The first thought that penetrated Ian’s mind was that he must have died. Death was the only explanation for the surreal blend of pain and Siranoush’s voice. The pain was real, but the voice must be a hallucination. The fact that Siranoush was speaking German deepened his conviction. She spoke too many languages as it was. There ought to be one she hadn’t mastered.
His mouth suddenly watered as the tantalizing smell of lamb stew from the bazaar hit his nostrils. The warmth of it filled his mind. He struggled to lift his head and open his eyes. Tried to croak her name. Siranoush. His mouth and tongue were swollen. His arms were still bound, the limbs deadened from lack of blood, and he could not touch his face. He sensed, however, that his eyes were swollen, too. The slight movement he made in his effort to lift his eyelids awakened the excruciating wounds in his scrotum and penis, and he whimpered aloud.
No one answered.
He forced his eyes open, one at a time.
The light in this back room was dim. The door to the front was firmly closed. Next to him, Zadiq was breathing like a man whose lungs were filling slowly with fluid. Otto was nowhere to be seen.
Then he heard the Nazi colonel’s voice, raised in flirtatious laughter. Siranoush. She was laughing, too, and it came to Ian with sickening despair that he had been duped by all of them—by everyone he’d trusted—and that the girl was a liar and a bitch. Otto had forbidden all contact with the outside because Otto knew Siranoush would come to help them. It was prearranged. She’d brought dinner.
She would feed Ian’s enemies and watch him die.
Cutlery scraped earthenware plates. Men sighed with satisfaction after a long pull at a bottle. Someone gave forth a belch. The pain in Ian’s groin was maddening. He would scream until he blew himself out like a candle.
Not in front of that girl.
“Danke, Fraülein.” Erich’s voice. He was still there, then. He yawned audibly. Yawned again. Tomàš said something Ian couldn’t catch, and the rest of the Germans roared.
He thought suddenly of Mokie: his father’s face, blurred in memory and gradually replaced by the set image of a photograph. It captured nothing of his soul. Mokie had known exactly what death was like. Not glorious. Balls torn to shreds. Please, dear God, he thought, in a variation on the old theme, help me to face death more like Mokie.
There was a crash from the front room. A chair had toppled over. None of the Germans was speaking anymore. The only sound was a persistent snoring.
The door to his death chamber eased open. She was standing there. Staring at him. A look of horror and pity on her face.
“Bond,” she whispered. Then she came swiftly to his side. She had a knife in her hands. She cut the ropes at his arms. He tried to move them while she freed his legs, but they fell to his sides like planks of wood.
“Otto,” he ground out.
“Drugged. They’re all drugged. I put it in the food.”
“Erich. He didn’t . . .”
“Betray me to them? No. Maybe even he wants out.”
She glanced over her shoulder as a man’s shadow filled the doorway.
God help us, Ian thought. Then he saw who it was.
“Dutch,” he gasped.
“I’ll help you get your shirt on.” The Polish pilot was sweating profusely, and his hands shook. “Skurwysyn—what have they done to you?”
More Polish obscenities as he saw Zadiq.
“Kurwa! We’ll never get trousers on these two.” He glanced around the storeroom. “Blankets. There must be blankets.”
“Out there.” Siranoush tossed her head toward the front room.
Dutch disappeared from Ian’s view. He closed his eyes for an instant; Siranoush was cutting the bonds on Zadiq’s arms.
“We’ll have to carry them out one at a time,” Dutch said.
“Arev?” Ian asked.
“Dead,” Siranoush said brusquely.
She’d freed Ian’s legs. He tried to move his feet. The mere twitch of his thigh muscles sent agony spiking through his abdomen. He had to stand up and free himself from the chair, but his mind skittered away from the pain.
Dutch lifted one arm, then the other, as he eased Ian’s shirt onto his back. Ian was still weak; but sensation was returning. From his shoulders to his fingertips, he throbbed with blood.
Dutch gripped him beneath the armpits. “Swear if it helps,” he said. “Now. On the count of three—”
“No,” Ian said clearly. “Get Zadiq out first.”
—
“AMBASSADOR WINANT?”
“Yes?” He poked his head out of the conference room. He and Anthony Eden, Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, were fine-tuning the proposal for postwar Poland’s borders. Stalin demanded the frontiers respect the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line of 1939—which had been guaranteed by Hitler—because it returned Ukraine and White Russia to the Soviet Union. The British government preferred something called the Curzon Line, which dated from World War One and gave a bit more land to the Poles. Roosevelt wanted the Poles to gain territory to the West, land taken from Eastern Germany. He’d ordered Gil Winant to talk to the Brits. If anybody could broker compromise, Winant could.
Gil lifted his brows at the uniformed NKVD officer standing before him. The man inclined his head. “You are requested on the telephone line.”
He followed the soldier to the embassy switchboard—the obvious nerve center for communication, as opposed to the secret one below stairs that Michael Hudson had found. A young woman offered him a receiver. He put it to his ear. The woman remained standing, staring at him, as did the NKVD officer. Both were probably ordered to listen to his conversation. He turned his back.
“Winant speaking.”
“Good evening, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Mr. Diba! What a very great pleasure, sir.”
“As it is for me.” Diba switched immediately to French. “I regret to disturb your conferences, Mr. Winant, but I have encountered a slight problem at the Park Hotel. There is a young British woman in uniform sound asleep in a chair in the lobby. We do not believe she is one of our guests.”
Winant frowned. “Is she a member of the Occupation Forces?”
“I do not think so. When I arrived here for my usual luncheon, I observed her in the hotel bar. I will add that I noted her particularly, because she was in the company of your American friend. The one named for the river.”
“Where is Mr. Hudson now?”
“Certainly not in the Park Hotel.” Diba hesitated; Winant could almost feel him thinking down the telephone wire. “We have tried to rouse the young lady. She remains quite insensible. In view of that—and a similar incident involving another young Englishwoman—I decided to call you, sir, rather than the British Embassy.”
“I see.” Winant thought quickly. He would find Sarah and take an embassy car. “Get some coffee into her, Mr. Diba. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
—
ZADIQ HAD NOT regained consciousness, and his breathing was labored. Ian guessed he was in a coma and envied his near-death state. It allowed Dutch to throw a blanket over Zadiq’s body and lift him like a large sack of potatoes. He turned carefully and made his way through the room full of snoring commandos.
“Water?” Siranoush said.
Ian lifted his head.
She held a cup to his mouth and he felt the liquid seep between his lips. It dribbled over his chin. He tried to raise a hand to wipe his mouth—and found that he could. He grasped the cup and drank by himself.
Then he looked at her. “Is there a car?”
“A taxi. We paid it to wait.”
“Where do we go?”
“Back to the bazaar.”
Ian shook his head. “Zadiq needs a doctor. So do I. We go to our embassies this time. You, too—and Dutch. You’ll be safer there.”
“Can you stand?”
Ian met her eyes. No tears of pity there—just ice-cold determination. “I can try. Let me hold on to you.”
He grasped her shoulders and clenched his teeth. The blood from his torn genitals had congealed on the wood frame of the gutted chair. Like a bandage, he thought. Tear it free in one go. He bore down with his hands on the girl’s frail shoulders and forced his thighs to lift him.
The dancing dots of pain swam again in his vision. Siranoush, unbalanced, took a step backward. He swayed and moaned but did not scream. The blackness cleared. He stood upright by himself.
He swaddled himself in the blanket she gave him and said, “Let’s go.”
They shuffled slowly into the front room. The time it took seemed endless. They were horribly noisy. Exposed. At any moment, Ian thought, one of the men would wake and with the reflex born of years would reach instantly for his gun.
Otto was sprawled across the table, his head in his arms. Ian was tempted to take the knife Siranoush had used to cut his bonds and plunge it into the man’s back, but she was guiding him carefully along the wall, well away from any of them, and he did not have the strength to fight her. Or the strength to plunge a knife.
The house’s front door eased slowly open. Dutch’s head peered around it, and he seemed about to speak. But there was a small pop! as though one of Pamela’s Pol Roger bottles had blown its cork, and Dutch forgot whatever it was he had intended to say. With an expression of astonishment, he crumpled suddenly to his knees. Then fell face forward to the floor.
A neat black hole was burned through his back.
Ian looked from the dead Pole to the man in the doorway.
“Hudders,” he said. “I’ve been wondering when you’d get here.”