The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  Caroline allowed her gaze to veer for an instant from the empty ribbon of shell-pocked road, to take in the midnight landscape. She thought of postwar movies, still ardent with propaganda. Of desperate partisans allied to the British, of Chetniks who died on behalf of King Peter while he slurped oysters in London and danced at the Ritz. There were no angels in the Balkans, no heroes one could name. This was not a place for choosing sides. It was a place to abandon hope.

  “Tell me about iv Zakopan,” she commanded Eric’s ghost.

  It was a Ustashe killing field. The earth there is riddled with tunnels—ancient holes gouged into the hills. The Romans built them. The Hapsburgs hid an army there. And the Ustashe tortured partisans far below the ground. Mlan’s laboratory is hidden among the cliffs that soar above.

  “A bunker, like in Budapest?”

  He shook his head in the shadows. A concentration camp. Barbed wire, electrified fences, searchlights, armed guards. One woman equipped with a double-action Walther TPH,accurate range maybe twelve feet, will never storm the fastness alone. Even if she’s as steady with a handgun as you are, Mad Dog.

  “What’s he use the place for?”

  Experimentation. He tests his vaccines, his drugs, his chemical weapons, on Serb and Muslim prisoners.

  “And nobody comes looking for these people?”

  They’re the Disappeared, Carrie. Taken away at gunpoint in the middle of the night. And who knows where they end up? Nobody ever leaves iv Zakopan. There’s a reason the place is called “Living Grave.”

  They came up suddenly—the abandoned collectives, the burned outbuildings. A tractor’s skeleton loomed like an iron gibbet near the verge of the road, whispering of ancient crimes. Caroline glanced at her odometer to calculate the distance; when three and a half miles had worn away, she pulled the car to the shoulder and slowed to a stop. From here she would go forward on foot.

  She was wearing black microfleece leggings and a pair of running shoes—workout clothing that would have to double as combat wear. The Walther she pulled out of a black nylon shoulder bag—the only luggage she’d brought with her from Budapest—and strapped it to her thigh. She practiced drawing the weapon from its holster a couple of times, the mechanics a cover for her increasing nervousness, the acceleration of her pulse. She was alone in the middle of dumb-fuck nowhere, with a ghost and a .22-caliber gun for company; she had, at last count, six rounds in the chamber and thirteen extra bullets. Above her head the stars shone with a brilliance that was excruciating; they reminded Caroline of nights in Southampton, the sky deepening after sunset to ink blue rather than black, the constellations whirling to the sound of her great-uncle’s voice. The chink of ice cubes. Cicadas. A splash of Bombay Sapphire. Hank, she assured him, I’m thinking seriously of law school. I just might take you up on it.

  A pinprick of light scintillated in her palm. Eric’s homing device, registering a signal. Sophie Payne was within range.

  “After you,” she told him.

  And followed where he led.

  TWO

  iv Zakopan, 1:23 A.M.

  JOZSEF’S EYELIDS FLUTTERED OPEN, and he stared up at the ceiling. The room had no windows. Light, such as it was, came from a pair of gas lanterns propped on a crude table made of packing crates. Shadows, primitive and strangely comforting, flickered on the wall like the Indonesian puppet dance he’d once seen; for a moment he could not imagine where he was. The haze of delirium receded slowly, the way water drains from a basin—imperceptibly at first, then in a final rush that sweeps everything with it. And when that rush to consciousness came, Jozsef sat up abruptly. There was the helicopter, the lady torn from his arms, the rabbit’s foot pressed into her hand. And then the dash from the landing pad to this room, the lines of barracks whirling about him, the faces thrust against the chain-link fence. He was alone in a room on top of a cliff. He was at iv Zakopan.

  “Papa!” he cried out.

  Krucevic appeared in the doorway.

  Jozsef kicked away the soiled sheet and wrestled his wrists free of the tape that restrained them. “Where is the lady? What have you done with her?”

  “She is dead and buried,” Krucevic replied.

  “That is a lie. I know you lie!” Never had he spoken with such venom to his father, and for an instant, the boy felt sharply afraid. He cowered backward, white-faced and trembling, waiting for the punishment that would surely come.

  “If she was not dead when I left her, she is certainly dead now,” his father told him calmly. “You should rest. You’re still quite weak. Get back in bed before you disturb your intravenous feed.”

  Jozsef set his foot on the floor. His muscles screamed as though they had been crushed under the wheels of a truck. He tasted blood, felt himself sway, and clutched at the mattress.

  “Get back in bed.” His father came nearer, looming over him. “You were close to death yourself.”

  The boy stared at his own hands, clenched around the sheet to keep from trembling. “You cannot leave her in the ground, Papa. It is not right.”

  “But it is done,” Krucevic said, “and nothing will change it now.” He closed his fingers over Jozsef’s wrist, pried his weak hand from the sheet. Then he gathered up the boy and laid him carefully back in the bed, drew the sheet over his body. Jozsef closed his eyes on a surge of rage and anguish; he could not look at his father’s face, could not trust himself to speak without sobbing. A tear slid from under his lashes and lay wetly on his cheek. He turned his face into the pillow.

  “I am sorry for your pain, my son,” Krucevic said.

  It was the first and last time Jozsef would ever hear an apology on his father’s lips. He did not answer him.

  Krucevic turned away.

  And at that moment, a shout went up from Vaclav at his security station down the hall.

  She found the entrance to the ancient tunnels where Eric had told her it would be.

  It’s Mlan’s escape route from iv Zakopan. He’ll be certain to keep it in good repair.

  “He only has one?”

  By land. But there’s always the air.

  Caroline glanced swiftly toward the dark hulk of hillside rising above the ruined barn. No lights, no sound from the heights, to suggest an armed encampment. Just the transmitter signal pulsing strongly in her pocket now, reason enough to keep going.

  She crept forward through the withered November grass, the dead stalks rigid with hoarfrost. The smell of damp earth mingled with the sharp scent of distant snow—a fresh, nostril-flaring whiff that, absurdly, charged Caroline’s blood with hope. The barn door’s frame was blackened, the space beyond impenetrably dark. If Krucevic was waiting for her, this would be the moment for ambush—for some explosion of light and sound as death came shooting through the shattered door.

  The floor of the barn disintegrated in the blaze, Eric reminded her. It fell into the sheepfold below. The drop’s maybe eight feet. You can manage it. Drop close to the wall and walk around the foundation to the right. He’s mined the center, where the going looks easiest. Remember, Mad Dog, never take the path somebody carves for you. It’s there for a reason.

  She balanced on the ruined threshold carefully, her gun in her hand.

  The floor of the barn was a mass of rubble—tumbled bits of wood and stone, the shafts of a plow, glimpsed fitfully in the starlight streaming through the gutted roof. An iron bar, set into the dirt in the far corner—

  “I know,” she told him irritably. “I see it, okay?”

  “Mlan,” Vaclav said, his eyes on the screen, “there’s an infiltration. At the tunnel entrance in the barn.”

  Krucevic was at his side instantly.

  “It looks like a woman.”

  “A woman?” He peered at the monitor with narrowed eyes, disbelieving. “Probably some dick with long hair.”

  “Do you want me to go down?”

  They were short of men. Otto and two others— iv Zakopan guards—had driven north to Sarajevo Airport to meet the au
thor of the E-mail messages. They had not yet returned. Six men patrolled the barracks area where the prisoners slept fitfully; another guard was on duty in the hospital ward. He could not spare Vaclav, who alone was monitoring the new security system. If the woman had penetrated the barn, others would be climbing the cliffs.

  Krucevic glanced swiftly at each of the video display screens—there were four in all, facing every possible means of ascent to the fortified aerie. Blank. No triggered alarms, no red lights blazing. He slapped the panel in frustration. Where the hell were they? Nobody attempted an assault alone.

  The helipad. Da bog sauva! If they had already landed—

  But the security monitor showed him a quiet compound, two guards patrolling with machine guns at the ready. No rotors thunk-a-thunked through the clear night air.

  “Stay on the screens,” he told Vaclav. “I need you to follow the assault.”

  From his bedroom doorway, Jozsef watched his father wheel around, gun in hand, and race down the hall to the supply closet. He knew the tunnel ended there; he had often been locked in the dark and crawling passage as punishment when he was just a small boy. A woman was climbing steadily through the earth.

  Mama, Jozsef thought, you came for me at last. You came for me. And his father meant to kill her.

  Eyes huge and dark in his ravaged face, Jozsef lifted his hand from the support of the door frame. He swayed an instant, dangerously. Then he tore the adhesive tape from his wrist and threw the IV feed to the floor.

  The dirt walls of the tunnel were crudely carved and narrow. She crawled on her knees toward an uncertain end, a passage that could be blocked, a possible cave-in. She had no flashlight; the first law of infiltration is never tell them you’re coming. The dark was so profound that Caroline was disoriented; for a time she had no idea whether the passage was in fact rising or whether she was falling with infinite slowness toward the center of the earth. She closed her eyes and crawled on.

  The tunnel widens at the end so that you can comfortably stand, Eric whispered. But for God’s sake, be careful.

  Caroline stopped a moment to catch her breath. The darkness was smothering. Blood pounded in her ears, a throbbing cadence, adrenaline-fueled, and so loud it must tell the entire terrorist world, Here I am, why notkill me? She drew the homing device from her pocket. Soundless, vibrating, a needle point of red light—but the signal was fainter now. As though the transmitter was farther away. Apprehension knifed through her. What if I’m headed in the wrong direction? Shit.

  Then her head came up. She sniffed the air. It was less heavy, less weighted with earth and disuse. She was only feet from the tunnel mouth.

  She tucked the homing device away. She willed her heart to stop pounding. It ignored her. So she crawled on anyway.

  Jozsef moved like a sleepwalker, like a child learning to toddle, his legs barely obeying his will. He moved out of his room toward the hospital ward three doors down the hallway. Vaclav was staring at his surveillance monitors; the corridor was deserted.

  At the entrance to the ward Jozsef stopped and clutched at the door frame. There was screaming behind him, his father’s rage, a sharp cry of terror.

  Mama —

  He fought the mad desire to run to her, to hurl himself at his father and save them all—because failure lay that way. Jozsef did not have time for failure. He drew a shuddering breath and stepped across the threshold.

  There were sixteen of them strapped into beds, arms handcuffed to the iron railings. The livid glow of a fluorescent light spotlit their faces. A guard Jozsef did not know sat in a chair with a tattered copy of a Sarajevo newspaper spread open on his knees. He was in the act of rising, alerted by the screams, when Jozsef appeared.

  “Go!” the boy commanded. “My father needs you. We are betrayed!”

  The guard tossed aside the newspaper and reached for his gun.

  “Give me the keys.” Jozsef thrust out his hand. “My father’s orders.”

  The man looked doubtful. “Are you well enough?”

  “The keys!” Jozsef snarled.

  The man hesitated, then slapped a metal ring into his palm and dashed through the doorway. Jozsef shut the door behind him and locked it. Then he turned to face the damaged things lying in the beds.

  Two old men he discounted at sight; both were obviously adrift in coma. A girl of perhaps five stared sightlessly upward while her fingers plucked at the thin sheet. A woman was moaning, the sound repetitive, maddening—she had already lost her mind. But the rest, three women, two boys his own age, and seven men—were staring at him with expressions ranging from curiosity to open hatred.

  He moved toward the first as quickly as his own illness would allow, fingering the keys. No time. No time to test them all, with these people helpless and his mother’s screams silenced.

  “That one,” the man before him muttered in Serbian. He had bright blue eyes, impossibly blue eyes, under a mat of filthy black hair. His face was scabbed and bruised. “The one between your fingers. No—the one you just let go. It is the skeleton key.”

  Jozsef’s hands were shaking uncontrollably. He thrust the key into the lock, turned it to the right, and heard the click. The cuffs fell away. “You must fight,” he said haltingly in his mother’s tongue. “Fight for your life. Can you do it?”

  The man sat up and rubbed his aching arms. Then he stared at the door at the end of the hall, the one Jozsef had not yet locked. “There are guns in that storeroom. But it will be guarded.”

  “Then we must draw the guard to us,” Jozsef told him. He had unlocked four more sets of cuffs; all the prisoners capable of listening were listening now.

  He nodded at one of the women—dirty-blond hair chopped any which way, bright spots of color burning in her cheeks. She looked more alert than the rest. “Scream as though someone wanted to slit your throat. Break some glass. When the guard comes through that door, we will be waiting.”

  The blue-eyed man found a scalpel on a shelf. And when the woman screamed and the gun-room guard raced in with his automatic leveled, the man stood ready behind the door.

  The guard fell with the scalpel through his neck.

  Jozsef steadied himself against a bed. Stars were exploding behind his eyes. I must not faint.

  The blond woman’s hand gripped his shoulder. He saw, as from a great distance, that three of her fingers were missing. In her other hand she held a knife.

  “What now?” she asked. As though he were a grown-up. Someone who knew what should be done.

  “To the barracks,” he cried. And heard his father in his voice.

  Caroline crouched with her ear against the tunnel door, listening intently. Her gun was raised. Beyond the flat panel of wood must be the supply closet; beyond that, a silence that made her flesh crawl. Too tight. Too heavy. A silence screaming for air.

  Someone was waiting beyond the closet door.

  Of course he’s waiting. You didn’t really think this would work, did you?

  Shut up. I don’t have time for this now.

  Caroline clutched her Walther more firmly and thrust aside her fear. She was within an inch of death and singing about it, she was intoxicated with derring-do. For an instant she stood alone on a forty-foot jump tower in deepest Tidewater—only this time there was no Eric to shove his hand into the small of her back. She took a deep breath. Felt for the latch of the tunnel door. And hurled herself off the platform—

  He must have expected her to ease the door open gently, to peer around the edge, a deer in his headlights, while he pumped a round of bullets straight into her face. Instead the tunnel door slammed open and Caroline propelled herself, still crouching, straight at the man’s knees. He lost his balance and swayed heavily against a shelf, raining boxes and vials to the floor. The crash of glass. Caroline screaming, a guttural, wordless battle yell.

  It won her a few seconds longer.

  She saw the man’s dark eyes, the close-cropped hair, the healed white sickle at his temple where a bull
et had traveled long ago. Mlan Krucevic. The man she had hunted obsessively for years, the man whose face she had never seen. The man who had strapped Eric to a door and waited for it to explode.

  His foot swung in an arc toward her head. She had no place to roll in the closet’s narrow space, no place to dodge. A piece of glass knifed into her bicep—

  She thrust herself upward and fired.

  If you’re going to use a Walther, Eric murmured to her, a closet’s the only place to do it.

  Krucevic grunted with pain. Then the boot completed its arc and smashed into her cheekbone. Pain exploded behind her eyes, her hands came up to her face, she was curled in a fetal ball on the floor. He kicked her again in the kidneys. Then his hand was on her wrist, twisting. The delicate bones snapped under his strength—and she let go of the Walther’s grip. Two iron talons grasped her shoulders and hauled her to her feet.

  In an instant he would put his gun to her skull and pull the trigger. The pain was a dull roar in the back of her ears, like the sound of the sea captured in a shell.

  “Where are they?” he screamed in German. “Your team. Where are they?”

  Her bullet had struck him in the abdomen. Blood spread like a map across his stomach, it stained the dark gray sweater he wore to black. Why was he still standing?

  “Where are they?”

  The sound of a gunshot, and a man’s brutal scream, from the hallway beyond.

  His gun smashed again into her battered cheekbone. Agony cut like a jagged knife through her brain. She summoned her last shred of strength—and shoved her knee straight into the dark stain at his abdomen.

  He howled and doubled over, still clutching his gun. She kicked backward and scrabbled for the missing Walther.