Caroline felt suddenly afraid of all that Cuddy might find.
Nine
Budapest, 3:15 p.m.
Mirjana Tarcic heard the news of Istvan Lajta's death while driving over the Szechenyi Lanchid, the Chain Bridge, one of Budapest's most beautiful landmarks.
At night it was illuminated by a blaze of white lights, linking Buda and Pest, so that first-time travelers to the city on the Danube immediately thought of Paris. But today the bridge seemed ugly, a steel scrawl against the muddy brown river and the rain-washed towers of the lower city. It looked like what it was, an aging feat of engineering, its curvilinear heights a perfect platform for the launching of suicides.
Mirjana was stuck in traffic. She eased forward a few feet, braked, and closed her eyes. Istvan Lajta had been a young man. Younger than herself. What kind of despair drove a person to fire a bullet into his own brain? Even in the deepest valleys of her shadowed life, Mirjana had never considered suicide. Death was an abyss. She could not steel herself to peer over the edge.
The constant brutality of her years with Mian had taught her a stubborn survival, if only to disappoint him. She'd clung to the edge of the cliff with her fingernails, and when Mian approached to kick her hands from the edge, she'd clawed another hold. Lajta had left two children. The fool. The self-obsessed, ambitious young fool.
No one should abandon a child.
Mirjana's heart lurched, and with it the car. She had taken her foot off the clutch and the engine stalled. Behind her, a man at the wheel of a late-model blue Mercedes leaned on his horn and gestured rudely at her rearview mirror. A Mercedes. They were everywhere in Buda now, silver hood ornaments rising like latter-day coats of arms for a new governing class. She scowled at the man, at his perfect Italian suiting and his silk tie, and struggled with the ignition.
Jozsef. Had she abandoned Jozsef as utterly as Istvan Lajta had deserted his two sons? She had lied to Bela Horvath. She did live in hope of seeing Jozsef again.
Hope was a fever that burned deep in the heart of her silent nights, her sleepwalking days. Hope was almost as scalding as her thirst for revenge.
She drove on, diving toward the neat squares of the administrative district farther up the river. Beyond them was Bela's lab. She badly wanted to know what he had learned about vaccine No. 413.
But she had not gone four blocks before her way was barred.
People milled around the square in front of the old Hungarian Stock Exchange building; they were shouting and chanting in front of the National Bank, where Lajta's body had been found. A line of police, outfitted like astronauts uncertain of the atmosphere, presented riot shields and helmets to the crowd.
Mirjana rolled down her window and tugged at the sleeve of a protester sprawled across her bumper. The man glared at her through the windshield.
“What's going on?” she asked.
“It's a protest. About that swine, Lajta.”
“Istvan Lajta?”
“The szarhazi senki ripped off the treasury. And where's the money gone, I'd like to know! Where's my life savings?”
Szarhazi senki. The shithouse nobody. Istvan Lajta had fallen far from his days of glory at the University of Chicago.
The enraged protester pushed himself off Mirjana's hood and scrabbled for a paving stone.
“Forget these pissing sods,” she shouted back. “Get to your bank and withdraw your money before it's too late.”
“I already tried.” The man ran forward to join a surging mass near a shop window. The glass strained under the pressure of too many bodies; an unseen hand hurled a beer bottle; the plate glass shattered like ice. The looting had begun.
Mirjana leaned on her horn. The car in front of her was submerged in a wave of protesters. And as she stared past its terrified driver, a slender woman in the tired uniform of the working class-cheap raincoat, cheaper shoes-clubbed a policeman with the pointed end of her bright red umbrella. The policeman raised his nightstick and slammed it down on his attacker's head. The woman crumpled, openmouthed, at his feet. There was an instant's pause in the crowd's roar — then the bodies surged forward like a herd of wildebeest on stampede. They flung themselves at the helmeted line, and the billy clubs rose and fell. Mirjana's heart thudded painfully in her chest. It would be a matter of seconds before tear gas and rubber bullets filled the square.
She threw her car into reverse and glanced over her shoulder. And what she saw sickened her.
A band of construction workers had pulled open the door of the blue Mercedes.
One was smashing the windshield with a rock. Two others attempted to roll the vehicle on its side. And the rest — three men and a woman — had the driver down on the ground. He screamed as the steel-capped boots thudded brutally against his ribs. Mirjana reached over to the car's glove compartment and pulled out her handgun. She would not endure a pack of wolves.
She thrust herself out of the car, whispering a prayer that it would not be engulfed by the milling crowd, and pushed her way through the grunting workers.
They had moved from kicking their victim to punching his face. It was a mask of blood. He looked, Mirjana thought, unconscious. Or perhaps he was already dead.
“Stop it, you sons of bitches, before I blow your heads off!” she screamed, and fired her gun in the air. No one looked up. She fired again.
The sound brought riot police on the run. The attackers turned to fight them, and instantly Mirjana was caught in the furious crush. She fought it, gasped, lost her gun and her footing, and went down.
Paul Dougherty parked the plumbers van in the garage of an Agency safe house in Spandau twenty minutes after leaving Schloss Tegel. He and Fred changed back into their suits behind the living room's drawn blinds, then left by the rear door and caught the S-Bahn into town.
Caroline, Wally, and Tom waited for them in the station vault. They pulled up chairs and prepared to listen to Mahmoud Sharif's phone call the call he had made while smoking a cigarette in the deserted parking lot of Schloss Tegel.
“I called the head of our Berlin Task Force an hour ago,” Caroline told Fred.
“He has a lead on Sharif's bona fides.” It was a patent lie, but Cuddy had told her to hold the lid on the Sharif problem any way she could. Bona fides, as everyone in Intelligence knew, were passwords you threw at your opposite number to test whether he was legitimate.
“He may use the names Michael and Jane.”
“Good,” Wally said briskly. “We've got fun with Mike and Jane. Let's roll.”
Fred had attached the tape recorder to a small device that translated electronic pulses into numbers; within seconds, they would know exactly where Sharif had dialed. Fred pushed the play button. Caroline's mouth went dry.
Two rings, and then a woman's voice, prerecorded. Sharif had reached an answering machine.
“What language is that?” Shephard asked Caroline.
“Something Slavic, I think.”
Sharif's amplified breathing filled the room. They waited for the beep. When it came, the bomb maker said in English, “This is a message for Michael.”
Wally leaned closer to the box.
“Thanks for asking after the children. They're all fine, particularly our little girl.”
“Bastard hasn't got a little girl,” muttered Fred.
“Shush”
“She would love to visit whenever you're ready for her. Speaking of visits, I saw your friend Jane this morning. Jane Hathaway,” Sharif repeated, with emphasis. Shephard scribbled the name on a legal pad.
