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cover-up and conspiracy once the first victim died?
    It would be easier when someone died, in fact. They’d have an autopsy, then. They’d know.
    Except that Caroline already knew. Thirty April’s letter had come like a valentine from the grave, a dirty assignation she’d been dying to keep. The total obliteration of the neo-Nazi group had seemed too easy, even while she watched it happen; she’d learned to expect the hydra effect. Despite the cloud of misery she’d struggled through the past six days, she knew now that she’d been waiting for these words, this knock on the door. The next round. When she could atone for all her sins.
    “Did you pack your gun?” Shephard had asked.
    “I’m Agency, not Bureau. We don’t carry guns.”
    “Liar,” he retorted. “Call my hotel with your number. And get some sleep.”
    She’d watched him drive off with Steve Price in the journalist’s car, aware that Shephard was somehow relieved to have a role—to have something to do besides watch a sports channel in his jockey shorts. Like her, Tom had only been waiting.
    “I don’t want to sleep,” she told Cuddy now. “I don’t want to run or hide. I want to talk to the boy.”
    He glanced at his watch. “Visiting hours at Bethesda Naval are long since over.”
    “So what? Jozsef’s the best option we’ve got. You can flash your badge and mouth platitudes about national security. I’ll smile and look sympathetic.”
    “Does this mean you’ve decided to stay?” Cuddy asked.
    “I have no choice. I’m a target, remember?”
     
    Jozsef Krucevic was the son of 30 April’s leader, Mlan Krucevic, a man Caroline had helped to destroy. The boy had flown back to Washington in Air Force Two with Sophie Payne’s body. For thirty-eight hours, dangerously ill, he’d hung on the fringe of the waking world. Two days ago, however, he’d sat up in bed for the first time and eaten green gelatin; Caroline had spent a few enjoyable hours with him, explaining the nature of American cartoons. Nobody had figured out where Jozsef was going to live, or with whom. It had seemed important to get through Payne’s funeral before disposing of her killer’s son.
    Bethesda Naval was a surreal place, with its massive central tower in the Thirties Fascist style. A light at its apex distinguished the room from which James Forrestal, once a Secretary of Defense, had jumped to his death. Caroline found suicide a macabre sort of memorial for any building, particularly a hospital. She drove her Volkswagen while Cuddy called ahead to the night nurse on Jozsef’s pediatric intensive care ward and told the woman that the boy’s CIA handlers needed to speak with him immediately. The nurse had refused to give them access—she lacked the proper authority—at which point Cuddy called Dare Atwood at home in Georgetown and brought the DCI up to date. A personal escort—a military doctor, by the look of him—stood waiting for them at the front entrance.
    “Are you getting marathon victims in your ER?” Cuddy asked as they strolled briskly in the direction of Acute Care Pediatric.
    “Seventy-four Marines, at last count,” the doctor said starkly.
     
    Jozsef seemed both older and younger than his age, with his dead-white cheeks and large, hollow black eyes. Like a child out of Dickens, Caroline thought. Too knowing, consumptive, and doomed. His frail fingers plucked at the starched hospital sheet. The legs beneath were as thin and straight as two metal poles. Jozsef. She had carried him on her back straight out of hell.
    “Hey, kiddo. You still up?”
    “They had to give me my shot,” he answered irritably. “They were able to replicate Father’s medicine—did they tell you? He thought it was an impossible code to break. He was wrong.”
    “About a lot of things,” Caroline said gruffly, and reached to tousle Jozsef’s hair. He’d been deliberately infected by his own father with a genetically engineered strain of anthrax. “You