“The offices are closed,” Greta said firmly, and clicked the button off.
More static, insistent, blaring and Greta wished, suddenly, that she had never come into work at all, that she had stayed at home like so many good Berliners, terrified of the Turks.
“What?” she snapped.
“My business is with the lab.”
“Your name?”
“I'm from the Health Ministry. It's about the mumps vaccines. The humanitarian relief.”
Gretas brow cleared. Of course she had known of the vaccine consignment for Pristina; it was the one matter of legitimate business she could expect all week. It was a large shipment ten thousand ampules at least, the first of several scheduled for the refugee population.
“You are familiar with the loading dock?” she asked.
“No”
“Where is your truck?”
“I was told nothing about a truck,” the woman outside retorted.
“I have come for the health minister's personal supply. The minister is to carry it to Kosovo himself tomorrow as a goodwill gesture.” Greta hesitated.
“I was not told,” she said.
“Is there anyone with more authority in the office?” The woman was fumbling in her handbag, searching for her official identification; through the surveillance monitor Greta could sense her impatience. “Anyone who might be able to help me? Greta Oppenheimer, for instance?”
“I am Greta Oppenheimer.” Surprise brought her upright.
“Mian told me to ask for you,” the woman said, and stared directly into the surveillance camera's lens.
Greta's breath snagged in her throat. How could this creature utter the word with such a casual air? As though it were a name like any other? A name you might toss over a dinner table: Pass the cabbage, Mian. No one knew His name, no one but the handful of faithful admitted to His presence. Certainly not this bitch, who had never laid eyes on Him, who could not possibly know Him. Heat surged through Greta's veins and burst in a wave at her cheeks. He had told this woman her name.
“I am Greta,” she repeated.
“Then open the door, you crucifier of Jesus, before I freeze my tits off,” the woman spat out contemptuously.
And Greta obeyed.
“I haven't got much time,” she said briskly, and tugged at the fingertips of her gloves.
Her voice, freed of the speakerphone's distortion, was heavy and coarse. German was not, Greta thought, her first language; but what was? She might be Russian or some other type of Slav. A woman from the East. From His homeland.
“The minister has requested twelve dozen ampules.”
“That's our normal crating quantity.. ..”
“Good. Fetch it.”
Greta glanced over her shoulder. She swallowed nervously.
“I have no access to that vaccine.”
“What?”
The sunglasses were swept off, and a pair of black eyes, heavily rimmed in kohl, stared at her implacably.
“The laboratory is closed,” Greta said. Such a vague word for the battery of electronics that encircled His kingdom, that ensured the unworthy were barred. “I have no access to the storerooms.”
The 'woman's brows came sharply together.
“But this is nonsense! It was expressly approved by Mian himself! What am I to tell the minister?”
Greta stared at her helplessly.
The woman fished a second time in her capacious handbag. Like her clothes, it was black. She might have been dressed for mourning, Greta thought, or an avant-garde play. The only spot of color was at her throat, a white scarf wound tight as a tourniquet.
She held up a piece of paper and began to read from it. “
“Vaccine No. 413. A box of twelve dozen ampules. To be personally called for on November tenth.” I am at VaccuGen, yes? And you are Greta Oppenheimer?”
“Yes.” Who never called Him by His name.
The woman slapped her gloves on the reception desk.
“Then what am I to do? Tell the minister that Mian failed him again? Is the entire shipment locked away somewhere? Because if it is, young woman, I can assure you that the minister will have Krucevic's balls for breakfast. The minister is expected in Pristina tomorrow, and Ernst Schuler is not a man to look ridiculous. Do I make myself clear?”
“The shipment is in the loading bay.”
“And do you have access to that?”
Greta nodded.
“Then for the love of the Savior, take me to it,” the woman snapped, “before I call Mian myself. No one will notice a carton more or less, and it's as much as my life is worth to return to the ministry empty-handed.”
When the woman had scrawled some initials on a notepad and left with the box under her arm, Greta went slowly back to her desk. It was a brief excitement; it had afforded her the sound of a human voice. She was not likely to hear one again that day.
But in this she was wrong. She had not been reseated in the reception area twenty minutes when the static burst out again. She glanced up at the street monitor and saw the figure of a balding, middle-aged man, the collar of his good cloth coat turned up against the cold November day.
“May I speak with Greta Oppenheimer?” he asked.
“I am Greta,” she replied. And was suddenly filled with foreboding. Never had she been requested by name. And now twice in one day “I have come for the mumps vaccine,” the man said.
“Your colleague has already been here,” Greta replied.
“What colleague?”
“From the Health Ministry. For the vaccines. The minister himself sent her.”
“My dear young lady,” said the man, amused, “someone has been having a joke with you. Do you know who I am?”
He turned his face fully into the range of the camera positioned above his head.
Greta stared intently at the monitor; a sickness rose in her throat.
“Ernst Schuler,” she whispered.
The Minister of Health.
Five
Bratislava, 10:15 a.m.
As Dare Atwood had predicted, Sophie Payne was no longer in Prague.
Her captors had tried to take her to Hungary, driving out of the city at one o'clock in the morning, after the American flag in the embassy garden had been raised to full mast and the President was known to be cooperating. They had injected her with the Anthrax 3A antibiotic and bundled her into the trunk of Michael's car, heading first east through the night and then, abruptly, when it became clear the Czech border guards were searching everything that approached the Hungarian border, south. They skirted the Tatras Mountains and ended, after many hours, in Bratislava, which had once been called Pressburg and known the glory of the Austrian empire. Now the city was famed for recidivist Communism and thuggish politics, for the Semtex explosives manufactured on its outskirts, for dispirited pottery and rudimentary wine. The ancient vines trailed through the hills like bony fingers, scrabbling for a purchase in the dust.
They had intended to reach Budapest but chose Bratislava by default, because Vaclav Slivik knew a woman in the Slovak State Orchestra. Many years ago, when Olga Teciak was a young woman of twenty-four whose sloe eyes and graceful limbs were utterly bewitching against the prop of her cello, Vaclav had pursued her violently, and she was enough in the thrall of the past to accord him some kindness now. When he knocked on the door at 4:33 a.m. unheralded and unapologetic, she was so disoriented as to let him in.
It was only after the guns appeared that Olga understood what she had done. But by then, her doom was sealed.
Sophie lay now on the woman's cracked tile floor, her hands and feet bound, her mouth gagged. The bathroom smelled faintly septic, an odor of decay unsuccessfully masked with ammonia. Olga's apartment was one of a series of similar faceless cubicles in one of the mass of faceless Soviet-built concrete towers strung across the Danube from the historic heart of old Bratislava. The complex as a whole could boast the highest suicide rate in the country. It looked like an architect's embodiment of despair. And at the moment, Sophie found the mood to be catching. She had crossed yet another border. No one, it seemed, was following.