The Cutout cc-1

by Francine Mathews

  The CIA was not in the practice of printing rumors.

  Four grainy black-and-white photographs were tucked into Krucevic's file.

  Caroline studied the first, dated seven years before: a shot of a tenement house in flames, a Turkish woman raising her hands in anguish, keening. At her feet was the blanketed corpse of her small son. The next photo was now famous the world over: a Mercedes limousine creased in its midsection like a metallic boomerang. Gerhard Schroeder's body lay at a bizarre angle across the backseat, his right hand dangling from the open passenger door. The chancellor had been an attractive man before Krucevic crushed his armored car like a soda can.

  Caroline's fingers hesitated over the final two pictures. She hated seeing them.

  They had been taken in a police morgue, as exhibits in a trial that would never be held. Krucevic's trial for inhuman cruelty, for utter lack of heart. Dagmar Hammecher was three and a half when she was snatched from her nanny at gunpoint. She had bright gold hair that cascaded down her back, and she loved to pose in ballet shoes. Her mother taught in a Hamburg medical school, her father was a banker. But it was Dagmar's grandpa whom Krucevic intended to destroy. Ernst Hammecher was a federal court judge charged with considering the constitutionality of Germany's new alien-repatriation laws.

  He had survived the Nazi era, and was no friend to bigots. He was expected to reverse the legislation. Ernst Hammecher received his granddaughter's hand in the mail two days after she had been kidnapped.

  Caroline forced herself to look at the police photograph. The childish fingers still curled upward, as they must have done a thousand times in Dagmar's short life — reaching for her mother, her favorite stuffed toy, the curved handle of a juice cup. But the edge of the severed wrist was ragged and black with blood.

  They had not attempted to spare her pain.

  “Otto,” Caroline whispered. The 30 April member who enjoyed killing.

  The final shot was of Dagmar's corpse, dropped on her grandfather's doorstep six days after the child's abduction. The small features were gaunt and pale, too drawn with suffering to be those of the little girl who loved ballet tutus and chocolate ice cream. Krucevic had shaved her head. The wounds of electrodes placed in the child's skull were obvious even in reproduction.

  Her throat tightening, Caroline thrust the vicious image face-down against the file folder and read through Krucevic's bio again.

  One of the sources she had used in the report — a DO source — had been characterized as untested, with good access. She flipped quickly through the documents attached to the left-hand flap of Krucevic's file. A translated piece from the German newsmagazine Das Bild; another from a Sarajevo newspaper; five State Department cables out of Frankfurt, Bonn, and Belgrade; and three TD's — the classified and sifted reports disseminated by the Directorate of Operations. These were what she sought.

  When the DO released clandestine reporting for an Intelligence analyst's use, it always withheld the foreign agent's code name. As an act of kindness, however, the directorate characterized the sourcing. A reliable source was one whose information had proved accurate over time; an untested one offered intelligence that couldn't easily be verified or that was too recently reported to assess. But any source with good access was inherently more valuable than one without.

  Unless that access was used to sell false information. Krucevic was certainly clever enough to plant a mole in the CIA's turf; but what had this one actually reported? That the good doctor had shot two of his people in an internal purge.

  That he was driven to wipe Islam out of Central Europe. Nothing particularly earthshaking, and hardly worth Krucevic's brilliant effort at deception. A 30 April mole would have been put to better use.

  And yet Caroline felt an almost sickening surge of excitement at the thought: A source with good access to 30 April existed. A source who might know where Eric was. A source who could lead them to Vice President Sophie Payne.

  His code name and history could be found in one of the DO's asset files, to which Caroline was routinely denied access. She was an analyst, not a case officer; she had no clearance for information that linked a source to his identity, a code name to an address. But Scottie Sorensen and Cuddy Wilmot did.

  She checked the report's date and origination. The TD had been disseminated the previous February from the DO's Hungarian branch. Which meant the asset was probably handled by Buda station.

  “Hey, Mad Dog, could I see you in my office for a minute?”

  She gasped involuntarily, clutching the file to her chest.

  “Cuddy, you scared the hell out of me. What's up?”

  He grimaced.

  “Nothing major. Just an evaluation I'd like you to sign.”

  It was a deliberate lie, and Caroline saw with mild shock that they had become a cell within a cell, collaborators in a subterfuge.

  “Okay,” she said neutrally, and tucked the Krucevic file under her arm.

  “Interesting reading?” Cuddy inquired as they walked toward his office.

  “Nothing you haven't seen before. They like to say that leadership analysis is the People magazine of Intelligence, but I don't think People will be running this stuff anytime soon.”

  “Let's pray for that, shall we?” He shut the door firmly behind her. He had abandoned his glasses, and the hazel eyes were bloodshot from hours of scrolling through text on a computer screen. The look on his face — self-absorbed, absent, as though he pursued a line of thought only remotely connected to the scene before him — was one Caroline knew well. Cuddy was in the grip of the chase. Until he nailed Sophie Payne's kidnappers, he would abuse his body, his brain, and the people around him.

  “You need a cigarette,” she said, dropping into the seat before his desk.

  “Or a good long run.”

  “And what do you need? A leave of absence?”

  “Answers to a lot of questions would be just fine. Or a shoulder to cry on.”

  “Why don't you call Hank?”

  “Hank's shoulders are a little too well tailored for tears. Besides, I haven't talked to him in nearly a year.”

  “Then I'd say it's high time.”

  “He never liked Eric, Cud. And what could I tell him? It's all a close hold anyway.”

  Hank. His silver-haired profile rose in Caroline's mind, shimmered there like the outline of a perfect knight, an old-world cavalier. The acute gaze, the measured speech. Hank never swerved from the path of reason. He'd taught her everything she knew, and most of what she'd forgotten.

  “The DCI would advise me not to talk to my lawyer,” she added. “Even one in my family.”

  “Not all Hank's counsel is professional.”

  Caroline shrugged in discomfort, and Cuddy dropped the subject. They stared at each other for a few seconds in silence, uncertain what to say. Every topic seemed forbidden.

  “Feeling betrayed?” Caroline asked finally.

  “Feeling stupid,” Cuddy replied.

  “Sometimes they're the same thing.”

  “Scottie's asked me to head up the Berlin Task Force. I got the impression I had no choice.”

  “This is where I say, “That's why they pay you the big bucks.” Right?”

  “Not if you want to survive.” His eyes were unreadable. “I've had just about as much as I can take, Carrie. I've spent thirty months investigating a crash that didn't kill my best friend, and I've just been told by the DCI herself to suppress information critical to the recovery of the Vice President. I don't know why I'm still here.”

  “Maybe,” she suggested, “because you think you can fix it. Big mistake. Cud.”

  He laughed harshly and looked away.

  She felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the man. He was a good person, a faultlessly honest person, who didn't deserve this kind of painful ambiguity.

  Never mind that ambiguity was the human condition: Cuddy lived in a happy mess of absolutes. He refused to eat meat, but his fingertips were permanently stained with nic
otine. He stood in the rain-filled doorways at the end of the Agency's corridors ten times a day, burning his death ration and hoping to save his lungs later with a three-mile run. He fought the last good fight in the U.S. government tracking terrorists but believed Amnesty International was a front for Communist insurgency. He spoke five languages, all of them well, which was something that most people did not know. Cuddy never advertised.

  Each morning, he drove down the Maryland side of the Potomac while Caroline drove up the Virginia. He wore jeans and carried his work clothes in a backpack.

  He parked his car on Canal Road and canoed across the Potomac to the Agency's foot. Those last few moments, Caroline thought Cuddy gliding alone through an arrowhead of water were all he could really claim of his day.

  “Who's working the task force with you?” she asked him.

  “Dave Tarnovsky. Lisa Hughes. Fatima, in case there's a Middle East connection.”

  But not Eric's wife. Caroline would be kept at bay, an unknown quantity. There was nothing wrong with Cuddy's team Tarnovsky was an ex-SEAL, an expert on explosives; Lisa Hughes had just completed her doctorate in Middle Eastern studies; and Fatima Bowen was a native Lebanese, one of the dark-skinned, silk-clad, black-haired women who served the CTC as a translator and general cultural referent. She'd married Mike Bowen twenty years earlier, during his last tour in Beirut. When he died in the 1983 car bomb attack on the U.S. embassy, Headquarters had given Fatima a job. Lebanese women with a thirst for revenge were to be prized above rubies.

  “Sounds like Scottie is focusing on the Palestinians,” Caroline said neutrally.

  “To buy time, I suppose?”

  “To divert attention from Eric. Per Atwood's instructions.”

  “That might work .. . until 30 April makes contact.”

  “And won't we look like idiots if they do.” He glanced at her sidelong. “What was Eric really like in Budapest, Carrie?”

  “You visited us in Nicosia,” she said tiredly. “Multiply that by ten. On good days, he was jumping out of his skin. On bad days, he was comatose.”

  “Was he close?”

  A sudden, sharp memory of Eric's hands roaming over her body. The Mediterranean heat, black olives and lemon. How long had it been since he had touched her?

  “Close? Not to me. I suppose it makes sense that he walked away without a backward glance in the Frankfurt airport. I don't know what happened, Cuddy. How he managed to drift so far.”

  “Not close to you,” he corrected impatiently. “To penetrating 30 April. Was he jumping out of his skin because of the danger? Or because he'd already turned on all of us?”

  “I don't know.” Her throat was tightening despite her best efforts. “I just do not know, Cuddy. He stopped talking.”

  “Even to you.” A flat statement.

  What kind of wife were you, anyway?

  She could not trust herself to reply.

  “That's strange,” he muttered.

  “Even the polygraphers recognize a case officer's right to pillow talk. They've practically canonized it.”

  Pillow talk. From a man who had walked the streets at night, while she tossed alone and restless? Cuddy, Caroline thought, would make a damn good polygrapher himself. He had a genius for posing the brutal question.

  “Maybe he wanted to protect me “ She bit off the words. A more credulous woman could go on believing that Eric was protecting her that the whole elaborate lie of the past thirty months had been designed to shield her from terror. But Caroline refused to be credulous any longer. The credulous impaled themselves on swords of their own making.

  “Scottie tells me Atwood wants you polygraphed”

  She laughed at the abrupt change of subject.

  “I suppose it's inevitable. She has to know whether I'm telling the truth about believing Eric was dead. Lets hope the polygraphers keep their questions confined to MedAir 901.”

  “I think we can assume they will. Atwood is unlikely to share the fact of Eric's existence with Security. Just keep your mind on the plane crash and forget about Sophie Payne. You'll be fine.”

  “Scottie likes to add a column of numbers when he's hooked up to the machine.” Caroline spoke with an effort at lightheartedness she was far from feeling. “He swears it keeps him from reacting to the questions. But I'm lousy at math.”

  “Then try spelling. Anything is preferable to nerves. Nerves can look like guilt to the box, and guilt might register as deception.”

  “Thanks. You've no idea how comforting that is.”

  He studied her, then said, “I wish I could go with you.”

  “But some things, as my grandma told me during potty training, we are forced to do alone.” Caroline undipped the clandestine report from Krucevic's file and slid it across the desk.

  “Take a look at this, Cuddy. There's a DO asset who's close to 30 April.”

  “Hungarian desk.” Cuddy nipped to the second page, brows knit, instantly absorbed. “This guy could be in Buda. Hell, by this time Sophie Payne could be in Buda.”

  “Exactly. We've got to send out a tasking cable.”

  “And how do we phrase that cable, Carrie?”

  “Hey, guys, the official Task Force line is that the Palestinians are responsible for the Berlin bombing, but chat up your 30 April asset and ask whether he's ever heard of Sophie Payne'?”

  Caroline frowned.

  “I've read weirder tasking cables, thank you very much. Case officers are used to working blind. And with the Veep snatched, Scottie will have every terrorist expert the Agency owns sniffing the ground — the reports will come flooding in. This is a lead, Cuddy—”

  Cuddy tossed her the DO report.

  “We don't know diddly about this guy, Mad Dog. He's untested. What if he's one of Eric's recruits?”

  He was closer to penetrating 30 April than ever before.

  “I wouldn't be surprised if he was,” she replied.

  “Then think about that. The source would be tainted, wouldn't he?”

  “Tainted,” she repeated. “Because he knew Eric?”

  “For Christ's sake, Carrie! As of this morning Eric's whole career is suspect. We don't know when he betrayed us or how completely. We don't know what's true and what's crap. Every report, every recruitment they're compromised. And that goes for everybody Eric ever handled.”

  “We could find out who recruited this one,” she shot back, tapping the TD.

  “The Hungarian desk could tell us.”

  “If I called in some favors, maybe. But I'm not sure that'd be a good idea.”

  “The TD is barely six months old,” she argued. “This source is still out there, Cud still on our payroll.”

  “And you think he could lead us to Eric and, by extension, Payne. Forget it. It's a nonstarter. Don't let Eric screw you again, Carrie, just because you want to believe.”

  There was a short and painful silence.

  “I think you ought to see something,” Cuddy said. He walked out of the office.

  After a second, she followed.

  He led her to a computer terminal that Scottie kept reserved for one use only the terrorism database, DESIST.

  It was the pride of the CTC, a compilation of over a thousand terrorist groups and organizations. Raw data phone numbers, bank accounts, airline manifests, business cards could be fed into the computer and analyzed for patterns too slight and seemingly random to attract attention. When DESIST went to work, the most amazing connections between utter strangers appeared as if by magic. DESIST could tell you when one man in Belgrade carried the address of another in Zurich, or whose phone number rang in which safe house. It could match passports to false pictures, bring up a myriad of aliases, connect the dots between terrorist groups that the world believed to be enemies: members of the IRA who were friendly with Hizballah; bankers who laundered money for both the Kurdish PKK and the Algerian Jihad. An entire world of uneasy relationships existed in the DESIST data banks, a labyrinth of obligations and mortal
mistrust.

  “Sit down,” Cuddy said, “and plug in Eric's alias.”

  “Which one?” she asked.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I only knew one.”

  “In Budapest, he was using "Michael O'Shaughnessy."”

  “Try it.”

  “But you know there are no Americans listed in this database,” she protested.

  “It's illegal for the CIA to track U.S. citizens.” Cuddy shrugged. “Does a dead man have citizenship? Try it, Mad Dog.”

  She typed in the name. The computer thought about it for a split second. And then it spat out two words, Mahmoud Sharif, and a phone number. She wrote down the number and plugged it into the database. Nothing. She glanced at Cuddy.

  “Try just "Sharif".”

  Obediently, she ran the name through the system. An extensive file reeled out. “"Hizballah bomb maker,"” she read, “ "legally resident in Berlin."”

  “Sharif is believed responsible for that series of bombs the BKA found last March,” Cuddy told her. The BKA — the Bundesknminalamt — was the German equivalent of the FBI. “He'd wired them into electronics — television sets, stereo components, laptop computers — and stored them in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt.”

  “I remember that,” Caroline said. The BKA had confiscated seven of the bombs safely; an eighth had exploded in the act of being defused. Two men had died.

  “Why didn't he go down for it?”

  “Sympathetic judge. Circumstantial evidence.”

  “I see.”

  “German Intelligence is convinced Sharif made twelve bombs. So where are the other four?”

  “Underneath the Brandenburg?”

  Cuddy shrugged.

  “Ask Sharif, he'll say he knows nothing about electronics. He's just a carpenter with a German wife and a kid named Moammar.”