“Back? That's insane! Krucevic will kill you.”
Caroline gazed at Eric's face and saw the wind howling in his bones. He was only forty. He looked far older. He had no way in from the cold, and he knew it. He would live for a while, a hunted man. And then he would die in the dark, far from home. This time, no one would break the news.
He reached into his pocket, his eyes scanning the street beyond her head.
“Take this. It's a map to Krucevic's Budapest: base. Take it to your COS” — he was dissociating himself now, he wanted nothing to do with the Agency apparatus — “and get a raid going. But do it fast. You haven't much time.” Caroline glanced at her watch. It was 12:32 p.m.
“The place is an arsenal...”
“I know. We have the blueprints.” She clutched the paper between chilled fingers. “Eric, Krucevic blew your car. He wants you dead. Bela Horvath may have told Krucevic everything before he died. You can't walk back into that sort of situation. Unless you have a death wish.”
“Sophie Payne is alone, Caroline.”
“We'll get to her. In a matter of hours. But it's time you walked away. Anything else is just ego. The Eric Carmichael I knew would never throw himself away on pride.”
“We both know there's no going back, Mad Dog.” And at last, she heard bitterness in his voice.
“To survive evil, you have to become its friend. You have to take its hand and walk with it a ways. And then the path behind is barred to you. You're no longer the person you were, the person who would never think of putting a silencer to a little girl's head. You can't wake up on a Saturday morning in the suburbs of Washington and take a run along the canal or chat over coffee about the Super Bowl not if you have the remnants of a soul. You're too guilty for peace.”
“It's as though you really did die,” she said.
“I've done some terrible things, Caroline. I don't live with them easily. I can't wipe them off my soul.”
It was true, she thought, with infinite sadness; and there was no going back to her marriage, either. The man she had loved yearned for in death, and desired in life was gone.
“Take this.” He was holding out a beeper. “It's a homing device for a transmitter I planted. Highly sophisticated German technology. If you're within two miles, it should lead you to the Veep.”
Her fingers closed around it.
“Promise me you won't return to that bunker.”
“What promise could I possibly make that you would ever believe?” He studied her narrowly. “Krucevic suspects he's been betrayed. He may already have left Budapest. If the maps no good”
“Then what? Berlin? For more antibiotic?”
He shook his head.
“Like I said, Mian doesn't retreat. He'll go onward, not back. There's only one place left.”
Caroline's brain raced furiously. To Poland, where Cuddy had traced the Hungarian treasury funds? But Krucevic had no lab in Poland or none that she had ever identified. If Krucevic cared at all about Jozsef...
“He'll go to ground,” she murmured. “Like a wounded animal. He'll go home, won't he?”
Eric nodded.
“To Bosnia. Ziv Zakopan. The old death camp south of Sarajevo. He's got a lab there, set high in the hills.”
She took a step backward, her breath catching in her throat. Ziv Zakopan. A place so terrible, even rumor spoke in whispers. A place no prisoner had ever left alive.
“It really exists?”
“It must,” Eric said bleakly. “I've been there. Now listen carefully, Mad Dog. I'm going to tell you where it is.”
Seven
Budapest, 1:03 p.m.
In that last moment, when Eric turned to walk away, Caroline reached for him and held him close. She was done with bitterness and rage. Done with weighing her options, cataloging pain, attempting to control the future — it was enough, in that moment, to feel the heart of the man she loved beating close to her own.
“God, don't leave me,” she whispered. “I can't stand it, Eric”
“Neither can I,” he muttered into her hair. “You tear the soul from my body, Carrie.”
“Then take me with you. We can run together.” She felt no loyalty now to the Agency that had betrayed him. He loosened the hands she had locked around his waist and held her at arm's length. For perhaps three seconds, she watched him consider her offer. Then he shook his head.
“Its not finished. This business. Running won't end it.”
“You've done enough!”
“Remember Sophie, Caroline. Sophie. I owe her a chance. And I need you to help me.”
Caroline's protests died on her lips. She dropped her head to his chest, as futile as pounding a brick wall. Sophie Payne was more innocent than Eric. Sophie Payne demanded retribution.
“Let it go, Mad Dog,” he said quietly. “We live the lives we're left with.”
“We will not let him win, do you hear?”
“Mian?”
“Scottie,” she said fiercely. “Seattle. We will not let him ruin us and walk away clean.”
He smiled at her, but there was no belief in his eyes. She felt like a child he was humoring. She snatched at his wrist.
“Damn it, Eric. I won't let you just lie down and die”
“No. You never would. My mad dog — ” He leaned forward and kissed her full on the mouth. The savagery behind it was like an electric shock.
“Do you still have your grenade pin?” he asked her.
She nodded, too breathless to speak. The cunning and unlikely grenade pin.
“Here's mine.”
It dangled before her nose, an olive drab metallic ring broad enough to circle a man's finger. She reached a trembling hand to his, and their fingers locked.
“I've kept it all these years,” Eric said. “My link to the past. To you.” His grip tightened. “If we both survive this, Mad Dog, I will find you. Believe that”
And then her hand was hers again. The grenade pin slipped back into his pocket.
She watched him walk away, hoping he would look back — but what would she do if he did? To stand stock — still on the paving stones of Budapest while Eric left her once again was much more difficult than running.
Eric did not look back.
When he had turned into a side street and vanished from view, she took a shuddering breath and thrust her hands into her pockets. The sharp, clean edge of his computer disk. The homing device. And the folded piece of paper that was the key to Sophie Payne's prison.
Time was short. She would need an explanation for the map's existence — Vie Mannelli would demand it. Heading for her hotel, Caroline crossed the street at a run. Tom Shephard was sitting inside Gerbeaud's with a copy of the Herald Tribune spread open before him. He had consumed almost all of a chocolate torte and, to Caroline's surprise, had taken it with tea. A pot of Earl Grey still perfumed the air gently with bergamot.
“You're late.” He tossed his napkin aside. “I haven't got much to tell you, I'm afraid. Mirjana Tarcic was treated in a hospital the day of the riots, then disappeared. The federal police think they might have a lead — ”
“Have you paid, Tom? I've got a taxi waiting.” The impatience in her face stopped his objection.
“What is it?”
“Krucevic.” She held aloft a slip of paper. “His Budapest base. The one that matches Wally's
