The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  “Boss!” yelled Berg from the foot of the steps. “There’s an old lady down here, says she lives up above! You want to see her?”

  The mother. Bassza meg.

  Esterházy’s stomach heaved. He ducked back into the bathroom without a word.

  Tom Shephard could not have reached Marinelli before the red eye blinked, before the laser beam he could not see was intersected and the explosive circuit completed. But he ran anyway, his mouth open in a yell against the stupidity of all cowboys, the bravado of SEALs, toward the Medici prince outlined for an instant against the mouth of hell.

  NINE

  Budapest, 6 P.M.

  EMBASSY BUDAPEST OFFICIALLY CLOSED for business at five P.M., but no U.S. installation in a rioting city, with a hostage Vice President and a rescue mission in progress, simply shuts its doors and sends its people home. Caroline had company in the station vault: Vic Marinelli’s secretary, an efficient woman in her forties named Teddy, who scrupulously organized files while waiting for news. Teddy was slim and stylish in her long, narrow skirt; she shifted paper with quick hands that never mistook their purpose. Caroline would have been grateful for a distraction—she was tense and apprehensive—but Teddy seemed disinclined to talk.

  In her mind, Eric walked slowly away down a rain-washed street.

  Christ, Eric, I won’t let you just lie down and die.

  No. You never would.

  She pushed him aside with difficulty, pulled up a chair to a computer terminal, and began composing a cable for Dare Atwood.

  Classification: Top Secret. Routing: the DCI’s personal channel. Caroline added her Cutout slug, which would limit access to Dare Atwood alone. Then, confronted with the body of the cable, she typed:

  The following is information received from Michael O’Shaughnessy, an operative working under nonofficial cover who penetrated the 30 April Organization. During the past thirty months, C/CTC handled O’Shaughnessy in place. This intelligence was secured at C/CTC’s direction from 30 April’s main computer database.

  C/CTC meant “Chief, Counterterrorism Center.” Dare would know immediately what Scottie Sorensen had done, from the moment of MedAir 901’s explosion; Dare was a High Priestess of Reason, too. She would unravel the knots faster than Scottie could tie them.

  Caroline retrieved Eric’s disk from her coat pocket. Downloading foreign data onto a secure Agency computer was technically forbidden; the fear of electronic virus transmission was too great. Caroline suppressed a qualm and pulled up the disk’s file list. She began systematically copying it into the DCI’s cable.

  A phone pierced the station’s stillness. Teddy cut it off on the first ring.

  “Caroline? Could you go down to Reception and talk to a guy from the federal police? He asked for Shephard or Marinelli, but I said they were unavailable.”

  Mirjana. She stood up, her pulse accelerating, and hit the computer’s screen saver. “Please don’t secure the vault, Teddy. I’m still cabling Headquarters.”

  The visitor, a broad-shouldered, stocky man in a rumpled wool suit, was pacing by the time she got to the marine guard.

  “Caroline Carmichael,” she said. “How may I help you?”

  He shook her hand mechanically, but his face remained guarded. “Where is Shephard?” he asked in halting English.

  “We expect him momentarily. I work with Mr. Shephard. I’m happy to relay any message—”

  “You are FBI?”

  “Department of State,” Caroline said smoothly. “Temporary duty from Washington. And you are—?”

  “Esterházy.”

  He flipped open a badge; she studied it briefly. “Shephard brought you a photograph this morning.”

  His eyes widened slightly. He nodded.

  A few chairs were ranged against one wall of the reception area; Caroline turned, and Esterházy followed her. They sat down fifteen feet from the impassive marine guard.

  “Tell Shephard the woman is dead,” Esterházy said softly.

  “Mirjana Tarcic? Murdered?”

  “But yes.”

  “Was she shot? Like Horváth?”

  “She was beaten. A scarf around her neck, tight. You do not want to know. …”

  “You found her in Budapest?”

  The man had no reason to tell her anything. His gaze slid uneasily around the foyer; then he seemed to concede. “In Szentendre. A small town on the Danube Bend.”

  “I know it.” Two Sunday-afternoon trips in search of antiques, spring wind in her hair and red wine in her veins. Back when she and Eric had a home to fill.

  “Her mother has a flat there,” Esterházy said. “We learned of it this afternoon. Someone else got there first.”

  Krucevic. Or one of his men—Otto, perhaps. He’d have enjoyed choking the woman to death.

  Caroline swore under her breath. Eric’s network had been rolled up inside of a day. And Eric—

  “We found some things stuffed under a mattress. One was a book….” Esterházy gestured, groping for words. “In Horváth’s writing. From his lab—”

  “Notes?”

  He nodded. “I want Shephard to see. Is evidence, you understand, he cannot have this book—but I wish his opinion—”

  “Of course. Did you find anything else?”

  The man scrutinized her nervously. “Glass …” The word escaped him. He held up his fingers four inches apart. “So big. Filled with … we do not know what. Six of them. These we send to our police lab for study.”

  Somebody’s prescription got into the wrong hands, Scottie’s voice whispered in her mind. The Big Man was quite upset. Drugs from VaccuGen’s Berlin headquarters had been stolen two days before. Not the anthrax vaccine, Scottie had said. So what else would be worth the murder of two people?

  Erzsébet knew something was wrong with Mlan’s vaccines.

  What would Krucevic kill to conceal?

  Mumps. His small contribution to the Muslim problem.

  “I’ll tell Shephard.” Caroline stood up, intent upon the answers she knew she’d find on Eric’s disk. “He’ll contact you as soon as he can. And Mr. Esterházy—”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell your lab to be careful with that glass.”

  She knew disaster well—its look, its smell, the way the static charge of air itself changed in disaster’s presence—and the station was filled with it when she returned three minutes later. Teddy was standing behind her desk, the phone pressed against her shoulder. She stared unseeing at Caroline’s face, then dropped the receiver with a clatter and sank into her chair.

  Caroline snatched up the phone. “Carmichael.”

  “It’s me,” Shephard said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Marinelli’s dead. Bunker was wired. Blew sky-high.”

  “You should have known it would be wired! You had the goddamn blueprints—”

  “Don’t yell at me.” Shephard cut across her viciously. “I nearly died tonight, okay? Because of a guy who should’ve known better. Hell, we all should’ve known better. That map was a dangle. Krucevic was long gone.”

  Dangle. A deliberate plant. Had Krucevic suspected, then, what Eric was doing? Had he known everything?

  “You searched the bunker?” she asked Shephard.

  “Once the flames were out. Flames have a way of drawing police, even in Budapest, even in the midst of riots. Try explaining that one, Sally. Just try explaining what the hell the U.S. Legal Attaché for Central Europe is doing with explosives in Buda. Christ.”

  “Tom—”

  “So I told the fucking police the truth. That we thought the warehouse held the Vice President. They were not impressed. It took every string I could pull to get me off the hook, every apology I could think of in three different languages, before they’d let me go into the place with the firemen.”

  “You went in.”

  “I stepped over what was left of Vic Marinelli, Caroline, and I crawled through a shitload of wreckage.” The savagery in his voic
e scalded her. “You never told me Krucevic had an American in his entourage. But then there’s lots of crap you’ve never told me, right? Like your alias. Jane Hathaway The name Mahmoud Sharif used in Berlin to set up contact with 30 April. What the hell are you playing at, Caroline? And when are you going to come clean?”

  “What American?”

  “One Michael O’Shaughnessy from the passport in his breast pocket. A blond guy in his mid-thirties. But you know that, don’t you? Michael was Sharif’s other bona fide.”

  Her legs nearly folded under her. “You saw him?” she whispered.

  “What was left of him, yeah. Krucevic tortured him, then strapped him to the door and set it to blow. There was a grenade pin still dangling from his finger.”

  Caroline cradled the receiver and walked unsteadily away from Teddy’s desk. She groped her way to the computer. Her face was a mask, her mind screaming his name.

  She had already mourned Eric once. She knew how it was done. But this second time felt like a thin steel blade twisting between her ribs, a torment she could not grip strongly enough to tear out.

  Remember Sophie, Caroline. Sophie. I owe her a chance.

  He had gone back, despite her best arguments. While she waited for Shephard to pay his bill at Gerbeaud’s, they had nailed him to the cross.

  Good-bye, dear love. Good-bye.

  And then the word torture —that idle little word on Shephard’s tongue—flooded her senses. She gasped, leaned hard against the desk, gripped it until the pain knifed upward through her shoulders and she knew that she could feel.

  For the past four days Eric had dominated her thoughts, her work, her sleep, her heart. She had flown out of Washington in a fog of bitterness, suppressing emotion like a terminal illness. The High Priestess of Reason had no time to feel. Love could never be as strong as rage. Caroline had had no room for empathy, no thought for Eric’s torment during the past thirty months. Retribution was what she wanted, payment in blood for the agony he’d caused.

  She had seen him clearly for the first time in years. Calculating. Morally equivocal. Ruthless. A man for whom, nonetheless, justice had still meant something. He had thrown them both into this final battle because he thought it was more important than love or happiness. He had never asked permission. He had assumed that she would understand.

  The one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe, regardless of everything.

  She had never justified that trust. She’d punished him like a spiteful child.

  And Krucevic had tortured him. The grenade pin—

  She drew a shuddering breath, her throat so choked with unspent tears she could not breathe. It was too late for regret. Too late for love. What remained must be a settling of accounts, for Eric’s sake.

  It was the consummate Agency word, account. She and Eric had shared one for years: 30 April. It was time to make Krucevic pay.

  Teddy was weeping harshly for Marinelli in the outer room. Caroline pressed her fingers against her burning eyes and steadied herself. Then she stared once more at the computer screen. Clicked back into her cable. And began to learn what Eric had died for.

  TEN

  iv Zakopan, 9:30 P.M.

  SOPHIE PAYNE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS as the helicopter landed in the clearing beyond the trees. Pain tore at the lining of her stomach like talons; pain rattled in her lungs with every breath. For hours now she had drifted in a delirium where the voices of her son Peter and the terrorist named Michael blended with the face of her dead husband. I’m coming, Curtis, she told him, and was vaguely irritated by his impatience, by the way his looming form twisted and vanished before her eyes. It seemed desperately important that she reach for Peter; she clung to him, and held him tight, and felt his thin, little-boy bones tremble in her arms. And then, when the darkness cleared and Curt’s face receded, she knew that it was young Jozsef she clasped, not her son, and that her filthy sweatshirt was damp with his sweat and spatters of blood. The boy was burning with fever.

  When Vaclav killed the rotors, Otto and Krucevic carried her from the chopper. Jozsef whimpered as she was taken from him—he clung to her like a small bird, as though he knew that he would never see her again— but in her illness she was no proof against the men’s strength. She squeezed his hands tightly once in parting and felt him press something small and hard into her palm. The rabbit’s foot. He had given her his most precious possession. She clenched her fingers around it and did not look back.

  They dumped her unceremoniously on the ground. She lay there, curled in the fetal position, thinking of water. Cool water that trickled down the throat, still tasting of the ice it had once been. Water that gurgled over stones in the paddock at Malvern. It had its own language, that stream, an inconsequential chatter of horses’ mouths dipped and lapping, the scarlet flit of a cardinal’s wing, the slow, sinuous glide of a trout. Leaves spiraling in an eddy and the puncture point of a raindrop, Peter’s boats made of empty egg cartons, a toothpick for a mast. Sophie’s parched throat ached with the taste of blood.

  The thin beam of a pocket torch picked out a tumbled stile, a heap of scattered stones. Otto heaved the latter aside with a grunt. Beneath them was a manhole cover fashioned of solid iron. It took Otto and Krucevic pulling together to haul the thing out. Rust stained their hands corrosive orange. Then Otto turned and looked at her. He smiled.

  Oh, Michael, Sophie thought uselessly, you were wrong. I am going to die at this man’s hands.

  Slung over Otto’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry, she flailed out with her fists against his back … but she might as well have been the summer rain in the paddock stream, for all that she diverted him from his course. He dropped feetfirst into the manhole, his face against a ladder, so that her dangling head and back filled the passage’s remaining space. Her legs were pinned between the tunnel wall and Otto’s chest. There was barely room for one large man, much less the burden he carried; Sophie’s hair snagged on old concrete, she smelled dirt and mold and felt the small creatures that live in mold scatter at their passage. Where his shoulder jutted into her abdomen, pain shot upward and radiated, as severe as the contractions of labor. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of her mouth. She could not wipe it away.

  They went down and down, Krucevic following, maybe thirty feet into the earth—until the dying darkness at the tunnel’s mouth became impenetrable and the air was stale and decades cold.

  Otto dumped her on the tunnel floor. She retched, whimpered, and vomited blood.

  Somewhere above, Jozsef lay dreaming in the field. She had done this to him with her violent fingers, she had dashed to the ground the drugs that could have saved him, and he had watched her, silent, with the mute submission of a child whose life has always been determined by other people. Would she have risked so much if the boy were her son?

  The passage before them had once been concrete, or something more akin to the earth, like stone. She could see nothing until Krucevic’s flashlight played over the wall in front of her. An archway, perhaps five feet high, yawned like the mouth of a whale. Beyond it, only darkness and the fear that thrives in darkness. It reeked as a catacomb reeks, as all the dead spaces where civilization ends. Uncontrollably, Sophie began to shudder.

  She had thought that the vials of crushed antibiotic would force Krucevic’s hand, that to save his son he would abandon his mad quest to purify Europe. She had not reckoned with obsession. And now Jozsef was dying. His blood on her soul.

  Otto dragged Sophie forward, past openings narrow as cannon ports in the cold stone walls. Krucevic stopped suddenly and shone his beam into one of them.

  “Welcome to iv Zakopan, Mrs. Payne.”

  Sophie squinted against the light, pain shooting through her eyeballs. The beam picked out a heap of skeletons, innumerable, splayed across the dirt floor of the low-ceilinged space. They had probably been shot, and died where they lay: Half a century later she had a snapshot of how it had been—the moment of their murder.r />
  “What is this place?” she croaked.

  “It is the most hallowed ground of sacrifice in Bosnia,” Krucevic replied, “which is saying a good deal. Do you know what happened here fifty-eight years ago?”

  “The war.”

  “The war.” Krucevic’s laughter was brittle with contempt. “Mrs. Payne, there has been war in these hills for centuries. But in 1942, iv Zakopan was a Croat place. It was part of the Independent State of Croatia, which for three glorious years ruled this country.”

  “Ustashe,” Sophie muttered.

  “Ustashe, which in the Croatian language is another word for fascist. Yes, Mrs. Payne. iv Zakopan was established with the help of Nazi commanders and with the leadership of our great Ante Pavelic, the father of independent Croatia. We swept the Serb hordes out of Bosnia, we threw their women and children off our cliffs, we converted the Orthodox to the one true Catholic faith, and then we sent them to meet their God. There are the camps that everyone knows about— Jasenovac, near Zagreb, and Stara Gradiska—but at iv Zakopan, we destroyed our worst enemies, the partisans ruled by Tito, the faithless ones. We left them here to rot in the bowels of the earth, already less than human. And the world did not care.”

  “No,” Sophie protested. The pain was growing inside her like a swarm of bees, angry and intense, on the verge of bursting. “We would have known. This place—”

  “This place has been buried for half a century, and it will be buried long after your name is forgotten,” he said implacably. “Do you think they remember history in your country, Mrs. Payne? Everyone who knew about iv Zakopan is dead. Except for me.”

  Half a century. Of being classified as Missing, Presumed Dead. Of no one knowing. Her gaze met the hollow eye sockets of a skull, inches from her face, flooded with Krucevic’s beam. A thousand jaws, gaping wide in terror. No one walking in the fields above had even heard these people scream.

  “Do you know what it means in English—iv Zakopan?” Krucevic stared into her fevered eyes. “Literally it means ‘buried alive.’ But a more elegant translation might be ‘Living Grave,’ Mrs. Payne.”