Francine Mathews - The Cutout

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.

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.

When Krucevic's men appeared for the rendezvous, she would be on her way to Ziv Zakopan, where only Krucevic himself might guard the Vice President. It was dangerous, of course; she could not know how many men Krucevic would send for her and how many would remain behind. She was feeling her way toward Krucevic's camp. She did not have the luxury of playing 30 April like a fish. She no longer had the indulgence of time.

Caroline glanced at her watch. 12:40 a.m. Roughly twelve hours earlier, she had said good-bye to Eric. He had told her then that the Vice President could not live long.

Sophie had managed to crawl through the darkness of her prison, pulling herself forward with excruciating effort, her belly on the ground. She had crawled past the opening of the martyrs' charnel house, her skin prickling with horror at the bones beyond the wall, everything in her mind and body screaming. It was important, she told herself silently, not to consider what might lie on the floor around her. It was important to think of other things, to keep from going mad.

She had never been a person who minded the dark. At the house in Malvern she would lie restless in bed, long after Curtis had fallen asleep, his face turned into his pillow. She would listen for Peter's dreaming sigh from across the hall, then get up and walk noiselessly through the house. The things she had chosen and placed in these rooms were like strangers in the moonlight. She would caress the burnished arm of an antique chair, pick a feather from a cushion. And then, like a shadow, she would catch her reflection, a muted form shimmering in the mirror, only her eyes still luminous. She had liked to think that a century hence, on moonlit nights, her image would gaze out from the gilt frame.

Her eyes were tightly closed now. The difference between the darkness of Malvern and the night of Ziv Zakopan, she knew, was the silence. Here she was an amoeba suspended in water, a yolk inside an egg. There was no ancient house settling on its stone foundations, no wind sighing through the elms. No Peter dreaming across the hall — The anguish at her core when she thought of her son was unendurable; it sharpened the pain of her sickness, the slow agony of dying. Peter, with his eyes the color of moss, his quick speech and laugh of deprecation. Peter, whose square chin was Curt's chin whenever he was angry. Peter, who needed Sophie more than he could admit now, at the age of twenty — Sophie, who was his only family.

She clenched her teeth on the thought of Peter, burrowed deep into the pain, and used her son's face to keep the ghouls of Ziv Zakopan at bay.

She was very weak, and her throat was so parched that she could no longer swallow. At intervals she slept, then awoke with a start, cheek pressed against the filth of the stone passage, and sensed that she had been unconscious. It was probable, she thought, that sometime soon she would never wake again. But still she dragged herself forward, toward the manhole cover and the air above. Her journey covered perhaps ninety feet. It took over three hours. She collapsed for the last time at the foot of Otto's ladder. But the rabbit's foot she still clutched in her hand pulsed steadily through the night, transmitting its signal like an unquiet heart in the grave.