The Cutout

The boy squirmed fretfully under the sheet, tugging at the tape that secured his arm to the bed, the precious IV feeding into his wrist.

“Sophie,” he murmured, and then the sheet above his abdomen blossomed like a flower, a spreading stain that darkened as it grew, first peach and then salmon and then a rusty orange.

Jozsef was pissing blood.

Krucevic shuddered. He sank to his knees on the cold cement floor. He gripped the metal rail of the boy's bed until his hands lost their feeling, and this alone must be his prayer, the prayer of a man who acknowledges no god. He was crouched thus, doubled over with grief and rage, when Vaclav appeared in the doorway.

“Don't bother me,” Mian spat out.

“There's something you should see.”

“Go away.”

“But Mian — ”

He came to his feet with a howl, whipping his gun from its shoulder holster. Vaclav was twenty-two inches removed from a bullet in the brain. The cherub-faced Czech stared the gun barrel down.

“You should, Mian. See this.”

Krucevic drew a shuddering breath, bolstered the gun, and followed Vaclav down the hall.

Otto was seated in front of Tonio's laptop, his forehead almost touching the screen.

“It's from the university. How the tuck did some college kid find Mian?”

Krucevic stood behind him and read the Email. Bela's blood is on your hands, MIaii. Mirjana's dead. But I have Beta's notes and vaccine No. 413. Come and get them, if you can find me.

“The salba told someone,” he whispered.

Caroline left the university student center immediately after sending the first message. Time was of the essence: if her ruse was to help the dying Vice President, it must be effected quickly. She drove to the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, temporary home of war correspondents and relief workers, where a third of the three hundred and fifty rooms still showed damage. Patches in the curtains covered machine-gun holes, concrete crumbled under the hallway carpets, and a bored cocktail waitress chain — smoked through the lobby at 12:03 a.m. Caroline ordered a large cup of coffee and found an Internet port.

The worst of it isn't the epidemic itself — those thousands of children dead in Pristina, the disease spreading like a red stain on the snow. The real horror, Mian, is the salvation yon offered. Vaccines. Your special vaccines. Flown into Pristina on German planes, administered by the most selfless doctors the world has known — Nobel laureates, above reproach, Doctors Without Borders.

What happens to some boys who contract mumps in childhood? What happens to every boy inoculated with vaccine No. 413?

Sterility, Mian. Your small contrilnition to the Muslim problem, as the man called Michael once said. A generation of Albanians incapable of reproducing itself. Genocide without camps, a bloodless wave of cleansing. No one will even suspect the damage for another fifteen years at least. And by then it will be merely a flaw in the science. Regrettable. But hardly a crime.

And all those toddlers rotting in mass graves, all the parents destroyed with grief — just so much wreckage along the way.

Yon sicken me, Krncevic.

I'm going to the press. To the Americans. I have proof, and I want to sec you burn.

“Michael,” Otto murmured.

“Of course it'd be Michael who sold us out. He must've talked to a friend. An associate. His little form of insurance, in the event of death. And now that prick's got your E-mail address.”

“I'm going to the Americans,” Vaclav repeated.

“So he's not American himself. A free agent? One of Michael's Arabs?”

“He's a prick, whoever he is,” Otto insisted.

“A clever one. He sent the first message from the university. This ones from the Holiday Inn.”

“All he wants is money.” Krucevic stared at the text on the screen, weighing his options, then turned his back and headed for Jozsef's room.

“Ask his terms, Vaclav.”

“What makes you think Mr. Prick wants to deal?”

Krucevic smashed his hand once against the door frame, and the supporting wall shuddered.

“Nobody telegraphs a punch, idiot, unless they expect it to be dodged. He could have gone to the press and the Americans hours ago. So find out what he wants. Then we'll give him what he deserves.”

Caroline typed out her last message at the Sarajevo airport.

My terms? she wrote after an instant's thought. I want Mian Krucevic's head on a platter. I want the pleasure of watching him beg for mercy, the pleasure of refusing his dying wish. I want justice for MedAir 901 and for the Brandenburg Gate and for all the children who will never have children.

But I'll settle for the release of Sophie Payne.

Bring her to the Tunnel by 2 a.m. I will be waiting alone with the vaccine. If you are not there by 2:30, I will take what I know to the people who will destroy you.

“The Tunnel” required no explanation. Everyone in Sarajevo knew about the Dobrinja-Butmir Tunnel. Four feet wide and a quarter of a mile long, it was little more than a culvert that had been clawed under an airport runway during the height of the siege, a culvert that had been shelled by the Serbs for months and that served as the beleaguered city's chief link to the outside world. The Tunnel was a black-market conduit, a ribbon of commerce in a state of war; it was a thoroughfare, too, a communications link, a rite of passage. When bureaucrats from elsewhere in Bosnia needed to reach the capital, they used the Tunnel; even the American.

Part V Saturday, November 13

One Sarajevo, 12:33 a.m.

Ambassador had pushed his way through whenever he was forced to leave the city.

No one's dignity was beneath Dobrinja-Butmir.

Caroline hesitated. Could Krucevic possibly believe she was so stupid? The taunts in her message were incautious to the extent that they ought to amuse him. The author of such a message was intoxicated with her own power; in possessing the vaccine, she believed herself invincible. Such a person never considered that Krucevic made no deals.

Caroline, however, was not intoxicated. She was the very opposite of stupid. She was shrewdly calculating a risk. She had spent years studying Mian Krucevic's personality — reconstructing his behavior, assessing his deeds — in an effort to predict how he would act when it really mattered. She was about to find out just how good an analyst she was.

Krucevic, Caroline believed, would never bring Sophie Payne to the Tunnel on so slight a lure as her offer. He would keep his hostage safe at Ziv Zakopan; he would send his men to hunt down the vaccine. If the E-mail bargain was in fact a setup, he might lose a few men, but nothing more. If Caroline were alone, as she had promised, he'd order her brought back to his base for questioning. And after the questions, he'd kill her.

Only Caroline would not be crouched in the mouth of the Dobrinja-Butmir Tunnel.