The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  He sat down on the bed next to her. She refused to flinch.

  “I know that you see me as a Croat nationalist, Mrs. Payne. That is an understandable mistake. I fought for my fellow people in Bosnia because if I had not, the Serbs and the Muslims would have overwhelmed them and the mass graves you speak of would have held only Croats.” He lifted his hand and waved it gently, in farewell to the past. “That is done. Bosnia is a nation torn in three. The rifts will never heal. What the 30 April Organization attempts to ensure, Mrs. Payne, is that the plight of the Balkans will never become the plight of Europe.”

  Viewed this closely, the scar at his temple revealed itself as the work of a bullet. Someone had once tried to kill him. “You’re working for peace?” Sophie asked sarcastically. “That’s why you bombed the Brandenburg and kidnapped me?”

  “I am working to eradicate a cancer,” he replied impatiently. “Do you know that is the most common Serb image applied to ethnic Albanians? I would go further and apply it to the entire Islamic world. Adherents of the Muslim faith are the most ignorant and uncultured peoples in existence. They bring strife, fanaticism, darkness, and violence wherever they breed. And they breed, Mrs. Payne, as no people has ever bred before. Their children are their deadliest weapon. The numbers are against the Aryan peoples of the West, Mrs. Payne. You must know that. It is happening in your own country. The people of northern Europe have two or three children, while your blacks and Hispanics have a dozen each. In time, democracy will be overwhelmed in their cesspool.”

  He gazed at her piercingly, the brown eyes devoid of all emotion.

  “This is the great Achilles’ heel of the American elite. You invite the mongrels of the world to attend your universities and eat at your exclusive tables. Well, Mrs. Payne, the mongrels of the world will savage the hand that feeds them. I do not intend to let that happen in Europe.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sophie said. “How does holding me hostage affect the population of Europe?”

  “It buys me time. A decent interval without U.S. or NATO intervention.”

  “Intervention in what?”

  “The reconquest of an entire continent,” he said baldly, “without armies, warfare, or trials in The Hague. And then I will set about the process of cleansing.”

  “The world will never allow another Final Solution. If the air strikes against Belgrade taught you nothing else, they should have taught you that.”

  He shrugged. “Milosevic lacked finesse. It was not his fault—he’s a crafty manipulator, a ruthless executive, but his tools were limited. So were Adolf Hitler’s, Mrs. Payne. Did you know that Hitler wasted valuable time throughout the first years of the war in an effort to perfect his nerve gas? Like all great masters of innovation, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before. We intend to do it right.”

  “You mean, you and the four guys in the other room?”

  She had succeeded in nettling him; the dark eyes narrowed with malice.

  “Do you think the strength of the Aryan nation sprang forth only at Hitler’s command?” he barked. “It has always been there. It always will be. And heroes emerge from time to time to lead the fight for freedom.”

  It was then that Sophie finally understood the passion behind Krucevic’s careful facade, the inferno beneath his extraordinary self-possession. Like a Crusader from a vanished age, he had God and Destiny on his side. And at once she was afraid—deeply and coldly afraid—of what would eventually happen to her. She could expect no mercy from this man. To survive, she would have to destroy him on his own ground.

  How? For the love of God, how?

  “Do you know why the Serbs killed the Kosovars and drove them out of their kingdom?” he asked her.

  “‘Their kingdom’?” Even if she could somehow seize a gun and figure out how to fire it, it was not enough to kill him. She had to put an end to whatever her abduction had unleashed. How?

  “Because the Serbs have never forgotten that the invading Turkish hordes slaughtered their men on the Field of Black Birds at the battle of Kosovo.”

  “That was in the fourteenth century,” Sophie said distractedly.

  “In 1389, to be precise, and for more than six hundred years, that Serb defeat has been Serbia’s most hallowed holiday. In the United States, you celebrate victory. You parade down your village streets on the Fourth of July wrapped in your American flag. Serbs have never known what victory is. They sanctify the hour of their worst humiliation. What happened recently in Kosovo—the Serb butchering of ethnic Albanians— was a vengeance six hundred years in the making.”

  “Glorify it any way you like,” she retorted, “but it was still an unprovoked atrocity on a massive scale.” To fight him is useless; it’ll only get me killed. There were four men she knew of-—perhaps more—in the compound alone, men who were armed and ruthless. And then there’s Jozsef… I can’t leave Jozsef alone. But were all four of the other terrorists against her? What if Michael could be persuaded to help?

  “The Serb cleansing of Kosovo was the attempt by one people to eradicate another,” Krucevic said, unperturbed, “and in my opinion, it was unforgivably crude.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Even with Michael’s help—if I can get Michael’s help—an escape won’t put an end to Krucevic’s plans. It’s not enough to kill him and run. He has to be held accountable for the Brandenburg Gate. I owe Nell Forsyte that much.

  “I am trained as a biologist, Mrs. Payne,” he confided with an air of frankness. “I tend to conceptualize in medical terms.”

  “Really,” she replied noncommittally What is he talking about?

  And then she remembered the fear. The cold stink of anxiety, of fatal error, that she’d detected in him when her fever soared. Krucevic, the biologist, had been surprised by the recurrence. It had frightened him. Why? My survival is immaterial to him. So he must be afraid for his son.

  She snatched at the thought, she hid it deep in a closet in her mind. She had found it. Krucevic’s one vulnerability. Jozsef

  “If you discover that a cancer is multiplying in your body,” he went on, “if you see that the sickened cells are destroying the healthy ones, you have two choices. You can cut off the limb where the cancer feeds, and bury it deep in the ground. Or you can systemically poison the cells within and negate their ability to multiply.” He held up his hands like a successful magician. His own brilliance, the rabbit in his hat. “With patience and subtlety, Mrs. Payne, the sick cells will die. The healthy will prevail. Your body will be cancer free.”

  Mute, she stared at him. What he had just said was important, she knew. It was strategy, not just politics. He had told her exactly what he meant to do. He had handed her 30 April’s operational agenda. But the sense of it eluded her, like a Rubik’s Cube that failed to turn.

  He reached his right hand to her cheek. Instinctively, she jerked away from him. The hand slid down to her neck and gripped it cruelly. His other palm caressed her forehead. “I am checking you for fever, Mrs. Payne.”

  “I’m fine.” She was rigid under his hands. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “You lie. Already you feel less well than you did when our conversation began. In a little while, you will feel even worse. That is exactly as it should be.”

  He rose and moved to the door. She followed him with her eyes. Was he bluffing? Or was her mind about to melt with fever?

  “I want our friend Jack Bigelow to see the consequences of his ill-advised raid,” Krucevic told her. “A videotape, I think, is in order. We’ll wait a few hours while the bacillus gains in strength.”

  FOUR

  Berlin, 9:27 A.M.

  CAROLINE SPENT FORTY-TWO MINUTES in the Palestinian safe house while the smoke of Saleh’s Turkish cigarettes gradually clouded the room. She was puzzled by the fact of tobacco—wasn’t it blasphemous for a follower of Islam to use it?—but Arab culture wasn’t her strong suit. Maybe the prohibition centered on alcohol. Or maybe a fellow dedicated to the jihad was i
mmune from the restrictions applied to ordinary mortals. Regardless, the smoke was remarkably pungent. She would have to send her clothes to be cleaned before she checked out of the Hyatt.

  If she made it back alive.

  Saleh kept a curious sort of handgun on the table in front of him, with a free-floating barrel and an ergonomic handgrip. A Hammerlï, Caroline guessed. It probably had electronic trigger action, variably weighted. Which meant it could fire if Saleh so much as grazed the table leg. A two-thousand-dollar gun in a world of five-hundred-dollar competition. The carpentry business had been very good to Mahmoud Sharif.

  Saleh caught her assessing his piece. He held her gaze and did not blink. A garden-variety banker such as Jane Hathaway should look intimidated, Caroline thought— not as though she were calculating the speed of his draw. She folded her arms protectively across her chest and hunched slightly as she paced. No point in getting cocky.

  She was expected at the Interior Ministry in less than an hour. When she failed to show up, Wally might be worried. Unless it was he who had tailed her from Alexanderplatz in the white Trabant.

  What would Mahmoud Sharif do if he suspected she was not who she claimed? Was he likely to torture a woman? Or just shoot her in the back of the head and dump her body where no one would look for it?

  Caroline glanced again at Saleh. He was studying her with unconcealed interest, eyes narrowed against the smoke.

  The front door—the one she had supposed locked— swung back on silent hinges. Akbar stood there, his face devoid of expression. He took a step back, deferential now.

  The man who entered was taller than the others by a good foot and broad in the shoulder, with glittering black eyes and a clean-shaven face. His nose was so sharply hooked it might almost have been a caricature, and an angry red scar bisected his right cheek—the trail of shrapnel, Caroline thought. He wore black jeans and black leather boots and a dress shirt of raw silk. He smelled, ever so faintly, of freshly sawn wood. She imagined his children, running to greet him at the end of the day and being lifted high on a cedar-scented shoulder. Wood chips in his hair. She looked instinctively at his hands. Fine-boned, sensitive, adept at the manipulation of small parts. Had he constructed the device that brought down MedAir 901? Made floating candy wrappers of all those children high above the Adriatic?

  “Miss Jane Hathaway,” he said, and inclined his head. “I am Mahmoud Sharif. You wished to speak to me.”

  What was the protocol? Should she extend her hand? Would he take it if she did? She nodded back at him instead. “I appreciate your willingness to see me. I know you are a busy man.”

  “For the cousin of my friend Michael I would do much,” Sharif said impassively, and gestured toward the sofa.

  Caroline sat down. Sharif took one of the armchairs; Akbar, who still stood by the door, snapped his fingers. Saleh crushed out his cigarette and joined him. And that quickly, she was alone with Mahmoud Sharif and the gun his man had left on the table before her.

  It occurred to Caroline that there were at least a thousand questions Scottie Sorensen would have liked Sharif to answer, but posing a single one of them would destroy the perilous balance of this meeting.

  “Your false passport is excellent, Miss Hathaway, and the details that support it rather extraordinary.”

  She cocked her head and studied him as though she could not quite follow his meaning.

  “I particularly admired the pub receipts from Notting Hill Gate, and the British charwoman who answered the phone in what was supposed to be Hampstead,” he continued. “I studied in England many years ago; I could not have told your housekeeper from a native. But then, your organization has vast resources, does it not?”

  Caroline frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. Is there a problem with my passport?”

  “None at all,” Sharif assured her with a gleam of amusement in his eyes. “And for that I commend you. A great number of such documents pass through my fingers, you understand, and rarely have I seen one so accomplished. Unless, perhaps, it was Michael’s.”

  He waited for her reaction.

  “This is all very entertaining,” she said. “The blindfold, the gun on the table, the cool-your-heels-in-the-back-parlor-while-I-run-your-numbers treatment. But I have an appointment in less than an hour, Mr. Sharif, and I’d appreciate some candor.”

  “Candor,” he repeated. The gleam of amusement had vanished. “And would your appointment happen to be with the CIA?”

  “If I thought they knew where Michael was, I wouldn’t be here”.

  “I, too, had hoped for candor, Miss Hathaway But you have not even trusted me with your true name. I have no inclination to help you. Indeed, I waste my time here.” He got to his feet.

  She decided to take a risk. “I don’t think you even know where Michael is, Sharif.”

  “Michael O’Shaughnessy does not exist, Miss Hathaway. We both know that. Therefore he can never have possessed a cousin. Now tell me why I should help you.”

  “I’m here because Michael’s father has died!” she burst out. “Someone has to tell him. I’m the only one in the family he still trusts.”

  “I detest this sort of subterfuge, Miss Hathaway. It is demeaning to us both.”

  She was suddenly at a standstill. When you don’t know what to say, Eric whispered in her ear, don’t say anything at all. Impulsively, she decided to ignore him.

  “He’s in trouble, Sharif.”

  The man actually laughed. “Aren’t we all?”

  “This time he could die.”

  “But then, he’s done that before.” Sharif’s dark eyes flicked shrewdly up to her own. He took a small silver knife from his pocket and began to pare his fingernails. “Are you in love with him?” Contempt in the words.

  “Not anymore.”

  He set the knife down. “I know the man you are looking for. I even know his real name. I also know that he was once employed by the CIA and that they fabricated the papers he is presently using. Your papers, Miss Hathaway, are remarkably similar.” The eyes raked over her. “So if you are not in love with him—if that is not why you wish to see him—then I am forced to conclude that Michael is in difficulties with his government. And that you have been sent to me in the hope of finding him.”

  “Now I think it is I who waste my time.” Caroline reached for the handbag he had left on the table.

  Sharif gripped her wrist. “I have not the least intention of delivering him up to you.”

  She stared at him implacably.

  “In fact, in other circumstances I might be moved to interrogate you more harshly, and for a longer period.”

  “I don’t scare easily.”

  His fingers—the delicate, sensitive fingers—were suddenly around Caroline’s throat.

  She gasped, gulping for air, fighting the impulse to battle back. You must not show fear. And yet fear flooded her like a wash of warm water, moist between her thighs, rising hotly to her rib cage; a dull thud of heartbeat, the blood panicking inside her. Stupid, she thought bitterly. You stupid bitch. What were you playing at?

  “I could ask you any number of questions.” The Hammerlï’s muzzle kissed her temple. “Over the course of a week, or a year. I could find out whatever I needed to know, Jane Hathaway if I wished to spend the time. Whether you scare easily or not is a matter of indifference. What is important is how much pain is required to break you.”

  Her breathing now was nothing but a hiss. She kept her hands clenched tightly in her lap, a pathetic attempt at dignity. He watched her with the appearance of detachment, as though he were watching TV. The gun, hair-trigger, explicit in the hollow above her ear. Her lungs were screaming for air, and for an instant, she believed he would throttle her—that she would die clawing at his wrist in desperation. Anger knifed through her.

  “One thing intrigues me,” he said idly. And laid the gun down on the table. His other hand still gripped her throat. She could not croak the question he seemed to expect. He dangled th
e grenade pin before her nose.

  “This thing intrigues me. A keepsake, Akbar says. Something you treasure of Michael’s.” He snorted derisively. “A grenade pin?”

  She could no longer see for the black dots dancing before her eyes. In a second she would pass out. She reached up with both hands and dug her nails into his wrist. His eyelids flickered, but otherwise, he regarded her steadily. The pressure of his thumb against her windpipe increased. Flames flared inside her head. Panic imploded like a screaming child. Her fingers went slack.

  And then he released her.

  “I confess I do not comprehend the grenade pin at all.”

  Caroline drew a shuddering breath. “People … attach importance to all kinds of things.”

  “Women, in my experience, attach none whatsoever to the instruments of war.”

  “Then you and I know very different sorts of women.”

  “Perhaps. But even if we allow for the differences between Western and Arab women, Miss Hathaway— even if we suppose for an instant that any number of bankers in London carry such things in their purses— even then, the grenade pin does not fit. You were sent by your organization to discover this man’s whereabouts. Correct?”

  Caroline did not reply.

  “An organization such as yours does not think in subtle terms. It offers up the sentimental things: a high-school ring, a cherished love letter. It does not make a keepsake of a grenade pin.”

  “Then perhaps, praise be to Allah, your assumptions about me are false.”

  “My assumptions are never false,” Sharif said softly. “The day that I am wrong is the day that I shall die.”

  The bomb maker’s margin of error.

  “So,” he said briskly, “I must conclude that there is more to this matter than appears to the eye. You are unable or unwilling to be truthful; I cannot force you to be otherwise. But you know something more of this Michael than merely his false name. I will not tell you where he is. That I cannot do for anyone. But because of this—because of the grenade pin—I shall undertake to pass a message.”