The Cutout cc-1

by Francine Mathews

  “So it was,” he said to Jack Bigelow now. “I learned many lessons from my life behind the Iron Curtain. Chief among them is this: The nation that denies a people hope will never win the war. A nation that gives its people hope, Jack, gives them a reason to fight.”

  “And you see hope as … ?”

  “Money, Jack. Money. If I can pour deutsche marks into the developing economies of my buffer states Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, even Poland with time, I will turn despair into hope. I will deny the terrorists a foothold for their anarchy. And protect those who fall within the German sphere of influence.”

  Dare frowned slightly at the phrase “German sphere of influence.” But Bigelow was tired of chatter. He made a lewd gesture in the speakerphone's direction something suggestive of a giant hand job and prepared to sign off.

  “Listen, Fritz, we're always glad to know you fellas in the Federal Republic are fightin' the good fight. You get any news of Sophie Payne, you call me right away, y'hear? I'll be sendin' those Bureau boys over to Berlin ASAP.”

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  “You give that pretty little daughter of yours my best, okay? Bye, now.”

  Bigelow snapped off the speakerphone, then glanced around the faces assembled in the Oval Office. There was Matthew Finch, the National Security Advisor, a quiet, bespectacled, kindhearted man with an absolute intolerance for bullshit; Gerard O'Neill, Bigelow's Secretary of State, who was drumming his fingers impatiently on the arm of his chair; Al Tomlinson, the FBI director; and General Clayton Phillips, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Phillips frowned as he studied his notes.

  “Hope, my ass,” Bigelow drawled. “Somebody better tell my friend Fritz about Osama bin Laden, terrorist billionaire. Now that's the kind of money gives people hope. Wouldn't you say so, Dare?”

  “A chicken and an AK-47 in every pot,” she replied. “One can hardly blame Voekl, Mr. President. He has to be feeling rather stupid right now.”

  “He may sound that way, Dare, but problem is, Fritz is no dummy.” Bigelow lifted his boots off the desk and thrust himself out of his chair. “So what's he tryin' to pull, anyway? I call him about Sophie, and I get a stump speech about investment opportunities in Central Europe.”

  “Trying to change the subject?” suggested Al Tomlinson, the FBI director.

  “Then he's doing a lousy job of it,” said O'Neill, the Secretary of State. “No bunch of disaffected gastarbeiters kidnapped the Vice President. A bomb in Berlin gets them nothing but bad press.”

  “I agree.” Dare glanced down at her notes, feverishly thrown together in the past forty minutes by a senior analyst in DI/OREA.

  “But the Berlin police have issued a curfew for all Turkish aliens resident in the city and placed a cordon of riot police around guest-worker neighborhoods to deter reprisals. They're also conducting a house-to-house search for the Vice President and her captors. We don't believe they'll find a trace of them in Germany. In our opinion, the terrorists are long gone.”

  “I can see Turkish extremists bombing the Gate,” the President said thoughtfully, “but not snatching Sophie in a stolen chopper.”

  “They'd be more likely to kill her outright, just to make the German government look bad,” agreed Matthew Finch.

  “Or target a German they hate, like Voekl.”

  “Who, instead of being dead, now has the ideal excuse to hit the Turks harder. Do me a favor, Dare.” Bigelow wheeled suddenly toward her. “Start snoopin' in Fritz Voekl's backyard, okay? I want to know what time his daughter Kiki's curfew is, who Fritz calls for phone sex late at night, whether he puts whole milk or two percent on his Wheaties in the morning.”

  “Done.”

  “Fritz Voekl wasn't flying that chopper,” objected Gerard O'Neill.

  “No. But he wasn't in the square to take the blast, either, now was he, Gerry?”

  Bigelow pinned him with a look.

  “Any of your cookie-pushers over in the Bottom of the Fog get a better idea, you be sure an' send 'em to me.”

  O'Neill smiled nervously.

  “I think we can usefully speculate about the parties responsible,” Dare interjected. “The resident Turks are probably a scapegoat. Both the Voekl regime and possibly several other groups operating in the region would kill to discredit them publicly.”

  “Could be Kurdish separatists,” Al Tomlinson said abruptly. “They love it when Turks get egg on their faces.”

  “But the PKK has been in disarray in recent months,” Dare pointed out, “since Turkish forces captured their leader.”

  “Who snatched all those guys from Beirut in the eighties?” The President glanced around inquiringly.

  “Terry Anderson. Bill Buckley. That whole bunch. Who grabbed them?”

  “Hizballah.” Dare had spent most of the eighties on the National Security Council, frantically trying to get the CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley, home before he died of torture. She had failed. Jack Bigelow, on the other hand, had spent the eighties reinventing himself from corporate raider to the most trusted man in America.

  “If the rag heads were behind it,” snapped Gerard O'Neill, “we'd have heard from ten different terrorist groups by now, all claiming responsibility.”

  “Probably true,” Dare conceded.

  “And Hizballah has never kidnapped a woman.”

  “So who do we blame, Dare?” Bigelow den-landed.

  The real question, after all the perambulation. She drew a deep breath.

  “We believe the sophistication and timing of this particular hit rule out the lesser Middle Eastern organizations. In our opinion, three groups could be responsible: a German cell trained by the Saudi-in-exile, Osama bin Laden; one dispatched by the Palestinians-Ahmad Jabril or the PFLP-GC; or a group operating under the 30 April Organization.”

  “Germany's always been lousy with terrorists,” muttered General Phillips. “They send in kids with student visas, marry them to frauleins, wait for a convenient moment to activate.”

  Bigelow sighed. “Sort it out for me, Dare.”

  “As I'm sure you're aware, Mr. President, Osama bin Laden has been able to strike the U.S. significantly in the past, despite our constant efforts to monitor his terrorist network worldwide. He's independently wealthy and he works through a variety of front organizations, some legitimate, some less so.”

  “I thought he liked to operate outta the third world,” the President said.

  “But he may well have established a foothold in the new German capital years ago. You'll remember that bin Laden's father made his fortune in construction. Building contractors of every description have been the most visible commercial enterprise in Berlin for the past decade.”

  “And he sure loves taking out U.S. embassies,” muttered Gerard O'Neill. The memory of rubble in Tanzania and Kenya still had the power to enrage him.

  Bigelow glanced at his watch.

  “I know enough about bin Laden. Go on.”

  “Ahmad Jabnl, head of the PFLP-GC,” Dare said.

  “An old PLO hand who broke with Yasir Arafat decades ago. Jabril styles himself as an ideologue, a man who offers no quarter while Israel exists. But he likes hits with a lot of public relations value. His men bombed our troop trains in Germany in 1991.”

  “Then I'd say blowing the Brandenburg Gate is tame by comparison.” Bigelow's eyelids flickered.

  “Why Sophie?”

  Dare shrugged.

  “Jabril's lieutenant is serving a life term in a German prison. Maybe he wants him released.”

  “It's after nine o'clock in the evening over there,” Bigelow said impatiently. “Why the hell don't they give us a call?”

  Because Sophie Payne is already dead, and they've got nothing to bargain with now. Dare could have voiced the unspoken thought poisoning the room. Instead, she waited, briefing papers at the ready.

  “And the last group, Director?” the President asked.

  She felt a flutter of disquiet in her stomach.


  “The 30 April Organization.”

  Bigelow frowned.

  “Neo-Nazis, right? The ones you think assassinated Schroeder?”

  “We suspect they murdered Schroeder because he championed NATO air strikes against Belgrade. Mrs. Payne might very well have been next on their list.”

  The President stretched painfully. A ruptured disk in his lower vertebrae caused chronic back pain.

  “The guy who runs that organization is a war criminal.”

  “Mian Krucevic. A Croat biologist. We believe he's operating out of Germany. Here's his bio.”

  Bigelow reached for his reading glasses and scanned the document swiftly. Then he thrust it at Matthew Finch.

  “I'll have to ask my pal Fritz why he isn't cutting the ground from under this joker's feet.”

  “Too much money in pharmaceuticals,” Matthew Finch murmured.

  “The German police have tried to snare Krucevic for years,” Dare said, “but 30 April is an organization that leaves few tracks. Rather like our own right-wing militia groups.”

  “Who's funding them? Or is this nut case an independent operator?”

  “Krucevic never lacks for funds,” Dare told Bigelow. “He shifts money through a variety of numbered Swiss accounts. We think he channels most of it through a front company in Berlin called VaccuGen. It produces and exports legitimate livestock vaccines, although there is strong evidence to suggest it also does a healthy trade in illegal biological agents. Krucevic has a reputation in the gray arms world for concocting deadly bugs. I've placed the company on the NSA's target list. We should have everything that goes in or out of the place fairly soon.”

  “Do you have anybody inside?”

  She repressed a sharp breath, although Bigelow's question seemed innocent enough.

  “Not really, but we've been targeting them for some time.”

  Clayton Phillips glanced up from his doodling. He was a kind-looking grandfather of a man, despite the rows of brass gleaming on his uniform. He had raised three girls himself and had a soft spot for the Vice President. Dare detected the marks of strain around the general's eyes; he was chafing at inactivity, at his own sense of uselessness. The word target, however, had caught his attention.

  “Could we send in some cruise missiles against their operational base?”

  “We'd have to locate it first,” Dare answered.

  “Krucevic has a genius for self-protection. His identity and movements are so closely held, we've never even seen a picture of him.”

  Matthew Finch fluttered the bio.

  “This is picture enough. Krucevic is ruthless, he's efficient, and he's got no compunction about butchering Germans. He's nuts. But why snatch Sophie Payne? If revenge was the point, why not just shoot her in the square?”

  “Then we should expect a demand,” the President said sharply. “Krucevic's agenda for Sophie's release. Tit for tat. So what exactly will this asshole want?”

  “A Europe cleansed of the non-Aryan races,” Dare replied. “And that, Mr. President, you will never give him.”

  There was silence as everyone in the room considered the implications of what she had said. “They killed Nell Forsyte,” Bigelow said quietly. “Shot her in the head. It would take that a direct hit to stop Nell in her tracks. She had a four-year-old daughter.”

  “I'm sorry, Mr. President.” Dare folded her hands over her briefing book. The topaz winked and was swiftly covered.

  “For Ms. Forsyte and all the others.”

  “Mr. President?”

  Maybelle Williams, his executive secretary, peered apprehensively around the Oval Office door.

  Bigelow folded his reading glasses and smiled at her as chough nothing really bad could ever happen.

  “Yes, darling'?”

  “The Situation Room just called. Embassy Prague has got a videotape of the Vice President.”

  Eleven

  Prague, 8:15 p.m.

  The man Sophie thought was Michael sliced the bonds at her ankles and wrists and hauled her down a corridor to the bathroom. Windowless, like everything in the subterranean compound, it offered no chance for escape. Michael stood in the doorway with a gun poised while she used the toilet. She tried to ignore him, knowing that Krucevic would use this sort of humiliation to wear her down. When at last she stole a look at Michael, she detected only boredom.

  He threw a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and some socks at her feet.

  “Put those on.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your clothes are starting to stink.”

  She turned her back and stripped off her ruined suit. A red line across her thighs showed where Krucevic had pulled the skirt taut, and a dark blot like the map of Europe stained the fabric. Nell's blood.

  Wordlessly, Michael handed her a comb.

  For the first time in that extraordinary day, Sophie felt an overwhelming desire to cry. Her hands were shaking.

  She dragged the comb through her short black hair and splashed water on her cheeks. Then she dried herself with the front of her sweatshirt, a technique recalled from Adirondack camp days. There was no mirror in the room; perhaps they were afraid she would smash the glass and cut them all to pieces.

  She probably looked like shit anyway.

  “What in God's name are you doing here? You're American, aren't you?”

  The look on his face was half amusement, half contempt.

  “I have orders to beat you if you try to talk to me, Mrs. Payne,” he answered in German. “We all do. Don't push your luck.”

  He seized her by the arm and pulled her along the passageway, back to the room she already thought of as prison. Halogen lights now hung from the ceiling's steel beams; they flooded Mian Krucevic's face and that of the cherubic Vaclav, who held a video camera. Beyond him stood a gurney.

  “Ah, Mrs. Payne. A vision in black.” Krucevics mood had altered subtly, she noticed; he seemed in the grip of subdued excitement, his movements jerky and tense. He nodded to Otto.

  “The gurney.”

  Before she had time to react, Otto seized Sophie in a fireman's carry and dumped her unceremoniously on the stretcher. She lunged upward. But like young Jozsef, she lost. Otto snapped a belt over wrist and ankle, immediately restraining her.

  She thought of the needle, the desperate child, and felt a sickness in the pit of her stomach.

  “Is this really necessary? I'm not likely to kick you again.”

  “No,” Krucevic said slowly as he settled a newspaper next to her right ear, “I don't think you are. Vaclav?”

  He stepped toward them, video camera dangling in one hand.

  “Start with a close-up of Mrs. Payne's face, will you? Focus on the newspaper's date. Then pan back until they can see how she's lying. On no account are you to focus on me.”

  Strapped down and stripped of her elegant suiting, Sophie was no longer a person to Krucevic. She had become the merest prop, a faceless bundle in black sweats.

  She struggled uselessly against the gurney straps, then realized she only looked weaker. As though she was afraid. Panicking. How to seize control of the situation?

  She refused to admit that control was completely beyond her. Refusal might sustain her for several days if she survived the next few minutes.

  The camera lens came within a foot of her face. If this tape was going anywhere near the United States if there was a chance that Peter might see it she had a duty to remain calm.

  “Good evening, Mr. President.” Krucevic's voice came from somewhere in the darkness beyond the floodlights. “Let us state for the record that we have in our keeping one Sophie Friedman Payne, Vice President of the United States and apostate Jew. It is Tuesday, November ninth, somewhere in Central Europe. Observe the copy of the International Herald Tribune you see on your screen; it bears today's date. We are the 30 April Organization, and as Mrs. Payne is familiar with us, I must assume we need no introduction.”

  The camera lens retreated several
feet, took in the gurney and Sophie's shackled body.

  “Do you know, Mrs. Payne, why you are here?”

  “Because you murdered my bodyguard and kidnapped me,” Sophie said without hesitation.

  “You are here as a token of faith,” Krucevic amended patiently. “Of faith and commitment on both our parts to an enlightened course of action. Have we harmed you, Mrs. Payne?”

  “No. You've terrorized and humiliated me. But it takes a great deal more than that to harm me, Krucevic.”

  He had walked around the perimeter of the room until he could see her face, although he remained carefully off camera. His arms were folded across his chest, his dark eyes fixed on her own.

  “I'm afraid it does,” he said. “Otto? The hypodermic, please.”

  Sophie flinched involuntarily as the man approached. His face was now concealed behind a black hood, but his eyes were unmistakable dull with malice and anticipation. In his right hand he held a needle. She jerked convulsively in her bonds.

  “It is to Jack Bigelow that I am speaking now,” she heard Krucevic say. “I hope I may call you Jack, Mr. President. I am about to conduct a demonstration. I know you will watch very carefully.”

  He nodded. With a sudden, sharp movement Otto plunged the hypodermic into Sophie's thigh. She cried out at the shock of it, the gratuitous pain; behind his mask, Otto smiled. Eight people were assembled in the White House secure video tele-conferencing center, or VTC — a smallish space with an oblong table, twelve chairs, a wide-screen monitor, and a million-dollar array of telecommunications equipment.