The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  “They seem to know what they’re doing.” Stefan Marx was peering through the tent flap next to her. He was the head of their volunteer group, a veteran of Doctors Without Borders. A kind man who had left a thriving medical practice in Stuttgart to spend his time in the hellholes of the world. “Now, if only we knew what they were pumping into those kids’ veins.”

  Simone looked up at him swiftly. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that this vaccine can’t possibly have gone through clinical trials. I only hope to God it’s not worse than the disease. But I ask you—” He gazed angrily around the crowded tent, the faces of the suffering children. “Do we have a choice?”

  Enver Gordievic apparently thought so.

  Throughout the day, Simone had looked for him among the waiting parents. She had hoped against hope that he would be there, with little Krystle on his shoulder. Because she dreaded the moment when she might look up and find him standing in the medical tent with another feverish child. Simone had learned from bitter experience that only one in twenty children survived this disease.

  Stefan Marx laid his hand on her shoulder and smiled into her careworn face. “You should take a break,” he said.

  She opened her mouth to protest, to insist that she was just fine—but he’d already gone to help a nurse lift a boy from a pallet on the floor. Simone pulled on her jacket and stepped out into the early twilight of late fall. The medical teams would vaccinate under spotlights if they had to. No one wanted to turn these people away.

  She hesitated, uncertain which direction to take— then found herself striding toward Enver’s shelter. She had not seen him since his daughter’s body had been carried from the medical tent for burial.

  The small, crazily canted shack was silent as she approached. Simone stepped up to the door and knocked tentatively. And the flat panel of wood swung open under her hand.

  At first she could pick nothing out of the shadows. Then her eyes adjusted, and Krystle’s fair baby hair gleamed in the last bit of daylight. The child was lying on the floor, hands flung wide like a snow angel’s. Enver’s arms were around her. They might almost have been asleep.

  Then Simone saw the neat round bullet holes in each of their temples and the pool of blood shining wickedly on the floor. She saw the pistol lying spent where Enver’s hand had dropped it. He had found a third way, then—a path between sickness and untested vaccines. He had taken his girl home to her mother.

  “Enver,” Simone whispered. And her voice broke on his name.

  ELEVEN

  Berlin, 7:15 P.M.

  CAROLINE PACED THE CONCOURSE at Tegel Airport, careful where she set her feet. She had cleared her weapon with Hungarian airport security; the forms had been filed, the flight crew notified. All that remained now was to wait. The sense of vertigo she had attributed yesterday to jet lag was back with redoubled force—but tonight, it sprang from fear. She was flying to Hungary on pure gut, she lacked most of the pieces of the puzzle, and her mind bucked and surged with panic. Was Eric really in Hungary? And was Sophie Payne with him? Or had she clutched at the wrong straw out of desperation and hope?

  You analysts just demand so much certainty, Wally’s voice muttered in her mind, before you’re willing to move off a dime.

  She had tried to think as Eric would: as a case officer in the field. She had tried to work from instinct. But the terrain was unfamiliar, like the interior of a house navigated by dark; she was terrified of hitting walls where corridors should be. If she was wrong, Sophie Payne could die.

  The airport concourse swayed. Vertigo. She stopped short and took a steadying glance at a television monitor.

  The evening news flickered across the screen. She understood German poorly—it was a language that had never taken, somehow—but the images were clear. Uniformed riot police, a man’s bloodied, twisted face, a bottle exploding in midair. Shattered windows along the boulevards of Pest. Hungary was in turmoil.

  “I guess the news got out,” someone said behind her; she turned to see the battered raincoat, the five o’clock shadow along his jawline.

  “Shephard,” she said stupidly.

  “I think I’m seated next to you.” He fished in his pocket for a ticket and scowled down at it. “Ten-B. That means I’m in the middle seat, doesn’t it? Damn Mrs. Saunders! I suppose the old bat gave you the window.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Following Sally Bowles to Buda.”

  The implication was obvious: She had deceived him in the matter of Mahmoud Sharif, and he wasn’t about to lose sight of her now. She almost snapped his head off in annoyance, but then Shephard shrugged as though nothing much mattered and said, “The investigation on this end is dead.”

  “What about Old Markus and the dump truck?”

  “The stuff’s going to a landfill,” he said bleakly. “Wally’s agreed to lead a Bureau forensics team in there after dark. Wanna bet they find zip?”

  “With that as an alternative, I’d get out of town, too.” She forced a smile.

  He nodded toward the chaos on the television screen. “I hope you don’t expect to use your ATM card while we’re in happy Hungary. Stock market plummeted. The banks have frozen their assets.”

  “I’ve got cash. What do you expect to do there?”

  The hazel eyes flicked back to her face. “The Secret Service requested me. For the Lajta embezzlement probe. I’m the Central European LegAtt, remember?”

  “Of course. Sorry to be so dense. I’m a nervous flyer. I should have a drink or something.”

  To her surprise, he produced a flask from his coat pocket. “Here. Have a swig. Or do women sip?”

  “I’ve never actually seen one of these.” It was a dull silver, polished smooth from countless pockets. Someone had engraved his initials. “What’s in it?”

  “Single-malt Highland whiskey from a distillery I can’t pronounce.”

  “Is this legal?”

  “Come on. It’s Berlin.”

  On the TV screen overhead, a woman screeched; Caroline could recall enough Hungarian from her Budapest days to understand the obscenities. Az anyád! Your mother. Lofasz a Seggedbe! A horse dick up your ass. She tipped the neck of Tom’s flask into her mouth and felt the Scotch burn down her throat. Bassza meg. Fuck it. “Thanks. I have no idea what that actually tasted like—but thanks.”

  He laughed. “Why the nerves?”

  There was no reason he should know, of course. “Unexpected turbulence,” she lied.

  The plane, as it happened, sat two to a row on the left side of the cabin, so that Mrs. Saunders’s good sense was redeemed and Tom Shephard’s long legs were thrust out into the aisle. Once they were airborne, Caroline passed him the sports section of her newspaper. She was thankful for a quarter hour of silence.

  The news was rife with speculation about the Vice President’s kidnapping but mentioned nothing of the economic chaos in Hungary—so there had been no hint, then, of the “series of events” in Central Europe. Nothing an analyst could point to, no sign of a chink where the dam would give way. She flipped through the front section and found a picture of Pristina. Rank upon rank of Kosovar children, lined up for German vaccines. Twenty-three hundred kids were now sick. Another thousand dead. And the numbers were climbing. Vaccines —

  Caroline’s thought was interrupted by a flight attendant with a drinks cart. She asked for a gin and tonic. Shephard got a beer. In all the business of napkins and ice, the newspaper was set aside and her time for solitary thought was done.

  “Wally let me read your stuff. You seem to have a handle on Krucevic,” Shephard told her.

  “Whether it’s the right handle is the question.”

  “How do you research your personality assessments, Carrie?” His tone was careful, but she heard a judgment lurking somewhere. He didn’t buy the psychobabble.

  “When I haven’t got the guy on a couch, you mean? I use his date of birth and consult an astrologist. Krucevic was born in Saturn
with Mercury rising. I don’t have to tell you how bad that is.”

  He cracked a smile. “No, seriously.”

  “I use everything I can find, Tom. International police reports, foreign and domestic press, State Department reporting …”

  “Psychiatric evaluation?”

  “I usually collaborate with a staff psychiatrist, yes.”

  “And they think Krucevic is sane.”

  “Mlan Krucevic has never betrayed the least sign of mental instability. You can’t call a man nuts just because he kills people.”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to?” he asked her searchingly.

  “Call Krucevic nuts, or kill people?”

  “I mean, what’s it like to follow this guy for years, Caroline? Knowing he murdered your husband?”

  She felt a spark of anger toward Wally Impossible to have a private life in the Intelligence community. “Are you asking whether I’m on a personal vendetta?”

  “Let’s just say you have a variety of motives for whatever you’re doing. It didn’t take all that talk of the Third Reich to tell me that. I saw your clandestine getup this morning. I doubt even Wally knows about Sally.”

  Caroline sipped her drink and decided to ignore that particular probe. “Tom, my personal life has undoubtedly affected my analysis. Let’s take it as a given that I’m prejudiced against 30 April. We all are.”

  “But some of us more than others,” he pointed out. “I may want to put Krucevic out of business, I may want to save the Vice President—but I’m not motivated by revenge. That has to make a difference.”

  Revenge. Caroline’s spine tingled at the word. Was it revenge that drove Eric? Did he burn with desire to see Krucevic suffer, so that nothing—not even Sophie Payne, or the little girl he’d killed, or Caroline’s pain— weighed in the balance? She could not comprehend the depth of such emotion. Even in her worst moments of rage and despair, vindictiveness was beyond her. But she knew it was within Eric’s grasp. Revenge, to Eric, would look like justice.

  “Revenge, if it’s done right, makes you thorough,” she told Shephard brutally. “It makes you own the enemy. It forces you to live inside another person’s brain and think like he does. And that may be just what Sophie Payne needs right now. Nothing less than obsession will save her.”

  “Are you obsessed?”

  She glanced away from him, toward the night beyond the plane window. The wing lights were flashing blue and white. “I dream of Krucevic, Tom, and I don’t even know what he looks like. I feel him like a violence in my sleep.”

  He nodded wordlessly. “Tell me about Eric. If it’s not too painful.”

  She almost laughed. Since Eric’s phone call the previous night—that ruthless shot in the dark—Caroline had been tortured by every moment of loss and confusion endured in the past thirty months. But his voice had aroused her sleeping love—the love that had persisted, beyond terror and a false grave.

  She had flown to Berlin on rage. Rage was gone now; but she could not define what had taken its place.

  “Eric was a cowboy,” she told Tom Shephard. “An ex–Green Beret with a lot of physical courage, the kind of person you’d want at your back when things got rough. The CIA used to be full of them.”

  Shephard grinned. “Now the cowboys are all day traders, one inch away from financial ruin.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I find it …” He hesitated.

  “Hard to see me with someone like that? Cowboys aren’t Sally Bowles material? If I remember correctly, she preferred Yale men with failing courage.”

  “So what was it? Opposites attracting?”

  Why had she loved Eric? Why did she love him still?

  “He made me feel alive,” she attempted, as though telling Shephard might explain it for herself. “More alive than I’d ever felt before. Like a pulse was beating right under my fingertips. Eric never thought about his next step—he just took it. There’s a huge freedom in that kind of life.”

  “And terrible consequences.”

  “Yes—but it’s not how I live at all.” She glanced at him. “I live in my head. Loving Eric was reckless and intoxicating and risky. It had nothing to do with careful consideration. It was complete emotional surrender.” Like a shove off a jump tower from forty feet, fear and exultation rising with the ground. “I’ve never felt anything like it before or since.”

  “And you miss it. Miss him. So I guess you were happy.”

  “Yes and no.” She thrust aside the memory of sex like a hand at the throat, sex as ruthless as hunger, sex that cast her up on the sands of morning a bleached and whitened bone. “Eric was difficult. Moody, hard to reach sometimes—he took his work very seriously. But he had a great deal of charm. And a sense of humor. He was intelligent without being well educated; he had a canniness that was pure gut.”

  Gut. It was carrying her to Budapest.

  “A man’s man,” Shephard mused.

  “Entirely. But he was often afraid—sick with fear, churning inside. Fighting it gave him a sense of purpose, I think. Aside from a love of good beer and Jack Nicholson, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Just over ten years. How about you? Ever married?”

  “Yes.” His face tightened.

  She thought of the initials engraved on the hip flask and the fact that he carried it everywhere. “Divorce?”

  “Breast cancer.”

  “Ah,” she managed.

  “You know what it’s like to lose someone.” His eyes were now fixed on the plane bulkhead. “We went back to the States last posting, thinking she’d get better treatment.”

  “Strange, isn’t it, how you learn that you can’t change what’s going to happen? That you can only endure it.”

  “You remind me of Jen,” he said simply.

  “With blond hair or black?”

  It was the wrong thing to have said; she felt it acutely the moment the words were out, but she had done it and now would have to live with the adjustment in his expression, the closing off of feeling. She realized a moment too late that the glib impulse had been self-protective. Tom Shephard was getting under her skin.

  He was contentious and irritable and he shot from the hip, but Caroline sensed that what drove him was a fund of caring. He was brutally honest. His gaze was too piercingly intent, his questions too unswerving; he wore his heart on his soiled trench-coat sleeve. Tom was as transparent in his prickly defenses as Eric was opaque. She was afraid she might even be able to trust him.

  He reached into his briefcase for a paperback novel and said with deliberate casualness, “Are you going to Marinelli’s meeting tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think TOXIN will just hand you the Veep?”

  “Not without persuasion. Then we follow him into the enemy camp with as much firepower as we can beg, borrow, or steal.”

  And enough time for Eric to escape. Because if Eric is ever taken by U. S. forces, Dare’s precious Agency is screwed.

  “I’m beginning to understand your nickname, Mad Dog,” Shephard said. And flipped open his paperback.

  Caroline sank into her seat and looked firmly out the window. A man as good-hearted as Shephard could not possibly comprehend the violence that had won her the name, or the limits to which she could go. But she was very much afraid that he would discover both before their teamwork was done.

  Last night’s broken sleep was catching up with her; her eyes burned with exhaustion. She could pick out lights now in the darkness below, and a wide black band that might have been a road or a great wall but which she recognized as the river. The plane window was freezing against her cheek. It would be colder in Buda than in Berlin, and the air would be sulfurous with smoke from the cheap brown coal they still burned all over Central Europe. For an instant she could almost taste it, the damp Hungarian winter of her failed marriage.

  TWELVE

  The Night Sky, 8:12 P.M.

&
nbsp; IT IS NOVEMBER AGAIN, almost four years ago, November and her feet are scuffling through the dead leaves in Városliget Park. They are strolling idly along the winding path around the artificial lake. The fall afternoon slips sadly between boating season, just ended, and ice-skating, which is yet to come; the lake is forlorn and deserted under the brooding metal sky, a cup filling steadily with sodden leaves. Scottie is at Eric’s left, and Caroline is on his right. Scottie sports a jaunty tweed jacket—green and brown with flecks of plum in it, as though he has jetted in direct from the Highlands for a country-house weekend. They have tried to rise to the occasion his clothes suggest; they have attempted to make their life in Buda appear an expatriate’s dream. For Scottie, they window-shop for Herend porcelain, they compare notes on gulyás, they sip strong Turkish coffee amid velvet cushions while a Translyvanian fiddler plays. Now this walk through the park, a prelude to dinner, and a foil for Scottie’s handling. Because Eric has become his developmental, Eric is his latest hard target.

  Scottie has thirty-six hours to give, between a stop in Berlin and a flying visit to Istanbul. He is charming and yet uncomfortable in Caroline’s presence; his eyes slide perpetually to Eric’s face. She suspects that what Scottie craves is a little private conversation with his main man, the guy he put straight into the hot seat; but Eric’s conversation these days is minimal. He has locked some demon so deeply within himself that speech is something to hoard, speech alone might show his hand. He plays the Chief of Station to Scottie’s Headquarters Dignitary; he pulls out the stops and hits all the bells and whistles; but he is scrupulous in keeping Caroline by his side. Scottie will not go operational in Caroline’s presence. She sees that Eric is using her as a shield, without understanding why. Her position is painful; she has always admired Scottie, after all— he is the father Eric never had, his best friend in the clandestine world. Years later, when Eric is gone and Scottie has abandoned hope, he will turn to Caroline for unconscious comfort; but here in Budapest, on this November afternoon, Scottie eyes her like a delegate from a hostile service. She has turned his Joe.