The Cutout (23 page)

“You want a terrorist asset, Tom, you’ve got to get your hands dirty.”

It was the oldest debate in the counterterrorism game: how to penetrate the organizations you pursued without adopting their methods. Most of the people at the CTC, Caroline thought, would agree that it was impossible. You could trace a terrorist’s funds. You could blow up his training camps and operational bases. But you could not learn his most private thoughts, his most diabolical schemes, without an ear in his private councils. That meant controlling one of his own. Paying for terrorist treason. And that single fact almost guaranteed that someday, somebody—in the halls of Congress or the pages of the
Washington Post
—would accuse you of bankrolling a monster.

“Hungary,” the ambassador said thoughtfully. “It’s a big place. But this is good, Wally It’s a start. I suggest you get on the horn to your opposite number in Pest and direct him to work his assets.”

“Yes, sir,” Wally said briefly. He did not remind Dalton that the secure phones were down.

“There must be a 30 April body somewhere in that city,” the ambassador said. “We must get to him before Krucevic does.”

“Isn’t there some way to prevent 30 April from entering Hungary?” Shephard asked. “The borders should have been closed as soon as the bomb went off yesterday.”

“They haven’t been, and they won’t be,” Dalton told him. “The President undertook to give Krucevic his freedom until Sophie Payne is recovered. Any sign of an international manhunt, we jeopardize her safety.”

“That can’t go on indefinitely.”

“As far as our German friends are concerned, I imagine it could. It serves their ends to admiration. Why close the borders, when the enemy is within? You of all
people must know, Tom, that the enemy is the infidel Turk. He lives among us. He is to be punished for 30 April’s crimes, while 30 April gets away with murder.”

“Which raises a few questions about Fritz Voekl,” Caroline observed, “and his commitment to fighting international terrorism.”

Dalton smiled at her regretfully. “There are so many questions about Fritz Voekl, my dear. Questions that even I shall not put to him, I’m afraid. We need more information—the kind of information that can be used to pressure him—if we are to proceed from a position of strength. And now, if you’ll excuse me,” the ambassador said with a general nod, “I must present my respects to the chancellor and his daughter. It is young Kiki’s sixteenth birthday, and
le tout Berlin
will be raising a glass.”

EIGHT
Pristina, 2:13
P.M.

E
NVER GORDIEVIC WAS STARTLED AWAKE
at the first knock on his shanty’s door. His heart pounded. He glanced first at Krystle, the baby, who was napping in the lower bunk; she stirred drowsily and began to wail. Then he looked toward the door. No windows in the hut, no way to know who stood there. But it must be faced. Even if it was Simone.

He took the three steps at a run and pulled open the flimsy piece of wood. The Canadian doctor was framed in the doorway, her face lined with weariness, all her heart in her eyes.
Alexis
—

“You’d better come,” she said. And he didn’t ask any questions, just gathered up the little one in her blanket and raced across the churned mud to the medical tent. Simone was there before him, by the side of the cot where his daughter had lain through the early hours of morning, an IV taped into her small wrist. Her hand was on Alexis’s forehead, her stethoscope was searching the little girl’s chest. His daughter looked spent; her eyes were closed. She was not, Enver thought, even moving.
He waited, holding his breath, for Simone to shake her head, to draw the sheet up over his daughter’s golden hair—for his world to crack apart like a shattered glass.

He’d spent eight hours pacing the hospital tent floor, running his hands through his hair and talking, talking, to the woman with the French name, while friends watched his baby and Alexis spiraled downward into death.

“How will I tell her mother?” he had asked Simone once in despair, and she had looked at him in surprise.

“You’re married?”

“
Was
married. She was killed in a fire. During the civil war.”
I was supposed to take care of the girls.
“She’d always wanted a little girl. Someone to dress up, like a doll. I wanted boys, you know? Kids I could play soccer with.”

“Girls play soccer, too.”

He’d nodded distractedly. “It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t trade my girls now. They’re all I have left of Ludmila—she was only twenty-eight when she died. And I loved her.”

He had paused, embarrassed to be talking so freely to this woman, who had hundreds of other children to care for, other parents to hear. But Simone was sitting quite still, her eyes on his face; his confessions hadn’t bored her.

“Your wife must have been beautiful,” she had told him. “Your girls certainly are.”

“She named them after movie stars. From an American television show.
Dynasty
—you know it? She wanted everything for Alexis. Everything she never had. And for a while, we were doing so well. I had my practice, she had her apartment house—she inherited it from her father. Six apartments, six families. None of them survived the fire.”

He had spoken without emotion; he had told this story too many times to feel it anymore.

Simone had risen and gone to a small boy turning restlessly in the cot next to his daughter’s. “How did you escape?”

“I was in Budapest. Attending a constitutional-reform seminar sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department. My mother brought the girls to me for a holiday—she had never been to Hungary herself-—but Ludmila couldn’t get away. When war broke out, she called and begged me to stay. She wanted the girls to be safe.” He had looked directly at Simone, his eyes bright as if with fever. “I never saw her again.”

“But you and your daughters survived.”

“So we could die
here?”
he had retorted. It was the first sign of real bitterness he’d allowed himself to feel.

Simone had ignored it. She pressed a cold cloth against Alexis’s forehead. “You’re a lawyer, then.”

“That doesn’t mean much in Kosovo. Law has nothing to do with survival.”

“But someday, you’ll use what you learned in that seminar. Don’t give up hope, Enver.”

Alexis had whimpered in the cot, and Simone felt for her pulse. There were so many children now. One hundred and fifty-three more had arrived at daybreak. They lay in the tent with barely eight inches between their cots, some on pallets on the dirt floor. They moved into beds when another child died—

“Why aren’t you getting it?” he had asked her abruptly. “This disease. Why is it just the kids?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t strike adults. Or maybe, if you’ve had the more common forms of the disease or been inoculated against them, you’re immune. We know so little about this strain—we don’t even
know how the epidemic started. Or why the disease strikes boys far more savagely than girls—every gland in the boys’ bodies is swollen. But a German lab has been studying the virus intensively and has come up with a new vaccine. We expect some German medical teams to fly in any day and begin inoculation.”

“A vaccine? Specifically for this strain? How did they make it so fast?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes met his, and the agony in them was like a lash. “Enver, I’d urge you to have your youngest vaccinated.”

“Do you think it’s safe?”

“I think it can’t be worse than what we’ve got.”

He had thought about it all morning, while Alexis worsened; he had carried the idea of a vaccine back to his shelter when Krystle needed a nap. He had fallen asleep despite his best intentions in the quiet of that room, thinking of mumps, of killing strains. And while he slept, his elder daughter’s time had run out.

He took a step now toward Alexis’s cot and reached for her hand. It was cold—colder than his own, which was clammy with fear and raw weather. If only she would open her eyes one last time and look at him—if only he could hear her say his name—

Simone shook her head and removed her stethoscope from Alexis’s chest.

He would not look at Simone. He would not let the glass shatter, and with it, all the world—

“I’m so sorry, Ludmila,” he whispered to his dead wife. And buried his face in their daughter’s sweat-soaked curls.

NINE
Bratislava, 3
P.M.

I
N OLGA TECIAK’S APARTMENT
, the air grew stale and the hours dragged. Once the videotape was made, Krucevic sent Michael out in a car with Otto as caretaker. The two men drove across the Danube and into the center of Bratislava, where the U.S. embassy sat next to a massive old hotel in the Soviet mode, a former casino for party apparatchiks. The embassy had once been a consulate; when Slovakia declared independence from the Czech Republic in 1992, its status was upgraded, but an air of unhappiness lingered. Bratislava would never carry the prestige or romance of a Prague posting, and even the buildings knew it.

Michael was behind the wheel. The American embassy was coming up on the right, a block and a half away; early-afternoon traffic snarled the lanes ahead. The key was to crawl along in the right-hand lane, as though intent upon finding a parking space, until the red light ahead changed and the traffic moved freely. They had gone around the corner twice before this, circling the embassy’s position, in an effort to time the signal’s
changes. Thirty seconds, Michael thought, before red phased into flashing yellow and then blue-green. He was nearly abreast of the embassy door, maybe two yards still to go, when Otto rolled down his window and fired his gun at the lens of the nearest surveillance camera. The lens shattered. The far camera went next, just as it pivoted electronically to sweep the embassy’s street front. Two deliberate pops, mundane as a car’s backfiring, and the marine guards were suddenly shouting.

The light changed.

Otto hurled the bubble-wrapped videotape at the embassy steps. It skittered across the sidewalk directly in the path of a woman walking an overweight schnauzer; the dog hiccuped hysterically and lunged. One marine leapt forward and shoved the woman to the ground. The other kicked the package back into the street and then fell to the pavement, roaring, “Fire in the hole!”

Michael floored the gas pedal and spun sharply around the corner, rocketing down the side street that ran alongside the embassy building. He dodged one car to the left, careened into the opposite lane, jogged around an oncoming van, and turned left at the next intersection, the flow of traffic being blessedly with him. It was a simple thing now to head for the river.

“Fucking broad daylight.” Otto had rolled up the window and was staring back over his shoulder, intent upon a possible tail. “What the fuck’s he thinking, huh? That we’ll fucking die for him? Just one of those joes saw our plates—”

“They didn’t see the plates,” Michael said. “What are you saying? That Mlan made a mistake? That he’s losing it? I wouldn’t let him hear that.”

“What do
you
know, you useless piece of meat? You got shit for brains. Peas for balls. Next time, I throw
you
out the window.”

On the pavement in front of the American embassy, nothing exploded. One of the marines got to his feet and studied the package. The schnauzer broke free of its screaming mistress and sank its teeth into the marine’s ankle.

“You did well.”

Stoop-shouldered, with a bald spot as decisive as a Franciscan’s on the crown of his head, Béla Horváth was peering into a microscope ocular at a sample of vaccine No. 413—Mlan Krucevic’s answer to the mumps epidemic. No one else was in the laboratory. Except for the dark-haired woman with the white scarf wrapped like a bandage around her neck.

“Can you tell anything?” Mirjana Tarcic asked him.

“For that, we need time. Trials with mice. DNA scans. Assessment and analysis. But this is a start. The best we could possibly have.”

Béla took off his glasses, leaned toward her as she sat on the lab stool in a pool of light from a Tensor lamp, and kissed her cheek. “You’re very brave, you know.”

She flinched as though the praise stung her. “And then? When you have your analysis? What will you do with it?”

“Tell Michael. He’s the one who wants to know.”

She shook her head. “It’s not enough. We have to tell the world.”

“Tell them what?” Horváth smiled at her indulgently. “That the latest Yugoslav terrorist is quite possibly insane? The world will not be surprised.”

“I did not go to Berlin for Michael,” Mirjana said tautly

“No. And I do not flatter myself that you went for me. Why exactly did you go, Mirjana?”

Wordlessly, she reached her hands to her throat and unwound the scarf. It was as much a part of this woman as her sharp nose, her writhing dark hair. Béla had not seen her throat in at least five years.

The final length of silk trailed away. Her hand dropped to her side, clenched. He drew a deep breath, steadied himself, and reached trembling fingers to her cheek. She reared back, as though he might strike her.