The Cutout (16 page)

“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.

D
ARE 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?”

“It’s the fact of the hypodermic that has these people concerned. Apparently anthrax is an airborne infection. It’s a germ we inhale. Or a spore, as Estridge calls it. It invades the lungs and causes symptoms similar to a chest cold, followed by respiratory shock and death. But Krucevic injected his bug directly into the Veep’s bloodstream.”

“Go on,” Dare said.

“So the infection is systemic.”

She frowned into the darkness. “But he also injected her with an antidote. Or so we hope. That would be systemic, too—wouldn’t it?”

“Yes and no. The normal treatment of an unvaccinated patient exposed to anthrax
inhalation
is a four-week cycle of antibiotics, along with a three-part program of follow-up vaccination. It’s damned persistent in the human body. Krucevic claimed that this particular bug is about ten times as virulent. He also claimed to have an effective antibiotic. Something specific to his engineered anthrax strain. But the CDC is highly skeptical. If Krucevic can knock out that deadly a bacillus in one shot, they say, then he’s making medical history. They’d like to meet the guy.”

Dare’s heart sank. “They think she’s still sick.”

“They think she’s going to die in a matter of days,” Scottie said.

“Can we save her? If we get to her soon?”

It was an unfair question, Dare knew—one Scottie could never answer. He avoided it with predictable grace.

“What worries the CDC is the bacillus’s tendency to cause ulcers. There’s a form of anthrax infection common to livestock workers—they get it from infected sheep—that leaves open sores on the hands and arms. Estridge says the CDC is afraid that a bloodborne infection like Mrs. Payne’s could result in secondary ulceration of her major organs. Heart, liver, the lining of the stomach, you name it….”

Dare winced. “She could be bleeding inside.”

“And completely shut down over the next forty-eight hours. The woman should be in an intensive-care unit.”

“But surely Krucevic would have considered that. He’s a biologist himself.”

“Maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe he never intended for Sophie Payne to survive.”

“But he injected his own son with the stuff!”

“He
said
that he did,” Scottie cautioned. “But what do we really know, Director?”

“Nothing,” she retorted, “and we don’t have to know. All we have to do is assume. We have to project every possible scenario for the Vice President; we have to be prepared to offer solutions. That’s why we exist, remember?”

Scottie was silent.

“Get somebody at the CDC working on this bug,” Dare ordered, “because when the Vice President comes home—and I mean
when
, Scottie—she’ll need a treatment regimen already in place.”

“Got it,” he replied, and hung up.

Dare pressed her hands against her eyes and considered making coffee. Something about trees and an ax fluttered on the edge of her consciousness. She brushed it aside and called the President.

THREE
The Night Sky, 3:47
A.M.

C
AROLINE CARMICHAEL IS SOARING
across the Atlantic at thirty-nine thousand feet, an arrow shot straight at the heart of Central Europe; but in her fitful dreams, she crouches low in her grandfather’s dew-drenched furrows and waits, tensed, for pursuit.

The smell of damp Salinas earth rises from the morning fields and mingles with the dense musk of artichoke leaves, with the flare of garlic flowers from across three hectares, with creosote and diesel fumes from the black ribbon of highway. It is August 7, 1969, and she is exactly five years old. Her father has been gone for most of her life, gone somewhere in Asia without being dead, in a plane that failed him when he least expected it. She knows his face and name by heart, she knows the outline of his story as another child might know Santa Claus—Bill Bisby, Salinas hero, with the fields of artichoke and garlic in his blood; Bill Bisby, a flyboy at twenty-two, with his finger on the afterburner; Bisby the careless warrior, her daddy. A kind of elf, with his short, dark hair and his open grin, one
hand waving forever before the cockpit shield comes down. Bill Bisby, who might just slide down her chimney come Christmas.

Your daddy was a hero
, Grandpa whispers in her ear.
Your daddy died for his country. Your daddy might be coming back, someday. It’d be just like him to fool us all. You’ve got to make your daddy proud.

A screen door slams. Caroline cocks her head and watches as Grandma shakes the crumbs from Grandpa’s napkin, then turns back into the house without a glance for the warming day, without a hint of Caroline crouching secret in the acrid furrows. Grandma’s lips are folded in a line as straight as an ironed napkin edge; her eyelids are red. Caroline bites hard at a hangnail trailing from her thumb.

Her knees are dirty, and one of them bleeds. Her hair has not been combed. She has been up for four hours, up since the last hour of darkness and the irrigation machines rolling like giant spiders across the landscape. She is waiting there among the green leaves, the scent of garlic and artichoke, for a last glimpse of her mother.

Brakes squeal as a truck slows at the crossroads, turning toward Gilroy, its outline shimmering like a mirage in the morning heat. Caroline ignores it. She has heard such things from birth, as common as birdsong and the whisper of surf when the wind blows from the west. Her ankles ache from crouching and she needs to pee, but she stares unblinking at the farmhouse’s front door.

And there, thrusting carelessly through it in her worn jeans, blond hair flying, a pack already slung over her back, is Jackie. She clatters down the sagging wood steps. She shoves open the VW van’s battered door and hurls her heavy rucksack—army green, probably from a
surplus place, the irony of it lost on her—into the back. Then turns and waits for Jeremy. Or is it Dave? Last year it was Phil.

Caroline rubs at her streaming nose with a dirty hand, then wipes it on the skirt of her dress. Grandma would purse her lips and frown; she would think, inevitably,
Just like her mother.
When Jackie is gone, Caroline will creep into the house and stand furtively before the washbasin, before anyone sees. Have they missed her yet? Are they worried? Do they remember that it is her birthday?

The man with the beard and the long hair, the leather vest and the bell-bottom jeans with heart-shaped patches and peace signs scrawled in ink, avoids the door altogether. He shuffles around the far corner of the house from the direction of the privy, his thin frame curled in an eternal question mark. He stares at his own shoes as he walks. A mongrel dog lopes at his heels, tongue dangling. Its breath reeks of raw meat and decay, the good-natured slobber left in Caroline’s lap.

“Carrie!” her mother calls. She cups her hands to her mouth and bellows again.
“Carrie!
Shit! Where the
fuck
did that kid go?”

Caroline crouches closer to the earth and tries not to breathe.

Jackie turns, impotent and furious, her gaze roaming over the morning fields. Her daughter kneads the soiled cotton of her dress between hot and damp fingers. There was yelling last night, too, when she was supposed to be asleep; shouts and demands and a bitter sobbing that might have been her grandmother’s. They would not let Jackie take her away, Grandpa said, cutting off the tears; they owed that much to Bill. And to the child. It was no life for a five-year-old, in the back of a van. It was no life for Jackie.

“Don’t tell me how to raise my kid, old man,” Jackie had said.

“Seems to me you ain’t raising her,” Grandpa had replied.

And then, much later, the scent of pot and her mother’s hand in the darkness, smoothing Caroline’s hair back from her face. Caroline squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to sleep; she prayed that Jackie would stay all night, while the moon shifted across the face of the clapboard house and the cicadas died down to a murmur. But Jackie rose after a moment and shuffled back up the hall, the tip of her joint a wandering flare.

Now the man who may be Jeremy or Dave or even possibly Phil orders the dog into the back of the van. He slides the door shut with a rumble. Grandma is standing on the front porch, her fingers gripping the rail, her face wiped clean of emotion.

“Where’s my kid?” Jackie snarls. “Where’ve you put her, Ellie?”

Grandma allows herself to blink. “Nobody
puts
Caroline anywhere. The child has a way of hiding herself.”

“Right. Convenient. Isn’t that
fucking
convenient, Dave?
Christ.
Well, let’s find her. Carrie!”

Caroline’s heart is suddenly pounding in her rib cage; she buries her face in the leaves. She is one second away from racing toward the woman with the blond hair, one second from hurling herself into her mother’s arms. She so wants to be wanted. But she remembers, with the sharpness of a child’s memory, what it was like being Jackie’s girl. She can still smell the stench of her own unchanged diapers, the hunger of forgotten lunch and dinner and then breakfast again, the nights she slept hiding under a blanket in the back of a thousand cars, terrified that Joe or Zane or Eddie might remember she was there.

“Carrie!”
The voice hoarse with smoke and rage.

Her grandfather’s broken shotgun snaps suddenly to attention. The sound is small in the morning air, almost an indifference, but Caroline’s head comes up and her eyes move unerringly to the man standing silent on the front porch, his gun leveled at Jackie. Bill Bisby’s dad. The hero’s father.