The Cutout cc-1

by Francine Mathews

  He hung up.

  Aronson would want him to stay in Budapest. He would want him to shadow Krucevic, find out where he kept the woman, turn informer, and thus seal his death warrant. Aronson would want him — Anatoly Petrovich — to risk his life for someone he knew was as good as dead. He turned, trailing smoke from his splayed fingers, and sought the protective cover of the train.

  He cased it from front to back and took a seat at the very end of the last car — a smoking one, of course — folding himself into a corner near the half-open window in the six-person compartment. Otherwise, it was empty. He read his paper and pretended to ignore what he was actually studying frantically, the passage of other travelers along the corridor. Travelers who might be sent to kill him.

  The train gave a lurch, compartment doors hissed shut. In a moment, the conductor would ask for his ticket. He closed his eyes again and saw the dead man's face.

  Anatoly had never liked killing. He had done it when necessary — in the army, during his first tour in Afghanistan — but the mujahideen were wolves, rabid with violence. Killing them was a matter of survival. He had never watched a man consider his own death before — had never watched the knowledge come with all the inevitability of rain after a stifling day. When the pistol grazed his temple, Lajta's eyes had widened slightly, like a dog's when you pull hard on its ears.

  It was the only sign of fear the banker had shown.

  The compartment door slid open, and a youngish woman — tired face, raincoat smelling dankly of the streets — shoved a bulky suitcase inside. Its zipper was broken, and she had been forced to tie the lid shut with string. Everything about her suggested a weary struggle against respectable poverty — her dark stockings, her thick-soled shoes. Hair as dry and tousled as an old bird's nest.

  She gave Anatoly a furtive glance and took the seat farthest away.

  Did he look menacing? Or like a man in terror for his life?

  The woman drew a paperback from her purse and opened it. Idly, Anatoly glanced at the cover: something in German. She was going home, then, as he was. Her head drooped, absorbed in words; suddenly, the platform began to slide backward.

  Anatoly did not trust himself to gaze out the window.

  He was an expert at cracking security systems. The KGB had trained him, and he had worked all over the world, lifting the locks on office doors in Khartoum and Valletta and Santiago and Manhattan. He had defected fifteen years ago during his last tour, in Rome, when he'd been sent to bug the building directly next door to the U.S. embassy — a simple affair of attaching a remote fiber — optic device to one of the ancient pipes running between the walls of the two buildings.

  Anatoly had never been a man of politics. He was not much of a man for morality, either, or for debating the finer points of loyalty. The KGB had been good to him. He had been good to the KGB. But it was time for their paths to part.

  He had fallen in love with a translator at the Rome embassy, and the last few weeks of her tour were up. Anatoly was moving on to Kabul; Marya was returning to Moscow. He tried to buy time, a transfer, a change in Marya's assignment. The system proved inflexible.

  And so, on that night nearly fifteen years ago, he discarded his cigarette, told his partner to take a hike, ignored the placement plan for the listening device, and instead disarmed the American embassy. Then he broke the glass in a ground-floor window at the back of the building, a window that should have been barred. He thrust himself through, grunting as his leather jacket snagged on the ledge — it was a coolish night in February, even the ubiquitous Roman cats gone to ground — until his sneakered feet touched something springy and soft. A tumbledown couch in a minor bureaucrat's office.

  Anatoly stretched himself out on the cushions and went instantly to sleep.

  In the morning, an extensive debriefing, the Soviet listening device like a peace offering on the table.

  Forty-eight hours later, he and Marya were on a plane for Washington.

  He spent eighteen months telling the CIA everything he knew about security installations throughout the Soviet empire, and about the hostile listening devices and fiber optics planted in the walls of a hundred U.S. installations.

  Then the Soviet empire began to crumble and the KGB heads themselves fled to Washington, and Anatoly decided to look for other work. Two years later he was a freelancer in Hamburg, Marya was thriving, their baby was on its way. He had four employees and a reputation for discretion. The difficult jobs — the problems of access or of imaginative design, the jobs that still made his blood race — he took on himself. That was when he met Krucevic.

  The man came to Anatoly with a bunker in mind. Something entirely controlled by computer, with infrared detection zones, motion sensors, video surveillance inside and out. Krucevic wanted his own phone lines monitored, he wanted cellular communications routinely tapped, he wanted the hard drives of his computer systems armed to self-destruct at the first sign of penetration. What he wanted, Anatoly decided, was to live like a villain in a Dick Tracy comic strip.

  Anatoly drew up plans. Krucevic paid him and took the blueprints away. Anatoly thought that was the end of it. If the security measures were ever installed, he was not to know.

  He had little idea then that he was dealing with the devil. That knowledge came later. After Krucevic had visited a third and even a fifth time, walking into the offices in Hamburg unannounced. He came, always, on the nights Anatoly worked late over the bookkeeping. His knowledge of Anatoly's movements was the least disturbing thing about him.

  He began to trade on loyalty. He began to assume complicity. He began to threaten, to presume he owned Anatoly and his office and his pretty house in the suburbs with two children growing in it.

  And at last, Anatoly had gone to Berlin, as a penitent goes humbly to confession, and had sought the good offices and advice of the man named Wally Aronson. He had come to know Aronson years before, during the long months of debriefing in Virginia, and while he doubted that Aronson had brilliance or cunning or even great courage, Anatoly believed that the man had no evil in him.

  And all the power of American Intelligence at his back.

  Sitting now in the drab car of the MAV train while the telephone wires of Hungary dipped and soared like swallows beyond the window, Anatoly prayed that Intelligence might still mean something.

  Aronson had told Anatoly that two options were open to him. The first was to throw himself on the mercy of old friends and allow them to relocate his family safely to the United States. He would lose most of what he had built in Hamburg; he would start over again a pauper in a land of wealth. But the Agency might offer some work. Or, Aronson said, Anatoly could take a risk: He could play Krucevic like a fish, tell Aronson everything he learned of Krucevic's movements, and be compensated handsomely. The house in Hamburg, the office with four employees, Marya's contentment in her settled life — all could remain. And he would win the undying respect and gratitude of the United States.

  Anatoly was, by nature, a taker of risk. And he liked the freedom he had won for himself; he liked meeting Wally Aronson as an equal, with something to give rather than everything to beg. It made him feel less desperate.

  When Krucevic called, he was ready with his overnight bag and his ticket to Hungary.

  His instructions were to await instructions.

  They came at four a.m., with a ring of his bedside phone and the order to be on the pavement in front of his hotel in ten minutes.

  He was there, a small kit of tools resting on the sidewalk at his feet, when the car pulled up. Krucevic sat alone in the back. Otto was at the wheel. Beside him sat another man Anatoly did not recognize but who he later learned was named Tonio. For an instant, he hesitated — the only free space in the car was next to Krucevic, and he instinctively hated the proximity of the man — then slid into the backseat. And kept his tools secure between his feet.

  They drove swiftly through the empty streets, a yellow nimbus of rain in the predawn streetlights
. Anatoly's hands were sweating. Tonio chattered nervously, high-pitched and annoying, until Otto reached out and cuffed him, hard, across the face.

  Otto drove to the rear of the central bank, to the electronically controlled entrance reserved for employees and armored trucks. The massive steel gate was a system beautiful in its impregnability, and Anatoly would have approached the problem with delicacy and reverence had Krucevic not been sitting silently in the rear. Anatoly struggled to control his breathing, to defuse the set of rear doors and then Lajta's office itself with an economy of movement. By that time they had pulled Lajta out of the trunk of the car, his hands bound and his mouth gagged, and shuffled him upstairs through the dimly lit halls.

  Where were the security guards? Had Krucevic bribed them all? The important thing, Anatoly decided, was not to show fear. Krucevic scented fear like a dog, and Anatoly knew that he reeked of it now.

  He wanted no part of what they were planning. He would have liked to leave then, with the doors wide open and the deed still undone. But Krucevic expected him there to the finish, so that the security devices could be reinstalled. By that time it was five A.M.” still dark, and Tonio was bent over the keyboard of the personal computer in the finance minister's office, his concentration focused on the monitor like a beam of light. Lajta huddled on the floor, bewildered and malevolent. Slumped in a chair, Otto yawned with boredom.

  Whatever Tonio was doing took very little time — less than fifteen minutes — but the tension in the room sang through their veins like a pitch just beyond the range of hearing. Anatoly's fingers were ice cold. And then Tonio stopped clicking the keys and glanced at Krucevic with a grin.

  “Cazzofottuto, boss, we're in.”

  “Good,” Mian said easily, as though Tonio had mentioned the weather.

  “Now get back out and let's go.”

  The clicking of the keys recommenced. Anatoly expelled a breath. He avoided the eyes of the man on the floor.

  Then Tonio stood up and Krucevic nodded at Otto.

  Lajta was hauled to his feet. At gunpoint, Otto led him to the desk. The Minister of Finance was forced to sit down, and then his bonds were loosened.

  The gun was pressed in his right hand, and raised, with cruel precision, to his right temple. Otto waited an instant before he pulled the trigger — he looked directly into Lajta's eyes as they widened with terror, and smiled — and at that point, Anatoly could no longer watch.

  He restored the security devices, praying he would not vomit. They drove him back to his hotel and left him on the sidewalk.

  “I know you will say nothing,” Krucevic told him, “because you are a man who loves his wife. And those little girls — beautiful, the pair of them. I would not want Otto to know where such lovely girls live.” The rain would give way quite soon to snow, Anatoly thought as he stared through the train window; it was probably snowing in Moscow now, had been snowing already for weeks. The women would be shuffling through the Arbat in ill-fitting boots, their faces muffled to the eyebrows.

  He lit his eighth cigarette. The woman opposite closed her paperback, and with it, her eyes. Smoke had placed a scrim between them that softened the deep weariness of her expression. He felt for her suddenly an abyss of tenderness, a desire to keep her safe. To do what he could no longer do for Marya and their children.

  In Washington, it hardly snowed at all. But to get there —

  Where, in God's name, could he go?

  Seven

  Berlin, 1:19 p.m.

  “A connection between Fritz Voekl and 30 April,” Tom Shephard repeated. “Do you realize what you're suggesting, Caroline? That the chancellor of Germany organized a terrorist hit in his own capital. A hit that killed twenty-eight people, seventeen of them Germans.”

  “You think I'm nuts,” Caroline observed.

  Shephard shook his head.

  “I think you're dangerous. I think if you said that in public, you'd get a Volksturm bullet right between the eyes.”

  “That doesn't mean it isn't true.”

  “If we can prove it,” Wally said, “we'd bring down the government.”

  A look akin to joy — if joy could ever be so vicious — suffused Tom Shephard's face. What was incredible in Caroline's mouth was gospel in Wally's, apparently.

  That quickly, Tom was sold.

  “So what's the link? Where do we look for it? Not in the bomb. It was made of Semtex.”

  “The terrorist's material of choice. You assume that means it came from Slovakia.” Not for nothing had Caroline followed a bombing investigation for thirty months. She knew more than she'd ever cataloged about explosives. “But what if it's a Semtex-like material from a different source?”

  “Forensics could pinpoint exactly where it came from, given some time and a bit more residue.”

  “Or maybe it's a problem with the device itself,” she added. “A piece of broadcast equipment left in the bomber's van that carries incriminating fingerprints. Prints belonging to somebody the Voekl regime doesn't want connected to the Brandenburg Gate.”

  “Or maybe it's the bomb's timer,” Wally threw in. “That's how we nailed the perps in Pan Am 103. The timer they used to trigger the bomb was one of only twelve made by a single Swiss firm for a single client — Moammar Qaddafis brother-in-law.”

  “Or maybe it's a body.” Tom Shephard sounded morose. “The famous extra leg, from Oklahoma City. Or maybe Mian Krucevic himself was blown up in the van, with a love letter from Fritz Voekl in his breast pocket. But it doesn't matter, does it, if we can't get to the fucking crater.”

  “You give up too damn easily,” Caroline said.

  The scarred embassy on Pariser Platz was once again open for business. A mere two days after the bombing, the marine guards were back at the entrance, black armbands prominent on their biceps. Windows were boarded over where they had not already been replaced. A tattered flag flew at half mast, and concrete blast posts linked with chain blocked the building's exterior — or had they been hidden before, Caroline thought, by the ceremonial platform erected for the dedication?

  The posts were designed to keep a vehicle filled with explosive from parking near the door; they had been powerless against commandos on the roof and shock waves traveling across the street. But perhaps they offered the illusion of safety to the people inside — people who knew, as she did, that if someone wanted to kill them enough, he would probably succeed.

  Volksturm guards patrolled the streets leading into Pariser Platz, and barricades were everywhere. Wally abandoned his car on a side street and led them through a series of alleys to the embassy. The pavements were slick with the first flakes of snow.

  As they turned into the square, Tom Shephard stopped short. Uniformed Volksturm surrounded the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate like a cordon of honor; but behind them, bright mustard against the blackened stone, reared the shovel of a front-loader. As the three of them watched, it swiveled and disgorged a twisted load of metal into the body of a truck.

  “Fucking shit!”

  Shephard took off at a run. Wally and Caroline tore after him. A few feet from the Volksturm cordon, they caught him and pulled him back.

  “Fucking idiots!” He was struggling to break free and hurl himself at the nearest black shirt. “Get that fucking truck out of there!”

  “You can't do anything about it.” Caroline's voice was urgent, her fingers straining at his coat sleeve. “Tom — you'll only make it worse.”

  He shook her off.

  “Do you realize what they're doing?”

  “Yes.”

  “They're destroying evidence!”

  “Of course they are.”

  The bright front-loader bent, primal as a dinosaur, to devour a lamppost. Stone, metal, dust, and a few scraps of clothing clung to its jaws. The figure inside at work on the levers appeared to be whistling, oblivious to the spectators, the rolling news cameras, the enraged Shephard.

  “Holy God,” he burst out. “There could be human remains
in there. What in Christ's name are they thinking?”

  “Come on.” Wally steered him gently around. “Let the press deal with it. They always do.”

  The Volksturm had massed near the consular section's door. There a long line of Berliners and tourists had assembled in hope of visas; most of them, Caroline noticed, were Turks. They stood in silence, eyes averted from the armed men in black; but there was an ugliness in the air, powerful as the stench of cordite.

  Wally pulled her toward the embassy's main entrance. Between the two of them, Carrie and Shephard, he looked like a policeman making an arrest.

  “I've got to call the Bureau,” Tom muttered as they flashed IDs at the marine guards and hurried down the main corridor. “This is un-fucking-believable. Do you realize what those bastards are doing?”

  “Yes, Tom, I think we all realize,” Wally said patiently. He took the broad central staircase two steps at a time, turned left at the sec and floor, and strode down a corridor. Caroline barely had time to register a team of technicians mounted on ladders, busily rewiring the embassy ceiling, when Wally stopped in front of an office.

  “Mrs. Saunders!” he said gaily to the middle-aged woman behind the desk. “Meet Caroline Carmichael, otherwise known as Mad Dog”

  “Mad Dog?” muttered Shephard.

  Caroline extended her hand; Mrs. Saunders clasped it.

  “Mrs. Saunders is the station's nerve center,” Wally told them. “Although she has worked for an Intelligence organization for most of her life, none of us has ever learned her first name.”

  “It's Gladys, if you can believe,” said the woman. “My mother was Welsh. Just call me Mrs. Saunders. Everyone does. You have an action cable from Headquarters, Wally” — she looked at him severely over her half-glasses, which were tethered to her head with a black cord — “and Vie Marinelli has been on the phone from Budapest. He wants you before COB today.”

  “Station chief,” Wally told Caroline. “I put in a call to him this morning about DBTOXIN. So the cable system's up?”