The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  Sophie knew, now, why she was here.

  Otto dragged her away from the charnel pit.

  They reached what must have been the central room, the command center, twelve feet by twenty, with two wooden tables and a scattering of chairs, some broken and canted on their sides. Krucevic stopped short in the entryway sliding the beam around the walls, his breath rapid now and shallow with excitement. “The Kommandant lived in Sarajevo, but his days were spent here—his days and many of his nights. Underground, all hours are the same.”

  “You can’t know that. You’re older than I am, but you probably weren’t even born in World War Two.”

  “I was three when the Kommandant was taken. Old enough to remember the door to the tunnel, to remember these fields.”

  “Your father?” Sophie gasped.

  “He denied them the final victory, Mrs. Payne. He died in captivity, by his own hand.” Impossible now to read the crazed eyes under the clipped black hair. But she could feel the singing tension in the dank air of the chamber, the crackling of obsession barely suppressed. Krucevic was at his most dangerous.

  “A son should know his father’s greatness. A son should live to see his father avenged.”

  “You will never live to see your kind of vengeance, Krucevic, unless the world runs mad and everything good and true is utterly destroyed.”

  He turned the torch full on her face, blinding her. “You are dying, Mrs. Payne.” His voice was utterly indifferent. “I want you to die knowing just how wrong you are. You destroyed those vials of antibiotic— yes, Tonio told me how it was done—in the hope that Jozsef’s illness would stop me. You thought you could crush my vision of a new Europe with the ampules under your heel. You tried to kill my boy. For that, you forfeit any right you might have had to consideration. You deserve to be tortured, Mrs. Payne.”

  “I have been,” Sophie muttered. By the thought of what she had done to Jozsef

  “You deserve a public execution.” His face was close to her own now, his eyes shining in the torchlight. “But execution is too painless. I want you to die slowly here, I want you buried alive. And while you struggle for breath—while you crawl through the dirt—I will go on. I will save Europe. And my son.

  “Otto—let us see whether Mrs. Payne is able to stand.”

  Otto heaved her to her feet, then backed away. Sophie swayed and clutched at a chair; it toppled over as she fell.

  “I should judge her in no danger of escape,” Krucevic said.

  ELEVEN

  Langley, 2:46 P.M.

  THE CALL JUST CAME THROUGH FROM STATE,” Scottie Sorensen told the DCI. “Marinelli’s body will be on a plane home tomorrow night.”

  “And Michael O’Shaughnessy?” Dare didn’t turn away from her view of the pin oaks bordering the chasm of the Potomac River. “Does his body come home, too?”

  The news of Eric’s death had filtered through to only a few of the Agency faithful. It had come in a roundabout fashion, as such news must, because the passport he held as Michael O’Shaughnessy bore a next-of-kin notification number that ended eventually at the CIA. The person designated to take such calls— from the State Department’s consular section—also had access to the bank of real names associated with false passports. Haley Taggert could now be included among the number of those who knew that Eric Carmichael hadn’t exactly died two and a half years before.

  In a private session in the DCI’s office, Dare had tried to impress upon the administrative assistant that the matter was compartmentalized beyond her level of security clearance. Haley didn’t know where Eric’s body had been found or under what circumstances. With any luck, Dare could keep that information a close hold. But luck depended in part upon the Central European LegAtt’s control of the Hungarian police and the press corps milling through Budapest. Dare figured her luck had run out.

  “O’Shaughnessy’s body will be on the same plane,” Scottie told her.

  “Good. You’ll meet both caskets.”

  “Marinelli’s brother will be there.”

  “Then meet Eric’s. You owe him that much.”

  “I’m sorry, Director, I—”

  Dare wheeled around. “Don’t want anything to do with him? It’s a little late for that, Scottie.”

  He rocked a little in his Cole-Haan loafers, as he might have done in a White House receiving line, then bent his head attentively toward the DCI. She was suddenly sick with fury at the man—the man who thought he had her snowed, had her right where he wanted her, the man who probably laughed each night in the privacy of his own bedsheets about just how thoroughly she was screwed.

  “Sit down,” she said wearily, “you goddamn son of a bitch.”

  Scottie sat.

  Dare moved purposefully behind her desk. She found the hard copy of Caroline’s Cutout-channel cable, the cable filled with the past thirty months of Eric Carmichael’s life and enough intelligence to roll up Mlan Krucevic’s networks worldwide. Before she handed it to Scottie, she said, “Caroline is missing.”

  Concern furrowed the CTC chief’s brow.

  “I called Embassy Budapest when I got the news about Eric. Caroline is gone. She’s checked out of her hotel.”

  “I’ll alert our friends at every border crossing,” he said immediately. “Notify the airlines, the trains—”

  “‘Mad dogs and Englishmen come out in the noonday sun,’” Dare quoted softly. “I’ve already talked to Hungarian border control. I don’t want Caroline stopped. I want to know where she’s headed.”

  He stared at her, perplexed.

  “Tell me something, Scottie. That nickname of hers. Do you know how she got it?”

  “Eric gave it to her.”

  “But why, Scottie? Why? You don’t know?”

  Dare waited implacably. She had a forbidding face in the best of circumstances, a voice like rain-drenched gravel. Scottie lost some of his self-possession. It dissipated, like bubbles in warm champagne.

  “Let me tell you a story,” she suggested. “About a woman run mad. You’ve got all the time in the world, Scottie. Eric’s dead and now it’s Caroline’s word against yours about all the dirty tricks you’ve pulled. We don’t place people on trial here; we simply send them to Tbilisi and Uzbekistan and all the other shitholes in the world until their time runs out. It’s a long list, the list of shitholes, Scottie; and you have all the time in the world to consider it. So listen.

  “Caroline Carmichael lives by her wits. She prides herself on being logical. On remaining calm in any crisis. On finding objective truth through her subjective lens. She’s so good at projecting complete control that you have to know her well to see the fault lines inside, the places where surfaces shift and crack. There are forces in the earth, Scottie, that even Caroline can’t suppress, and sometimes she remembers it.”

  Dare stopped, expecting him to object—to squirm in his chair or express annoyance—but he was paralyzed for once. Tbilisi had taken the wind from his sails.

  “You know the training she’s had. Denied Area Penetration, Terrorist Tactics and Countermeasures, Isolation and Interrogation—every course Eric scheduled before he went out to Nicosia, Caroline had, too. They trained together. Eric the teacher, Eric the Green Beret, just another student like his logical wife.

  “Tell me, Scottie—how does the training go in Isolation and Interrogation?”

  He crossed his right leg over his left. Unconsciously protecting his crotch from a ball-breaker, Dare decided. “The trainers try to find a person’s vulnerability. Show him just where he’s weak. So that the weakness can be corrected … or avoided.”

  “They put Caroline in isolation for three days. She was told, going into the cell, that there was a way out if only she could find it. She analyzed every square inch of the place, looking for a method of escape. She had no furniture, no bedcoverings, only a pot in the corner and one window. A window that showed her Eric, lashed upright to a pole and periodically subject to abuse from a gang of soldiers.
/>   “After the first day, a trainer visited Caroline. He told her she could leave as soon as she confessed to her crimes—espionage, conspiracy, the usual gamut of trumped-up charges. He drew her over to the window and showed her Eric, who by this time was semiconscious, his head hanging, dried blood smeared above one ear. Eric would go free, the trainer explained, once Caroline confessed. She refused. She knew that they expected her, as a woman—a supposedly emotional creature—to find the sight of Eric’s suffering unbearable.

  “The process was repeated over two more days. By that time Eric’s moaning could not be shut out; it filled her head. She recited poetry aloud. She screamed. She ripped her clothes and stuffed scraps into her ears. When the trainer walked in on the third day, Caroline was already waiting at the window. He approached her carefully She allowed him to come close; she seemed oblivious to everything around her. When he was within two feet of her right hand, she reached out and snatched a live grenade off his uniform belt.

  “‘Cut Eric down or you die,’ she said. Completely calm. Utterly logical. And twenty seconds from annihilation.”

  “Mad dogs and Englishmen,” Scottie muttered. “So? What happened?”

  “Her trainer screamed an order through the window. Eric was released. Caroline tossed the grenade through the bars of her cell and it detonated in the air. The prison shack collapsed. Caroline was pulled from the rubble along with her trainer, both of them concussed.”

  “I’m surprised she wasn’t fired,” Scottie said.

  “She nearly was. I intervened. I had the power to do that, even then. She was my analyst. My office owned her. I forced her to submit to a complete psychiatric evaluation, and the docs vetted her clean. She had just been pushed, they said, a little too far. And Eric went to Nicosia alone. She was allowed to visit him, of course. They gave her Budapest’s analyst-in-station post two years later, for good behavior.”

  Dare came around the end of her desk. “So what’s the moral of the story, Scottie? Now that Eric’s coming home in a body bag and Caroline is AWOL in Central Europe?”

  “Beware men bearing live grenades,” he suggested roguishly.

  The DCI raised her right hand in an arc as though she might actually strike her counterterrorism chief— and then she stopped short. Dare, too, could be pushed too far.

  “The moral, you stupid ass, is that Caroline fights for what she loves, sometimes beyond the point of reason. She’s done trusting the Agency—the Agency, in the form of Scottie Sorensen, sold her husband out. She’s on her own now. And she’ll bring the prison house down around her if she has to, to save Sophie Payne. It’s the only thing she can do to restore Eric’s honor.”

  “She should be fired,” Scottie said, tight-lipped.

  “And it would suit your purposes nicely if Mlan Krucevic killed her,” Dare retorted. “But if anything happens to Caroline—if she’s hurt in the slightest way— I will hold you personally responsible.”

  “May I remind you, Director, that it was your decision to send her to Berlin?”

  “You decided for all of us, when you made Eric a rogue operator thirty months ago. In a different country, another century, you’d have been executed by firing squad at dawn, Sorensen.”

  Scottie’s mouth opened, then shut without a sound. He looked as though she had sucker-punched him. He understood, finally, all that Dare Atwood knew.

  But he had been too long a professional dissembler to consider honesty now. He rose and stood before her, the last true scion of the old-boy net. “If you’re unhappy with my performance, Director—”

  “Then I can take your SIS slot and hand it to the next available warm body,” she agreed. “That’s always been the case. You just never thought I’d do it.”

  Dare reached for the Cutout cable and tossed it in Scottie’s lap. “Read this. And if you decide to shoot yourself in a stairwell, call me first, okay? I’d like a front-row seat.”

  When the CTC chief had scuttled out of her office like a whipped dog, Dare picked up her phone and called Cuddy Wilmot. She had sent him a copy of the Cutout cable as soon as she saw its importance.

  “Well? Have you read it?”

  “Five times,” he muttered. “There’s so much here, we can’t digest it fast enough. Networks, operations, fund transfers—”

  “Where will Caroline go, Cuddy?”

  “Wherever Krucevic leads. She’s on a vendetta now—you realize that, Director?”

  “And where will it take her?”

  Cuddy hesitated. “To a place we’ve never located on any map; Mlan Krucevic’s boyhood home. iv Zakopan.”

  “Caroline knows where it is?”

  “Eric certainly did.” Cuddy’s voice was like flint. “It’s clear from the Intel contained in this cable that he saw the place.”

  “You thought Krucevic had plans for Poland. You watched money flood into coffers there.”

  “I did,” Cuddy admitted. “But the funds have stopped moving and everything’s quiet, from Danzig to Krakow. Poland’s as dead as that Budapest bunker.”

  Dare debated the point. It was a risk, throwing time and resources at a guess; but Sophie Payne’s kidnapping was eighty hours old and the President was losing patience. “You’re sure in your mind?” she asked Cuddy. “You stand by this judgment?”

  “I do,” he replied. “God help me.”

  “Any idea at all where this camp might be?”

  Cuddy hesitated. “During World War Two, it was thought to be somewhere on the outskirts of Sarajevo. But we only have whispers and rumors, Director. And what happened there occurred over fifty years ago. So much of Yugoslav history was distorted after 1945— made the tool of Communist ideology—that for a long time, the whole idea of iv Zakopan was discredited. Western historians called the story antifascist propaganda. But since the fall of Communism and the Bosnian war, the rumors have resurfaced. And Krucevic is always at the center of them.”

  “Sarajevo,” Dare repeated, clutching at the one element she needed to understand. “We still have NATO peacekeeping planes on the ground there; I’ll request AWAC coverage in a hundred-mile radius around the city. Retargeting overhead recon will take too much time.”

  “Caroline may call in,” Cuddy said, “and give us a fix on her location.”

  Or the border patrol may find her. Two passports I know of, two possible names. But what if there’s a third identity she hid from all of us?

  “We don’t have time to wait.” Dare’s tone was brisk. “Dig your tie out of a drawer, Wilmot, and put it on. We’re going to brief the President.”

  TWELVE

  Sarajevo, 11:43 P.M.

  FOR A MOMENT, holding the opposing currents between her fingers as she hot-wired the Skoda, Caroline was thrust back into a Tidewater May. The streaming curb of an ill-lit Sarajevo alley was transformed without warning into morning sunlight, kudzu and midges, the sharp green smell of bruised skunk cabbage underfoot. Forty people were somewhere in the woods around her, forty people attempting to cross the Farm’s ten thousand acres to a pinpoint on the map where a chopper would be hovering—and Eric was hunting them from the air.

  He had a machine gun mounted in the belly of the Chinook, he had forward-looking infrared, he had aggressors on the ground in jeeps and crawling on their bellies through the underbrush. He had radios and flare guns and diversionary tactics. His squad had nothing but the camouflage on their backs.

  They crouched in a gully, Caroline and three friends, their eyes barely visible above the tips of the wild grasses, watching a dirt road they could not avoid crossing. Suddenly, a green army jeep roared out of nowhere and skidded to a stop. The driver jumped out, his M-16 pointed to the sky. Caroline noted his cap, soiled with sweat above the brim; she saw the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. His name was Carl. He had a baby about twenty months old. And, fake bullets or no, he was going to shoot them down.

  Two men burst from the trees behind Carl and flung themselves across the road. The driver turned and gave chas
e.

  The keys to the jeep were still in Carl’s pocket, but Eric had taught her which wires to choose, which ends to touch. Holding her breath, she fired the ignition, a prickling of fear striding up her back, and even when the engine turned over and she whipped the jeep around in the dust, she waited for the sputter of Carl’s M-16 and a radio call that would end the exercise for all of them.

  Nothing but midges and a cooling breeze across the windscreen, high cirrus curling above.

  She drove to the pickup point eating the lunch Carl’s wife had probably packed that morning, sharing it with her friends—potato chips, a fat ham sandwich, and three chocolate cookies scrupulously divided. They had not eaten in two days.

  The jeep they abandoned in the middle of the base’s main road, where someone was sure to find it. They slept away the afternoon among the dandelions and headstones of an abandoned graveyard. Caroline awoke at three P.M. to the sound of rotors churning the humid air.

  Carl demanded a confession. He demanded an apology. He declared the theft of the vehicle to be against the exercise rules. The rules dictated that one should suffer in order to survive. Caroline admitted nothing.

  In the field, Eric told her, you do whatever it takes. If the car means you live and somebody else doesn’t, you take the car. You don’t stop to think about whether the guy will miss his next meal.

  The Skoda’s engine turned over. She raised her head above the dashboard and stared out at Sarajevo.

  Caroline had been on the road now for nearly four hours. She had formed the vaguest of plans—a hash of hope and guts—thrown together as she scrolled purposefully through Eric’s files on an embassy computer. As she read, her mind dazed and jumping with violent death, the superstructure of Krucevic’s plan appeared beneath her fingers, like a stockade of privets shaken free of snow. She saw the brilliance in his simplicity, the tragedy he had engineered. And saw how his dead wife could be used against him.