dark eyes narrowed with malice.
“Do you think the strength of the Aryan nation sprang forth only at Hitler's command?” he barked. “It has always been there. It always will be. And heroes emerge from time to time to lead the fight for freedom.”
It was then that Sophie finally understood the passion behind Krucevic's careful facade, the inferno beneath his extraordinary self-possession. Like a Crusader from a vanished age, he had God and Destiny on his side. And at once she was afraid — deeply and coldly afraid of what would eventually happen to her. She could expect no mercy from this man. To survive, she would have to destroy him on his own ground.
“Do you know why the Serbs killed the Kosovars and drove them out of their kingdom?” he asked her.
“'Their kingdom'?”
“Because the Serbs have never forgotten that the invading Turkish hordes slaughtered their men on the Field of Black Birds at the battle of Kosovo.”
“That was in the fourteenth century,” Sophie said distractedly.
“In 1389, to be precise, and for more than six hundred years, that Serb defeat has been Serbia's most hallowed holiday. In the United States, you celebrate victory. You parade down your village streets on the Fourth of July wrapped in your American flag. Serbs have never known what victory is. They sanctify the hour of their worst humiliation. What happened recently in Kosovo the Serb butchering of ethnic Albanians was a vengeance six hundred years in the making.”
“Glorify it any way you like,” she retorted, “but it was still an unprovoked atrocity on a massive scale.”
