The Cutout (38 page)

It was out of Caroline’s hands now. The Budapest station would run with the recorded number. They would find Mirjana Tarcic’s house. They would have Tarcic arrested on a trumped-up charge, a favor from the Hungarian police–or surveil her in the belief she could lead them to Krucevic.

And they would certainly find Eric. Unless Caroline got there first. Did she want to? Did she want to learn the whole truth about her marriage—the lies, the gross deceptions, the misplaced trust?

Wally cradled the receiver. “Marinelli’s signaled a
meeting with DBTOXIN for the morning. News of the Hungarian bank crash has hit the street, Carrie. People are rioting.”

She had no choice but to go forward, whatever she would find. “Wally is there a night train to Budapest?”

“It’s a sixteen-hour trip.” He regarded her grimly. “Take a plane, Carrie, and stay at the Hilton. The President will spring for it.”

TEN
Pristina, 4:30
P.M.

T
HE CHILDREN HAD BEEN WAITING
patiently in line for seven hours now, ever since the German medical teams had arrived on the ground in Kosovo and set up their assembly-line vaccination. The trail of parents and toddlers snaked through the main street of the squatters’ village, several thousand strong, and it moved with surprising efficiency. The young men and women—medical students, many of them, and all volunteers—had thrown themselves into the task. And while the children in the quarantined squatters’ camp were vaccinated, another team had set up shop elsewhere in the city of Pristina. Fear of the spreading epidemic had knifed through the entire province of Kosovo.

Simone Amiot had not yet had a chance to speak to many of the German volunteers—the numbers of sick and dying exceeded a thousand now, and all her time was spent in the medical tent. She managed to snatch two or three hours of sleep each day. Never enough. She found herself nodding off in the midst of examinations; she
moved through fatigue as though it were deep, deep water, and waited for some tide to turn. For the epidemic to peak, for the numbers to recede. Perhaps the vaccines would make a difference.

“They seem to know what they’re doing.” Stefan Marx was peering through the tent flap next to her. He was the head of their volunteer group, a veteran of Doctors Without Borders. A kind man who had left a thriving medical practice in Stuttgart to spend his time in the hellholes of the world. “Now, if only we knew what they were pumping into those kids’ veins.”

Simone looked up at him swiftly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that this vaccine can’t possibly have gone through clinical trials. I only hope to God it’s not worse than the disease. But I ask you—” He gazed angrily around the crowded tent, the faces of the suffering children. “Do we have a choice?”

Enver Gordievic apparently thought so.

Throughout the day, Simone had looked for him among the waiting parents. She had hoped against hope that he would be there, with little Krystle on his shoulder. Because she dreaded the moment when she might look up and find him standing in the medical tent with another feverish child. Simone had learned from bitter experience that only one in twenty children survived this disease.

Stefan Marx laid his hand on her shoulder and smiled into her careworn face. “You should take a break,” he said.

She opened her mouth to protest, to insist that she was just fine—but he’d already gone to help a nurse lift a boy from a pallet on the floor. Simone pulled on her jacket and stepped out into the early twilight of late fall. The medical teams would vaccinate under spotlights if they had to. No one wanted to turn these people away.

She hesitated, uncertain which direction to take— then found herself striding toward Enver’s shelter. She had not seen him since his daughter’s body had been carried from the medical tent for burial.

The small, crazily canted shack was silent as she approached. Simone stepped up to the door and knocked tentatively. And the flat panel of wood swung open under her hand.

At first she could pick nothing out of the shadows. Then her eyes adjusted, and Krystle’s fair baby hair gleamed in the last bit of daylight. The child was lying on the floor, hands flung wide like a snow angel’s. Enver’s arms were around her. They might almost have been asleep.

Then Simone saw the neat round bullet holes in each of their temples and the pool of blood shining wickedly on the floor. She saw the pistol lying spent where Enver’s hand had dropped it. He had found a third way, then—a path between sickness and untested vaccines. He had taken his girl home to her mother.

“Enver,” Simone whispered. And her voice broke on his name.

ELEVEN
Berlin, 7:15
P.M.

C
AROLINE PACED THE CONCOURSE
at Tegel Airport, careful where she set her feet. She had cleared her weapon with Hungarian airport security; the forms had been filed, the flight crew notified. All that remained now was to wait. The sense of vertigo she had attributed yesterday to jet lag was back with redoubled force—but tonight, it sprang from fear. She was flying to Hungary on pure gut, she lacked most of the pieces of the puzzle, and her mind bucked and surged with panic. Was Eric really in Hungary? And was Sophie Payne with him? Or had she clutched at the wrong straw out of desperation and hope?

You analysts just demand so much certainty
, Wally’s voice muttered in her mind,
before you’re willing to move off a dime.

She had tried to think as Eric would: as a case officer in the field. She had tried to work from instinct. But the terrain was unfamiliar, like the interior of a house navigated by dark; she was terrified of hitting walls where corridors should be. If she was wrong, Sophie Payne could die.

The airport concourse swayed.
Vertigo.
She stopped short and took a steadying glance at a television monitor.

The evening news flickered across the screen. She understood German poorly—it was a language that had never taken, somehow—but the images were clear. Uniformed riot police, a man’s bloodied, twisted face, a bottle exploding in midair. Shattered windows along the boulevards of Pest. Hungary was in turmoil.

“I guess the news got out,” someone said behind her; she turned to see the battered raincoat, the five o’clock shadow along his jawline.

“Shephard,” she said stupidly.

“I think I’m seated next to you.” He fished in his pocket for a ticket and scowled down at it. “Ten-B. That means I’m in the middle seat, doesn’t it? Damn Mrs. Saunders! I suppose the old bat gave
you
the window.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Following Sally Bowles to Buda.”

The implication was obvious: She had deceived him in the matter of Mahmoud Sharif, and he wasn’t about to lose sight of her now. She almost snapped his head off in annoyance, but then Shephard shrugged as though nothing much mattered and said, “The investigation on this end is dead.”

“What about Old Markus and the dump truck?”

“The stuff’s going to a landfill,” he said bleakly. “Wally’s agreed to lead a Bureau forensics team in there after dark. Wanna bet they find zip?”

“With that as an alternative, I’d get out of town, too.” She forced a smile.

He nodded toward the chaos on the television screen. “I hope you don’t expect to use your ATM card while we’re in happy Hungary. Stock market plummeted. The banks have frozen their assets.”

“I’ve got cash. What do you expect to do there?”

The hazel eyes flicked back to her face. “The Secret Service requested me. For the Lajta embezzlement probe. I’m the Central European LegAtt, remember?”

“Of course. Sorry to be so dense. I’m a nervous flyer. I should have a drink or something.”

To her surprise, he produced a flask from his coat pocket. “Here. Have a swig. Or do women sip?”

“I’ve never actually seen one of these.” It was a dull silver, polished smooth from countless pockets. Someone had engraved his initials. “What’s in it?”

“Single-malt Highland whiskey from a distillery I can’t pronounce.”

“Is this legal?”

“Come on. It’s Berlin.”

On the TV screen overhead, a woman screeched; Caroline could recall enough Hungarian from her Budapest days to understand the obscenities.
Az anyád!
Your mother.
Lofasz a Seggedbe!
A horse dick up your ass. She tipped the neck of Tom’s flask into her mouth and felt the Scotch burn down her throat.
Bassza meg.
Fuck it. “Thanks. I have no idea what that actually tasted like—but thanks.”

He laughed. “Why the nerves?”

There was no reason he should know, of course. “Unexpected turbulence,” she lied.

The plane, as it happened, sat two to a row on the left side of the cabin, so that Mrs. Saunders’s good sense was redeemed and Tom Shephard’s long legs were thrust out into the aisle. Once they were airborne, Caroline passed him the sports section of her newspaper. She was thankful for a quarter hour of silence.

The news was rife with speculation about the Vice President’s kidnapping but mentioned nothing of the economic chaos in Hungary—so there had been no hint, then, of the “series of events” in Central Europe. Nothing an analyst could point to, no sign of a chink where the dam would give way. She flipped through the front section and found a picture of Pristina. Rank upon rank of Kosovar children, lined up for German vaccines. Twenty-three hundred kids were now sick. Another thousand dead. And the numbers were climbing.
Vaccines
—

Caroline’s thought was interrupted by a flight attendant with a drinks cart. She asked for a gin and tonic. Shephard got a beer. In all the business of napkins and ice, the newspaper was set aside and her time for solitary thought was done.

“Wally let me read your stuff. You seem to have a handle on Krucevic,” Shephard told her.

“Whether it’s the
right
handle is the question.”

“How do you research your personality assessments, Carrie?” His tone was careful, but she heard a judgment lurking somewhere. He didn’t buy the psychobabble.

“When I haven’t got the guy on a couch, you mean? I use his date of birth and consult an astrologist. Krucevic was born in Saturn with Mercury rising. I don’t have to tell you how bad that is.”

He cracked a smile. “No, seriously.”

“I use everything I can find, Tom. International police reports, foreign and domestic press, State Department reporting …”

“Psychiatric evaluation?”

“I usually collaborate with a staff psychiatrist, yes.”

“And they think Krucevic is sane.”

“Mlan Krucevic has never betrayed the least sign of
mental instability. You can’t call a man nuts just because he kills people.”

“Haven’t you ever wanted to?” he asked her searchingly.

“Call Krucevic nuts, or kill people?”

“I mean, what’s it like to follow this guy for years, Caroline? Knowing he murdered your husband?”

She felt a spark of anger toward Wally Impossible to have a private life in the Intelligence community. “Are you asking whether I’m on a personal vendetta?”

“Let’s just say you have a variety of motives for whatever you’re doing. It didn’t take all that talk of the Third Reich to tell me that. I saw your clandestine getup this morning. I doubt even Wally knows about Sally.”

Caroline sipped her drink and decided to ignore that particular probe. “Tom, my personal life has undoubtedly affected my analysis. Let’s take it as a given that I’m prejudiced against 30 April. We all are.”

“But some of us more than others,” he pointed out. “I may want to put Krucevic out of business, I may want to save the Vice President—but I’m not motivated by revenge. That has to make a difference.”

Revenge.
Caroline’s spine tingled at the word. Was it revenge that drove Eric? Did he burn with desire to see Krucevic suffer, so that nothing—not even Sophie Payne, or the little girl he’d killed, or Caroline’s pain— weighed in the balance? She could not comprehend the depth of such emotion. Even in her worst moments of rage and despair, vindictiveness was beyond her. But she knew it was within Eric’s grasp. Revenge, to Eric, would look like justice.

“Revenge, if it’s done right, makes you thorough,” she told Shephard brutally. “It makes you own the enemy. It forces you to live inside another person’s brain
and think like he does. And that may be just what Sophie Payne needs right now. Nothing less than obsession will save her.”

“Are you obsessed?”

She glanced away from him, toward the night beyond the plane window. The wing lights were flashing blue and white. “I dream of Krucevic, Tom, and I don’t even know what he looks like. I feel him like a violence in my sleep.”

He nodded wordlessly. “Tell me about Eric. If it’s not too painful.”

She almost laughed. Since Eric’s phone call the previous night—that ruthless shot in the dark—Caroline had been tortured by every moment of loss and confusion endured in the past thirty months. But his voice had aroused her sleeping love—the love that had persisted, beyond terror and a false grave.