The Cutout (30 page)

“Who should be following, Jane Hathaway?”

“Following
me
? No one. I know no one in Berlin.”

The Mercedes lurched forward, picking up speed, and swerved violently to the left. Caroline slid against the man beside her, and he grunted.

“There is a white Trabant behind us. My friend who is driving is certain it has been behind us some time. Who do you know with a white Trabant?”

“No one. I’m a stranger here. But if it’s a Trabant, it won’t be behind you long. They’ve got no power.”

“That is not the point,” the man said sternly. “We cannot take you to Sharif if we do not know who is following. You are with the police, perhaps?”

“Of course not! I told you. I’m from London. I don’t know anybody in Germany. Maybe it’s one of
your
friends.”

He did not reply. The car swerved again, accelerated, made a series of abrupt turns.

Wally.
Plausible, sympathetic, endearing Wally Had he set her up with the story about Sharif at the Tacheles and then watched to see what she’d do?

Or was it someone else from the station—someone deputed by Dare Atwood, perhaps, to keep tabs on her?

Dare knew what Jane Hathaway looked like.

When you’re under surveillance, Mad Dog
, said Eric’s voice in her mind,
never, never let your tail know you see him. If you do, he’ll suspect you’re worth following.

But Sharif’s men had never learned Eric’s lessons.

Bore him to tears. Change your plans if necessary. Abort the meeting or the dead drop or the safe-house visit. And when you lose him, do it so casually he never sees it coming. Never with a high-speed car chase through a crowded city, where the cops might decide to get involved.

As the Palestinians were doing now.

But no cops were interested in a gray Mercedes careening through eastern Berlin. All the cops in the city, it seemed, were standing guard around the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate.

Fingers fumbled at the cloth around her eyes. “You may get out now, Jane Hathaway.”

He was already standing at the open car door, one hand politely extended. She placed her own within it and allowed him to help her out of the car. Arab courtesy, she thought. There would probably be a plate of dates and figs in the room beyond.

What she found, however, was a space as deliberately innocuous as an Agency safe house. Whatever their problem with mobile surveillance, the Palestinians had absorbed some form of tradecraft.

Three windows, blinds drawn. One couch, quite characterless, and two armchairs at correct angles beside it. A coffee table with an ashtray in the event that she smoked. Beyond this, a small cubicle that was probably a bathroom.

No family photographs, no magazines with address labels, no books that might reveal a personal taste. No telephone. No television. She was certain she would find the windows and front door locked.

She took off her coat and threw it over a chair. “Which of you is Sharif?”

The tidy man in the leather jacket smiled slightly. “None of us, Jane Hathaway You may call me Akbar.”

The names of the other two were not for her keeping, it seemed.

“How did you hear of this … Mahmoud Sharif?” Akbar asked her.

She frowned, as though puzzled. “From my cousin Michael, of course. Michael O’Shaughnessy He’s done some favors for Sharif in the past.”

“Sharif is beholden only to Allah,” he replied.

“Then perhaps the obligation was my cousin’s,” Caroline suggested graciously. “But Michael told me that if I ever needed to reach him, Mahmoud was the one man in Europe who would know where he was.”

Akbar perched on the arm of the sofa and studied Caroline. She continued to stand, her back to the wall and her eyes on the door.

“Why is this Michael so difficult to find?” he asked.

“Aren’t most of Mahmoud’s friends?”

“But no.” He spread his arms out wide to include the silent pair ranged behind him. “We are as you see. Present when you required us. Without even the demand of a proof or a demonstration of good faith.”

“Other than the little matter of a blindfold,” Caroline pointed out.

His expression did not change. “Why do you wish to see Mahmoud?”

“I told you. I need to find my cousin. His father has just died. There was no way to contact Michael, and I need to speak to him about the family.”

“Perhaps a message could be passed.”

“Perhaps. But I don’t think that’s for you to say, Akbar. Unless you really are Sharif.”

Mirth flooded the dark eyes. It was gone before Caroline had a chance to interpret it.

“And now I must beg to examine the contents of your purse, Jane Hathaway.”

It was a large black leather shoulder bag in the shape of a backpack. It fairly screamed Knightsbridge. She handed it to him wordlessly and sank down onto the couch.

He carried the purse to the bare table and shook out its contents. Caroline could have recited them in her sleep.

The sunglasses, on top.

A red leather wallet, with about one hundred and fifty-three marks in bills and small change, a Visa card, a Harrods credit card, a British driver’s license, and a long-distance calling card.

A picture of Eric from Nicosia.

A U.S. passport with the usual navy blue cover, bearing the name of Jane Hathaway and an address in London. The picture had been taken at the Agency; it was a good likeness, despite the wig.

Three Chanel lipsticks, all of them well used.

A pen and pencil in a case.

A matchbook from last night’s bar at the Tacheles.

A cell phone.

A small hairbrush, with several black hairs from the wig wound around its bristles.

A few phone numbers (London exchange) and jottings on crinkled slips of paper, some of them receipts from Jane’s favorite pub in Hampstead.

“And what is this?” Akbar inquired, his index finger thrust through an olive green metal ring. He held it up and twirled it slightly around his knuckle. A single rod about an inch long swung from its middle.

“Don’t you know?” Caroline asked him blandly. “It’s a grenade pin.”

The black brows lifted. “A curious item for a lady’s purse, surely?”

Caroline smiled. “My cousin Michael gave it to me years ago. He was a Green Beret.”

Akbar twirled the pin once more around his finger, thoughtfully this time, then set it down beside the lipsticks. “Saleh will remain with you, Jane Hathaway I shall go for a time and return. You must be patient. Sharif is a busy man.”

He thrust her things back into the bag and, with a curt bow, turned for the door.

THREE
Budapest, 9
A.M.

H
OW ARE YOU FEELING THIS MORNING
, Mrs. Payne?”

He always spoke to her in English, although the others used German. Sophie suspected that he thought her unworthy of his adored tongue. The electronic door had slid back so noiselessly that she had had no warning. He leaned there against the jamb with a newspaper in his hand. She sat up in bed and stared at him.

Sophie had not been sleeping. She had been studying the ceiling in an effort to detect whether it had any stains on its surface, and if so, whether they would start to move. This might, she thought, be an indication of the recurrence of her illness. But for all her vigilance, the effects of anthrax would probably surprise her. As had Krucevic.

“Considering the past twelve hours,” she said in answer to his question, “I’m fine.” It was a patent lie, but she had no intention of rewarding him with the truth.

The mad surge for the door, her head bound in a blanket, her mouth stuffed with somebody’s socks, her mind
screaming with vivid, shaming panic. An arm belted around her waist. The jolting dash down echoing stairs. No one speaking, the sensation of cold and wet in the pelting rain. The child lying murdered on her mother’s bed.

Sophie was placed on the floor of a truck between Otto and Michael, sightless and mute, with a raging desire to weep burning in her nostrils. She suppressed it viciously, willing the grief to turn to hatred, a passion that would sustain rather than destroy her.

“You have remarkable resilience,” Krucevic said now.

“It’s one of the great American secrets. We endure. Jack Bigelow has resilience, too. I wonder if he has more than you.”

Krucevic smiled. “If you’re suggesting this is a test of wills, Mrs. Payne, I’m afraid you romanticize the matter. This is not an affair of honor between two gentlemen, with yourself as the prize. Neither of us values you that much.”

“I’m not concerned about myself. Except inasmuch as my life or death affects the fate of my nation.”

“How admirable. And how difficult to believe. Do I detect a trace of hypocrisy, Mrs. Payne? Is it so important to consider yourself a martyr? I suppose it lends a certain style to death. If one cares about such things.”

He threw her the phrases the way another man might toss potato chips to a dog, his mind entirely on other matters. The tension that had turned him rigid in Bratislava was gone; he seemed at ease, at home with himself, impervious to concern. Sophie fought with despair. If Krucevic could stand in her door without a care in the world, events must be turning his way.

“What are you really after?” she asked.

“Why should I tell you, Mrs. Payne?”

“Because when you get what you want, you’ll kill me. And before I die, I’d like to know why.”

He studied her. “Have you so little faith in your government? Jack should have saved his time and money. That failed raid will have cost him something in respect.”

“What raid?” she asked sharply.

“The one that drove us out of Bratislava last night. Drove us, I might add, in a U.S. government–operated mobile listening post. Otto killed the agents and shot up their electronics before we loaded you in the back.” He pushed himself away from the wall and walked toward her. “Your people found you, Mrs. Payne. And no doubt they meant to rescue you. But in a lamentably half-assed manner. I had expected better of Mr. Bigelow. A Huey or two, at least, on the building’s roof. But no.”

That accounted for his air of superiority. He had outwitted the U.S. government. Sophie bit back disappointment and thought,
They’re on my trail. They’ll get him soon.

“So let’s take it as a given that I won’t be rescued. Tell me what you’re up to. Is it revenge? For the NATO air strikes in ’99?”

“The allied bombs destroyed Belgrade,” Krucevic said indifferently. “I despise Belgrade as much as the United States. I’m a Croat, Mrs. Payne, although I don’t expect you to comprehend the significance of that fact.”

“You are far more than a Croat, Mlan Krucevic. You are an unreconstructed Ustashe fighter. You’re a throwback to the fascist midnight of 1939. We’ll agree that you enjoyed seeing the Serbian republic devastated by war. That you spared no tears for the Kosovar dead. A dozen mass graves here or there mean nothing to you. So what’s the point? Why strike out against the U.S.?”

He sat down on the bed next to her. She refused to flinch.

“I know that you see me as a Croat nationalist, Mrs. Payne. That is an understandable mistake. I fought for my fellow people in Bosnia because if I had not, the Serbs and the Muslims would have overwhelmed them and the mass graves you speak of would have held only Croats.” He lifted his hand and waved it gently, in farewell to the past. “That is done. Bosnia is a nation torn in three. The rifts will never heal. What the 30 April Organization attempts to ensure, Mrs. Payne, is that the plight of the Balkans will never become the plight of Europe.”

Viewed this closely, the scar at his temple revealed itself as the work of a bullet. Someone had once tried to kill him. “You’re working for
peace?”
Sophie asked sarcastically. “That’s why you bombed the Brandenburg and kidnapped me?”

“I am working to eradicate a cancer,” he replied impatiently. “Do you know that is the most common Serb image applied to ethnic Albanians? I would go further and apply it to the entire Islamic world. Adherents of the Muslim faith are the most ignorant and uncultured peoples in existence. They bring strife, fanaticism, darkness, and violence wherever they breed. And they breed, Mrs. Payne, as no people has ever bred before. Their children are their deadliest weapon. The numbers are against the Aryan peoples of the West, Mrs. Payne. You must know that. It is happening in your own country. The people of northern Europe have two or three children, while your blacks and Hispanics have a dozen each. In time, democracy will be overwhelmed in their cesspool.”

He gazed at her piercingly, the brown eyes devoid of all emotion.

“This is the great Achilles’ heel of the American elite. You invite the mongrels of the world to attend your universities and eat at your exclusive tables. Well, Mrs. Payne, the mongrels of the world will savage the hand that feeds them. I do not intend to let that happen in Europe.”

“I don’t understand,” Sophie said. “How does holding me hostage affect the population of Europe?”

“It buys me time. A decent interval without U.S. or NATO intervention.”