The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  Béla Horváth’s body had not yet been discovered in the ruins of his lab. She was granted a period of ignorance.

  Mirjana slept fitfully, despite the soothing drum of rain on the skylight glass. She awoke with a start to the slam of a door and knew that her mother had left for work. The older woman owned an antiques store on the main street of Szentendre, Fó Ter, a thriving business now that people had cash to spend.

  It was already after ten o’clock.

  Panic washed over Mirjana. She turned, threw off the wool blanket her mother had tucked around her, and searched frantically for the notebook and ampules. They were there still, on the floor at the sofa’s foot, where she had dropped them the night before.

  The strong earthen smell of coffee pulled her to the kitchen. Her mind was still dazed with terror. Her ribs, cracked and tightly taped by a Budapest hospital, ached with every breath. Mlan Krucevic lurked in the corners of her brain, in the closets she forced him to occupy; he hammered loudly at her padlocked doors. He knew about her mother. He knew the apartment in Szentendre. What had she been thinking of to draw him this way? Fool. She had thrown herself down the Danube Bend in desperation, in the middle of the night, but she could not stay. Her mother—

  Where were the ampules? The notebook? What time was it, now?

  She stared crazily around the room, her throat swelling with fear, then saw them lying where she had left them—on the floor near the sofa. Thank God. She wasn’t losing her mind. She took a deep swallow of the coffee, choked, and spat it into the sink.

  Why was she so afraid of him? He had done almost everything to her body that one man could do. If he killed her at last, it would be nothing more than a single moment of terror in the long line of such moments that had punctuated her life. She was not afraid of pain. She was terrified of losing. For once in her life she had the upper hand with Mlan Krucevic—she had the notebook and the ampules, she had knowledge and power over his life. She had a chance to take back Jozsef

  She would find a safe place. She would hide herself and her mother. And then she would contact Mlan— somehow, there was always a way—and tell him what she knew. What she could give to the world, to the United States: the truth about vaccine No. 413.

  And at last, after decades of torment and loss and terror, she would grind his balls under her heel, and wear cleats to do it. She would demand the return of her son.

  And then? What then, Mirjana? You do not make deals with the devil. Because the devil always wins.

  Where is the notebook? The ampules? Da bog sauva —

  There. Near the sofa.

  She poured half the cup of coffee down the drain with shaking fingers. And at that moment, there was a knock on the door.

  Mirjana went rigid. She could not breathe.

  Another knock, louder this time.

  And then the sound of a metal pick sliding into the lock.

  There was no other way out of the apartment. She was trapped.

  Mirjana tore wildly across the small room, whimpering deep in her throat, and snatched up the notebook and ampules. He will not win.

  She thrust Béla’s things under her mother’s mattress in a kind of frenzy. She had mounted a chair and unlocked the skylight by the time the front door was kicked open.

  Shephard insisted on escorting Caroline past the Volksturm tanks and down Dorottya Utca toward Vörösmarty Ter.

  “Are you coming with me?” he asked abruptly.

  “To the Interior Ministry?” She was surprised. “I’d just cramp your style. These are your contacts, Shephard. You don’t need me hovering in the background. I require too much explanation.”

  “That you do,” he muttered under his breath. “So are you off for a quick change in a telephone booth? Caroline Carmichael into Sally Bowles? A meeting with Sharif’s Budapest division, say?”

  She stopped short. So he had taken Wally Aronson’s hints to heart. What else was Tom Shephard beginning to suspect?

  “Look,” she temporized, “I’m sorry I haven’t been completely frank. We work for different agencies. We have different kinds of constraints. I don’t expect you to explain your operational code. So don’t ask me to explain mine. I promise you that everything I do—with blond hair or black—is dedicated toward finding the Vice President.”

  His sharp eyes bored into hers, unappeased.

  “If you want to nab Mirjana Tarcic, you’d better get going,” she said.

  “Where will you be?”

  “At Gerbeaud’s. The café in Vörösmarty Ter. I need some coffee.”

  “I’ll meet you there for lunch.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Let’s say one o’clock.”

  “Done.”

  She waited on the sidewalk until he was out of sight, despite the raw wind gusting off the Danube. Something in the way he carried himself in his rumpled clothes— graceful as a cricketer in flannels, from an era long dead—lifted her spirits immeasurably. She found that she was actually thankful for him: for Tom Shephard, the millstone around her neck. She had not anticipated how useful he could be. He was, after all, the Central European LegAtt. The security systems of an entire region were theoretically at his fingertips. Mirjana Tarcic was as good as bagged.

  She was still gazing after him when Eric’s car pulled up to the corner of Dorottya Utca.

  He had the passenger door open. She got in.

  SIX

  Budapest, 10 A.M.

  DON’T SPEAK, Eric had written on a scrap of paper. Car’s bugged.

  Caroline held the note tightly in her hand and stared straight ahead through the windshield. It had begun to rain, a fine mist that clouded the glass; the interior of the Audi was musty with wet wool and dead smoke.

  He drove fast, toward the Elizabeth Bridge and across the Danube to Gellért Hill, up the winding, parklike roads that switched back and back. In the eleventh century, pagan Huns had rolled St. Gellért down this hill to his death in the Danube. In the nineteenth, the Hapsburg rulers had mounted cannon here and trained them against their own city. More recently, the Soviets had erected statues on the hill, celebrating Communist brotherhood. It was, Caroline thought, a place consecrated in betrayal.

  He pulled up at the summit, monuments soaring behind his back. Gellért Hill was deserted at this time of day, in this shower of rain. She got out.

  Eric left the keys in the Audi’s ignition and joined her. “We don’t have much time.”

  He began to walk, tugging her with him, toward the river roiling gray through the streaming trees.

  “What are you doing out here in broad daylight, alone? That’s not Krucevic’s MO,” Caroline said tensely.

  “He sent me out.” Eric’s voice was almost feverish. “He sent me out for a fucking newspaper, Caroline. It’s a setup.”

  “Béla Horváth is dead.”

  He stopped in his tracks, swearing softly, and released her. “Mirjana?”

  “Hasn’t been found. But Buda station’s screening her calls. Don’t use her number.”

  A hundred yards behind them, the Audi they’d left seconds before exploded with the scream of a flying shell. The driver’s side door flew off, kited high into the air, and plummeted to the ground ten feet from where they stood.

  “Holy shit,” Caroline whispered.

  They stopped running at the entrance to the baths that formed the basement of the Hotel Gellért. Eric paid their admission without waiting for change and they ducked inside, as though intent on some shameful assignation. The air was thick with steam and the pungency of eucalyptus. She looked up, saw the cathedral height of the mosaic tile ceiling, an illusion of sanctuary. And thought, They are hunting him.

  Eric led her to a table set into an alcove. She sat down, weak-kneed. He remained standing, a man with places to go, always on the verge of leaving her.

  “Last night,” he said, “after I left your hotel, I drove back to Krucevic’s base. He wasn’t there. Tonio was dead drunk and the boy and Mrs. Payne were sleeping. I downloaded every
thing from his computer. Everything that matters. Then I tried to get the Veep and Jozsef out. Krucevic came back before I could.”

  “And?”

  “And he accused me of selling him out to his ex-wife and Horváth.”

  “Which I presume you’ve done.”

  “Systematically,” Eric agreed, still in the same intense undertone. “It’s the whole point of this operation. I’ve got a network out there. It’s in place. I use it.”

  “Why didn’t he kill you?”

  “I told him he was wrong.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That alone should have bought you a bullet.”

  “I pointed out that I had never been given access to his computer. His computer holds everything that Krucevic values. One person alone has access.” He leaned closer to her, his blue eyes blazing. “To save myself, I gave him Tonio, who was lying unconscious at his feet, reeking of alcohol. I’d knocked him on the head with the butt of my gun. I told Krucevic that if he was looking for a traitor, he should check first with the man who owned his keyboard. Would you call that cowardice, Caroline?”

  “Don’t ask me to stand in judgment over anything you do, Eric. I can’t grant you absolution.”

  “The Veep is dying,” he said. “She’s dying, Caroline, and you’re right, we’re out of time. I can’t leave her alone.”

  “I think you just did,” she retorted. “There’s no road back from a blown car. Did you push the button, or did they?”

  “I didn’t wire the car. Let’s just call that Krucevic’s insurance.”

  Across the distance of maybe a hundred feet, a wet head was bobbing in the warm spring pool. The echoing vastness of the Gellért baths could play tricks with sound, send deceptive waves curling along the ceiling tiles. But Eric was speaking softly.

  “How sick is Payne?” she asked.

  “I’d give her twenty-four hours. Less, probably.”

  “The antibiotic doesn’t work?”

  “It works for a while. She’s had several doses of it, which accounts for the fact that she’s still breathing. But Krucevic has cut her off. His antibiotic supplies were limited. He was saving them for his son. And then Payne smashed all that he had.”

  Caroline stared at him in dismay. “That’s … that’s insane.”

  “She thought that if Krucevic was out of drugs, he’d trash his campaign. Head back to the labs in Berlin.”

  “You don’t agree.”

  “Krucevic never retreats, Carrie.”

  “He’ll kill her for this, won’t he?”

  “I think that’s what she wants,” Eric mused. “She’s got immense courage, Caroline—she’s tougher than you’d believe—but she’s in enough pain to think death would be a relief. Last night she asked me to shoot her. I probably should have. Now—”

  He reached into his jacket and withdrew a small brown envelope. “Get this to Scottie.”

  “What is it?”

  “A computer disk. Everything Scottie needs to know is on it. Mlan’s contacts in terrorist organizations worldwide, his complete list of accounts, the way the money flows, the mumps epidemic—”

  “Mumps epidemic? You mean in Pristina?”

  An angel with flushed cheeks sinking on her mother’s shoulder. Thousands of sick and dying children, the Muslim horde Krucevic despised. No more sacred to him than firebombed hostels, or dead chancellors, or winsome Dagmar Hammecher, her blond hair shaved and her small hand sawn off. Of course the mumps epidemic was no accident. Caroline’s anger flared as the random pieces shifted into place.

  “And copies of Krucevic’s E-mail correspondence with Fritz Voekl,” Eric concluded.

  “Voekl’s sending German medical teams into Pristina with vaccines right now,” she said. “Is that the point? Create an epidemic so that Fritz can save a few Muslim lives?”

  “You’re the analyst.”

  She stared at him. The disk in her hand held over two years of their lives. Outside the rain beat down on Budapest, dead leaves swirled in the city park. The city park. Where Scottie’s ghost still walked in tweeds, an arm around each of their shoulders—

  “Scottie knew about you, didn’t he?” she said very softly. “All this time. Scottie knew you weren’t dead.”

  Eric went utterly still. His face took on a look of brittle awareness. “He never told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  Slowly, he reached for the chair opposite and sat down. “Are you saying that Scottie never told you I was alive?”

  When he could have the most exotic undercover operation ever conceived in his own backyard, subject to no oversight, financed by selective borrowing among the CTC’s ample accounts?

  With Eric to run and enough room to run him, Scottie could screw them all—Congress, the guys who’d been promoted past him, Dare Atwood in her cherry-paneled office on the seventh floor. Why tell anyone at all? It was a much better secret savored in silence. And with a little luck and expert timing, Scottie might even catch Mlan Krucevic, certified sicko, with all the adulation that could bring.

  Deception was second nature to Scottie; he had compartments to spare in his sinuous brain. Eric fit so conveniently into one of them. Caroline felt suddenly giddy with hilarity. Of course Scottie told nobody. This thing was as sexy as a stripper in the living room, it was the wet dream of a case officer’s long, dry career.

  “What do you think Scottie is,” she replied with a shaky laugh. “Unprofessional?”

  Eric stood up suddenly and tossed the small table aside like so many milk cartons, tossed it at the tiled wall of the baths with a violence that echoed and reechoed under the streaming ceiling. Her second explosion that hour. And seized her by the shoulders, oblivious of the bathers watching them now.

  “You honestly thought that I would leave you— spend all this time under cover—without a word? You think I would do that? You think any kind of operation would be worth that kind of pain?”

  “I had nothing else to believe.”

  “Thirty months.” He paced viciously away from her. “Thirty months of hell, of being not what I am, of plotting and calculating and hoping there’s some kind of God between me and death, of thinking, Caroline is there. She is there. I will get back to her —”

  He stopped.

  “Only that was never part of the plan, was it? That’s why he didn’t tell you. Scottie never thought I was coming back.”

  “Eric,” she said brusquely, “you’re dead and buried. And believe me, right now, everybody at the Agency would prefer you stayed that way. No one’s prepared to offer an explanation for your survival. The truth has never had much to do with Operations, has it?”

  “But this is Scottie we’re talking about.” He stared, unseeing, at the steam rising like cumulus from the surface of the pool.

  “There’s no way he could have told me. I’d have rejected the entire idea. Or I’d have shared the secret— with Cuddy, maybe. You know I would.”

  “Cuddy doesn’t know?” Eric stared at her blankly. “What about Dare Atwood?”

  “She sure as hell knows now.”

  “You all wish I were dead.” Accusing now, with herself as proxy for the man he couldn’t strike. “That’s what you want.”

  “Well …” She rose and went to him, afraid of the high-vaulted chamber’s effect on sound. “Nobody was thrilled to see you alive and well and kidnapping the Vice President, understand?”

  Eric wheeled away from her. “He used me. Completely and utterly. And I volunteered for the privilege. I was so proud that he trusted me….”

  “Are you saying that Scottie engineered the hit against Payne?”

  “That would be Oliver Stone’s version, Caroline. Don’t be paranoid. Scottie put me under deep cover, working for Krucevic. And told me that when I had what I needed to nail the asshole, he’d get me out.”

  What had Scottie said only Tuesday morning? He’s akiller, Caroline, and he’s out in the cold. It wouldn’t be Scottie who brought Eric home. Scottie had ru
n a rogue operation. As a result, Vice President Sophie Payne was dying.

  But Scottie had complete deniability—as long as Eric was silenced forever.

  They crept through the Var, the Castle District, scorning the open expanse of the Danube ramparts, the funicular railroad, the places where tourists thronged. They took the side streets and alleyways beyond Gellérthegy until at last they emerged at the north end of the Var. This part of Buda had been destroyed and rebuilt so many times—by Mongols and Turks and Austrians and Nazis—it seemed a fitting place to turn over the rubble of their lives. A place where the appearance of order was all that remained.

  “There was a girl,” Eric said as they walked, “at the university. A graduate student in molecular biology. Her name was Erzsébet Király.”

  “What about her?”

  “She worked part time in Mlan’s lab. I recruited her there, before the end—before MedAir 901. She was sharp and funny and you would have liked her, Caroline, with her peasant skirts and her long red braids hanging down her back. She knew something was wrong with Mlan’s vaccines.”

  “You mean the mumps?”

  “His small contribution to the Muslim problem.” Eric looked at her searchingly “It’s all on the disk. Make sure you get it to Dare. Not to Scottie. Is that understood?”

  She nodded. He walked on, head down, hands thrust in his pockets. She tried not to look over her shoulder for a man with a gun.

  “Three years ago, I started paying Erzsébet to smuggle information out of the lab,” Eric said. “She did a good job. So good, Mlan chose her to carry his germs to Turkey.”

  “On MedAir 901?”

  “It made excellent sense.” Eric kicked at a paving stone and watched it skitter into the street. “Airlines don’t x-ray boxes of certified medical supplies. Not vaccines. Not when the boxes come with the right government seals and stamps. They’re too afraid that radiation will destroy the drugs. Do you see?”