The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  She left Embassy Budapest and hailed a taxi. She had the presence of mind to go back to the Hilton before heading for the airport—she needed a change of clothes and her Walther, comfortable shoes, some extra cash. She checked out of the hotel and left her luggage with the bellman. To be called for later, if she survived.

  Caroline had absolutely no right to decide the Vice President’s fate in the backseat of a Hungarian taxi. She had no business keeping vital information, such as the location of Krucevic’s lab at iv Zakopan, entirely to herself. The High Priestess of Reason stood back in judgment, showing Caroline the flaw in all she did; she scolded her and pleaded with her to call in reinforcements—Caroline almost tapped the taxi’s glass partition and sent the driver back to the Hilton. She should be awash in self-doubt. She was an analyst, after all—one who demanded time, one who required more pieces of the puzzle.

  But recklessness sang in her veins. Mlan Krucevic and Scottie between them had pushed her past her breaking point, and she would have juggled grenades if a few had been handy.

  If she failed in this last great act of hubris—if she swung out from her trapeze and found no hands dangling—she would be destroyed. Failure, thought Caroline, was the headiest prospect she’d been offered in years.

  She wanted to go home. She had no home any longer.

  Hank, she prayed as her driver leaned on the horn, I promise I will call you if I manage to survive.

  When she closed her eyes, she saw a man in black leather walking slowly away. Did he wave once, in farewell? Or was he motioning her onward?

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

  What, Caroline thought, would Eric do if he were alive tonight and sitting beside her? He would trust her to follow her particular instincts, the ones she never believed she had.

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

  She should contact the Agency. Tell them how and where to throw raiders into the breach. She should give them the location of iv Zakopan. But Caroline was uncertain whom to trust at the CIA. Twice in the past four days, rescue operations had failed horribly. Eric was dead and Sophie Payne close to it. The military option was dicey at best; even the reluctant High Priestess in her head agreed.

  Not Tom Shephard, she thought as the taxi careened over the northwest highway. I cannot trust Tom with his questioning eyes and his way-too-obvious suspicion. Not Cuddy—not poor loyal Cuddy, with one thumb on his glasses and his pulse on the polygraph. Not Dare, who has her position to think of. An entire bureaucracy to protect. And never Scottie.

  Scottie of the debonair suits and the poker face, Scottie who ran agents the way a child threw toys into battle—Scottie danced among shadows of his own, a parallel kingdom within the Agency itself. In a world where who you are depends upon what you know, Scottie had always known the most.

  Now, for the first time, Caroline knew more.

  She had a fix on 30 April’s location. She had a homing device for tracking the Vice President. And she knew what Mlan Krucevic did not: that Béla Horváth’s lab notebook and vials of stolen vaccine—mumps vaccine No. 413, according to Eric’s disk—were in the possession of the Hungarian federal police.

  Krucevic feared that notebook and those vials more than Chinooks on the roof or Delta Force troops in the heating ducts. He feared them more than losing Sophie Payne. He had killed his wife and his oldest friend to suppress the truth. And now Caroline was going to inform him that he had failed.

  She made the last plane out of Budapest that night— the last plane that week—bound for Bosnia. She bought a ticket in her true name because she had no intention of leaving the Walther in Hungary, and her paperwork for the weapon read Caroline Carmichael. The Agency was already tracking her—the look on the face of the Hungarian border control guard told her that. Her alias was probably compromised as well. He did not have a poker face, that passport official; it was rumpled like a used paper bag, his eyes two small prunes. He studied her malevolently, glancing from passport to woman and back again. The question in the back of Caroline’s mind was why he didn’t simply bar her from the plane. Nothing was easier. A polite word—a hand on the arm—a tedious wait in a featureless office—and her documents returned when the flight took off.

  The answer, she knew, was because he didn’t care where she came from. He wanted to know only where she was going. And so an hour later she bundled Jane Hathaway into a garbage can at Sarajevo Airport and became someone she had almost forgotten: Caroline Bisby, High Analytic, with her finger on the afterburner and contrail streaming. The stuff of which mad dogs are made.

  She pulled the hot-wired Skoda away from the curb and drove deeper into the city, feeling her way. She knew Sarajevo only as a series of images on a television screen, a garble of names too difficult to pronounce. It was a European city, beautiful in the Baroque manner of Vienna and Prague and old-town Bratislava, a small city cupped in a valley ringed by mountains. On the hills above the red tile roofs, the army of neighboring Serbia had erected siege guns and positioned tanks. Each day between 1992 and 1996, the Serbs had bombarded Sarajevo with four thousand shells. It was the longest siege in modern memory, longer even than the vicious Nazi siege of Leningrad; but in the end, NATO marched in and the Serbs marched out.

  The Stabilisation Force peacekeepers were still there, afraid of what might happen if they left.

  The Skoda bobbled and dipped as she drove across a shell hole. Someone had filled it with bright red epoxy, a cartoon attempt at public works. As far as the eye could see, brilliant gouts of blood dotted the street.

  She was looking for the university on a map spread across her knees—which was in Croatian with Hungarian translation, neither helpful—while driving through the darkness of a city that seemed to have had most of its street signs blown away. But the university must surely possess a student center that never closed down, a place where coffee could be bought and politics debated and a laptop connected to the World Wide Web. Caroline had memorized Mlan Krucevic’s E-mail address. It was there like a lost pearl among the terrorist’s messages to Fritz Voekl, part of the archives Eric had managed to steal.

  “Papa,” Jozsef croaked through his swollen lips, “what have you done to the lady? Where is she?”

  Mlan Krucevic laid his cool hand on his son’s forehead and brushed back his sweat-soaked hair. The antibiotic for which he had retreated to iv Zakopan was already streaming through an IV into his son’s veins, but it would be hours before he glimpsed signs of improvement in Jozsef. He refused to consider that improvement was beyond him, that Jozsef might have slipped too far into the maw of the disease. Mlan Krucevic had not played God for so many decades to succumb to failure now. He had not built this new iv Zakopan high above the old killing ground and labored patiently for years in its laboratory to be defeated by a germ of his own making. He would not pay for immortality with the blood of his son.

  “Shh,” he said. “You must rest. You are safe now. I have saved you.”

  The boy squirmed fretfully under the sheet, tugging at the tape that secured his arm to the bed, the precious IV feeding into his wrist. “Sophie,” he murmured, and then the sheet above his abdomen blossomed like a flower, a spreading stain that darkened as it grew, first peach and then salmon and then a rusty orange. Jozsef was pissing blood.

  Krucevic shuddered. He sank to his knees on the cold cement floor. He gripped the metal rail of the boy’s bed until his hands lost their feeling, and this alone must be his prayer, the prayer of a man who acknowledges no god. He was crouched thus, doubled over with grief and rage, when Vaclav appeared in the doorway.

  “Don’t bother me,” Mlan spat out.

  “There’s something you should see.”

  “Go away.”

  “But Mlan—”

  He came to his feet with a howl, whipping his gun from its shoulder holster. Vaclav was twenty-two inches removed from a bullet in the brain. The cherub
-faced Czech stared the gun barrel down.

  “You should, Mlan. See this.”

  Krucevic drew a shuddering breath, holstered the gun, and followed Vaclav down the hall.

  Otto was seated in front of Tonio’s laptop, his forehead almost touching the screen. “It’s from the university. How the fuck did some college kid find Mlan?”

  Krucevic stood behind him and read the E-mail.

  Béla’s blood is on your hands, Mlan. Mirjana’s dead. But I have Béla’s notes and vaccine No. 413. Come and get them, if you can find me.

  “The zalba told someone,” he whispered.

  Caroline left the university student center immediately after sending the first message. Time was of the essence: If her ruse was to help the dying Vice President, it must be effected quickly. She drove to the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, temporary home of war correspondents and relief workers, where a third of the three hundred and fifty rooms still showed damage. Patches in the curtains covered machine-gun holes, concrete crumbled under the hallway carpets, and a bored cocktail waitress chain-smoked through the lobby at 12:03 A.M. Caroline ordered a large cup of coffee and found an Internet port.?

  The worst of it isn’t the epidemic itself-—those thousands of children dead in Pristina, the disease spreading like a red stain on the snow. The real horror, Mlan, is the salvation you offered. Vaccines. Your special vaccines. Flown into Pristina on German planes, administered by the most selfless doctors the world has known—Nobel laureates, above reproach, Doctors Without Borders.

  What happens to some boys who contract mumps in childhood? What happens to every boy inoculated with vaccine No. 413?

  Sterility, Mlan. Your small contribution to the Muslim problem, as the man called Michael once said. A generation of Albanians incapable of reproducing itself. Genocide without camps, a bloodless wave of cleansing. No one will even suspect the damage for another fifteen years at least. And by then it will be merely a flaw in the science. Regrettable. But hardly a crime.

  And all those toddlers rotting in mass graves, all the parents destroyed with grief—just so much wreckage along the way.

  You sicken me, Krucevic.

  I’m going to the press. To the Americans. I have proof, and I want to see you burn.

  “Michael,” Otto murmured. “Of course it’d be Michael who sold us out. He must’ve talked to a friend. An associate. His little form of insurance, in the event of death. And now that prick’s got your E-mail address.” “‘I’m going to the Americans,’” Vaclav repeated. “So he’s not American himself. A free agent? One of Michael’s Arabs?”

  “He’s a prick, whoever he is,” Otto insisted.

  “A clever one. He sent the first message from the university. This one’s from the Holiday Inn.”

  “All he wants is money.” Krucevic stared at the text on the screen, weighing his options, then turned his back and headed for Jozsef’s room. “Ask his terms, Vaclav.”

  “What makes you think Mr. Prick wants to deal?”

  Krucevic smashed his hand once against the door frame, and the supporting wall shuddered. “Nobody telegraphs a punch, idiot, unless they expect it to be dodged. He could have gone to the press and the Americans hours ago. So find out what he wants.

  “Then we’ll give him what he deserves.”

  Part V

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13

  ONE

  Sarajevo, 12:33 A.M.

  CAROLINE TYPED OUT HER LAST MESSAGE at the Sarajevo airport.

  My terms? she wrote after an instant’s thought. I want Mlan Krucevic’s head on a platter. I want the pleasure of watching him beg for mercy, the pleasure of refusing his dying wish. I want justice for MedAir 901 and for the Brandenburg Gate and for all the children who will never have children.

  But I’ll settle for the release of Sophie Payne.

  Bring her to the Tunnel by 2 A.M. I will be waiting alone with the vaccine. If you are not there by 2:30, I will take what I know to the people who will destroy you.

  “The Tunnel” required no explanation. Everyone in Sarajevo knew about the Dobrinja-Butmir Tunnel. Four feet wide and a quarter of a mile long, it was little more than a culvert that had been clawed under an airport runway during the height of the siege, a culvert that had been shelled by the Serbs for months and that served as the beleaguered city’s chief link to the outside world. The Tunnel was a black-market conduit, a ribbon of commerce in a state of war; it was a thoroughfare, too, a communications link, a rite of passage. When bureaucrats from elsewhere in Bosnia needed to reach the capital, they used the Tunnel; even the American ambassador had pushed his way through whenever he was forced to leave the city. No one’s dignity was beneath Dobrinja-Butmir.

  Caroline hesitated. Could Krucevic possibly believe she was so stupid? The taunts in her message were incautious to the extent that they ought to amuse him. The author of such a message was intoxicated with her own power; in possessing the vaccine, she believed herself invincible. Such a person never considered that Krucevic made no deals.

  Caroline, however, was not intoxicated. She was the very opposite of stupid. She was shrewdly calculating a risk. She had spent years studying Mlan Krucevic’s personality—reconstructing his behavior, assessing his deeds—in an effort to predict how he would act when it really mattered. She was about to find out just how good an analyst she was.

  Krucevic, Caroline believed, would never bring Sophie Payne to the Tunnel on so slight a lure as her offer. He would keep his hostage safe at iv Zakopan; he would send his men to hunt down the vaccine. If the E-mail bargain was in fact a setup, he might lose a few men, but nothing more. If Caroline were alone, as she had promised, he’d order her brought back to his base for questioning. And after the questions, he’d kill her.

  Only Caroline would not be crouched in the mouth of the Dobrinja-Butmir Tunnel. When Krucevic’s men appeared for the rendezvous, she would be on her way to iv Zakopan, where only Krucevic himself might guard the Vice President. It was dangerous, of course; she could not know how many men Krucevic would send for her and how many would remain behind. She was feeling her way toward Krucevic’s camp. She did not have the luxury of playing 30 April like a fish. She no longer had the indulgence of time.

  Caroline glanced at her watch. 12:40 A.M. Roughly twelve hours earlier, she had said good-bye to Eric. He had told her then that the Vice President could not live long.

  Sophie had managed to crawl through the darkness of her prison, pulling herself forward with excruciating effort, her belly on the ground. She had crawled past the opening of the martyrs’ charnel house, her skin prickling with horror at the bones beyond the wall, everything in her mind and body screaming. It was important, she told herself silently, not to consider what might lie on the floor around her. It was important to think of other things, to keep from going mad.

  She had never been a person who minded the dark. At the house in Malvern she would lie restless in bed, long after Curtis had fallen asleep, his face turned into his pillow. She would listen for Peter’s dreaming sigh from across the hall, then get up and walk noiselessly through the house. The things she had chosen and placed in these rooms were like strangers in the moonlight. She would caress the burnished arm of an antique chair, pick a feather from a cushion. And then, like a shadow, she would catch her reflection, a muted form shimmering in the mirror, only her eyes still luminous. She had liked to think that a century hence, on moonlit nights, her image would gaze out from the gilt frame.

  Her eyes were tightly closed now. The difference between the darkness of Malvern and the night of iv Zakopan, she knew, was the silence. Here she was an amoeba suspended in water, a yolk inside an egg. There was no ancient house settling on its stone foundations, no wind sighing through the elms. No Peter dreaming across the hall—

  The anguish at her core when she thought of her son was unendurable; it sharpened the pain of her sickness, the slow agony of dying. Peter, with his eyes the color of moss, his quick speech and laugh of deprecation. Pet
er, whose square chin was Curt’s chin whenever he was angry. Peter, who needed Sophie more than he could admit now, at the age of twenty—Sophie, who was his only family. She clenched her teeth on the thought of Peter, burrowed deep into the pain, and used her son’s face to keep the ghouls of iv Zakopan at bay.

  She was very weak, and her throat was so parched that she could no longer swallow. At intervals she slept, then awoke with a start, cheek pressed against the filth of the stone passage, and sensed that she had been unconscious. It was probable, she thought, that sometime soon she would never wake again. But still she dragged herself forward, toward the manhole cover and the air above.

  Her journey covered perhaps ninety feet. It took over three hours. She collapsed for the last time at the foot of Otto’s ladder. But the rabbit’s foot she still clutched in her hand pulsed steadily through the night, transmitting its signal like an unquiet heart in the grave.

  iv Zakopan is twenty-three miles south, Eric said in Caroline’s mind, along the road to Foça. You climb out of the city and then descend through the pass. After maybe ten miles you’ll see a power plant and an explosives factory. The road’s shit to begin with, but by the time you’re thirteen miles out of Sarajevo, it’s pretty smooth.You’re in a valley, it runs down to the Drina River. About mile nineteen you’ll start to pass collective farms, or what’s left of them. The buildings are burned-out shells. Four miles beyond, on the left, is a rutted dirt road. Don’t miss it in the dark. That’s the turning for iv Zakopan.

  She drove south through the night, along a road littered with derelict tanks and abandoned gun positions and the refuse of war that time had not yet buried. NATO had condemned the Serbs for what they did in Bosnia, and later for the atrocities of Kosovo, but the world did not remember the Ustashe terror of World War II; it knew absolutely nothing about the horrors committed by Croats at iv Zakopan. The world had the luxury of simple solutions.