The Cutout cc-1

by Francine Mathews

  She wants Eric to quit the Agency.

  Eric can no longer say whether home ever existed.

  Scottie sees the rifts in marriage before they heave, before the land slides out underfoot; he blames Caroline for Eric's distance.

  The folly of Vajdahunyad Castle towers above them like a bit of Disney plunked down on suspect terrain. Caroline fingers a coin in her left pocket. She answers ScOttie when he offers a word; she tosses the ball of conversation over Eric's head as though they are conspirators, communicating across a garden wall. Eric, as always, has retreated within. His feet find the path of their own accord. His head is sunk into the collar of his coat. He is searching for threats, mapping out protective cover, his eyes are moving constantly. Caroline is on the verge of screaming, Talk to me, God damn it, talk or let me go — but Scottie is admiring the baroque wing of the architectural folly. She outlines the history of Vajdahunyad for his particular edification, she maps whole centuries with one finger in the air. In Washington the breeze would be sharp with wood smoke, a festive smell that quickens the appetite and sings of winter holidays;

  but in Budapest the air is yellow and rotten with burning coal. Presently they will put the lake to their backs and turn toward the zoo in the park's northwest corner, not from any desire to see the sad-eyed elephants or the desperate cats pacing in their cages, but because the city's best restaurant, Gundel's, is there in its Art Nouveau palace, and today is cause for celebration.

  “How many years has it been?” Scottie asks them now.

  “Eight,” Caroline says. “Our eighth anniversary.”

  “You kids.” He rests one hand casually on Eric's shoulder, but Eric is staring past him, at a dark patch in the woods.

  “I don't think even one of my marriages has lasted that long. But I hope you've got years together. Really. I do.”

  While Caroline was dreaming with her head against the window, Shephard stirred in his seat. He banged his tray table, dropped his book in the narrow space between the rows of seats, and swore under his breath. Caroline never moved.

  Exhaustion shadowed her eyes; her mouth was parted slightly with deep and even breathing. The plane was starting into its descent. He had to know who Sally Bowles was.

  He bent down to retrieve the paperback, and flipped open the leather flap of Caroline's purse. It would be a civilian passport with a blue cover, not her official black diplomatic one.

  He riffled delicately through the contents of the purse with his fingertips, tension prickling the back of his neck. There was a zippered compartment. He eased it open with his forefinger, mentally cursing his clumsiness. And felt the folded edge of something.

  A matchbook. He thrust it back and felt again — The two-by-two snapshot was of the woman in the black wig. And the name in the data field was one he had heard only three hours before, on the lips of a wiretapped Palestinian.

  Jane Hathaway.

  What was the other name Sharifhad used? Michael?

  Shephard tucked the fake passport back in its compartment and straightened in his seat. His pulse accelerated. Caroline was working with a Palestinian terrorist. Sharif had put her in contact with 30 April. And Wally Aronson clearly had no idea. He drew a sharp breath and ran his fingers through his hair. The plane was steadily losing altitude, and even the flight attendants were strapped in. Was Caroline a terrorist mole in the heart of the investigation? Would she betray them all? Or was she operating under instructions from Washington that no one not even the Agency's own station chiefs was privileged to know?

  Shephard closed his eyes. He had gone behind her back and been rewarded with dangerous knowledge. He had chosen this sudden mistrust, this creeping sense of treachery. He would have to live with it now.

  And watch Jane Hathaway's every move in Budapest.

  Thirteen

  Budapest, 9:30 p.m.

  A cramping pain curled in Sophie Payne's bowels, making her writhe like a creature possessed. For the second time this night, she vomited blood.

  From the wall behind her head came pitiful wails, the voices of delirium. She buried her face in the damp pillow.

  The sound of a belt slicing down on exposed skin. A squeal of pain, pathetically suppressed. Jozsef was no coward.

  “What did you tell her?” Harsh words, in fluent German.

  “I never said anything, Papa! I haven't spoken to her in months!”

  “You lie!”

  The belt. An agonized whimper.

  “You lie!”

  The blows were raining fiercer now. The boy would be scarred with weals, the blood bright on his translucent skin.

  “For the love of God, stop it .. .”

  Sophie whispered.

  “You have been talking to your mother,” Krucevic muttered viciously into the dark. “Telling her everything. How else could she know? How else could she find Greta and convince her to give up the vaccine? You gave her the information. You betrayed me, Jozsef! Do you know the damage you've done? We must find her! You must tell me before it is too late!”

  “I thought you killed her long ago!” A cry of loss and hatred.

  “Killed her?”

  “You must have. Why else would she leave me here?”

  So it had mattered to Jozsef, this year of abandonment. Sophie thought of his draggled rabbit's foot, the last, pathetic talisman of a normal life. A child's hope against hope that his mother was alive.

  “Because she's a coward,” Krucevic spat out. “Your mother is too much of a coward to come after you, Jozsef. She would not dare to face me”

  “Where is she, Papa?”

  “You tell me. You're the one who has been talking to her on the sly. Sneaking around, taking my phone in the middle of the night, calling Belgrade. Do you think I don't get the bills? Do you think I don't recognize that number?”

  “I did call! I have called her every week since you took me away! But never once have I heard her voice. Never once, the least word. She is not in Belgrade. She is not anywhere. I do not know where she is!”

  He broke down into a terrible weeping. Sophie's heart burned for the boy, for the lost and fragile child in the room beyond her wall, his thin shoulders spasming with grief. The sound was magnified in her delirium; it swelled, consuming her air, her sight, until the walls vibrated with bitterness and she choked on Jozsef's tears herself. What kind of monster was his father? Didn't he comprehend at all what it was like to be a pawn, a token between two warring parties, one the mother who nursed you and the other the father who demanded your will? Could he see nothing of how the boy was torn? Jozsef was dying for lack of the mother he loved. But he would also die, Sophie felt sure, before he would betray Mian Krucevic.

  The belt sliced down again; the boy cried out.

  “That will teach you to take my phone,” his father said.

  From the moment Mian Krucevic had learned of Mirjana's intrigue — of the brazen theft of his drugs in broad daylight — he had been convinced that Jozsef was the source of 30 Aprils leak. It was entirely like his bitch of a wife to milk the boy for information. Jozsef was young, he was not yet tough, he could be manipulated by his emotions. That was one reason Krucevic had taken him from his mother. He would not have Jozsef spoiled by a Serbian whore.

  But he had beaten the boy almost senseless, and the story had never changed.

  Jozsef was not the source of Mirjana's information. And what a lot of information she possessed.

  Mirjana had known how to find VaccuGen. That could be explained. It was, after all, a private corporation that conducted legitimate business. VaccuGen vaccines ensured that livestock the world over — particularly in developing nations — would not fall prey to a host of diseases. But how had the zaiba known Greta Oppenheimer's name? How had she known exactly which vaccine to steal?

  There was only one answer. Someone within 30 April had betrayed him. And Krucevic had a very good idea who that person was.

  He glanced at his watch. Almost dinnertime. Like Christ at the Pas
sover supper, he would break bread with the man who had sold him for thirty pieces of silver.

  And afterward, he would crucify him.

  The airport taxi carried Tom Shephard and Caroline Carmichael through boulevards of screaming sirens, around squares of massed police. They passed checkpoints and blockades and forced their way across bridges thronged with people. The false stone facades of the nineteenth-century buildings flickered against a backdrop of flame.

  Hungary's Houses of Parliament were burning.

  Caroline stood at her hotel room window and watched. The glorious old buildings were ablaze with light, like something from an Impressionist painting, the crimson and gold flames mirrored in the black of the Danube.

  “The government fell an hour ago,” Shephard said from her doorway.

  The flames rippled, reflected, in the black water.

  “And the Volksturm land in the morning,” she replied.

  Tonio shivered beside Michael in the passenger seat, the latest of Krucevic's videos resting on the console between them. He had been whistling a tune something by U2, a B-side recording, he knew them all but not even rock and roll could comfort him tonight.

  “Jesus .. . who'd have thought they'd riot over money?”

  “Krucevic,” Michael answered. “That was the point of the plan, Tonio. Mian needed an excuse to get the Volksturm into Hungary, and you certainly gave it to him.”

  “I just do what I'm told.” Tonio was defensive. “I just work the keys.”

  They were close to the city now, and the sky above Budapest glowed like a blast furnace. Tonio shivered.

  “From the look of that, the place'll be crawling with cops. Cazzofottuto” He crossed himself, the scars on his wrist livid in the light from the dashboard.

  The Italian prison system had not been kind to Tonio.

  He jabbed at the car stereo buttons; a czardas filled the car, some guttural words.

  “They've got shit here for music, you know that? Like their language. And their economy. Pure shit.”

  Michael reached over and snapped off the radio.

  “Why don't you sing? A little Paul Simon always works in the darkness.”

  “I could use a drink,” Tonio said.

  “It's not much farther.”

  “There's bound to be roadblocks. Detours. Police barricades. Maybe we should just go back. Tell him we couldn't get close”

  “We'll get close.”

  Tonio glanced at him.

  “You know this place, huh? You've been here before?”

  Michael looked over his left shoulder, signaled, and moved into the fast lane.

  Tonio hadn't really expected him to answer. Michael said less than any man he'd ever known any man without a bullet in his brain.

  “Did you know that Mian is following us?” he asked Tonio conversationally.

  “Following us?” Panic, pure and deadly, flooded through his body.

  “Or at least Vaclav is. He's driving. I picked him up about fifteen minutes out of the bunker. Otto's in the passenger seat. He looks happy.”

  Nobody liked it when Otto looked happy.

  “Why would they be following us?”

  “I don't know. Maybe it's a test.”

  Tonio swallowed hard on the fear that filled his throat.

  “What kind of test?”

  “For Mian, there's only one kind.”

  Michael was right. A year ago, Tonio had watched the boss put a gun to the heads of two men he'd known and liked.

  “What the fuck have you done, Michael?”

  “Me? All I did was shoot a little girl when Mian asked. What have you done, Tonio, with your magic fingers? Have you looked somewhere in Mian's computer that you shouldn't?”

  “No! I swear it on the Virgin!”

  Michael raised an eyebrow.

  “Then I guess we've got nothing to worry about. Sing. With any luck, we'll lose them.”

  He exited the Ml abruptly, well to the west of Buda, snaking the car through the traffic of the side streets and heading downhill toward the bridges over the Danube. They were in the eleventh district now, Gellerthegy, the neighborhood behind the castle's heights, and the broad expanse of Villanyi Ut was ominously deserted. Then, in the headlights, the plaza that was Moricz Zsigmond Korter and the police checkpoint.

  “Merda,” Tonio muttered. He huddled lower in his seat, a furtive rodent beneath a mop of blond curls. “Turn around.”

  “Absolutely not. We're going ahead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mian never will,” Michael answered implacably.

  He slowed the Audi to a stop and rolled down the window. An officer approached.

  Incomprehensible language, and then Michael nodding.

  “Get the registration,” he told Tonio.

  “What?”

  “It's in the glove compartment.”

  There was a gun in the glove compartment, too at the bottom, where a casual observer would never suspect, and for an instant, Tonio saw Michael's plan. But the Hungarian cop was staring at him, his cap visor very correct across the brow, and under the weight of those flat dark eyes Tonio could not move, could not seize the gun and shoot the man in the forehead. He had watched while Otto had killed the finance minister, Lajta, he had watched a score of deaths in the past few months, but he could not bring himself to murder now.

  Besides, there were other police waiting beyond the headlights, their uniform pants picked out in a halogen glare.

  Michael reached across him and took a packet of papers from the glove compartment. Another few words in halting Hungarian.

  The cop nodded, nipped through the documents, and then returned them. He barked a word.

  Michael produced his passport.

  “Tonio?”

  “What? Santa Maria what?”

  “The officer would like your passport.”

  His brown eyes widened, and he drew a quick breath. Did he have it? Or had he left it in the bunker? Madonna, but Krucevic would kill Michael. What if their names were already on a list somewhere what if these cops followed them, saw the videotape tossed out a window, gave the registration to the Americans The cop held out his hand. Tonio reached inside his jacket. His fingers brushed the textured butt of his gun. A few seconds, a flare of light, and Michael could wheel the car up Villanyi Ut before the others thought to follow.. ..

  What then?

  He pulled his passport out of his breast pocket.

  The cop glanced at it indifferently and then handed them both back.

  Michael's window slid closed.

  Blindly, Tonio grabbed one of the passports with shaking fingers and stuffed it into his jacket.

  “What the fuck did you say back there?” he snarled.

  “The car's registered to VaccuGen.” He turned left into Bartok Bela Ut, still heading downhill.

  “We're traveling salesmen from Berlin. We know nothing about riots.”

  “Salesmen.”

  “We know nothing about curfews. We're looking for the Gellert Hotel. It's a few blocks from here.”

  “Dio, I need a drink.”

  The floodlit facade of the hotel loomed before them, an Art Nouveau confection hard by the Chain Bridge, and suddenly, Michael pulled right and then left, into Budafoki Ut. He was still humming “Graceland.” Now Tonio would have the goddamn tune in his head for the next thirty days.

  “Here.” Michael jerked the Audi into a space at the curb and killed the engine.

  “You're in no shape for this.” He reached into his pocket and handed Tonio some deutsche marks.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That's Libella.” He gestured toward the bar.

  “Last time I checked, a pretty decent place. You'll like the music. They'll take your deutsche marks gladly and rob you blind in the process, but so what? Money's tight these days in Buda.”

  “What about the video?”

  “I'll deliver it,” Michael said curtly. “I should go on foot any
way. It's safer.”

  “But Mian — ”

  “Mian turned back at the police checkpoint. Mian will never know. I'll find you in an hour. Two, at the outside. If I'm later than that, take the car and get out.”

  Tonio swallowed nervously. He could never leave without Michael — not and expect to see morning.

  His eyes flicked to the dull gold light pouring from the bar's windows. How long had it been since he'd had a drink? Mian hated drink like he hated women. He would have to be careful.

  Michael was already a block away, heading for the bridge, a shadow under the flame-torn sky.

  He waited until he stood on the Pest side of the water before pulling out his cell phone. The number he dialed was one Wally Aronson would recognize. For the past four hours, it had been bugged by the Budapest station.

  The click of Mirjana's machine. He dialed his access code and waited for the messages. Then Sharif's voice filled his ear.

  He listened, the pace of his heart rising slightly as he understood. Then he hung up. His breathing was audible, less perfectly controlled, and he stared intently across the Danube at the distant mass of the Hilton as though he might see her form backlit in a window. The sight of her face on a television screen had been enough to risk a call in the night. Now, knowing that she was here — A klaxon screamed somewhere behind him. He turned away from the river and strode swiftly toward the rioters on Szabadsag Ter. They had coalesced, he knew, in front of Magyar Television and the National Bank — one across the square, the other just next door to the embassy. It would be impossible to approach the place without a fight.

  U.S. installations throughout Europe should be on alert, their marine guards dying to catch a tourist with the key to Sophie Payne's whereabouts stuffed tight inside his jacket. The embassy was out of the question. Where, then?

  For an instant, memories of that other Budapest — of the nighttime surveillance, Caroline beside him, the conversation unwinding as it had always done through the relentless grid of streets-filled his mind. There was the ambassador's residence — he knew it well, a nineteenth-century petit palace in a residential quarter of the city, ringed with a sizeable garden. The marines standing vigil there would concentrate on points of egress, not bushes and flower beds. He could toss the tape over the wrought-iron palings and disappear before he was detected.