The Cutout cc-1

by Francine Mathews

  Greta. He frowned at the phone.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “A woman, a woman came. Not who she said she was. She took the virus.”

  “What virus?”

  “The vaccine,” she amended. “No. 413. For mumps. The one for humanitarian relief. She said that she was from the Health Ministry, she had a paper, she was so very angry oh, Herr Krucevic, I am so terribly sorry...”

  “No names!” he barked, more loudly than he had intended.

  “No names,” he repeated. “Who was she?”

  “She did not say.”

  “And you allowed her to take the vaccine?”

  “She was from the Health Ministry,” Greta bleated pathetically. “She signed her initials to the dock manifest. I cannot make them out. And then the health minister, Herr Schuler, arrived, and he said it must be a joke. A joke!”

  She sounded as though she was nearly peeing with terror, on the verge of tears.

  You stupid cow, he cursed her silently. You hopeless and sodden piece of human shit. Gently now, gently, before she fainted.

  “What did this woman look like?”

  “Dark. Black hair, black eyes, black clothes. She spoke with an accent like” She had been about to say, like yours. “Like someone from your country.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A white scarf. Around her neck.”

  Anger flared like bile and flooded his mouth. Zaibal Fucking mother of a whore. She! She had taken it! Then by the bloody cross of King Tomisav, I will find her. And when I do, I will slit her throat as a traitor and a Serb.

  “What am I to do?” Greta begged in a whisper.

  She was already stupid, but fear would make her dangerous. He must give her something to do, a purpose, before she destroyed them all. Krucevic's mind leapt forward, considered and discarded options.

  “Close the office and get to Budapest,” he told her. “I have a job only you can manage.”

  “I shall not fail you, mein Herr” She was sickening in her gratitude. He could do with her what he chose. He cut the connection.

  His enemies were trying to destroy him. But God was on his side. He had discovered the treachery before it was too late. If only he were in Budapest now! But all movement was impossible before dark. He had roughly one hundred kilometers to travel three hours by road, twenty minutes by air and time was slipping through his fingers. He must be patient. He must not allow rage to make him careless.

  A white scarf around her neck.

  The error of improvisation.

  Krucevic cursed the Czech border guards, cursed Slovakia, cursed Vaclav Slivik and all the women he had ever known. He cursed Olga Teciak with particular virulence. She was the most available object of his hatred.

  Olga was a stranger. He distrusted her simply because she was unknown and because she was a woman. She was huddled now in her bedroom with her young daughter cradled in a blanket. Both of them were terrified. Olga had probably figured out who Sophie Payne was; it was no secret any longer that the American Vice President had been kidnapped. Word had gotten out, by newspaper and television broadcast. He had been a fool to follow Vaclav's advice. Teciak could not possibly be trusted.

  He required some sort of insurance.

  “Mian,” Michael said behind him. “Mrs. Payne is awake and eating.”

  It was one of Krucevic's rules that they refer to the woman with courtesy. Courtesy was another form of cruelty. He dismissed his anger, the shadow of fear, and moved on to the next step.

  “Good,” he said briskly. “She'll need her strength. It's time to take a picture for the President.”

  Jozsef was chewing companionably with Sophie on the bathroom floor, although the meal was quite dreadful: canned orange juice, stale white bread, some sort of processed cheese. She choked on the food and the persistent taste of blood. It must be something to do with the anthrax, she decided. Not everything had an antidote.

  “Do you know where we are?” she asked the boy.

  “Bratislava, I think. But you should not ask me any questions. About the operation, I mean.”

  Sophie smiled faintly.

  “Is that what I am? An operation?”

  “That is how my father calls it.”

  “I see. But we were in Prague a few hours ago. Your father said so, when he was filming me.”

  “Yes.” Jozsef's voice dropped apprehensively. “We were not supposed to come here, I think. We changed our route quite suddenly last night, because the guards were searching people. Michael got you through the first crossing — from Germany to the Czech Republic — with his American passport, but Papa did not think it would work this time. And so we turned back.”

  Hope stirred in Sophie's heart.

  “So it was the Czech guards your father was afraid of. But crossing into where?”

  “If you ask me questions, lady, and I talk to you, there will be trouble.”

  “My name is Sophie,” she said.

  Jozsef turned this over in his mind.

  “My mother's name is Mirjana.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  The fringe of lashes lowered over his eyes. He was rolling sonic-thing rapidly between his fingers.

  “What is that?” Sophie asked.

  The fingers stilled, then were thrust into his pocket.

  “Nothing. Do you want that piece of cheese?”

  She shook her head. He seized the cheese immediately. She waited while he ate.

  “There is a woman here,” Sophie said. “And a child. The woman's name is Olga, but I do not know the girl's.”

  “A girl? How old?”

  “She is sucking her thumb still, and she is very frightened by all of us. The woman is frightened, too, although she tries not to show it.”

  “So the woman is not one of you?”

  “I told you. We were not supposed to come here. The woman is a friend of Vaclav's. That is dangerous for her and probably for Vaclav, too,” he added.

  “Dangerous how?”

  The boy drew his finger across his throat. The gesture was all the more appalling for its casualness.

  “But she's helped you!” Sophie protested.

  “She had no choice. And now she will say anything to protect her little girl. Those who are afraid, lady, are like snakes under the heel. They strike as soon as you move.” Sophie was about to argue with him about to utter stupidities about the impossibility of hurting the innocent but the words died in her mouth.

  “When I was young,” Jozsef continued, “I had two friends. Brothers. They lived on the street where I lived, and our mothers used to push us along the pavement together in our prams. Our mothers liked to talk. They shared things from their kitchens; they sewed together and drank coffee. When I had a ball or a toy, I shared it with the brothers, and they with me.”

  “That's good,” Sophie said encouragingly when he stopped. “It's good to have friends, Jozsef. Have you lived all your life in Belgrade?”

  “No,” he said doubtfully, “I do not think I have ever lived in Belgrade, or if I did, it was very long ago. My mother is there now. She is Serb. That is why my father took me from her. We are Croats. And at the time I am speaking of when I was a young boy we lived in Sarajevo.”

  “And do you still have friends there? In Sarajevo?”

  He shrugged.

  “What happened to the boys? The brothers?”

  “They were Muslim dogs.” His beautiful eyes met hers. “When the war came, my father knew that their father would kill us if he did not kill him first, and so Papa went in the night and cut his throat. Then he killed the boys one after the other as they lay in their beds, and showed their mother what he had done. He dropped their bodies at her feet.”

  Sophie forced herself to speak.

  “No one who had a boy of his own could do such a thing. No one.”

  Jozsef's black brows came down, puzzled.

  “But they were Muslims and we are Croats. If my father had allowed them to
live, they would have grown up to avenge their father's death. I would do the same.”

  “I cannot believe that.”

  “Then you are very foolish, lady. Or you have not seen enough of the world.”

  Sophie thought of the endless trips on Air Force Two, the succession of state visits and briefings and prepared speeches.

  “Perhaps you're right, Jozsef. And your father? He told you that he had killed your friends?”

  “He took me with him that night. I watched what he did.”

  The boy's fingers were worrying the object in his pocket again. He drew it out, and she saw that it was a rabbit's foot a triangular bit of dirty white fur, pathetic.

  “When she saw them lying dead, lady, their mother fell on her knees and tore at her hair.”

  “I suppose your father killed her, too?”

  Jozsef tossed his good-luck charm over his shoulder and caught it behind his back in one deft movement.

  “A woman suffers more when she is allowed to live, lady. But Drusa that was her name was afraid of the suffering, I think. She twisted her skirt into a rope and hanged herself from the kitchen window.”

  Sophie squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, Mian Krucevic stood in the doorway, staring down at her. His son's face was white as a bone.

  “Get out,” Krucevic said.

  Jozsef scrambled to his feet and darted around him.

  “Mrs. Payne.”

  She lifted her face and stared back at him. He handed her a newspaper. The headline screamed her own name.

  “I require your assistance, Mrs. Payne.”

  “Then you will have to unbind my feet.”

  “That will not be necessary. Please hold the newspaper below your chin. Vaclav?”

  Krucevic stepped back, and a camera lens took his place. Unconsciously, Sophie raised a hand to smooth her hair, and then caught out in a vanity so misplaced it was painful dropped it to her lap.

  “This will be sent to your friends at the White House, Mrs. Payne, so I suggest you consider what you say. For the record I would like to state that you are still the prisoner of the 30 April Organization and that, true to our word, we have administered the Anthrax 3A antidote since our last communication. Would you describe your experience, please?”

  “I'm still alive.”

  “But unfortunately, we have no guarantee that you will remain so.”

  “Most of us have to live with that uncertainty,” she said.

  This seemed to give him pause. But only for an instant.

  “Jack, Jack,” Krucevic said, with all the sorrow of a disappointed parent. “What were you thinking of? Alerting the Czech border guards? For shame. Under the terms of our agreement, you were to refrain from attempting to rescue Mrs. Payne. And yet, mere hours after the flag went up in your embassy garden, you've gone back on your word. Don't let it happen again, Jack. I require free passage throughout the region. I want that message sent to every head of state in Central Europe. And I do not want to be thwarted again.”

  It was only a matter of moments, Sophie thought, before he produced another needle. But instead the camera lens zoomed in on her face.

  “I won't use a hypodermic this time, Jack. If you fail me again, I will put a bullet in this woman's brain. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot bring people back from the dead.”

  Six

  Berlin, 12:06 p.m.

  Caroline Carmichael reached Berlin at ten-thirty Wednesday morning, twenty-two hours after Sophie Payne's kidnapping.

  Almost nothing was left of the city she remembered. She had visited twice during her posting to Budapest, when reunification was just a word and the movement of the capital from Bonn still years away. Bulldozers and cranes had taken root everywhere in the vacant lots, profuse as mushrooms after rainfall, and a trip across the city was an exercise in strategy, a meticulous ground campaign waged with map and mental compass. Equipment the color of sulfuric acid, pits that yawned a football field's depth into the earth, the halogen-lit midnights and clouds of exhaust — these were all that one knew of Berlin in the mid-nineties.

  The West had decided the past must be regained, and if not regained, then rewritten. A political process, on the face of it; but emotional in its force, perhaps because it was so obvious and so physical. The Wall had divided families and consigned the most glittering of Berlin's neighborhoods — the haunts of kaisers and courtesans, seditionists and strippers — to the shabbiness of memory. The Wall had left places like Potsdamer Platz, once the bustling heart of Berlin, to silence and weeds, its paving stones aching for a footfall.

  But Berliners, over time, had grown used to the change. New life had sprung up along the internal border like ground cover after fire. And then the cranes had come, in soaring ranks of red and blue and gold, their arms outstretched to the east.

  Caroline drew wide the curtains of her window. The plane full of technicians from Washington had flown into the bomb site so quickly that the embassy, its communications arrays shattered, had received no cable of their coming. The Secretary of State had phoned the ambassador's residence; a harried first-tour officer had spent most of the night finding accommodation for nearly forty people in a frightened city already inundated with visitors. Caroline had drawn the Hyatt, a spanking-new hotel in the middle of the reborn Potsdamer Platz, where the towers of the Sorry Center jostled for position and waves of raw mud still lapped at the foundations. It was rather, she thought, like being the first resident of a space station, one of civilization's outriders. She would have preferred a converted old palace off Kurfurstendamm, where the whoosh of tires on the rain-wet streets was as soporific as surf; but the Hyatt probably offered a good government rate. Even in crisis, economy ranked high among a first-tour officers considerations.

  And if she leaned forward now and glanced left, her nose pressed against the window, she could just make out the shattered glass dome of the Reichstag. An ill-fated building, she thought — burned by Hitler, and now racked by damage from his neo-Nazi followers in the blast that had swept Sophie Payne away. Politics had a way of turning violent in Berlin. Whole streets were obliterated, then recast with a different face. This was something Berliners understood: They lived on a volcano. The cranes could do only so much before history would have its way again.

  She kicked off her shoes and fell back on the bed. Solid polyester beneath her hair, nothing like the eiderdown smelling faintly of the farmyard in a small hotel off Kurfurstendamm. She felt a sharp pang of nostalgia for old Berlin.

  Here at the Hyatt, she might have been anywhere, the trappings of Central Europe consigned to the last century. Except that Eric was within range. He breathed the same coal laden air. Caroline closed her eyes and for an instant felt terrified. She wanted to draw the pillow over her head and smother in darkness. It was unlikely that even a single member of 30 April was still in Germany. Eric must be miles away by now. But she felt the force of his presence play over her like a tracking beam.

  Was she mad even to try to draw him in?

  That was what Dare Atwood wanted. A trap for Eric, and ultimately for his master.

  Caroline, the lure.

  Dare had no fucking idea what a marriage was like. How you could love a person without even knowing him. How he could own a piece of you, despite nearly three years of absence and betrayal how he could command some shred of loyalty and give nothing in return. Was it something about the marriage vow? That glancing blow of the sacred?

  And in her heart of hearts, Caroline knew that she couldn't summon Eric anymore.

  He had no desire to see her. He had chosen, after all, to leave. A trap was not a trap without a lure.

  She felt relief flood over her like a kind of peace. Eric might betray her abominably, but she would not be required to betray him.

  Absurd.

  She was too tired to resolve the questions of love and loyalty, the war between reason and heart. She had a job to do. A Vice President to find, the Agency to protect that vast,
imperfect sum of too many parts, that humming hive of secrets, most of them not worth knowing. What did she owe Eric Carmichael, anyway? She had paid enough debts during a decade of marriage.

  What would she say if they actually came face-to-face? What would he say if he knew that she was hunting him?

  Don't even ask, Mad Dog. If I told you, I'd have to kill you.

  The oldest joke in the Intelligence book.

  He would have to be hunted, all the same.

  She glanced at her watch. Wally Aronson, the Berlin station chief, expected her at the ambassador's residence in an hour. But the Brandenburg Gate lay straight down Ebertstrasse from her hotel in Potsdamer Platz, a brisk walk in the cold afternoon air. She just had time. A police barrier wrapped Pariser Platz like a package, turning the chaos into an apparition of order, the reflexive German impulse. Caroline stood in her jeans and sweater, a bright plaid blazer open to the raw wind, and snapped pictures from the edge of Strasse des 17 Juni, the broad boulevard running straight through the heart of the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond Pariser Platz, 17 Juni became Unter den Linden, the most beautiful boulevard in all of Berlin, with its royal palaces and museums and meandering river Spree. A decade ago, Unter den Linden was closed to the West and Strasse des 17 Juni led only to the Wall — a dead end rather than a gate.

  The Brandenburg had been a neoclassical dream, modeled on the Acropolis's Propylaea: six Doric columns surmounted by a plinth and frieze, the figure of Peace drawn by a chariot. Ironic, Caroline thought as she photographed the torso of a shattered horse in the rubble of the Gate. In Berlin, Peace was driven by the engine of war, Peace came at the cost of constant bloodshed. Napoleon had marched his Grande Armee beneath the Gate not long after it was built; Prussia had trained her cavalry in the square; Hitler's Ubermenschen had goose-stepped down Unter den Linden; and East German guards had patrolled within spitting distance of the prancing horses. But it had taken terrorists to topple the chariot to the ground.

  She ignored the barriers and the cones and the police and walked insouciantly forward, to the very edge of the bomb crater. The FBI technicians were already there, some of them kneeling on plastic sheets at the edge of the torn earth, others in conversation with what Caroline supposed were German investigators.