The Cutout (56 page)

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.

iv Zakopan is twenty-three miles south
, Eric said in Caroline’s mind,
along the road to Foça. You climb out of the city and then descend through the pass. After maybe ten miles you’ll see a power plant and an explosives factory. The road’s shit to begin with, but by the time you’re thirteen miles out of Sarajevo, it’s pretty smooth.You’re in a valley, it runs down to the Drina River. About mile nineteen you’ll start to pass collective farms, or what’s left of them. The buildings are burned-out shells. Four miles beyond, on the left, is a rutted dirt road. Don’t miss it in the dark. That’s the turning for
iv Zakopan.

She drove south through the night, along a road littered with derelict tanks and abandoned gun positions and the refuse of war that time had not yet buried. NATO had condemned the Serbs for what they did in Bosnia, and later for the atrocities of Kosovo, but the world did not remember the Ustashe terror of World War II; it knew absolutely nothing about the horrors committed by Croats at
iv Zakopan. The world had the luxury of simple solutions.

Caroline allowed her gaze to veer for an instant from the empty ribbon of shell-pocked road, to take in the midnight landscape. She thought of postwar movies, still ardent with propaganda. Of desperate partisans allied to the British, of Chetniks who died on behalf of King Peter while he slurped oysters in London and danced at the Ritz. There were no angels in the Balkans, no heroes one could name. This was not a place for choosing sides. It was a place to abandon hope.

“Tell me about
iv Zakopan,” she commanded Eric’s ghost.

It was a Ustashe killing field. The earth there is riddled with tunnels—ancient holes gouged into the hills. The Romans built them. The Hapsburgs hid an army there. And the Ustashe tortured partisans far below the ground. Mlan’s laboratory is hidden among the cliffs that soar above.

“A bunker, like in Budapest?”

He shook his head in the shadows.
A concentration camp. Barbed wire, electrified fences, searchlights, armed guards. One woman equipped with a double-action Walther TPH
,
accurate range maybe twelve feet, will never storm the fastness alone. Even if she’s as steady with a handgun as you are, Mad Dog.

“What’s he use the place for?”

Experimentation. He tests his vaccines, his drugs, his chemical weapons, on Serb and Muslim prisoners.

“And nobody comes looking for these people?”

They’re the Disappeared, Carrie. Taken away at gunpoint in the middle of the night. And who knows where they end up? Nobody ever leaves
iv Zakopan. There’s a reason the place is called “Living Grave.”

They came up suddenly—the abandoned collectives, the burned outbuildings. A tractor’s skeleton loomed like an iron gibbet near the verge of the road, whispering of ancient crimes. Caroline glanced at her odometer to calculate the distance; when three and a half miles had worn away, she pulled the car to the shoulder and slowed to a stop. From here she would go forward on foot.

She was wearing black microfleece leggings and a pair of running shoes—workout clothing that would have to double as combat wear. The Walther she pulled out of a black nylon shoulder bag—the only luggage she’d brought with her from Budapest—and strapped it to her thigh. She practiced drawing the weapon from its holster a couple of times, the mechanics a cover for her increasing nervousness, the acceleration of her pulse. She was alone in the middle of dumb-fuck nowhere, with a ghost and a .22-caliber gun for company; she had, at last count, six rounds in the chamber and thirteen extra bullets. Above her head the stars shone with a brilliance that was excruciating; they reminded Caroline of nights in Southampton, the sky deepening after sunset to ink blue
rather than black, the constellations whirling to the sound of her great-uncle’s voice. The chink of ice cubes. Cicadas. A splash of Bombay Sapphire.
Hank
, she assured him,
I’m thinking seriously of law school. I just might take you up on it.

A pinprick of light scintillated in her palm. Eric’s homing device, registering a signal. Sophie Payne was within range.

“After you,” she told him.

And followed where he led.

TWO
iv Zakopan, 1:23
A.M.

J
OZSEF’S EYELIDS FLUTTERED OPEN
, and he stared up at the ceiling. The room had no windows. Light, such as it was, came from a pair of gas lanterns propped on a crude table made of packing crates. Shadows, primitive and strangely comforting, flickered on the wall like the Indonesian puppet dance he’d once seen; for a moment he could not imagine where he was. The haze of delirium receded slowly, the way water drains from a basin—imperceptibly at first, then in a final rush that sweeps everything with it. And when that rush to consciousness came, Jozsef sat up abruptly. There was the helicopter, the lady torn from his arms, the rabbit’s foot pressed into her hand. And then the dash from the landing pad to this room, the lines of barracks whirling about him, the faces thrust against the chain-link fence. He was alone in a room on top of a cliff. He was at
iv Zakopan.