crazy thought struck her. Maybe it was her. Her child. No matter what those doctors had tried to tell her, tried to beat out of her, tried to beat into her, no matter how much she understood rationally that the whole thing had been a delusion, deep down she didn’t believe them. She knew herself, knew her instincts, knew her inner voices.
She stopped, caught herself. No. Her lover was dead. She was gone. It was over.
And then the phone rang again and this time she knew she had no choice. She had to answer it. Had to go in there.
She opened the door. The room was just as she had left it nine months ago, a perfect dream room for a twelve-year-old girl, filled with fluffy pillows and stuffed animals. She could practically smell her presence, and if she squinted hard enough, could imagine that she saw the outlines of the girl’s body still visible in the bedclothes. Then the phone rang again.
Now she heard the melody clearly: Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. She shuddered, moved in the direction of the sound, searching for it until she realized that it was staring right at her: on Emma’s bed, lying atop the stack of pillows like the princess atop the pea.
It was still ringing as she picked it up, if you could call what phones did these days ringing. “Hello?” she said in a voice that she hoped was strong. She flinched at the silence, dreading whatever was at the other end of the line. Waiting, waiting…
And then he spoke: “Compassionate leave is over. It’s time to get back to work.”
Amanda Harrington collapsed unconscious onto the floor.
Either a universe that is all order,
or else a farrago thrown together at random,
yet somehow forming a universe.
—MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book IV
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
DAY ONE
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DAY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
DAY THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THREE DAYS LATER
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
Budapest, Hungary
From Castle Hill, the view was straight east, across the Danube and into central Asia. Nobody thought of it that way anymore, of course, but two hundred years ago, before unification, the change in topography mirrored the change in the people and in the culture. On the right bank was Buda, rugged and hilly, while on the left lay the old city of Pest, gateway to the steppes of central Asia. From here it was practically a straight shot across Hungary to Nyiregyhaza, through the Carpathians and into the Ukraine, and thence to the Ural Mountains, and Siberia.
He had been here; Devlin knew it. If he sniffed the air, he could practically smell him. He had lost the trail in France, in that horrible refuge the monster kept in the old Abbey of Clairvaux, now a maximum-security French prison. Lost him thanks to Milverton’s nearly lethal knife thrust through his shoulder, and Skorzeny’s final, desperate kick. Milverton had been every bit as good as he had thought, and Skorzeny even more dangerous and clever. But the former was no longer with us; for the latter, it would be only a matter of time. Devlin had sworn that to the President of the United States, to himself and, most of all, to her.
The sound of voices, speaking softly in Hungarian, wafted across the still night air.
The Hilton Budapest was a near-ideal blending of the sacred and the profane, constructed in and around the ruins of a 13th-century Dominican Church and a baroque-era Jesuit college. The St. Matthias Church stood nearby, and behind it the Fisherman’s Bastion, with its seven towers and filigreed walkways. In the dark, it was a perfect place to hide. Devlin stepped back into the shadows and waited.
Operational security was everything.
The voice drew closer. Two men walked within fifteen feet of him, lost in conversation, wreathed in cigarette smoke. The rest of the civilized world had gradually kicked the habit, but not in central Europe. Good. Cigarettes dulled the senses, and not only of taste or, depending on which hand the smoker used, touch, but also of hearing. The small sounds associated with smoking, on a night as quiet as this, seemed many decibels louder: the inhaling, the exhaling, the spitting. Devlin had long ago learned to turn anything to an advantage, and now he was going to allow a filthy habit to shelter him until the moment was right.
He had trailed one of them from Geneva, Switzerland, across the Alps, through Austria, where he had narrowly missed him in Vienna and finally here to Budapest. His name was Farid Belghazi, an Algerian-born French scientist attached to the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, better known as CERN, and among the projects he had been assigned to was the Large Hadron Collider, the proton-smashing experiment that was attempting nothing less than to re-create the conditions that obtained at the dawn of the universe: the Big Bang. In short, they were searching for the “God particle.”
Belghazi was hardly after anything so grand, but as someone who had a top security clearance throughout the facility, his knowledge of the other research into high-energy particle physics that was going on near the French-Swiss border could be invaluable to civilization’s professed enemies. In addition, CERN had been the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and was actively involved in GRID computing to power data analysis; a virtual supercomputer of networked workstations, all working on the same problem. If you were going to insinuate a spy into a sensitive agency, CERN was probably the next best target after NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, itself. The National Security Agency had first picked up Belghazi’s trail by flagging a series of phone calls and e-mails. As the lead operative of the Central Security Service’s Branch 4, Devlin naturally had access to the information. Now he was going to find out what it all meant.
About ten meters ahead, Devlin shadowed the two men, keeping within the cover of the Fisherman’s Bastion. Now he could hear the voices clearly. The pair was speaking Hungarian, one speaker a native, the other his man, Belghazi. Magyar was not one of Devlin’s best languages, and he knew