The Cutout (35 page)

The scarred embassy on Pariser Platz was once again open for business. A mere two days after the bombing, the marine guards were back at the entrance, black armbands prominent on their biceps. Windows were boarded over where they had not already been replaced. A tattered flag flew at half mast, and concrete blast posts linked with chain blocked the building’s exterior— or had they been hidden before, Caroline thought, by the ceremonial platform erected for the dedication?
The posts were designed to keep a vehicle filled with explosive from parking near the door; they had been powerless against commandos on the roof and shock waves traveling across the street. But perhaps they offered the illusion of safety to the people inside—people who knew, as she did, that if someone wanted to kill them enough, he would probably succeed.

Volksturm guards patrolled the streets leading into Pariser Platz, and barricades were everywhere. Wally abandoned his car on a side street and led them through a series of alleys to the embassy. The pavements were slick with the first flakes of snow.

As they turned into the square, Tom Shephard stopped short. Uniformed Volksturm surrounded the rubble of the Brandenburg Gate like a cordon of honor; but behind them, bright mustard against the blackened stone, reared the shovel of a front-loader. As the three of them watched, it swiveled and disgorged a twisted load of metal into the body of a truck.

“Fucking shit!”

Shephard took off at a run. Wally and Caroline tore after him. A few feet from the Volksturm cordon, they caught him and pulled him back.

“Fucking idiots!” He was struggling to break free and hurl himself at the nearest black shirt. “Get that fucking truck out of there!”

“You can’t do anything about it.” Caroline’s voice was urgent, her fingers straining at his coat sleeve. “Tom—you’ll only make it worse.”

He shook her off. “Do you realize what they’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“They’re destroying evidence!”

“Of course they are.”

The bright front-loader bent, primal as a dinosaur, to devour a lamppost. Stone, metal, dust, and a few scraps of clothing clung to its jaws. The figure inside at work on the levers appeared to be whistling, oblivious to the spectators, the rolling news cameras, the enraged Shephard.

“Holy God,” he burst out. “There could be human remains in there. What in Christ’s name are they thinking?”

“Come on.” Wally steered him gently around. “Let the press deal with it. They always do.”

The Volksturm had massed near the consular section’s door. There a long line of Berliners and tourists had assembled in hope of visas; most of them, Caroline noticed, were Turks. They stood in silence, eyes averted from the armed men in black; but there was an ugliness in the air, powerful as the stench of cordite. Wally pulled her toward the embassy’s main entrance. Between the two of them, Carrie and Shephard, he looked like a policeman making an arrest.

“I’ve got to call the Bureau,” Tom muttered as they flashed IDs at the marine guards and hurried down the main corridor. “This is un-fucking-believable. Do you realize what those bastards are doing?”

“Yes
, Tom, I think we all realize,” Wally said patiently. He took the broad central staircase two steps at a time, turned left at the second floor, and strode down a corridor. Caroline barely had time to register a team of technicians mounted on ladders, busily rewiring the embassy ceiling, when Wally stopped in front of an office.

“Mrs. Saunders!” he said gaily to the middle-aged woman behind the desk. “Meet Caroline Carmichael, otherwise known as Mad Dog.”

“Mad Dog?” muttered Shephard.

Caroline extended her hand; Mrs. Saunders clasped it.

“Mrs. Saunders is the station’s nerve center,” Wally told them. “Although she has worked for an Intelligence organization for most of her life, none of us has ever learned her first name.”

“It’s Gladys, if you can believe,” said the woman. “My mother was Welsh. Just call me Mrs. Saunders. Everyone does. You have an action cable from Headquarters, Wally”—she looked at him severely over her half-glasses, which were tethered to her head with a black cord—“and Vic Marinelli has been on the phone from Budapest. He wants you before COB today.”

“Station chief,” Wally told Caroline. “I put in a call to him this morning about DBTOXIN. So the cable system’s up?”

“No. We used carrier pigeon. Also”—Mrs. Saunders glanced at her notes—“somebody throaty and Russian called. At least, I think he was Russian. Real hush-hush. A bad case of secret-agentitis, if ever I heard one. He hung up when I asked for his name.”

Wally stood stock-still in front of the secretary’s desk, considering this. “When?” he asked.

“Maybe ten, ten-fifteen.”

“Could it have been our developmental?”

“Old what’s-his-acronym? I don’t know. Heavy smokers all sound the same to me. Particularly when they’re foreign.”

“Long-distance call?”

“Either that or our line’s bugged. Lousy connection.”

Wally whistled tunelessly under his breath while his fingers riffled the papers in Mrs. Saunders’s In box. “Where’s Fred?”

“He and Young Paul are out in the van, per your instructions.” Mrs. Saunders sat back in her desk chair and smiled nastily. “It’s so
nice
to see Fred working again. He managed to get rid of That Girl, you know. Gone home to see her mother.”

Wally looked up. “That Girl, Mrs. Saunders, is his wife.”

“She’ll get him PNG’d one of these days,” Mrs. Saunders predicted darkly. “Absolutely no discretion. Thinks it’s a hoot that her husband’s a spy. Hasn’t the faintest clue spying’s still a crime to the host country. How’s McLean, sweetie?” This to Caroline.

“Congested,” she managed.

“I’ve got a nice little house in Arlington. Keep it rented.
God help me
if I ever go back.”

Wally disappeared through the office’s inner door, a vaulted one, thrown open to Mrs. Saunders’s view. Tom and Caroline followed him inside.

It might have been a gentleman’s study—if the gentleman was a little paranoid. There were no windows: The Agency had long ago discovered that electronic emissions, even the tapping of fingers on a computer keyboard, bounced off glass and could be picked up by anyone remotely handy. Three workstations with computers and a motley collection of files dotted the space. The floor was carpeted in crimson pile that further deadened sound; the walls were lined with bookshelves. Within the walls, multiple layers of steel prevented electronic penetration. There was a document shredder, a combination safe, a few plants dying under fluorescent light, and a silver-framed picture of Brenda on Wally’s desk.

“The developmental wouldn’t be your 30 April safecracker, would it?” Caroline asked.

He raised an eyebrow at her, looking for all the world like a satanic Puck. “Do you need to know?”

“I’d
like
to know. If he’s calling from Buda and hanging up in a hurry, maybe he’s on to something.”

“Maybe he is,” Wally said smoothly. “If that
was
the developmental. But it’s not like Anatoly to be spooked by Mrs. Saunders. We’ll just have to wait until he calls back.”

“What time is it in Washington?” Shephard demanded. He was, Caroline saw, still obsessed with stopping the destruction of evidence in the street below.

“I don’t think it matters, Tom.” Wally turned on his computer terminal. “You’re not calling. Shut up and start thinking for once.”

To Caroline’s surprise, Shephard submitted to the abuse. He slumped into a chair and fixed his eyes on his shoes.

“You need a car and a good driver.” Wally stuck his head into Mrs. Saunders’s province. “Oh,
Gladys
?”

“Yes,
Walter
?” she replied acidly.

“Any of the FSNs report for duty?” FSNs—Foreign-Service Nationals—were local folk who served as support staff for the U.S. embassy.

“There’s Ursula.”

“Ursula would stick out like a sore thumb at a construction dump. Get me Tony.”

“Tony was killed in the bombing, dear,” said Mrs. Saunders imperturbably

Wally was silent for a moment. “Okay. How about Old Markus?”

“Old Markus it is.” She leaned on an intercom button and buzzed.

“Old Markus is perfect,” Wally told them.

“You’re sending him out after the dump truck,” Shephard said.

“Why not? Got a better idea?”

“And then what—he sifts through the debris in the dead of night?”

“I doubt he’d know what to look for.” Wally took off his suit jacket and reached for a cable. “You’re the forensics nut, Tom. You’ve got all those Bureau teams twiddling their thumbs over at the Hyatt. Why not put ‘em to work?”

“It might be considered against the law.”

“German or U.S.?” Wally tore the cable in half and stuck it in a burn bag. “But I see your point. Whereas if I got involved, it’d still be against the law, but
you’d
feel better, right?”

Shephard said nothing. Wally smirked at Caroline. “There it is in a nutshell, Mad Dog. The Agency avoids evidence like the plague, because evidence is admissible in court, where sources and methods never go. But we love to help other people
find
evidence. It makes our little day. And are they grateful?”

“Once in a while,” Shephard muttered.

“Not often enough.”

“Okay, Wally,” he said in exasperation. “I’m grateful for Old Markus. Let him follow the damn truck, and we’ll decide later how to deal with whatever he finds.”

And at that moment, the secure phone rang.

“Suicide,” Wally said in disbelief. He sank down into his chair, fingers gripping the receiver. “Why commit suicide if you’ve just embezzled the nation?” His eyes were fixed on Caroline’s face, but there was no expression in
them; he might have been looking at a featureless wall. “All right, Vic. I understand. I’ll get back to you tonight.”

He hung up.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Vic Marinelli, from Budapest.”

“And?”

“István Lajta committed suicide last night. Or early this morning.”

Shephard looked up. “The Hungarian Minister of Finance?”

“Lajta killed himself?” Caroline was shocked. “But he’s young—a rising star in the Liberal Party! People talked about him as a future prime minister.”

“His assistant found him this morning. One bullet through the temple, gun lying on the floor.” Wally grimaced. “His wife identified it as Lajta’s.”

“He had a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago,” Shephard protested.

“Even that, it seems, is no shield against bullets.”

“They’re sure it was suicide?” Caroline persisted.

“There was a note—or a confession, I guess—typed on the guy’s computer screen.”

She snorted. “Anybody can type, Wally. What’d Lajta confess to?”

“Embezzling the Hungarian treasury.”

Shephard whistled.

“That includes at least a hundred million in IMF loans. The ministry is scrambling to sit on the news and trace the funds.”

“So they called Vic Marinelli.” Caroline immediately understood. The CIA’s Chief of Station was usually declared to a friendly host country, and depending on the relationship, he could serve as a government’s sounding board in times of crisis.

“Vic has asked for Secret Service assistance. The Treasury guys are pretty good at chasing down electronic transfers.”

“But
why?”
she asked, working it out. “Why put a bullet in your brain if you’ve just pulled off the heist of the century?”

“Remorse?”

She groaned. “Oh, come on, Wally.”

“He was murdered,” Tom Shephard said brusquely.

Caroline caught his meaning and threw it back. “The only reason to kill Lajta—”

“—is if he didn’t do it,” Tom finished. “Whoever stole the cash left Lajta holding the bag.”

“Vic seemed certain it was suicide,” Wally objected, “and he’s not stupid. The building hadn’t been broken into—”

He stopped short and went very still.

“Your friend Anatoly,” Caroline said grimly. “No wonder old what’s-his-acronym hung up on Gladys.”

Wally didn’t reply. Instead, he reached for the phone and dialed a number. But before it rang, he slammed down the receiver. “If Lajta died sometime during the night, Anatoly won’t even be back in Hamburg yet.
Shit.
I’ve got to get to him—”

“Before Krucevic does.” Caroline picked up a silver letter opener and studied the engraving—a message of thanks from one of Wally’s previous postings. “Do you seriously think Krucevic will let him go?”

“I don’t know.” Wally sank back into his chair, defeated.

“Why would 30 April steal from the treasury?” Tom Shephard asked. “If you’re going to rob a bank, rob one in Switzerland. Not Hungary. I don’t get it.”

But Caroline did. “Fritz Voekl doesn’t want Switzerland,” she said. “Switzerland is clean and well ordered and more efficient than ten Germanys. Fritz wants a reason to clean up the wrong side of the tracks.”

“What are you saying?”

“Voekl needs a cause. A crisis. He wants a plausible reason to send German troops throughout the neighboring countries. The countries that can’t stop the Muslim hordes from invading the German sphere of influence. Voekl wants an invitation to take over.”