The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  She asked for another lime and received a second tiny bottle of gin to go with it. The butterflies in her stomach were settling down to sleep, the tension that had knit her joints relaxing inexorably. Takeoff, at this rate, might be nothing more than falling off a log.

  There was her boarding call, at last. She rose and felt the blood pound suddenly into her temples. She would regret the gin in what passed for morning.

  She gathered up her magazines and paperbacks, her laptop computer and her briefcase. She gave one last glance at the television screen. Chancellor Voekl filled it, his arm around the shoulders of the Czech prime minister. An announcement of German technical assistance and antiterrorism aid, the CNN newscaster said, following the explosion of three pipe bombs in historic areas of Prague.

  Bombs in Prague. Where 30 April certainly had been only hours ago. She walked slowly toward the screen, straining for the sound of Voekl’s voice above the babble of departure.

  He was speaking in German, his words sonorous and deliberate before the translator’s text took over. The transfer of Volksturm militia to the Czech Republic underlined the common cultural past and mutual security concerns of the two Central European countries; it heralded a joint commitment to combating the destabilizing influence of outside forces in their societies, and gave notice to those who would threaten peace….

  Caroline fought down her frustration. What time had the bombs exploded? And where exactly had they been? Did the Prague police have any idea who was responsible?

  The image shifted suddenly from Fritz Voekl’s face to that of a suffering child. Enormous eyes, dark with pain. A hectic flush in the cheeks. With her wispy red hair and her tattered party dress, she was nonetheless an angel. The child thrust her thumb in her mouth and turned her face weakly toward her mother’s shoulder. Caroline’s heart surged upward in her chest, a prick of unexpected tears under her lids. To hold a child like that—the soft floss of her hair, the warm weight—

  “Sixty-three more children died of mumps today in the ethnic Albanian squatters’ village on the outskirts of Pristina, in Kosovo,” the newscaster said implacably. “Thousands of former refugees, who returned to find their villages and housing destroyed by Serb forces during the 1998 Kosovo war, have taken up residence in the makeshift housing constructed from the remnants of bombed buildings. But World Health Organization officials say the strain of mumps virus that struck last week is unlike any on record. Producing severe glandular swelling and excessively high fever, the disease has already claimed the lives of two hundred and thirteen children, a mortality rate that is both unusual and alarming. More ethnic Albanians are sickening daily. Thus far, the deadly mumps virus appears to be confined to the squatter area, but local leaders warn the infection could spread despite stringent efforts at quarantine.”

  Caroline turned away from the screen. One more voiceless tragedy in a part of the world that had already given up hope, one more small angel dead by morning in her mother’s arms. Disease followed war like morning followed night; it lurked in the ruptured water mains, in the rat-infested rubble. It riddled the dirt where the children played. But the weight of grief in Yugoslavia was impossible to comprehend. The Kosovars had lost their homes, their livelihoods, and now their children—the one thing they had fought so desperately to save.

  Caroline walked toward the flight attendant, her boarding pass extended, then stopped dead as the German translator’s voice picked up where the newscaster had left off. Fritz Voekl was sending German medical teams into Kosovo armed with an experimental new mumps vaccine. Fritz Voekl—who had fought NATO involvement in the Yugoslav civil war, who thought the Kosovars were just another bunch of poor-mouthed Muslims looking for a handout. So what if their children were dying? That left fewer to feed.

  The teams would begin inoculating ethnic Albanian children throughout the province as soon as they arrived.

  Caroline stared at the screen in disbelief as Voekl smiled for the flashbulbs. She would never have called the chancellor a humanitarian. But refugees stay home, when home is safe and healthy. Maybe Fritz had figured that out at last.

  It was unlikely he’d learned to care.

  Part II

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

  ONE

  Pristina, 3:45 A.M.

  SIMONE AMIOT FOLLOWED THE ORANGE GLOW of the man’s cigarette as he crossed the rutted dirt road and made for her tent—a bobbing spark in the darkness of the wee hours, like a june bug uncertain of its flight. His figure was backlit by a single flaring torch the police guard had thrust into the mud—a bulky, formless silhouette, hands shoved into the pockets of a battered down jacket. His chin was lowered over his chest, as though he were lost in thought or intent upon watching where he put each foot. There was an air of assurance about him, even at this distance; of relaxed accommodation with his squalid surroundings, the uniformed men patrolling at his back. He could not, Simone decided, be a parent.

  She removed the earpiece of her stethoscope and folded it briskly in three—then spared a second to lay her cool, smooth fingers on the bare chest of the four-year-old boy lying inert on the cot before her. She did not need her stethoscope for this one anymore. She drew the sheet over his head very gently and allowed her hand to rest on the brown hair, still damp with sweat. Drago Pavlovic. Three days ago he had been playing in the street with a combat fighter made of paper and sticks. He had grinned at her as she walked by, and roared the sound of his engine. Drago was sturdy for his age, with brown eyes and freckles on his nose. He was about to lose his right front tooth.

  Drago was number three hundred and twenty-seven. Or was it twenty-eight? At least Simone was spared the job of breaking the news to his mother. The woman had been murdered the previous year.

  She rubbed wearily at her forehead, as though she could push aside the burning sensation of tears and futility. Pristina was her third stint with Médecins sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders—but it was by far the most difficult. Last year, and the year before that, there had been bullet wounds. Burn victims. Broken limbs. Dehydration. Horrible in themselves—but things Simone could treat. In Pristina, she was brought face-to-face with the limits of her own power. She had no tools to fight the mumps ravaging the squatter population. And nothing to keep it from spreading.

  In the past five days, she had personally held vigil over more than two hundred children. Most were buried now in hastily dug graves on the edge of the squatters’ camp, their delicate features dusted with lime. Her years of schooling, her years of practical knowledge, the drugs she had flown in from Toronto—none of them did any good. She might as well have been a woman of the Middle Ages, showering incantations and powdered bat wing.

  A handful of Simone’s more than two hundred stricken children had actually survived the mumps scourge. One of them, a little girl with bright red hair, was sleeping soundly on a cot in the far corner. Although still weak and far from well, Dania gave them all hope. When the fever took her, she plunged like the others into delirium and dehydration, but in Dania’s case the IV feeds and ice compresses actually seemed to work. Her mother, whom Simone knew only as Ragusa, sat stoically by the child’s bedside for three full days. She sponged her daughter’s forehead with a damp cloth, exchanged her soiled nightdress for a clean T-shirt, whispered relentlessly to a mind that wandered far in hectic dreams. She said little; she spoke almost no English. Her husband and brother had been shot by the Serb militia. Her eldest child, a son, was hiding out in the hills with a band of Albanian guerillas. One daughter had been lost on the road and never recovered. A blind grandmother and little Dania were all that Ragusa had left.

  At three o’clock in the morning two days before, when the child’s fever at last had peaked and broken, settling back down to double digits—when Simone could tentatively declare that the danger was past and the child would live —Ragusa had stared at her, unbelieving. Then she had thrown herself across Dania’s sleeping form, her shoulders shaking with sobs of terror and relief. She
had cried aloud in thanks to a God that was not Simone’s, a God that had taken other sons and daughters without hesitation or mercy. Simone touched the woman’s shoulder, and she turned to seize the doctor’s hand. Ragusa had managed to call her child back from the Valley of Death, but she believed it was Simone who had saved her.

  Later, as she crossed the muddy tracks that separated the hospital tent from the rest of the camp, Simone saw the woman waiting shyly by the mess tent door.

  “Coffee, Ragusa?” she asked, hoping that these words at least were comprehensible. “Un peu du café?”

  Ragusa shook her head. She was clutching something close to her frayed coat. Simone hesitated, uncertain how to bridge the gulf of language, but then the woman seized her hand and pressed her burden into it.

  “For you,” she said haltingly. “Dania. My thanks. Is all …”

  It is all that I have, all that I can give you, who have given me back my life.

  Ragusa hurried past her. Simone looked down into her palm. The woman had parted with the last few things she possessed: three tampons, their paper covers torn and grubby. Simone placed them carefully in her white lab coat pocket and watched Ragusa retreat across the rutted mire. She could have laughed aloud, or cried. But all she felt was unworthy.

  The flap of the medical tent was swept aside, and the orange glow of a cigarette arced to the dirt like a deadheaded flower. The man she had glimpsed in silhouette a moment ago. He had the decency to stamp his tobacco out, in deference to the ailing children.

  “May I help you?” she said in English.

  “I don’t know,” he answered in the same language, surprising her. “It’s the middle of the night. But I thought somebody might be here. Could I borrow a thermometer?”

  Simone rose from the dead child’s bedside and moved toward him. “Is someone ill?”

  He hesitated. The air of assurance faltered a little. In the half-light thrown by her propane lantern, she saw him for what he was: a man torn from sleep, eyes bleary with worry, but determined not to panic. “It’s Alexis. My oldest girl. She’s rather … hot.”

  “I see. I’d better come.”

  Simone delayed only long enough to inform one of the nurses about Drago Pavlovic’s death. Then she pulled on a jacket over her white coat and jeans, gathered up her medical kit, and followed the man out into the darkness. People were already stirring all over the camp; she heard the clang of coffeepots, caught the flare of fires, the guttural hawking of an old man’s throat. A wave of fatigue so powerful it was akin to vertigo nearly knocked her off her feet. She was not the only doctor in Pristina—there were at least fourteen volunteers from North America and Western Europe— but the epidemic had strained them to their limits. And today would bring a fresh wave of sick and dying.

  “I’m Enver,” he said, holding out his hand. “Enver Gordievic. You’re the doctor from Canada.”

  “Toronto, yes. Simone Amiot.” He had surprised her again. But she was accustomed enough to camps by this time to know that gossip is every refugee’s lifeblood. She kept her hands in her pockets and smiled at him; the casual gesture of shaking his hand was just one more way of passing sickness. “Do you know Canada?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve only been to D.C.”

  Not “Washington,” not “the United States”—but “D.C.” Simone decided to assume nothing about Enver Gordievic.

  He led her to a shelter built out of scraps of lumber, a windowless box the size of a doll’s house. It was canted unsteadily on a cinder-block foundation; but it had a door that swung on rope hinges, and when Simone ducked through the opening and stepped inside, she found the interior fairly warm and dry. He had built bunk beds for the children. There were two of them, both girls.

  “Alexis,” he said softly—and then, in a language Simone could not understand, added a few more sentences. His hand smoothed the child’s golden hair. She raised her head weakly, then let it fall back on the pillow. Even at a distance of five feet, Simone recognized the glassy eyes and flushed cheeks of fever. She drew a quick breath of rage and frustration, then crossed to the little girl’s bedside.

  “She’s burning up! Why didn’t you bring her straight to the clinic?”

  “Because the kids who walk in there never walk out,” Enver said bluntly. “She has the mumps?”

  “Of course. I can tell just by looking at her. The swelling hasn’t come out yet, but it will in a matter of hours. It’s the dehydration that concerns me. She needs an IV feed, and quickly.”

  “No.” He reached for Simone’s arm and steered her firmly toward the hovel’s door. “Thank you very much for your time, Dr. Amiot, but all I needed was the diagnosis. I’ll take it from here.”

  “Are you nuts?” Simone swung on him furiously, then her eyes widened. “You’re planning to get her out of the camp. I can assure you, Mr.—” His last name escaped her. “—Enver, that the care your daughter will find elsewhere in Pristina is no better than what we can offer her here. If you move her, she’ll die.”

  “That may be true. But there aren’t a hundred other kids lying in beds next to her, competing for attention, elsewhere in Pristina. I’m taking her to my mother.” He bent down and gathered the little girl up in his arms. His face, when he looked at Simone, was deliberately calm; he was a man who knew what he needed and how to get it.

  “Will you do me a favor?” he asked her.

  “Please, Enver. Don’t move the child.”

  “Would you watch Krystle for me? The little one? It’ll take me an hour to get to my mother’s and back.”

  Simone turned away from the two-year-old slumbering in her bunk and pulled open the door. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ve got to find Dr. Marx. Perhaps he can convince you to bring Alexis to the tent—”

  “Don’t waste your time.”

  “I don’t,” Simone said abruptly. “I use every spare minute to save these lives. Your daughter can’t leave. She can’t set foot outside this camp. As of midnight we were put under strictest quarantine. Surely you’ve seen the police patrol? The epidemic cannot be allowed to spread throughout the rest of the city, or the province. Try to leave, and the police will beat you silly. Try harder, and they’ll shoot.”

  “I’ve got to go to work in the morning! I’ve got clients!”

  “They’ll have to wait.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know.” Her fingers spasmed on the doorknob. “Until this is … over.”

  He stood there, his daughter in his arms, and Simone watched as his expression changed. The easy assurance fled. What replaced it was a look she had come to know: hunted, desperate, defiant of the odds.

  The look of a cornered animal.

  TWO

  Georgetown, 4:13 A.M.

  DARE ATWOOD WAS DREAMING OF TREES: spectral branches writhing like the architraves of a cathedral when one stares at them too long, neck craned backward, the self diminished by an inhuman height. The light under the leaves was cathedral-like, too; dim as clouded glass, smothered with incense. She began to walk through the tunnel of tangled limbs, but the branches were keening, they screamed for sunlight and air. She had never known a tree could grieve—and with her knowledge came an unreasoning fear, so that she turned abruptly in her sleep and repressed a whimper. She must run, must find the road again and the car she had abandoned—but the trees had closed and shut off her path.

  I need an ax, she thought, and looked down at her hands. All she held was her Waterman pen.

  The shrill cry of a bird in her ear—primeval, ravenous. She jumped, and the trees shattered as though they were painted on glass. The phone was ringing.

  The phone.

  She struggled upward, heaved back the bedclothes, and groped into the darkness for her secure line.

  “Dare Atwood.”

  “Director,” came the apologetic voice in her ear, more cordial than primeval birds. “I’m sorry to disturb you.” It was like Scottie Sorensen to sound collected and urbane at 4:13
A.M. The wee small hours were Scottie’s native element; it was the time when hunting was best. “We’ve just heard from the CDC—and you had asked to be called.”

  “Go ahead,” Dare said tersely. The CDC was the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The hypodermic dropped with Sophie Payne’s clothing on the steps of the Prague embassy had been flown there by jet for analysis. Dick Estridge—a twenty-three-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, an authority on chemical and biological weapons—had been dispatched to meet the plane. Presumably he and a CDC epidemiologist had worked for most of the night.

  “It looks, walks, and talks like anthrax,” Scottie told her.

  “So Krucevic wasn’t bluffing.”

  “No. If this is really the needle that inoculated the Vice President.”

  “That’s an assumption we have to make.” Dare considered the point, as she had considered it a thousand times since Payne’s abduction. The needle and its contents represented a worst-case scenario. If they were merely a bluff, so much the better. If they weren’t, then the President and the Agency should be prepared. “Or don’t you agree?” she asked Scottie. “Does the CDC think the needle is a fake?”

  “No. From what Estridge tells me, the anthrax bacillus is particularly hardy. It can survive exposure to sunlight for days, and it can live in soil and water for years. The trip to Atlanta in a used hypodermic was nothing. And then there’s the blood.”

  “Blood,” Dare repeated.

  “The President authorized transmittal of Mrs. Payne’s medical records from Bethesda Naval to the CDC. Her blood type matches residue found in the hypodermic.”

  He was holding something back, Dare knew. Offering her the security of facts before venturing into the unknown.

  “What else, Scottie?”