of a battered garage, and a tree trunk blocked the line of sight from Bela's kitchen door. A better man than Vaclav would have missed it.
Mirjana had spent most of the day in the emergency room of a Budapest hospital, waiting to be treated for bruises and cracked ribs. She had never gone home. One call to her answering machine had convinced her that home was a mistake.
Mian and his men had left Bela's house hours ago. If she did not move soon, someone would come back.
She had hoped against hope that it would be Bela himself who returned — whistling cheerfully as he walked up the drive, letting himself in through the front door, putting the teakettle on the stove in the wee hours of morning. That was foolishness, of course.
Her cold hand sought the door handle and eased it open.
The rains had brought down a mass of deadwood from the trees. The crunch of twigs beneath her feet was remorseless as death. She could not allow herself to breathe. She crept up to the back door wondering why his neighbors said nothing, why lights did not go on and alarms sound and yet, they had suffered the noise of breaking glass without reaction. They were Hungarians.
They had grown up under the Party system; black cars in the night had always taken people away. The wisest course was simply to go on sleeping.
Her fingers found the latch. Inside, darkness.
She stepped forward, toward a patch of moonlight bright as halogen on the gray linoleum, and saw a tumbled mass of human hair. The sight stopped her in her tracks.
Not hair. Wet strands of a mop, fallen from the open broom closet. With a ragged breath, she reached for it and propped it inside. What had they wanted with this, in the middle of the night? Or had the broom closet door, poorly latched, fallen open under the mop's weight?
She hesitated, eyes adjusting now to the darkness, and scanned the narrow space.
There was the usual broom, a dustpan neatly stacked beside a pail, bottles of cleaning stuff and a carryall filled with clean rags. She knelt and groped along the floor, dreading mice. And touched the square shape of the knapsack.
She had seen him pedaling to work so many times, the knapsack a memory of those university days in Leipzig when they'd all managed to be happy. Bela had hidden it here in his last moments, and Mian in his viciousness had not understood.
Mirjana clutched the backpack to her chest and ran heedless of the neighbors, of the branches cracking underfoot for her life.
Four
Budapest, 7:30 a.m.
“I have a theory,” Torn Shephard said as the taxi pulled away from the entrance to the Hilton, “that a city's soul is something you can feel. It walks the streets, asks you for change on a deserted corner, tells you what song it has to sing. You know what I mean?”
Caroline glanced at him wordlessly. So Tom was a morning person. He had found something to love in this sordid new day, the air rank with burning and the looters asleep in the streets. After Eric had left her, she'd lain awake for hours.
It was impossible not to consider every one of his words, every choice she had made; impossible not to see that she had fucked up abominably. She had drawn Eric straight into her trap, and for emotional reasons, she had let him go. It was unforgivable. Unprofessional. It was exactly the kind of example a male case officer would use in an argument against women in Intelligence. Caroline showered blue language on her own head while Tom Shephard chatted genially at her side — Shephard, who had no idea that she had held the Vice President's kidnappers in the palm of her hand and simply waved good-bye. Eric would never contact her again. And Sophie Payne's life was at risk —
“You okay?” Shephard asked.
“I didn't sleep well,” Caroline said brusquely. She felt bruised and overly sensitive, as though she suffered from sunburn.
“Take Paris,” he went on. “Paris is a wealthy woman with a checkered past. She danced at the Folies Bergeres in her youth, then married a besotted comte”
“The very opposite of Washington,” Caroline managed. “Washington has the fussy correctness of a bureaucrat's briefcase.”
“And a tropical-weight suit,” she added, “permanently creased.”
“Istanbul... Istanbul is a stalled caravan, hardening in the sun.”
“St. Petersburg has diamonds in her hair and a gun at her back.”
“So what's Budas story?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“It's part of your territory.”
“But you've lived here.” His look was almost accusing. Intent, invasive, as disturbing as it had been in the plane the previous night. Her pulse quickened.
What is he looking or ...
“I just visit here,” he persisted. “I want to hear your version of the truth.”
The taxi driver grunted and slowed his car to maneuver around an overturned van.
Its engine block was still burning. They were the only people moving on the streets except for a contingent of black-shirted guards. All stared at the taxi suspiciously as it creaked past. Caroline refused to make eye contact. And prayed that she and Shephard would be allowed to proceed.
“Budapest,” she told him, “is a middle-aged man in a shabby coat, nursing an espresso at an outdoor café. It is very cold, and the smell of dog urine from the wet pavement mingles with the coffee and the sharp scent of pickled beets from somewhere down the street.”
“He's wearing wire-rimmed spectacles,” Shephard offered, “and writing in a notebook with a torn cover. His wife left him years ago, but he's haunted by the memory of her laugh.”
Caroline turned to look at him.
“Is he?” she asked. “Better laughter than tears, Tom.”
The hazel eyes did not waver.
“What are you haunted by, Caroline?”
It was all there before her suddenly, the concourse in Frankfurt and the man turning away.
“The memory of silence,” she replied. And did not speak again until they had reached Szabadsag Ter.
The protesters had abandoned the U.S. embassy. No mega phoned speeches or hurled rocks greeted Shephard and Caroline as they approached. There was a checkpoint, however, backed by the ominous clatter of tanks, so they dismissed the taxi and covered the last thirty yards on foot, their diplomatic passports held high.
After a grim few moments of consideration, the guards waved them through.
The stretch of turf that ran between Magyar Television and the National Bank, a modernist cube of glass and steel, was churned to mud and studded with green shards of what had once been soda bottles. The burned trash cans were smoldering now, and stank of seared plastic; a bird, brown as the Danube in winter, pecked disconsolately among the torn seat cushions of a torched car. But the impulse toward civilization had begun to reassert itself; red tape with harsh Hungarian exclamations already cordoned off the worst areas.
