The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  “There was a bomb in the VaccuGen cargo and Erzsébet put it on the plane,” Caroline said flatly. “Why weren’t you on that flight, too?”

  “I was. I gave up my seat.” His voice was still flush with amazement at it, the narrowness of chance. “I gave up my seat to a woman with a sick child, a woman who needed to get back to Istanbul. The baby was wailing. A flight attendant stood at the front of the plane and asked for volunteers. I went.”

  “They didn’t bother to pull your boarding pass?”

  “This was not an American airline, Carrie. It was a third-world plane with about forty seconds to hit its takeoff slot at one of the busiest airports in the world. They sent me to the counter to rebook and plunked the woman and baby down in my seat. Never took my name off the 901 manifest.”

  “But you didn’t rebook.”

  “I went first to your gate. Your plane had already pulled back. So I got lunch instead.”

  “And thirty-three minutes after takeoff, MedAir 901 exploded,” Caroline finished. Life as I knew it, shot down in flames. The jetway at Dulles seven hours later, Scottie andDare waiting with the news. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it. And then Scottie’s face—grief on that perfect forehead. Mourning the only thing that mattered. His Eric. Then I knew it was true.

  “The plane blew up with Erzsébet and the woman and her baby on board,” Eric said. “I called Scottie as soon as the news came through.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “You were somewhere over the Atlantic. And Scottie promised he’d explain.”

  Explain. As though I were a lunch date skipped for a perfectly good reason. She raised her fists and beat them against his chest in fury. “You did this for Erzsébet Király? You traded me for her?”

  He circled her wrists and held them tightly. “I paid her to betray Mlan. I caused her death. A twenty-one-year-old girl. I owed her something, I think.”

  “Your life for hers. Our marriage.” Caroline’s voice was lacerating. “So was it worth it, Eric? Your payment in blood? Are you happy with the bargain?”

  His eyes were shuttered. “Happiness was never the point, Mad Dog.”

  “No. I see that now.”

  Three blocks from the Hilton he stepped into the doorway of a vacant storefront and pulled her roughly against him. The embrace was cover, she thought; there was no emotion behind it. Just a piece of business in case anyone was watching. The cold hollow in the center of her chest widened and spread, dulling her senses.

  “I’ve got to leave you here,” he said, “and get back to Sophie.”

  “Back? That’s insane! Krucevic will kill you.” Caroline gazed at Eric’s face and saw the wind howling in his bones. He was only forty. He looked far older. He had no way in from the cold, and he knew it. He would live for a while, a hunted man. And then he would die in the dark, far from home. This time, no one would break the news.

  He reached into his pocket, his eyes scanning the street beyond her head. “Take this. It’s a map to Krucevic’s Budapest base. Take it to your COS”—he was dissociating himself now, he wanted nothing to do with the Agency apparatus—“and get a raid going. But do it fast. You haven’t much time.”

  Caroline glanced at her watch. It was 12:32 P.M.

  “The place is an arsenal—”

  “I know. We have the blueprints.” She clutched the paper between chilled fingers. “Eric, Krucevic blew your car. He wants you dead. Béla Horváth may have told Krucevic everything before he died. You can’t walk back into that sort of situation. Unless you have a death wish.”

  “Sophie Payne is alone, Caroline.”

  “We’ll get to her. In a matter of hours. But it’s time you walked away. Anything else is just ego. The Eric Carmichael I knew would never throw himself away on pride.”

  “We both know there’s no going back, Mad Dog.” And at last, she heard bitterness in his voice. “To survive evil, you have to become its friend. You have to take its hand and walk with it a ways. And then the path behind is barred to you. You’re no longer the person you were, the person who would never think of putting a silencer to a little girl’s head. You can’t wake up on a Saturday morning in the suburbs of Washington and take a run along the canal or chat over coffee about the Super Bowl—not if you have the remnants of a soul. You’re too guilty for peace.”

  “It’s as though you really did die,” she said.

  “I’ve done some terrible things, Caroline. I don’t live with them easily. I can’t wipe them off my soul.”

  It was true, she thought, with infinite sadness; and there was no going back to her marriage, either. The man she had loved—yearned for in death, and desired in life—was gone.

  “Take this.” He was holding out a beeper. “It’s a homing device for a transmitter I planted. Highly sophisticated—German technology. If you’re within two miles, it should lead you to the Veep.”

  Her fingers closed around it. “Promise me you won’t return to that bunker.”

  “What promise could I possibly make that you would ever believe?” He studied her narrowly. “Krucevic suspects he’s been betrayed. He may already have left Budapest. If the map’s no good—”

  “Then what? Berlin? For more antibiotic?”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, Mlan doesn’t retreat. He’ll go onward, not back. There’s only one place left.”

  Caroline’s brain raced furiously. To Poland, where Cuddy had traced the Hungarian treasury funds? But Krucevic had no lab in Poland—or none that she had ever identified. If Krucevic cared at all about Jozsef—

  “He’ll go to ground,” she murmured. “Like a wounded animal. He’ll go home, won’t he?”

  Eric nodded. “To Bosnia. iv Zakopan. The old death camp south of Sarajevo. He’s got a lab there, set high in the hills.”

  She took a step backward, her breath catching in her throat. iv Zakopan. A place so terrible, even rumor spoke inwhispers. A place no prisoner had ever left alive. “It really exists?”

  “It must,” Eric said bleakly. “I’ve been there. Now listen carefully, Mad Dog. I’m going to tell you where it is.”

  SEVEN

  Budapest, 1:03 P.M.

  IN THAT LAST MOMENT, when Eric turned to walk away, Caroline reached for him and held him close. She was done with bitterness and rage. Done with weighing her options, cataloging pain, attempting to control the future—it was enough, in that moment, to feel the heart of the man she loved beating close to her own.

  “God, don’t leave me,” she whispered. “I can’t stand it, Eric.”

  “Neither can I,” he muttered into her hair. “You tear the soul from my body, Carrie.”

  “Then take me with you. We can run together.”

  She felt no loyalty now to the Agency that had betrayed him.

  He loosened the hands she had locked around his waist and held her at arm’s length. For perhaps three seconds, she watched him consider her offer. Then he shook his head.

  “It’s not finished. This business. Running won’t end it.”

  “You’ve done enough!”

  “Remember Sophie, Caroline. Sophie. I owe her a chance. And I need you to help me.”

  Caroline’s protests died on her lips. She dropped her head to his chest, as futile as pounding a brick wall. Sophie Payne was more innocent than Eric. Sophie Payne demanded retribution.

  “Let it go, Mad Dog,” he said quietly. “We live the lives we’re left with.”

  “We will not let him win, do you hear?”

  “Mlan?”

  “Scottie,” she said fiercely. “Scottie. We will not let him ruin us and walk away clean.”

  He smiled at her, but there was no belief in his eyes. She felt like a child he was humoring. She snatched at his wrist. “Damn it, Eric. I won’t let you just lie down and die.”

  “No. You never would. My mad dog—”

  He leaned forward and kissed her full on the mouth. The savagery behind it was like an electric shock. />
  “Do you still have your grenade pin?” he asked her.

  She nodded, too breathless to speak. The cunning and unlikely grenade pin.

  “Here’s mine.”

  It dangled before her nose, an olive drab metallic ring broad enough to circle a man’s finger. She reached a trembling hand to his, and their fingers locked.

  “I’ve kept it all these years,” Eric said. “My link to the past. To you.” His grip tightened. “If we both survive this, Mad Dog, I will find you. Believe that.”

  And then her hand was hers again. The grenade pin slipped back into his pocket. She watched him walk away, hoping he would look back—but what would she do if he did? To stand stock-still on the paving stones of Budapest while Eric left her once again was much more difficult than running. Caroline is no trouble, whispered Uncle Hank in her ear. Caroline does the hardest thing, always.

  Eric did not look back.

  When he had turned into a side street and vanished from view, she took a shuddering breath and thrust her hands into her pockets. The sharp, clean edge of his computer disk. The homing device. And the folded piece of paper that was the key to Sophie Payne’s prison.

  Time was short. She would need an explanation for the map’s existence—Vic Marinelli would demand it. Heading for her hotel, Caroline crossed the street at a run.

  Tom Shephard was sitting inside Gerbeaud’s with a copy of the Herald Tribune spread open before him. He had consumed almost all of a chocolate torte and, to Caroline’s surprise, had taken it with tea. A pot of Earl Grey still perfumed the air gently with bergamot.

  “You’re late.” He tossed his napkin aside. “I haven’t got much to tell you, I’m afraid. Mirjana Tarcic was treated in a hospital the day of the riots, then disappeared. The federal police think they might have a lead—”

  “Have you paid, Tom? I’ve got a taxi waiting.”

  The impatience in her face stopped his objection. “What is it?”

  “Krucevic.” She held aloft a slip of paper. “His Budapest base. The one that matches Wally’s blueprints.”

  “Jesus.” Shephard emptied his pockets of loose change. “How the hell did you find that?”

  “Call it a gift from Mahmoud Sharif’s Budapest division,” she said.

  Vic Marinelli came to attention in his chair. “A map?” he said into the receiver. “Right—it’s coming through the secure fax right now. Jesus! What do we do with it?”

  “You wait for Atwood and Bigelow to come on-line in the VTC room,” Cuddy Wilmot told him, “and then you conference.”

  Marinelli was already staring at the rough line drawing of the northwest sector of Budapest, a neighborhood of warehouses and commercial trucking. The map was furred and ratcheted with electronic interference, but he could piece his way, bit by bit, to the center of Krucevic’s heart. His own began to thud with excitement. Headquarters had finally done its job. “What time’s the teleconference?”

  “One-thirty Have Caroline and your LegAtt in the vault three minutes before.”

  “Caroline? You mean your analyst?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Marinelli’s tone made it clear that he did not. “This is operational, Wilmot. She shouldn’t have access.”

  “Caroline is an expert on Mlan Krucevic,” Cuddy replied patiently, “and she’s already seen the map, Vic. I sent a copy to her hotel.”

  “You what?”

  “I thought she’d be able to tell me whether the details made sense. She thinks that they do.”

  “But she’s an analyst,” Vic repeated in disbelief. “Not a case officer. What were you thinking?”

  “We don’t draw those lines so strictly here at the CTC.” Cuddy sounded almost amused. “We use an interdisciplinary approach to cases. And you owe the map to Caroline in the first place. It was at her suggestion that we queried this source.”

  The source, Cuddy had already explained, was an American citizen they would call the Volunteer. He was in the habit of dealing gray arms to dubious clients, but from time to time, he offered information to the CIA in recompense for his sins.

  “This is un-fucking-believable,” Marinelli muttered.

  “Caroline thought of the Volunteer immediately when she saw Wally Aronson’s blueprints. But she was worried about turf-—who handled the guy, what she was allowed to tell you. So she called me.”

  Marinelli’s eyebrows lifted satanically at a target six thousand miles away. He’d spent enough time in the game to know when Headquarters was trying to upstage him.

  “Luckily, the asset was available for questioning— he’s being held in a medium-security facility in West Virginia.”

  “And he just … volunteered … the route to 30 April’s bunker,” Marinelli mused. “Lucky doesn’t even begin to describe it, Wilmot.”

  “Strap one on, Vic.” Now the amusement was obvious. “We’ll be pulling for you back home.”

  In Washington, D.C., it was only seven-thirty in the morning. Caroline studied Dare Atwood’s face on the secure video monitor and found new lines of weariness and strain. The Vice President of the United States had been kidnapped seventy-two hours ago. Since then, Dare had probably briefed Congress once or twice, met or avoided a legion of reporters, held endless meetings with her Intelligence chiefs, and taped a political talk show appearance for airing on Sunday morning. In between, she would have eaten badly, dispatched aides to her Georgetown home in search of a fresh silk blouse and pink lipstick, and taken the long walk from the East Gate to the White House six or seven times, briefcase in hand. The possibility that Eric might go public about his Agency affiliation would have destroyed what little sleep Dare had. The appearance of this map to 30 April’s bunker should have come as an enormous relief. But gazing at the monitor, Caroline couldn’t find relief in Dare’s face.

  Jack Bigelow, on the other hand, looked as though he were wired for sound. His image nearly catapulted through the television screen. He’d slept well, had a big breakfast, and was goin’ out huntin’, loaded for bear.

  “Hey there, folks,” he drawled genially when Embassy Budapest came on-line. “Hear y’all been doin’ yer jobs real well fer a change. Soph’s gonna be pleased as punch when y’all come knockin’ at the asshole’s door.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. President, Director Atwood,” said Ambassador Stetson Waterhouse. He was a recent political appointee to the Buda post—a lifelong fly-fishing buddy of Jack Bigelow s—and a man crucified by concern for protocol. “I have with me COS Vic Marinelli; the Legal Attaché for Central Europe, Mr. Tom Shephard; and Ms. Caroline Carmichael, of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Are we coming through clearly on your end?”

  “Clear as mud, Stetz,” said Bigelow. “DCI’s gonna give us a little summary.”

  “Mr. President,” Dare began, “it is our view that Vice President Sophie Payne may presently be held at 30 April’s Budapest headquarters, a warehouse with underground facilities located in an industrial sector of the city. You have a copy of the map to that warehouse in front of you. Our sources suggest that Payne was present at that site as recently as three hours ago. We have a fix on the facility’s location, and blueprints of its security systems. We do not yet know, however, whether the terrorists and Mrs. Payne are still there.”

  The DCI had barely finished before Bigelow’s voice cut over hers. “You guys on the ground got any ideas?”

  Ambassador Waterhouse looked around at the three of them, flummoxed.

  “Mr. President,” said Marinelli, “we received the map only fifteen minutes ago. I—”

  “Get some surveillance on the place.”

  “Yes, sir.” Marinelli reached for a phone on the desk before him; he dialed an internal embassy number.

  “And make sure yer watchers are armed, son. We don’t want another Bratislava.”

  Bratislava. The memory of two case officers shot to death in a plumber’s van loomed large in all their minds.

  Caroline
kept her eyes on the screen. Since her return to the station, the COS had been treating her as though she carried the plague.

  A gray-haired man in uniform who sat at Bigelow’s left stabbed his microphone button abruptly. She recognized the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  “We can send up some AWAC planes,” Clayton Phillips barked. “Intercept all electronic emissions coming out of Budapest. There are NATO crews on the ground already in Hungary.”

  “But you’ll have to get NATO consent,” objected Matthew Finch, the National Security Advisor. “That means giving NATO a reason for the intercepts. Sharing the truth. And losing control. Could be a big mistake.”

  “What about Delta Force?” Bigelow asked.

  “If we had more time—” Phillips began.

  “Then what about Germany?” Bigelow was getting impatient. “Ramstein Air Base. Scramble a bunch a guys outta there.”

  “Again—to assemble the team, get them in a plane, send them to Budapest, and deploy them at the site,” General Phillips said, “you’re talking three hours.”

  “Three hours.” Bigelow glanced at his watch, then squinted at the video monitor. “What time’s it over there?”

  “In three hours, Mr. President, it will be almost five P.M.,” Stetz Waterhouse told him.

  “Gettin’ dark. That’ll have to do. Unless—”

  The President released his mike button and leaned to whisper in his security advisor’s ear.

  “Ms. Carmichael,” said Matthew Finch, “in your bio of Mlan Krucevic you state that he never negotiates. Could you amplify on that point?”

  “Certainly.” She threw a glance at Marinelli; his expression remained wooden. “Negotiation is a nonstarter for several reasons. First, Mlan Krucevic would have to come out in the open—speak under the eyes of the world press—as Mrs. Payne’s kidnapper, and he shuns that kind of publicity. He’ll avoid it at all cost. Second, negotiation means Krucevic gives up Mrs. Payne in order to get something else. We have nothing to offer Krucevic that he wants. And it’s a point of honor to the man that he does not concede.”