“But yes.”
“Was she shot? Like Horvath?”
“She was beaten. A scarf around her neck, tight. You do not want to know….”
“You found her in Budapest?”
The man had no reason to tell her anything. His gaze slid uneasily around the foyer; then he seemed to concede.
“In Szentendre. A small town on the Danube Bend.”
“I know it.” Two Sunday-afternoon trips in search of antiques, spring wind in her hair and red wine in her veins. Back when she and Eric had a home to fill.
“Her mother has a flat there,” Esterhazy said. “We learned of it this afternoon. Someone else got there first.”
Krucevic. Or one of his men — Otto, perhaps. He'd have enjoyed choking the woman to death.
Caroline swore under her breath. Eric's network had been rolled up inside of a day. And Eric —
“We found some things stuffed under a mattress. One was a book.. ..” Esterhazy gestured, groping for words. “In Horvath's writing. From his lab — ”
“Notes?”
He nodded.
“I want Shephard to see. Is evidence, you understand, he cannot have this book — but I wish his opinion — ”
“Of course. Did you find anything else?”
The man scrutinized her nervously.
“Glass .. .” The word escaped him. He held up his fingers four inches apart. “So big. Filled with .. . we do not know what. Six of them. These we send to our police lab for study.”
Erzsebet knew something was wrong with Mian's vaccines. What would Krucevic kill to conceal?
“I'll tell Shephard.” Caroline stood up, intent upon the answers she knew she'd find on Eric's disk. “He'll contact you as soon as he can. And Mr. Esterhazy — ”
“Yes?”
“Tell your lab to be careful with that glass.”
She knew disaster well — its look, its smell, the way the static charge of air itself changed in disaster's presence — and the station was filled with it when she returned three minutes later. Teddy was standing behind her desk, the phone pressed against her shoulder. She stared unseeing at Caroline's face, then dropped the receiver with a clatter and sank into her chair.
Caroline snatched up the phone.
“Carmichael.”
“It's me,” Shephard said.
“Where are you?”
“Marinelli's dead. Bunker was wired. Blew sky-high.”
“You should have known it would be wired! You had the goddamn blueprints — ”
“Don't yell at me.” Shephard cut across her viciously. “I nearly died tonight, okay? Because of a guy who should've known better. Hell, we all should've known better. That map was a dangle. Krucevic was long gone.”
“You searched the bunker?” she asked Shephard.
“Once the flames were out. Flames have a way of drawing police, even in Budapest, even in the midst of riots. Try explaining that one, Sally. Just try explaining what the hell the U.S. Legal Attache for Central Europe is doing with explosives in Buda. Christ.”
“Tom — ”
“So I told the fucking police the truth. That we thought the warehouse held the Vice President. They were not impressed. It took every string I could pull to get me off the hook, every apology I could think of in three different languages, before they'd let me go into the place with the firemen.”
“You went in.”
“I stepped over what was left of Vie Marinelli, Caroline, and I crawled through a shitload of wreckage.” The savagery in his voice scalded her. “You never told me Krucevic had an American in his entourage. But then there's lots of crap you've never told me, right? Like your alias. Jane Hathaway. The name Mahmoud Sharifused in Berlin to set up contact with 30 April. What the hell are you playing at, Caroline? And when are you going to come clean?”
“What American?”
“One Michael O'Shaughnessy, from the passport in his breast pocket. A blond guy in his mid-thirties. But you know that, don't you? Michael was Sharif's other bona fide.”
Her legs nearly folded under her.
“You saw him?” she whispered.
“What was left of him, yeah. Krucevic tortured him, then strapped him to the door and set it to blow. There was a grenade pin still dangling from his finger.”
Caroline cradled the receiver and walked unsteadily away from Teddy's desk. She groped her way to the computer. Her face was a mask, her mind screaming his name.
She had already mourned Eric once. She knew how it was done. But this second time felt like a thin steel blade twisting between her ribs, a torment she could not grip strongly enough to tear out.
He had gone back, despite her best arguments. While she waited for Shephard to pay his bill at Gerbeaud's, they had nailed him to the cross.
And then the word torture — that idle little word on Shephards tongue — flooded her senses. She gasped, leaned hard against the desk, gripped it until the pain knifed upward through her shoulders and she knew that she could feel.
For the past four days Eric had dominated her thoughts, her work, her sleep, her heart. She had flown out of Washington in a fog of bitterness, suppressing emotion like a terminal illness. The High Priestess of Reason had no time to feel. Love could never be as strong as rage. Caroline had had no room for empathy, no thought for Eric's torment during the past thirty months. Retribution was what she wanted, payment in blood for the agony he'd caused.
She had seen him clearly for the first time in years. Calculating. Morally equivocal. Ruthless. A man for whom, nonetheless, justice had still meant something. He had thrown them both into this final battle because he thought it was more important than love or happiness. He had never asked permission. He had assumed that she would understand.
She had never justified that trust. She'd punished him like a spiteful child.
And Krucevic had tortured him. The grenade pin. She drew a shuddering breath, her throat so choked with unspent tears she could not breathe. It was too late for regret. Too late for love. What remained must be a settling of accounts, for Eric's sake.
It was the consummate Agency word, account. She and Eric had shared one for years: 30 April. It was time to make Krucevic pay.
Teddy was weeping harshly for Marinelli in the outer room. Caroline pressed her fingers against her burning eyes and steadied herself. Then she stared once more at the computer screen. Clicked back into her cable. And
