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Caroline turned away from the screen. One more voiceless tragedy in a part of the world that had already given up hope, one more small angel dead by morning in her mother's arms. Disease followed war like morning followed night; it lurked in the ruptured water mains, in the rat-infested rubble. It riddled the dirt where the children played. But the weight of grief in Yugoslavia was impossible to comprehend. The Kosovars had lost their homes, their livelihoods, and now their children the one thing they had fought so desperately to save.

Caroline walked toward the flight attendant, her boarding pass extended, then stopped dead as the German translator's voice picked up where the newscaster had left off. Fritz Voekl was sending German medical teams into Kosovo armed with an experimental new mumps vaccine. Fritz Voekl who had fought NATO involvement in the Yugoslav civil war, who thought the Kosovars were just another bunch of poor-mouthed Muslims looking for a handout. So what if their children were dying? That left fewer to feed.

The teams would begin inoculating ethnic Albanian children throughout the province as soon as they arrived.

Caroline stared at the screen in disbelief as Voekl smiled for the flashbulbs.

She would never have called the chancellor a humanitarian. But refugees stay home, when home is safe and healthy. Maybe Fritz had figured that out at last.

It was unlikely he'd learned to care.

Part II

Wednesday, November 10

One

Pristina, 3:45 a.m.

Simone Amiot followed the orange glow of the man's cigarette as he crossed the rutted dirt road and made for her tent — a bobbing spark in the darkness of the wee hours, like a June bug uncertain of its flight. His figure was backlit by a single flaring torch the police guard had thrust into the mud — a bulky, formless silhouette, hands shoved into the pockets of a battered down jacket. His chin was lowered over his chest, as though he were lost in thought or intent upon watching where he put each foot. There was an air of assurance about him, even at this distance; of relaxed accommodation with his squalid surroundings, the uniformed men patrolling at his back. He could not, Simone decided, be a parent.

She removed the earpiece of her stethoscope and folded it briskly in three — then spared a second to lay her cool, smooth fingers on the bare chest of the four-year-old boy lying inert on the cot before her. She did not need her stethoscope for this one anymore. She drew the sheet over his head very gently and allowed her hand to rest on the brown hair, still damp with sweat. Drago Pavlovic. Three days ago he had been playing in the street with a combat fighter made of paper and sticks. He had grinned at her as she walked by, and roared the sound of his engine. Drago was sturdy for his age, with brown eyes and freckles on his nose. He was about to lose his right front tooth.

Drago was number three hundred and twenty-seven. Or was it twenty-eight? At least Simone was spared the job of breaking the news to his mother. The woman had been murdered the previous year.

She rubbed wearily at her forehead, as though she could push aside the burning sensation of tears and futility. Pristina was her third stint with Medecins sans Frontieres — Doctors Without Borders — but it was by far the most difficult. Last year, and the year before that, there had been bullet wounds. Burn victims.

Broken limbs. Dehydration. Horrible in themselves — but things Simone could treat. In Pristina, she was brought face-to-face with the limits of her own power. She had no tools to fight the mumps ravaging the squatter population. And nothing to keep it from spreading.

In the past five days, she had personally held vigil over more than two hundred children. Most were buried now in hastily dug graves on the edge of the squatters' camp, their delicate features dusted with lime. Her years of schooling, her years of practical knowledge, the drugs she had flown in from Toronto — none of them did any good. She might as well have been a woman of the Middle Ages, showering incantations and powdered bat wing.

A handful of Simone's more than two hundred stricken children had actually survived the mumps scourge. One of them, a little girl with bright red hair, was sleeping soundly on a cot in the far corner. Although still weak and far from well, Dailia gave them all hope. When the fever took her, she plunged like the others into delirium and dehydration, but in Dailia's case the IV feeds and ice compresses actually seemed to work. Her mother, whom Simone knew only as Pagusa, sat stoically by the child's bedside for three full days. She sponged her daughter's forehead with a damp cloth, exchanged her soiled nightdress for a clean T-shirt, whispered relentlessly to a mind that wandered far in hectic dreams. She said little; she spoke almost no English. Her husband and brother had been shot by the Serb militia. Her eldest child, a son, was hiding out in the hills with a band of Albanian guerillas. One daughter had been lost on the road and never recovered. A blind grandmother and little Dailia were all that Ragusa had left. At three o'clock in the morning two days before, when the child's fever at last had peaked and broken, settling back down to double digits — when Simone could tentatively declare that the danger was past and the child would live — Ragusa had stared at her, unbelieving. Then she had thrown herself across Dailia's sleeping form, her shoulders shaking with sobs of terror and relief. She had cried aloud in thanks to a God that was not Simone's, a God that had taken other sons and daughters without hesitation or mercy. Simone touched the woman's shoulder, and she turned to seize the doctor's hand. Ragusa had managed to call her child back from the Valley of Death, but she believed it was Simone who had saved her.

Later, as she crossed the muddy tracks that separated the hospital tent from the rest of the camp, Simone saw the woman waiting shyly by the mess tent door.

“Coffee, Ragusa?” she asked, hoping that these words at least were comprehensible.

“Un peu du cafe?”

Ragusa shook her head. She was clutching something close to her frayed coat.

Simone hesitated, uncertain how to bridge the gulf of language, but then the woman seized her hand and pressed her burden into it.

“For you,” she said haltingly.

“Dailia. My thanks. Is all .. .”

It is all that I have, all that I can give you, who have given me back my life.

Ragusa hurried past her. Simone looked down into her palm. The woman had parted with the last few things she possessed: three tampons, their paper covers torn and grubby. Simone placed them carefully in her white lab coat pocket and watched Ragusa retreat across the rutted mire. She could have laughed aloud, or cried. But all she felt was unworthy.

The flap of the medical tent was swept aside, and the orange glow of a cigarette arced to the dirt like a dead-headed flower. The man she had glimpsed in silhouette a moment ago. He had the decency to stamp his tobacco out, in deference to the ailing children.

“May I help you?” she said in English.

“I don't know,” he answered in the same language, surprising her. “It's the middle of the night. But I thought somebody might be here. Could I borrow a thermometer?”