The Cutout (33 page)

“You know quite well, Tom, that it is irrelevant what I think.” Schoettler’s face hardened, and the quick brown eyes slid away. “We shall probably learn with time that the Turkish anarchists were in league with the kidnappers.”

“I’m sure we will,” Shephard retorted. “But you’re better than this, Schoettler. How can you stand to eat this kind of shit every day?”

The Interior Minister rose. He extended his hand to Caroline. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Carmichael. I regret that you have come all this distance for nothing. Perhaps you can take the opportunity to see something of Berlin while you are here—”

“That’s it?” Shephard was on his feet now, squared off across the desk from Schoettler. His face was pale with fatigue, the eye sockets ghastly. “That’s the meeting? You don’t even want to hear what the Bureau techs have learned from the crater?”

“That reminds me, Tom.” Christian Schoettler touched his forefinger to his temple and frowned. “Now that the suspects have confessed, we no longer require the Bureau’s assistance. The crater has been
closed to your technicians as of ten o’clock this morning.”

“The hell it has!” Shephard retorted.

“Please accept our deepest thanks for your hard work, and the work of your Bureau colleagues.”

Shephard snatched the blue ministry file from Wally’s hands and tossed it toward Schoettler’s trash can. “You can’t do this, Christian. It’s a violation of international law. American citizens died at the Brandenburg, and the Bureau is required to investigate crimes against Americans anywhere in the world. You can’t bar us from the bomb site.”

“That is a point of law I am hardly qualified to address,” Schoettler said with one of his brief smiles. “But as we at the ministry understand it, the Bureau’s jurisdiction is investigatory only. All responsibility for the collection
of evidence
rests with the host country.”

“Thank you for your time, Herr Bundesminister,” Wally said, and extended his hand. Schoettler shook it.

“It doesn’t end here, Christian.” Tom Shephard’s eyes blazed. “As soon as I walk out that door, I’m calling Washington.”

It took both Caroline and Wally to steer Tom Shephard out of the Interior Ministry and into the backseat of the station chief’s waiting car. The LegAtt was no longer shouting by the time they reached the street, but from the venomous look on his face, Caroline knew Shephard was unreconciled.

“What exactly is the Bureau’s jurisdiction?” she asked.

“It’s exactly what the good man said,” Wally replied. “Investigatory only. We take what we can get in foreign
crime scenes and hope for cooperation. Tom can threaten all he wants, but he’s walking on thin ice.”

“I get the impression he does that a lot.”

“Like a Zamboni at full throttle.” Wally shot Tom a glance; the LegAtt wasn’t biting. “Believe it or not, Schoettler’s one of the good guys. He’s an SPD holdover from the Schroeder era. He’s trying to work for Voekl without completely compromising his job.”

“Well, he just failed today,” Shephard snarled.

“Schoettler’s back is to the wall,” Wally mused. “I wonder what that means.”

“A truckful of fertilizer didn’t blow the Gate,” Shephard fumed. “The device was strategic. It was
targeted.
It was plastic explosive with a battery and a timer, for God’s sake, packaged in an acutely calibrated amount. Given a little time in the crater, we could have reassembled the device. Do you
know
what that could have told us?”

“Who made it,” Caroline answered, and thought of Mahmoud Sharif.

“So forget Schoettler,” Wally said briskly. “Forget the crater for a minute, and think. If Schoettler’s stonewalling, then the Voekl government came down hard on the Ministry of Interior. Why would they do that?”

“They
despise
the Ministry of Interior,” Tom retorted. “Voekl works around it entirely, through the Volksturm guards. They’re Hitler’s Gestapo all over again.”

“That’s why Schoettler has been permitted to stay.” Wally returned patiently to the point. “He’s wallpaper. He makes Voekl look good. But this time, Voekl needed Schoettler’s ministry to shut us down.”

“Which must mean,” Caroline said slowly, “that the chancellor is afraid of what the FBI will find in the crater.”

Tom Shephard pulled his eyes away from the window and stared at Caroline intently.

“We’ve already found evidence that contradicts their suspects. What else is there?”

Proof of complicity at the highest levels
, Eric’s voice muttered in her brain.
Fritz Voekl’s balls in a sling.

“Isn’t it obvious, Tom? Something that connects
Voekl
to 30 April.”

SIX
Budapest, 10:30
A.M.

A
NATOLY RUBIKOV WAS A MAN
of few words, which is why he was still alive.

He crushed out the remains of his cigarette in the twist-off cap of his bottled beer, and immediately lit another. He smoked filtered cigarettes because Marya worried about his lungs and wanted him to quit. The filter was a bone he threw her, although filters meant nothing when a man smoked as much as he did. Cigarettes were Anatoly’s solace—an addiction, yes; a weakness, of course; but so much a part of his biological imperative that to abandon them now would be to poison himself with fresh air.

And the air of Budapest, when he thought about it, was scarcely clean anyway.

He smoked absentmindedly, the way other people breathed, his eyes fixed on the snowy television screen mounted behind the bar. Everything was murk—the air of the place, the yellow lights, the expression in the eyes of the waitress with bright orange hair and laddered stockings. The murk comforted him, and so he delayed the inevitable accounting, the walk out into the raw
cold of the streets, the phone call he would have to make. It was ten-thirty in the morning.

The television broadcast was in Hungarian, a language he had never understood. He continued to stare at the screen, his beer drained to the faint tracings of foam, waiting for the face.

Could it be possible that no one had found him?

Anatoly closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the rim of the empty beer bottle.
How could no one have found him?

The Hungarian National Bank occupied a building on the green swath of Szabadsag Ter, next to the embassy of the United States and across the way from Magyar TV headquarters. At this hour it should have been swarming with bankers and secretaries and clerks and factotums, all going about their legitimate business, and the man with the hole in his temple and the pool of blood under his neck should have been found by now. His picture should have flashed up on the television screen—not the man as he looked dead, but sleek and repellent in the full flush of power.

Perhaps they were keeping the mess under wraps, Anatoly thought. Assessing the damage. Deciding what could be told. If they waited much longer, Krucevic would take matters into his own hands.

And if I wait much longer, Krucevic will think too much about what I saw. He’ll decide that a bullet keeps the best secrets.

The short, curling hairs at the back of his neck began to rise of themselves.

He crushed out the second cigarette and tossed a hundred-forint note on the counter. The orange-haired waitress followed him with her eyes as he left.

He placed the call in the Keleti train station, barely seven minutes before the Berlin train.

“Aronson,” he said thickly when the receptionist answered.

“Mr. Aronson is not in. Would you like to leave—”

He hung up.

Aronson would want him to stay in Budapest. He would want him to shadow Krucevic, find out where he kept the woman, turn informer, and thus seal his death warrant. Aronson would want him—Anatoly Petrovich—to risk his life for someone he knew was as good as dead.

He turned, trailing smoke from his splayed fingers, and sought the protective cover of the train.

He cased it from front to back and took a seat at the very end of the last car—a smoking one, of course—folding himself into a corner near the half-open window in the six-person compartment. Otherwise, it was empty. He read his paper and pretended to ignore what he was actually studying frantically, the passage of other travelers along the corridor. Travelers who might be sent to kill him.

The train gave a lurch, compartment doors hissed shut. In a moment, the conductor would ask for his ticket. He closed his eyes again and saw the dead man’s face.

Anatoly had never liked killing. He had done it when necessary—in the army, during his first tour in Afghanistan—but the mujahideen were wolves, rabid with violence. Killing them was a matter of survival. He had never watched a man consider his own death before—had never watched the knowledge come with all the inevitability of rain after a stifling day. When the pistol grazed his temple, Lajta’s eyes had widened slightly, like a dog’s when you pull hard on its ears. It was the only sign of fear the banker had shown.

The compartment door slid open, and a youngish woman—tired face, raincoat smelling dankly of the
streets—shoved a bulky suitcase inside. Its zipper was broken, and she had been forced to tie the lid shut with string. Everything about her suggested a weary struggle against respectable poverty—her dark stockings, her thick-soled shoes. Hair as dry and tousled as an old bird’s nest. She gave Anatoly a furtive glance and took the seat farthest away.

Did he look menacing? Or like a man in terror for his life?

The woman drew a paperback from her purse and opened it. Idly, Anatoly glanced at the cover: something in German. She was going home, then, as he was. Her head drooped, absorbed in words; suddenly, the platform began to slide backward. Anatoly did not trust himself to gaze out the window.

He was an expert at cracking security systems. The KGB had trained him, and he had worked all over the world, lifting the locks on office doors in Khartoum and Valletta and Santiago and Manhattan. He had defected fifteen years ago during his last tour, in Rome, when he’d been sent to bug the building directly next door to the U.S. embassy—a simple affair of attaching a remote fiber-optic device to one of the ancient pipes running between the walls of the two buildings.

Anatoly had never been a man of politics. He was not much of a man for morality, either, or for debating the finer points of loyalty. The KGB had been good to him. He had been good to the KGB. But it was time for their paths to part.

He had fallen in love with a translator at the Rome embassy, and the last few weeks of her tour were up. Anatoly was moving on to Kabul; Marya was returning to Moscow. He tried to buy time, a transfer, a change in Marya’s assignment. The system proved inflexible.

And so, on that night nearly fifteen years ago, he discarded his cigarette, told his partner to take a hike, ignored the placement plan for the listening device, and instead disarmed the American embassy. Then he broke the glass in a ground-floor window at the back of the building, a window that should have been barred. He thrust himself through, grunting as his leather jacket snagged on the ledge—it was a coolish night in February, even the ubiquitous Roman cats gone to ground—until his sneakered feet touched something springy and soft. A tumbledown couch in a minor bureaucrat’s office.

Anatoly stretched himself out on the cushions and went instantly to sleep.

In the morning, an extensive debriefing, the Soviet listening device like a peace offering on the table.

Forty-eight hours later, he and Marya were on a plane for Washington.