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don’t look too bad. Seen any SpongeBob lately?”
    He lifted one shoulder in a petulant sort of shrug, his eyes sliding toward Cuddy. He’d met Cuddy only once, and seemed to feel awkward around him. As though Cuddy were watching and judging him. As Cuddy certainly was.
    “I’ve been reading. This. ” He gestured toward the book; a paperback of The Golden Compass Caroline had given him a few days before. “I cannot decide what is real and what is false in all the words. My English is good—but my brain . . .”
    “. . . is better. You’ll get there—stick with it. Look, we’re sorry to bother you so late, Jozsef, but we need to ask you some questions.”
    The huge dark eyes came up to her own. “You always do. That’s why you saved my life, is it not? So I could tell you everything I know?”
    She shook her head. “You saved mine, I think. Or we saved each other. That’s what good people do.”
    “I am not a good person. I am a killer’s son.” His gaze dropped to his thin fingers again, restlessly kneading the blanket. Caroline glanced at Cuddy, who’d remained standing in the doorway, one shoulder propped against the jamb as though it were his office. His face was expressionless; he had not yet decided what he thought of the boy—what was real and what was false, amid all Jozsef’s words.
    Caroline drew an uncomfortable vinyl-backed chair closer to the bed. “I was hoping you could tell me how long ago your father decided on Sophie Payne. Why he chose the vice president to kidnap, I mean. Did he dislike her personally? Did he know she was coming to Berlin?”
    Jozsef shrugged again. He was pissed about something beyond this unexpected visit. Bored in a hospital that was no better than a prison? Worried about what might happen next?
    “They will not let me go to the funeral,” he said plaintively. “It is not fair! I want to say good-bye to Lady Sophie! Can’t you make them let me out?”
    Cuddy shifted in the doorway, jabbed at his glasses. “Maybe they think you’re not well enough.”
    “I am! I’m perfectly fine! I have been fine for two days! They’re not letting me go on purpose—to . . . to punish me because my father killed her! He nearly killed me, too!”
    “Jozsef.” Caroline smoothed the blanket over the thin legs. “I’ll talk to your doctor. Okay? I’ll talk to him. I’ll let him know that I’ll personally take care of you and make sure you get through it. We’ll see what he says, all right?”
    The boy gave her a look full of such desperate hope that she suddenly understood what Santa Claus must feel like on Christmas Eve. Did a funeral matter so much? Maybe. When it was for somebody you’d failed to save.
    “How long ago did Mlan decide on Mrs. Payne?”
    “At least a year,” he said rapidly. “He told me he had been planning for a year. Tracking her movements. Learning everything he could. Even in her shower at the Naval Observatory, he boasted, she was never alone. He knew her shoe size. Which restaurants she went to and what she ordered. He told Lady Sophie all that, the first day he took her. He liked to see people squirm. To invade their minds. She could not have escaped him, Miss Carrie. If it hadn’t been Berlin, it would have been Paris.”
    “I can see that.”
    “Even in her shower,” Cuddy repeated. His careful gaze drifted over Caroline. “At the Observatory. He said that?”
    Jozsef nodded.
    “There were people watching her at the veep’s residence? People on Mlan’s payroll?”
    “I don’t know if he paid them. But yes, he had informants. People who followed her. People she would not notice.”
    “Who were they?” Cuddy asked with deliberate casualness.
    Jozsef laughed—a short, bitter bark. “My father never told me those things. He was not a fool.”
    “No,” Caroline agreed. “He was not a fool.”
    She studied the boy’s face for an instant, seeing the brutal shadows beneath the eyes, the sharpness of the facial bones. “Were