“Tell me where she is. That's all I want from you.”
“I need more time.”
“You've had too much time, you son of a bitch!” Tears of rage pricked at her throat — rage at his insouciance, at the way he had walked back into her life as though he expected her to be there, her arms wide open — She was terrified, suddenly, of breaking down. Rage was her friend. Rage was a tool. Let him believe she was stronger alone than she had ever been in his shadow. Let him fear the High Priestess of Reason.
She moved toward him, her hand punching hard into his chest with each step.
“One call to the lobby, Eric, and I shut you down! One call”
“You won't do that.”
“Give me a good reason!” She had one already: Bring Eric in, and he'd damage the Agency irrevocably. She cared little for bureaucracies creaking roughshod over the world, but Dare Atwood, Cuddy, Scottie Sorensen — they were all the people Caroline loved, the only ones left to protect.
“Don't you understand? It's over. No more vendettas, no more little girls with bullets in their brains. No hijacked VP's.” It ends lie re He gave way, a bewildered expression on his face.
“Much more is at stake than Sophie Payne. You need Krucevic, Caroline. More than that, you need everything he runs — the bank accounts, the networks, the points of liaison worldwide. You've got to roll him up. That's what I've been working for. Not just Krucevic's life, but everything he's built.”
“So work with we,” she den-landed. “Give me the route to his base here in Hungary. Give me the Polish operation. Anything, Eric, that might help.”
“You know about Poland?”
Caroline laughed harshly.
“What did you think — that only you could do this job? We've all been doing it while you were dead and buried. I wish to hell you'd stayed that way.”
“No, you don't,” he whispered. His face was stark in the orange glow flooding the room from across the river. The light made a death mask of the sharp planes of his face, and she saw how much the past few years had aged him.
But she could not relent. Relent, and she'd lose him.
“Where's your base, Eric? Tell me and I'll have a team inside of it before dawn.”
He hesitated; he gave it an instant's thought. But the habit of self-reliance ran too deep.
“I need a few more hours, Carrie.”
“Time's up.” Her voice was sharp with contempt.
“Now get out of here before I call the cops.”
“Caroline...”
“Nothing.”
It came out with explosive force.
He stopped, frozen.
“Nothing. You. Say. Will. Make. Any. Difference.” It seemed important to pronounce each word with equal weight, as though he were deaf, half literate, a confused and pathetic foreigner. The small flower of hope that had bloomed in Berlin turned brown within her and died.
“I know I hurt you,” he began. He raised a hand to touch her, and she went rigid.
His eyes Eric's eyes, bluer than the sea and stark with pain stared at her wordlessly. Was he begging her? Her?
One call. That was all. Let him plead to the station if he was so goddamn desperate.
“Get out,” she whispered.
And he did.
Fifteen
Budapest, 11:40 p.m.
“Lady. Lady Sophie — are you awake?”
He was whispering urgently from the hallway. She pulled herself to the edge of her bed and dangled one arm toward the floor. If she could roll off the bed, perhaps she could crawl over and talk to him.. .. She tested her weight, leaning down on one hand, and felt her wrist buckle. The effort made her dizzy with exhaustion.
“Lady Sophie!”
“Yes, Jozsef?” she croaked.
“My father is gone. May I come in?”
Despite the pain cramping deep in her bowels, Sophie smiled. It was like the boy to ask permission.
“By all means. If only I could open the door.”
It slid back soundlessly. She saw his small body outlined against the light of the passage, the remote control in one hand. In the other, he held a hypodermic.
“I have medicine.” He slipped to her bedside still whispering. He was a boy who would probably whisper for the rest of his life.
“You must take it soon, before it is too late. There is not much medicine left. And I have had more than my share.”
“Your father can make more,” Sophie said.
“Not here in Budapest. If he went back to Berlin, maybe, to his lab .. . the Anthrax 3A bacillus is highly secret and very dangerous, lady. Papa does not carry it everywhere.”
“Keep your antibiotic, Jozsef.”
He frowned.
“But you must take it! Do you know what is happening to you? It is very bad, lady. First you vomit blood. Then you vomit your entire stomach. Your heart is eaten away within you. And then at last, in unbearable pain, you die. My father has told me.”
“And is your father always right? Was he right about your calls to your mother?”
He looked away.
“Where did he beat you?”
Wordlessly, he lifted the front of his shirt. His abdomen was a mass of red lines.
“No one has the right to keep you from her. She's your mother and she loves you.”
“If she's alive,” Jozsef retorted, “then why hasn't she tried to find we?”
“When your father decides to kidnap somebody, he makes sure they're never found. Don't blame your mother. Look what he's done to the marines.”
Jozsef giggled — a boyish sound, the first she had ever heard him make — and she was transported for an instant back to her old house in Malvern, before Mitch's death, Peter's grubby hands clutching his father's ankle while Mitch dragged him along, pretending not to notice. Rough housing. Wrestling. The tumble of boyhood.
“Do you want to escape?” she asked Jozsef.
The laughter died.
“I could not.”
“Do you want to?”
It was easier to be honest in this darkened room, her voice as relentless as the voice of conscience.
“How? We can't even get out of this compound. We're locked in. The doors are impossible to force. They're electronic. And you're too ill.”
“Then we'll have to make your father give us up.”
Jozsef snorted.
“My father will never do that. You're too important.”
“I don't mean anything to him at all,” she said firmly. “I've served my purpose. But you mean the world to
