The Cutout (21 page)

The Brandenburg had been a neoclassical dream, modeled on the Acropolis’s Propylaea: six Doric columns surmounted by a plinth and frieze, the figure of Peace drawn by a chariot.
Ironic
, Caroline thought as she photographed the torso of a shattered horse in the rubble of the Gate. In Berlin, Peace was driven by the engine of war, Peace came at the cost of constant bloodshed. Napoleon had marched his Grande Armée beneath the Gate not long after it was built; Prussia had trained her cavalry in the square; Hitler’s
Übermenschen
had goose-stepped down Unter den Linden; and East German guards had patrolled within spitting distance of the prancing horses. But it had taken terrorists to topple the chariot to the ground.

She ignored the barriers and the cones and the police and walked insouciantly forward, to the very edge of the bomb crater. The FBI technicians were already there, some of them kneeling on plastic sheets at the edge of the torn earth, others in conversation with what Caroline supposed were German investigators.

One man stood apart, arms folded over a creased tan raincoat. Its very ordinariness screamed Government Official. He was stony-faced and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, but there was something arresting in the stillness of his pose. If he had not been standing inside the official barriers, Caroline would have taken him for a mourner. His face had the self-absorbed potency of grief. As she looked at him, he turned his head and
stared straight at her. No hint of friendliness or curiosity; the look was frankly hostile. He took her for a disaster junkie.

She raised her camera and ignored him.

There were television crews, too—an embarrassment of television crews, from every major American network, from the Berlin and Frankfurt and Hamburg stations, from Italy and France and the U.K. and Poland.

This was going to be easy.

Caroline took pictures of chaos: chunks of macadam, twisted cables, the intestines of the city thrown obscenely outward. The construction of the square’s new U-Bahn station had taken years; now its subterranean walls caved inward. Broken glass shimmered everywhere.

She panned across the square to the embassy door. The shattered platform on which Sophie Payne had stood twenty-four hours ago was still there, one end pitched skyward. Yesterday, pennants had snapped in the breeze. Then bullets, screaming and blood, a gurney wheeled madly to the platform’s edge.
Eric.

She lowered her camera and studied the building. It was a large embassy, and most of the windows in the facade were smashed, but the walls themselves had held. The blast, then, had been strong enough to destroy the Brandenburg Gate while leaving much of the surrounding structures intact. A surgical bomb, if such a thing could truly be said to exist. A diversion, while the real victim disappeared into the blue.

“Ausgehen Sie, bitte.”

A police guard, voice harsh with contempt, was advancing upon her, his face obscured by a riot helmet. The federal eagle screamed red and gold across his black shirt—he was one of Fritz Voekl’s special troops, the
Volksturm. Caroline raised her camera, focused on his face, and snapped.

Taking office on the heels of assassination, the new chancellor had made fighting crime a priority of his first year. Crime, Voekl declared, sprang from the conflict between Western European values and Eastern ones, between Christian and Muslim ways of life. Crime was the product of the Turkish population, in fact; until the Turks were sent back to their own country, all that decent Germans could do was to stand firm against their demands. And the Turks were just the tip of the Muslim iceberg: The trickle of Albanians and Montenegrins, of Kurds and Kazakhs and Georgians and Uzbeks from the east, was alarming in the extreme. Tolerance was a mistake. Acceptance was insanity. Germans, even liberal Germans such as Voekl’s murdered predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, were dying in the streets.

The message had played superbly at the polls, particularly among Ossies, the former citizens of the defunct German Democratic Republic, where crime officially had never existed. Now the Ossies were joining Voekl’s Volksturm, his national militia, in droves. And as she stared at the policeman’s spread-eagle insignia, Caroline had to admit the chancellor’s savvy Voekl had killed one problem—persistent unemployment in the east—while brilliantly furthering his anti-Turk agenda. And he’d placed throughout the country an army loyal only to him.

“Hinaus!”
The truncheon was raised, the black shirt close enough to graze with her fingertips. She felt the man’s animosity wash over her like a strong smell.

“Speak English?”

He shook his head aggressively. She stood her ground, focusing her lens, and saw a British television crew pivot to film the encounter. In a minute the cop
would take her camera and dash it to the pavement. Deliberately, she leaned around him, pointed her lens at the embassy, and clicked the shutter.

The gurney it was believed, had come from within—a bogus rescue operation staged from the roof. Caroline had watched the videotape of Eric so many times she had the sequence embedded in her mind. The period from explosion to kidnapping had been slight— about nine minutes. Therefore, 30 April must have known how to navigate the new building before they’d ever landed the chopper. That, in itself, was suggestive.

“Halt!”
He grabbed her arm and thrust her back from the barrier. Caroline tensed. Then she screamed.

Two American camera crews joined the British one already filming her. The Italians looked interested and started to move.

“Let go of me, you asshole!” She broke free of the policeman’s grasp and held her camera behind her back. “Jesus! Isn’t this a free country?”

The guard raised his truncheon obligingly. The film crews filmed. And then a raincoat-clad arm was thrust between them, and someone said, “It’s okay.”

It was the man she’d seen earlier, staring at the wreckage. She had time to register sandy hair, a beak of a nose. He said something in German to the Volksturm guard, and the truncheon was abruptly lowered. Then he turned to Caroline. Sharp hazel eyes simmered with anger. And something else. Contempt?

“This isn’t the best place for sightseeing, ma’am. We’d appreciate it if you’d move on.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, deliberately rude. “I’m going.
Jesus.”

With luck, she’d make the evening news.

With luck, Eric and his friends would be watching.

SEVEN
Berlin, 1
P.M.

T
HE WOMAN WHO HAD STOLEN
Mlan Krucevic’s vaccine No. 413—the mumps vaccine that would soon be injected into the bodies of thousands of Kosovo’s children—had wasted little time in getting the box of ampules out of the country. At the main counter of Malev Air in Berlin’s Tegel Airport, she presented a signed letter typed on the official stationery of the Hungarian Ministry of Health and an equally impressive packet of documentation from a Hungarian lab. She managed the same air of officious irritation that had carried her through her encounter with Greta in the VaccuGen offices, and after one Malev Air attendant pressed her too closely about her mission, she embarked on a furious lecture in geopolitics. Hungary, Mirjana Tarcic reminded the attendant, shared a border with Yugoslavia. Tens of thousands of ethnic Hungarians inhabited the autonomous Yugoslav province of Vojvodina, just across that border. And since Hungary was now a member of NATO, which had pummeled Serbia from the air for months, tensions
in the autonomous province were running high. Who knew when floods of refugees might start spilling into southern Hungary? And what diseases and vaccines might be necessary then? The Hungarian Ministry of Health had determined it should be prepared. If the Malev Air attendant wished to discuss the matter further, she could refer him to her ministry superior.

A tedious twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds later, Mirjana Tarcic carried the sealed carton containing her estranged husband’s mumps vaccine onto the Budapest flight. Malev Air magnanimously dispensed with the requirement of security X ray. Radiation might harm the vaccines, and that was the last thing anyone wanted. The cause, as Mirjana reminded them, was a humanitarian one.

She placed the box between her booted feet, halfway under the seat in front of her, and remembered a similar box of vaccines on another flight. She had just copied Mlan Krucevic’s method for getting a bomb onto a plane. But this time the vaccines were real, and potentially more explosive than the package that had blasted MedAir 901 out of the sky. She hugged her arms across her chest and stared through the window at an approaching baggage train, overwhelmed for an instant by what she had done. If Mlan found out, he would hunt her down and kill her.

And she knew him well enough to believe that he would find out.

She read no magazines, she made no conversation with the elderly Hungarian woman seated next to her during the two-hour flight. She kept her sunglasses on. Mlan, Mirjana knew, had spies everywhere. To beat him at his game, she must be more vigilant than he, more far-sighted, more paranoid. There was nothing like thirteen
years of marriage to a psychopath to teach you about survival.

In Frankfurt, Germany, at Headquarters NSA Europe, Patti DePalma sat at a desk in a windowless room that was utterly silent except for a Muzak version of Paul Simon’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The Muzak was piped throughout the sprawling government complex in the IG Farben building; it was intended to mask office conversation in the event anyone was listening. Patti frankly loathed the tinned tracks—“Memory,” “What I Did for Love,” even the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.” They made her feel like a character in a book by George Orwell. And life as an intercept translator was Orwellian enough.

This morning, however, only an hour into her shift, Patti was spared the bastardized Paul Simon. Her earphones were on. She was listening intently to a conversation in German pulled directly from a rhombic antenna array designed to intercept a wide range of very specific communications. Since Dare Atwood’s first conversation with President Bigelow regarding the 30 April Organization eighteen hours earlier, this particular array, made up of diamond-shaped wires scattered over several hundred acres, had been intercepting communications at VaccuGen in Berlin.

And so Patti listened as Greta Oppenheimer sobbed out the story of vaccine No. 413 to Mlan Krucevic. From there, it was merely a matter of locating the phone Krucevic had used. And within two hours, Olga Teciak’s Bratislava apartment complex was circled in red on a large-scale map of the city pasted on the White House Situation Room’s wall.

“Mad Dog! Come on in.”

One of Wally Aronson’s hands grasped the ambassador’s glossy black door. The other beckoned Caroline almost surreptitiously, as though his password to the clubhouse might expire without notice. A marine guard stood at attention in the hall, his eyes riveted on thin air.

“He’s expecting you, but we haven’t much time,” Wally told her. “He’s due at the chancellor’s for cocktails.”

The ambassador’s residence was a grand old place in Charlottenburg, with nine-foot windows and chestnut trees that threw heavy shade in summer. A world removed from Pariser Platz. Caroline had taken a few minutes at the Hyatt to dress in business clothes, and was suddenly glad.

“You look great, Caroline.” Wally touched her lightly on the shoulder, a gesture halfway between a salute and an embrace, and that quickly Caroline was back in boot camp, Wally swinging from a chin-up bar with his boot laces dangling.

He was short and lithe with a perpetual smile hovering around his eyes. The goatee had grayed since Caroline had last seen him, two years before. They were old friends from the Career Trainee program and Budapest; now he was Chief of Station, Berlin. It was a plum he’d pulled relatively early in his career—but then, Wally had been born with the soul of a spy. He had probably rifled his mother’s love letters as soon as he could read, Caroline suspected, and worn gloves to do it.

He led her past a formal drawing room hung with miles of gray-blue silk, its atmosphere thick with the suspended breath of public spaces. Caroline looked at
the purposeful chairs, all elegant line and backache, and imagined the parties—a crush of black velvet and white satin, the haze of cigarette smoke that always amazed Americans and was inescapable in Europe. Wally crossed the wide hall—here there were ceiling frescoes of Venus rising, an abandon of putti—to a set of double doors. The ambassador’s study.