The Cutout (2 page)

“Stay down.”

“I’d prefer to get up.”

The Secret Service agent ignored her, but Sophie felt a slight shifting in the woman’s weight; Nell was craning her neck to scan the square. Sophie had a momentary vision of a pile of dignitaries—American, German—all crushed beneath their respective security details. She giggled. It was an ugly sound, halfway between a sob
and a gasp.
If I could just get up, I’d feel better. More in control.
She dug an elbow into Nell’s ribs.

The agent grunted. “When I count to three, stand up and face the embassy. I’ll cover your back.”

“Shouldn’t we crawl?”

“Too much glass.”

Nell gave the count and heaved Sophie to her feet. Only then did the Vice President notice that she’d lost a shoe. All around her, men and women lay on the platform amid splatters of blood, a hail of glass. The podium, Sophie realized, had miraculously shielded her from shrapnel. A tense ring of German security men surrounded the foreign minister; he sprawled motionless amid a heap of splintered chairs. Somebody—the embassy doctor, Sophie thought—was tearing open his shirt.

At the right side of the platform, maybe a yard from where she stood, a dark-skinned scowling man drew a machine gun from his coat and aimed it at Sophie.

She stared at him, fascinated.

Then Nell’s pistol popped and the man’s left eye welled crimson. He reeled like a drunk, his gun discharging in the air.

This time, Nell tackled her at the knees.

The medevac helicopter circled over Pariser Platz twice, ignoring the frantic signal of an ambulance crew from the rubble below. There was nowhere to land; survivors trampled the wounded underfoot, and the main exits to the Tiergarten and Unter den Linden were choked with tumbled stone and rescue vehicles. The chopper pilot veered sharply left and hovered over the roof of the embassy. Normally, a marine guard would have been
posted there for the duration of the Vice President’s speech, but the soldiers had probably rushed below in the first seconds after the explosion. The roof was empty. The pilot found the bull’s-eye of the landing pad and set down the craft.

A two-man team scuttled out of the chopper, backs bent under the wind of the blades. They rolled a white-sheeted gurney between them. A third man—blond-haired, black-jacketed—crouched in the craft’s open doorway. He covered the team with an automatic rifle until they reached the rooftop door. There, one of the men drew a snub-nosed submachine gun from his white lab coat and fired at the communications antennae bolted to the embassy roof. Then he blew the lock off the door.

A security alarm blared immediately. It was drowned in the clamor of Pariser Platz.

The blond-haired man raised his gun and glanced over his shoulder at the helicopter pilot. “They’re in. Give them three minutes.” He scanned the rooftop, the heating ducts and the forest of defunct antennae. Brand-new, state-of-the-art listening posts, all shot to hell in seconds. The CIA techies had probably been there for weeks installing them.

The helicopter rotors whined, and the man in the black jacket steadied himself against the door frame as the craft lifted into the air. The screams below seemed hardly to affect him. He scanned the square like a hawk, waiting for the moment to dive.

Machine-gun fire. It was the sound of her recurring nightmare—a dream about execution and a firing squad. Sophie struggled in Nell’s grip, choking on the wave of
oily smoke that had flooded Pariser Platz. It was impossible to see much—only the blank wall of the embassy looming. The agent lifted her under the armpits like a child.

“We’ve got to get inside.” Nell thrust Sophie toward the dignitaries’ chairs, vacant now as a theater on a bad opening night, shards of glass sparkling everywhere. Sophie could feel Nell’s urgency nipping at her heels.

A marine guard thrust open the shattered main door. Then he fell, slack-mouthed and startled, dead at Sophie’s feet. Nell’s arm came up beside her. The agent fired at something in the shadows of the entryway And then, with a sound like a punctured tire, Nell dropped to her knees. There had been no report from another gun. Someone inside the embassy had a silencer.

A clatter of footsteps, a gurney being lifted over the marine guard’s corpse. Blood was spreading rapidly across the dark blue wool of Nell’s suit. A rescue team in white coats surged toward Sophie, and she sank down beside the agent with a feeling of relief. Nell grabbed Sophie’s waist with one arm and with the other raised her gun. As Sophie watched, a bullet struck the agent square in the forehead and she slumped over, rage still blazing in her eyes.

Sophie was cradling her, a dragging, bleeding weight, and screaming
Nell, Nell
, when they seized her from behind. Then night fell like the guttering of a candle flame.

“Get out of the way!”

The man at the head of the gurney shouted in German to the bewildered survivors at the edge of the platform. “We need room! Move it!”

The medevac helicopter hovered two hundred yards above Pariser Platz, a gurney line descending from the motorized reel. It took only seconds for the two men below to attach the stretcher. It rose slowly, smoothly, with its white-sheeted burden. A figure appeared through the swirling maelstrom of smoke—black leather jacket, blond head. He reached for the stretcher, steadied it, and swung it carefully inside.

A German newsman, his face smeared with soot, had his lens trained firmly on the chopper. Where it gripped the video cam, his right hand was slick with blood. “Who’s on the stretcher?” he demanded.

The gurney team ignored him.

The newsman swung his camera into the face of one of the medical techs. Livid with anger, the man shoved it aside. The reporter dropped the camera with a cry of pain and clutched his wounded hand.

Shedding their white coats, now stained with blood and dust, the two men pushed through the crowd. An ambulance idled at the edge of the Tiergarten, strangely unresponsive to the hundreds of wounded in the square. They made for it at a run.

TWO
Arlington,7
A.M.

C
AROLINE CARMICHAEL BALANCED
her coffee cup—an oversized piece of Italian pottery with
Deruta
stamped on the bottom—between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Her gaze was fixed on the dull blue wing of a jay carping beyond her window. She may have seen the bird—may have recorded something of its petulance, the way its beak stabbed angrily at the sodden leaves. She may have acknowledged the rain streaming down into the defeated grass, and in some hollow of her mind determined which suit to wear to work; but for the moment she was content to sit nude beneath her oversized terry-cloth robe. It enfolded her like an ermine, a second skin. It had once belonged to Eric, and that alone made it precious.

The cotton loops smelled faintly of lemons. She closed her eyes and imagined him breathing.

Lemons. The groves of Cyprus, dry hillsides crackling with rosemary. Cyprus had come well before Budapest and was thus a place that Caroline could consider without flinching. Raw red wine and merciless sunlight, the
sea a cool promise through the tumbled stones. She had bought the robe in a shop in Nicosia. He had worn it maybe four times.
I’m not a robe kind of guy
, he’d told her when she packed for home.
Take it with you. Really.

And just what, Caroline wondered, was a robe kind of guy?

When Eric emerged from the shower, his hair a tousle of spikes and the night’s growth of beard a haze along the jaw, he rarely reached for a towel. The drops beading his skin evaporated in the Cyprus heat, while he stood lost in thought, eyes fixed on nothing. Caroline never asked where his mind went in such moments. She was too well acquainted with Eric’s demons—the fear that gripped him before certain meetings, the uncontrolled retching over the porcelain bowl.

Nicosia was bad. Budapest was worse.

She could have loved the craggy old city on the banks of the Danube were it not for the change in Eric. Some nights, working surveillance in the passenger seat beside him, she would lose herself in the spectacle of Buda Castle, floodlit and austere on its manicured slope. By day she plunged into the warren of Pest’s back streets, where the buildings’ grimy plaster facades, untouched as yet by the mania for renovation, hovered like the backdrop to a Bogart movie. Beneath the coal dust that penetrated every crevice of every shop, she found carved chests daubed with brilliant birds, embroidered linens, spurs once owned by a Magyar horseman. She fingered the cloth, stroked the splintered wood, and imagined a vast plain swept by wild herds. Later, when the incessant rains of March fell, she retired with a book to Gerbeaud’s, the city’s most venerable coffeehouse. She toyed with chocolate torte and eavesdropped on young Italian tourists.

Eric refused all refuge. He grew hollow-eyed from strain and restless nights; he spoke sharply when he spoke at all. When she referred to a time beyond Buda, he lost the thread of conversation. Always a creature of discipline, he became, if anything, an ascetic—forgoing sleep, the after-embassy drinks hour, even her body in the small hours of morning. The night meetings ended increasingly at dawn, long after she had closed her book and put out her light. She would awake early and dress for the embassy in silence, her husband an insensate stranger shrouded amid the sheets.

Three months before the end of their tour, Eric accepted temporary duty in Istanbul for the summer. Caroline decided to head for the States the same day he left Budapest. She had no reason to go on to Turkey with him, no duty in Istanbul. She would work in Langley and hunt for a house. Headquarters would be glad to have her back—they never asked inconvenient questions. And perhaps absence would improve Eric’s frame of mind. Dispatch him from his present limbo, a restored creature.

I’ll call you
, he says as they stand in the echoing concourse of the Frankfurt airport. There are no lounge areas at the individual gates, no place to sit and talk. Bearded men too large for their tropical-weight suits are wedged between newspapers and duty-free bags, smoking endless cigarettes. Their wives pace the concrete floors in wrinkled saris, children curled in their arms like sacks of flour.

The international terminal is one vast waiting room between past and future, punctuated by drooping plants and security portals and guards with electronic sensors. Terrorism haunts the Frankfurt airport, because a decade ago a boom box wired by two Libyans was
loaded from the tarmac into the baggage compartment of Pan Am 103. That flight ended in fiery chaos over a small town in Scotland. And now Frankfurt is determined to shut the barn door on the horse’s ass.

It takes hours to process through security. Tourists disinclined to learn from history ignore the gate queues and raise their voices in complaint. Bags are opened, or x-rayed, or swathed in yellow twine. Forms are stamped. Cameras monitor. People stand and sweat and stare blankly with ill-defined tension. And at last, the baggage dismissed, they win the freedom of this concourse. Its sterility is almost harrowing.

Caroline clutches her boarding pass in her right hand, her carry-on in her left, when what she really wants is to hold Eric until the breath leaves his body.