The Cutout (22 page)

But the room, when Wally threw open the doors, was empty.

He crossed the worn Aubusson carpet to the French windows. Beyond them was an expanse of browning grass, lime trees bereft of leaves. A smudge of afternoon sky. A white-haired man lounged in a canvas chair below the terrace, one elbow resting on a card table, thin legs extended before him. He wore a navy blue windbreaker, khaki pants, Top-Siders without socks. A faint breeze stirred a sparse lock of hair, and as he reached back to smooth it, the veins on his hand pulsed blue. Two men, strangers to Caroline, sat at his right and left. In their wool suits and trimmed hair, they resembled models imported for a photo shoot.

“Ah, there you are, Wally.” The ambassador spoke with relish, as though the COS had just brought round the drinks cart. “Good man.”

“Our guest from Washington, Mr. Ambassador. Caroline Carmichael of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Ambassador Dalton.”

Ambrose Dalton stood up. His hand, when Caroline shook it, was dry as vellum. He was a member of an old Connecticut family, a political appointee who had made a fortune in merchant banking. His wife’s name was Sunny. She had found her life mission after the Daltons’ son broke his neck in a rugby game; now she educated the insensitive about the rights of the physically
challenged. The Daltons gave generously to a variety of causes, some of them political. As a couple, they were two of President Bigelow’s oldest friends.

They were quite well acquainted with Sophie Payne.

“I’m so very sorry, Mr. Ambassador, about the damage to the embassy,” Caroline told him. “You and your staff are well, I hope?”

Dalton took her hand between both of his and patted it, more in sympathy than salutation. “We lost two of our marine guards. Mere boys. But you know that, I expect.”

She nodded wordlessly.

He studied her face, a calculation flickering in his eyes. “I understand you’re an expert, Ms. Carmichael, on this Krucevic character. Any expertise is, of course, a comfort, but I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. Sophie cannot be anywhere in Berlin.”

“Is that what the German police are saying, sir?”

“They say that no Turks could possibly have slipped past their borders, and that the extremists, when identified, will be summarily shot.” Dalton’s voice was as dry as his hand.

“Never mind that none of the men filmed with the helicopter was even remotely Turkish,” Wally added, “or that the video dropped in Prague identifies the kidnappers as the 30 April Organization.”

“Our German friends have not been privileged to view the terrorist video,” the ambassador reminded him. “For that matter, neither have I. I merely read the gisted transcript we received in the diplomatic pouch this morning. You may assume, Ms. Carmichael, that everyone at this table has also read that summary. May I introduce my Chief of Mission?”

“T. Hunter Price.” One of the imported models half
rose and nodded, then sank languidly into his seat. Caroline put him down immediately as a cookie-pusher with an attitude. Price would regard the embassy bombing as a State Department affair: He would resent the Agency’s involvement.

“And this is Paul Dougherty,” Wally said, his hand on Caroline’s elbow. “Paul’s in the consular section. You owe him your hotel room.”

“Hey, Caroline,” Dougherty said, jumping up and smiling broadly, “I read your stuff last night. Really cool.”

A first-tour Agency officer, no doubt, fresh from the University of Kansas or Georgetown’s foreign-service program. Dougherty looked about thirteen. She wondered where Wally’s more experienced people were, and then answered the question herself. They were meeting with counterparts in German Intelligence. Or were dressed in white overalls and canvas caps, trolling the streets in plumber’s vans, with listening equipment trained on a variety of buildings. Hoping against hope for a sound that might lead them to Sophie Payne.

“There’s Tom!” Dougherty chirped, his gaze going beyond Caroline. She turned and saw a rangy man in tweeds loping across the terrace, his hands shoved into his pockets. The newcomer had abandoned the government-issue trench coat for a rumpled oxford cloth shirt, suede bucks, and an old rep tie. One of his shoelaces had broken and been summarily knotted into place. His nose appeared to have suffered a similar fate. And from the appearance of his right cheek—which bore a red crease from eye to lip—he had recently fallen asleep on someone’s sofa with a copy of the newspaper folded under him.
Der Zeitung
, perhaps. It was shoved into his pocket along with his hands.

“LegAtt,” Wally Aronson muttered under his breath, and then, more audibly, “Caroline, meet Tom Shephard, the FBI’s Legal Attaché in Berlin. Tom’s coordinating our investigation on the ground.”

“We’ve met,” Shephard said. “At the crater.”

“I walked over to the Brandenburg to take a look around,” she explained to Wally.

“You took more than that.” Shephard continued to study her, as though she were a rare form of plant life he had only just discovered. The hazel eyes were still sharp, but the earlier simmering anger had vanished. “Do you always put your foot in it like that?”

“No,” she replied tersely. “And I usually don’t have to be reminded of it, either.”

“Was there some problem?” Hunter Price was the sort, Caroline suspected, who loved to recycle his neighbors’ affairs each morning over embassy coffee.

“Mud,” she replied. “Mud was the problem. The Tiergarten is churned to mush, and I definitely put my foot in it. See, Mr. Shephard? I even changed my shoes before this meeting.”

“Let’s get started, shall we?” The ambassador slid back into his seat. Caroline set her laptop on the ground unopened; she had brought it with the intention of typing her meeting notes, but the computer’s battery had run down and there did not appear to be an electrical outlet in the embassy garden. She drew out a yellow legal pad instead.

“I think we’ve all read Ms. Carmichael’s material and found it quite compelling,” Dalton observed. “Should we ever locate the Vice President and her attendant thugs, we shall be in the proverbial clover with Ms. Carmichael here on board. I hope you will excuse our impromptu picnic, my dear. We cannot entirely trust the acoustics within the residence.”

Caroline frowned. “You think you’re being bugged? In
Germany?”

“We sweep the place every week,” Wally broke in, “and we haven’t actually found anything. But there have been … incidents. Or should I say coincidences?”

“Within six weeks of taking up my post, Ms. Carmichael, I discovered to my astonishment that whenever I presented my objectives to Mr. Voekl’s late, unfortunate foreign minister—you were familiar with Graf von Orbsdorff, I presume?—he invariably knew what to expect. Either Orbsdorff was a clairvoyant, or he was cheating at the international game. Personally, I plump for the notion of cheating.” Dalton scowled, an honorable schoolboy. “And so I adopted the habit of taking my conferences
en plein air.
A fresh breeze focuses the mind wonderfully, don’t you agree?”

She smiled at him. “Can anyone summarize for me what we know of the bombing to date?”

“For that, I defer to Wally and Mr. Shephard,” Dalton said briskly. “Gentlemen?”

“We know that the embassy blueprints were sold to the highest bidder,” Wally began, “probably by the project architect long before construction was completed. Worse, we know that 30 April knew precisely where to hit the internal surveillance equipment. Agency techs have already gone through the building. Every camera and fiber-optic insert along the gurney’s path was shot to hell.”

Eric
, Caroline thought. He could have looked at the embassy’s blueprints and predicted with certainty where the security equipment would be placed. The realization came to her with a sick sense of disbelief-—that Eric could have betrayed a U.S. installation so easily to someone like Krucevic. She closed her eyes to shut out the image of the tilted platform, the twenty-eight dead. And
thought of something else: If Eric had told his 30 April cronies where to find the cameras and fiber optics, he’d as much as told them about his Agency past. Which meant that they knew everything that mattered.

Did they even know about
her?

She felt chilled to the bone. “So your VTC room is out, as well as cable channels.”

“They’ll be up and running in another twenty-two hours.”

“It’ll take at least a week to get the building completely secure and operational,” Tom Shephard said. He ran his fingers distractedly through his hair. “It’s like these guys had a three-D map of the building downloaded off the Internet, or something.”

So much for her cutout channel. And the ambassador’s residence was bugged. Caroline would have to call Headquarters from a corner pay phone and speak in riddles.

“They certainly hit the embassy fast,” she commented. “From the news coverage, it looks like nine minutes from explosion to kidnapping.”

“Which means they practiced.” Paul Dougherty’s eyes were alight, as though he’d awakened this morning to find himself cast in a techno thriller.

With the faintest suggestion of indulging the children, T. Hunter Price drawled, “This is infinitely fascinating, but it has nothing to do with the problem at hand. That being the location of Vice President Payne.”

“Go ahead, Hunter,” said Shephard with studied politeness. “If you know where she is, we’d love to hear.”

“I wouldn’t dream of stealing your moment, Tom,” Price replied. “I merely attempted to focus. The ambassador’s time is short.”

“Mr. Shephard has clearly profited from the fresh
air,” Dalton declared placidly, “and may be allowed to proceed. Tom, tell us what you’ve learned from the crater.”

“We think the bomb was in a television broadcast van parked right next to the Gate,” Shephard said immediately. “We’ll know more once Forensics has cataloged and thoroughly tested the wreckage, but the truck axle has already surfaced—and been ID’d.”

“That was quick,” Wally observed.

“Luck.” Shephard shrugged. He was studying the path made by his forefinger as it trailed across the surface of the ambassador’s card table. “The truck belonged to Berlin’s TV Channel Four. The two cameramen and the reporter who were supposed to be in it were found floating in the Spree last night. They’d been assigned to cover the Veep’s speech. They never arrived.”

“So instead of renting a van to park under the Gate, 30 April stole one and killed its occupants. These guys weren’t about to leave a paper trail.”

Shephard’s eyes flicked over to Caroline. “Multiple murder increased their risks considerably. But it also covered their tracks more effectively. No rental documents, as in the Oklahoma City bombing or the hit on the World Trade Center. And being a real broadcast van, the truck looked far more plausible in place.”

“What about the medevac chopper?” Caroline asked. “Has anyone located that?”

“Possibly.” Shephard focused on his finger again. “Somebody parked a helicopter near the rail lines south of Templehof yesterday—that’s the old East Berlin airport—and set it on fire.”

“Destroying any traces of prints or fibers,” Caroline said.

“Most of them. Yes.”

“Have any of the local hospitals reported a missing medevac pilot?” Wally asked.

“A young woman by the name of Karin Markhof,” Tom Shephard told him. “Still no trace of her. Either Markhof was paid to turn over the bird to 30 April and got out of town fast once the Brandenburg blew—or she’s lying dead somewhere.”

“She’s dead.” Caroline said it without hesitation. “Krucevic leaves nothing to chance.”

“Then let’s hope he screws up somewhere down the line. Because that’s all we’ve got.”

Wally stroked his goatee, eyebrows furled like question marks. T. Hunter Price adjusted his tie. Dougherty looked from face to face like an eager puppy.

“Does the station here have any 30 April assets, Wally?” the ambassador inquired.

“A few, sir.”

“What’s ‘a few,’ Wally? Exactly?”

“Two,” the Chief of Station conceded. “In the developmental stage.”

“Which means you’ve got squat,” muttered T. Hunter Price.

“We’ve got a woman who works in the Berlin office of VaccuGen, Krucevic’s main front company,” Wally shot back. “She’s not on the payroll, which means she hasn’t been vetted, and I’m not at liberty to discuss her particulars. But one of my officers has been developing her for months.”

“And?”

“Fred is still trying to make contact.”

Price threw up his hands in mute eloquence.

“What about the other recruit?” Caroline asked.

“He’s a different kettle of fish. Brilliant, oddball, and an unreconciled Communist. Krucevic wants to own
him, but our guy thinks Krucevic is poison. He cracks security systems for a living.”

“So how’d he come to us?” Caroline asked.

“He applied for an embassy job. As a security expert.”

“Fascinating,” burbled T. Hunter Price. “You just brought this crook in, I suppose, to discuss your mutually shady pursuits over a glass of Schultheiss. And in the process, you probably gave away the embassy’s fiber optics and security installations, Wally, to no less a personage than 30 April’s chief safecracker. I congratulate you, friend. I really do.”

“Horse pucky,” the station chief said. “I didn’t interview him at the embassy.” But he had flushed an angry red.

“Have you talked to him since the bombing?” Tom Shephard was rigid with interest.

“Last night. I didn’t tell him why we wanted Krucevic.” Wally glanced around the table. “Nobody in Berlin knows for a fact that 30 April did the Brandenburg, much less the Vice President, so I made it a fairly general query. But my guy thinks Mlan is headed for Hungary. Krucevic told him to get to Budapest and await instructions. I asked him nicely to keep us informed.”

Budapest
, Caroline thought.
I’m wasting my time here in Berlin.

“So this asset of yours is working for the terrorists.” Shephard was scowling.

“He’s not an asset. He’s a developmental.”

“Which means you’re not paying him.”

“Not formally. No.”

“But you’re considering placing him on your payroll. A borderline criminal who consorts with terrorists.”