The Cutout (40 page)

So it had mattered to Jozsef, this year of abandonment. Sophie thought of his draggled rabbit’s foot, the last, pathetic talisman of a normal life. A child’s hope against hope that his mother was alive.

“Because she’s a coward,” Krucevic spat out. “Your mother is too much of a coward to come after you, Jozsef. She would not dare to face
me
.”

“Where is she, Papa?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who has been talking to her on the sly. Sneaking around, taking my phone in the middle of the night, calling Belgrade. Do you think I don’t get the bills? Do you think I don’t recognize that number?”

“I did call! I have called her every week since you took me away! But never once have I heard her voice. Never once, the least word. She is not in Belgrade. She is not anywhere. I
do not know where she is!”

He broke down into a terrible weeping. Sophie’s heart burned for the boy, for the lost and fragile child in the room beyond her wall, his thin shoulders spasming with grief. The sound was magnified in her delirium; it swelled, consuming her air, her sight, until the walls vibrated with bitterness and she choked on Jozsef’s tears
herself. What kind of monster was his father? Didn’t he comprehend at all what it was like to be a pawn, a token between two warring parties, one the mother who nursed you and the other the father who demanded your will? Could he see nothing of how the boy was torn? Jozsef was dying for lack of the mother he loved. But he would also die, Sophie felt sure, before he would betray Mlan Krucevic.

The belt sliced down again; the boy cried out.

“That will teach you to take my phone,” his father said.

From the moment Mlan Krucevic had learned of Mirjana’s intrigue—of the brazen theft of his drugs in broad daylight—he had been convinced that Jozsef was the source of 30 April’s leak. It was entirely like his bitch of a wife to milk the boy for information. Jozsef was young, he was not yet tough, he could be manipulated by his emotions. That was one reason Krucevic had taken him from his mother. He would not have Jozsef spoiled by a Serbian whore.

But he had beaten the boy almost senseless, and the story had never changed. Jozsef was not the source of Mirjana’s information. And what a lot of information she possessed.

Mirjana had known how to find VaccuGen. That could be explained. It was, after all, a private corporation that conducted legitimate business. VaccuGen vaccines ensured that livestock the world over—particularly in developing nations—would not fall prey to a host of diseases. But how had the
alba
known Greta Oppenheimer’s name? How had she known exactly which vaccine to steal?

There was only one answer. Someone within 30 April had betrayed him. And Krucevic had a very good idea who that person was.

He glanced at his watch. Almost dinnertime. Like Christ at the Passover supper, he would break bread with the man who had sold him for thirty pieces of silver. And afterward, he would crucify him.

The airport taxi carried Tom Shephard and Caroline Carmichael through boulevards of screaming sirens, around squares of massed police. They passed checkpoints and blockades and forced their way across bridges thronged with people. The false stone facades of the nineteenth-century buildings flickered against a backdrop of flame.

Hungary’s Houses of Parliament were burning.

Caroline stood at her hotel room window and watched. The glorious old buildings were ablaze with light, like something from an Impressionist painting, the crimson and gold flames mirrored in the black of the Danube.

“The government fell an hour ago,” Shephard said from her doorway.

The flames rippled, reflected, in the black water.

“And the Volksturm land in the morning,” she replied.

Tonio shivered beside Michael in the passenger seat, the latest of Krucevic’s videos resting on the console between them. He had been whistling a tune—something by U2, a B-side recording, he knew them all but not even rock and roll could comfort him tonight.

“Jesus … who’d have thought they’d riot over money?”

“Krucevic,” Michael answered. “That was the point of the plan, Tonio. Mlan needed an excuse to get the Volksturm into Hungary, and you certainly gave it to him.”

“I just do what I’m told.” Tonio was defensive. “I just work the keys.”

They were close to the city now, and the sky above Budapest glowed like a blast furnace. Tonio shivered. “From the look of that, the place’ll be crawling with cops.
Cazzo fottuto
”. He crossed himself, the scars on his wrist livid in the light from the dashboard.

The Italian prison system had not been kind to Tonio.

He jabbed at the car stereo buttons; a czardas filled the car, some guttural words. “They’ve got shit here for music, you know that? Like their language. And their economy. Pure shit.”

Michael reached over and snapped off the radio. “Why don’t you sing? A little Paul Simon always works in the darkness.”

“I could use a drink,” Tonio said.

“It’s not much farther.”

“There’s bound to be roadblocks. Detours. Police barricades. Maybe we should just go back. Tell him we couldn’t get close—”

“We’ll get close.”

Tonio glanced at him. “You know this place, huh? You’ve been here before?”

Michael looked over his left shoulder, signaled, and moved into the fast lane. Tonio hadn’t really expected him to answer. Michael said less than any man he’d ever known—any man without a bullet in his brain.

“Did you know that Mlan is following us?” he asked Tonio conversationally.

“Following us?” Panic, pure and deadly, flooded through his body.

“Or at least Vaclav is. He’s driving. I picked him up about fifteen minutes out of the bunker. Otto’s in the passenger seat. He looks happy.”

Nobody liked it when Otto looked happy.

“Why would they be following us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a test.”

Tonio swallowed hard on the fear that filled his throat. “What kind of test?”

“For Mlan, there’s only one kind.”

Michael was right. A year ago, Tonio had watched the boss put a gun to the heads of two men he’d known and liked. “What the fuck have you done, Michael?”

“
Me?
All I did was shoot a little girl when Mlan asked. What have
you
done, Tonio, with your magic fingers? Have you looked somewhere in Mlan’s computer that you shouldn’t?”

“No! I swear it on the Virgin!”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “Then I guess we’ve got nothing to worry about. Sing. With any luck, we’ll lose them.”

He exited the M1 abruptly, well to the west of Buda, snaking the car through the traffic of the side streets and heading downhill toward the bridges over the Danube. They were in the eleventh district now, Gellérthegy, the neighborhood behind the castle’s heights, and the broad expanse of Villányi Út was ominously deserted. Then, in the headlights, the plaza that was Móricz Zsigmond Körtér and the police checkpoint.

“Merda,”
Tonio muttered. He huddled lower in his seat, a furtive rodent beneath a mop of blond curls. “Turn around.”

“Absolutely not. We’re going ahead.”

“Why?”

“Because Mlan never will,” Michael answered implacably.

He slowed the Audi to a stop and rolled down the window. An officer approached.

Incomprehensible language, and then Michael nodding.

“Get the registration,” he told Tonio.

“What?”

“It’s in the glove compartment.”

There was a gun in the glove compartment, too—at the bottom, where a casual observer would never suspect, and for an instant, Tonio saw Michael’s plan. But the Hungarian cop was staring at him, his cap visor very correct across the brow, and under the weight of those flat dark eyes Tonio could not move, could not seize the gun and shoot the man in the forehead. He had watched while Otto had killed the finance minister, Lajta, he had watched a score of deaths in the past few months, but he could not bring himself to murder now.

Besides, there were other police waiting beyond the headlights, their uniform pants picked out in a halogen glare.

Michael reached across him and took a packet of papers from the glove compartment. Another few words in halting Hungarian.

The cop nodded, flipped through the documents, and then returned them. He barked a word.

Michael produced his passport. “Tonio?”

“What?
Santa Maria—what?”

“The officer would like your passport.”

His brown eyes widened, and he drew a quick breath. Did he have it? Or had he left it in the bunker? Madonna, but Krucevic would
kill
Michael. What if their names were already on a list somewhere—what if these cops followed them, saw the videotape tossed out a window, gave the registration to the Americans—

The cop held out his hand. Tonio reached inside his jacket. His fingers brushed the textured butt of his gun. A few seconds, a flare of light, and Michael could wheel the car up Villányi Út before the others thought to follow….

What then?

He pulled his passport out of his breast pocket.

The cop glanced at it indifferently and then handed them both back.

Michael’s window slid closed.

Blindly, Tonio grabbed one of the passports with shaking fingers and stuffed it into his jacket. “What the fuck did you say back there?” he snarled.

“The car’s registered to VaccuGen.” He turned left into Bartók Béla Út, still heading downhill. “We’re traveling salesmen from Berlin. We know nothing about riots.”

“Salesmen.”

“We know nothing about curfews. We’re looking for the Gellért Hotel. It’s a few blocks from here.”

“Dio
, I need a drink.”

The floodlit facade of the hotel loomed before them, an Art Nouveau confection hard by the Chain Bridge, and suddenly, Michael pulled right and then left, into Budafoki Út. He was still humming “Graceland.” Now
Tonio would have the goddamn tune in his head for the next thirty days.

“Here.” Michael jerked the Audi into a space at the curb and killed the engine. “You’re in no shape for this.” He reached into his pocket and handed Tonio some deutsche marks.

“What are you doing?”

“That’s Libella.” He gestured toward the bar. “Last time I checked, a pretty decent place. You’ll like the music. They’ll take your deutsche marks gladly and rob you blind in the process, but so what? Money’s tight these days in Buda.”