Sixteen

Sheri looked up as the warden returned, his face red with morning air. Another man accompanied him, a man with a longer, softer face—a composite visage, she thought, of the entire Georgetown humanities department. His grey hair hung in long feathers on either side of his matching turtleneck. He looked at Sheri with veiled interest, making an effort to appear nonchalant. Tourists usually left the town untouched and, should they chance to pass through, they were invariably older, fatter and louder than he. None of them, he had learned over the years, cared for Chomsky or poetry. A criminal tourist might be a welcome change.

“Hello,” he said, in a soft tone of richly feigned boredom, “my name Adrianne. I’m here to translate for you, since you evidently don’t speak Romanian. He’ll need to know your name and where you’re from.”

She felt her color rise. That the man was insufferable, there was no question. And probably a Princeton washout. But he certainly wasn’t a bureaucrat, which meant that the warden hadn’t called the embassy yet.

“Thank god,” she said, with the realization that half-truths were her only option. “how is the man who was attacked? Is he ok?”

Adrianne shrugged his shoulders. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, my name is Sheryl. Sheryl Peary. It’s nice to meet you.” She held out her free hand, but he was already leaning back, cultivating a stale air of hippie chic against the peeling wall.

Fifteen

Tullia’s face, white with shock, spread a frightened and indignant crimson as she stood and walked toward the table. The man followed closely behind, his gun a breath away from her spine. She tried to catch Serban’s glance as she chose a seat at the corner, but he looked, expressionless, at nothing.

The second man spoke, and Tullia looked at him fully for the first time. He was dark-eyed with close-cut hair—a steely version of the men her mother had sometimes found at the bottom of a pint. His voice was joyless. “Mr. Balcescu, I am authorized to kill you, and I am fully aware of your language capabilities. We have been following your career closely, so it would be pointless to pretend innocence. We also know that you have undiagnosed c-10 Huntington’s disease. It’s a viral holdover from the cold war, a slow intellectual decay that kills its victims over years. The Soviets used it on American scientists-- NASA, the CIA, even a few university researchers. None of them could feed themselves by the end.”

He paused and drew an orange-capped plastic vial from an inner pocket with his free hand. “Look at me,” he demanded. The Serb set his jaw and looked up without moving his head. The man continued, “We know that you refuse on principle to deal with the east. That’s why we’re here. If you see our offer through, you retire to Romania with seven courses of the c-10 antidote. This is the eighth. Take them all and it’s a full cure.” He threw the vial onto the placemat at Serban’s elbows. “Refuse, and we’ll make sure that you die a slow death in a Bolivian jail. A senator of the United States and two businessmen will visit your home in Romania. They’ll travel as vacationers following The Historian. When they arrive, we think that they’ll negotiate for your participation in an arms transaction with a Yemeni rebel group. Set your terms and leave the rest to us.” He paused.

“Not agreed,” Serban said without seeming to move a muscle. “Not yet.”

“You have two weeks to consider. Return to Romania, leave the weapons here. Make any other choice, and you'll remember this as the last time you saw daylight.”