The Cutout (39 page)

She had flown to Berlin on rage. Rage was gone now; but she could not define what had taken its place.

“Eric was a cowboy,” she told Tom Shephard. “An ex–Green Beret with a lot of physical courage, the kind of person you’d want at your back when things got rough. The CIA used to be full of them.”

Shephard grinned. “Now the cowboys are all day traders, one inch away from financial ruin.”

“I suppose.”

“I find it …” He hesitated.

“Hard to see me with someone like that? Cowboys aren’t Sally Bowles material? If I remember correctly, she preferred Yale men with failing courage.”

“So what was it? Opposites attracting?”

Why
had
she loved Eric? Why did she love him still?

“He made me feel alive,” she attempted, as though telling Shephard might explain it for herself. “More
alive than I’d ever felt before. Like a pulse was beating right under my fingertips. Eric never thought about his next step—he just took it. There’s a huge freedom in that kind of life.”

“And terrible consequences.”

“Yes—but it’s not how I live at all.” She glanced at him. “I live in my head. Loving Eric was reckless and intoxicating and
risky.
It had nothing to do with careful consideration. It was complete emotional surrender.”
Like a shove off a jump tower from forty feet, fear and exultation rising with the ground.
“I’ve never felt anything like it before or since.”

“And you miss it. Miss
him.
So I guess you were happy.”

“Yes and no.” She thrust aside the memory of sex like a hand at the throat, sex as ruthless as hunger, sex that cast her up on the sands of morning a bleached and whitened bone. “Eric was difficult. Moody, hard to reach sometimes—he took his work very seriously. But he had a great deal of charm. And a sense of humor. He was intelligent without being well educated; he had a canniness that was pure gut.”

Gut. It was carrying her to Budapest.

“A man’s man,” Shephard mused.

“Entirely. But he was often afraid—
sick
with fear, churning inside. Fighting it gave him a sense of purpose, I think. Aside from a love of good beer and Jack Nicholson, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“How long were you married?”

“Just over ten years. How about you? Ever married?”

“Yes.” His face tightened.

She thought of the initials engraved on the hip flask and the fact that he carried it everywhere. “Divorce?”

“Breast cancer.”

“Ah,” she managed.

“You know what it’s like to lose someone.” His eyes were now fixed on the plane bulkhead. “We went back to the States last posting, thinking she’d get better treatment.”

“Strange, isn’t it, how you learn that you can’t change what’s going to happen? That you can only endure it.”

“You remind me of Jen,” he said simply.

“With blond hair or black?”

It was the wrong thing to have said; she felt it acutely the moment the words were out, but she had done it and now would have to live with the adjustment in his expression, the closing off of feeling. She realized a moment too late that the glib impulse had been self-protective. Tom Shephard was getting under her skin.

He was contentious and irritable and he shot from the hip, but Caroline sensed that what drove him was a fund of caring. He was brutally honest. His gaze was too piercingly intent, his questions too unswerving; he wore his heart on his soiled trench-coat sleeve. Tom was as transparent in his prickly defenses as Eric was opaque. She was afraid she might even be able to trust him.

He reached into his briefcase for a paperback novel and said with deliberate casualness, “Are you going to Marinelli’s meeting tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“You think TOXIN will just hand you the Veep?”

“Not without persuasion. Then we follow him into the enemy camp with as much firepower as we can beg, borrow, or steal.”

And enough time for Eric to escape. Because if Eric is ever taken by U. S. forces, Dare’s precious Agency is screwed.

“I’m beginning to understand your nickname, Mad Dog,” Shephard said. And flipped open his paperback.

Caroline sank into her seat and looked firmly out the window. A man as good-hearted as Shephard could not possibly comprehend the violence that had won her the name, or the limits to which she could go. But she was very much afraid that he would discover both before their teamwork was done.

Last night’s broken sleep was catching up with her; her eyes burned with exhaustion. She could pick out lights now in the darkness below, and a wide black band that might have been a road or a great wall but which she recognized as the river. The plane window was freezing against her cheek. It would be colder in Buda than in Berlin, and the air would be sulfurous with smoke from the cheap brown coal they still burned all over Central Europe. For an instant she could almost taste it, the damp Hungarian winter of her failed marriage.

TWELVE
The Night Sky, 8:12
P.M.

I
T IS NOVEMBER AGAIN
, almost four years ago, November and her feet are scuffling through the dead leaves in Városliget Park. They are strolling idly along the winding path around the artificial lake. The fall afternoon slips sadly between boating season, just ended, and ice-skating, which is yet to come; the lake is forlorn and deserted under the brooding metal sky, a cup filling steadily with sodden leaves. Scottie is at Eric’s left, and Caroline is on his right. Scottie sports a jaunty tweed jacket—green and brown with flecks of plum in it, as though he has jetted in direct from the Highlands for a country-house weekend. They have tried to rise to the occasion his clothes suggest; they have attempted to make their life in Buda appear an expatriate’s dream. For Scottie, they window-shop for Herend porcelain, they compare notes on
gulyás
, they sip strong Turkish coffee amid velvet cushions while a Translyvanian fiddler plays. Now this walk through the park, a prelude to dinner, and a foil for Scottie’s handling. Because Eric has become his developmental, Eric is his latest hard target.

Scottie has thirty-six hours to give, between a stop in Berlin and a flying visit to Istanbul. He is charming and yet uncomfortable in Caroline’s presence; his eyes slide perpetually to Eric’s face. She suspects that what Scottie craves is a little private conversation with his main man, the guy he put straight into the hot seat; but Eric’s conversation these days is minimal. He has locked some demon so deeply within himself that speech is something to hoard, speech alone might show his hand. He plays the Chief of Station to Scottie’s Headquarters Dignitary; he pulls out the stops and hits all the bells and whistles; but he is scrupulous in keeping Caroline by his side. Scottie will not go operational in Caroline’s presence. She sees that Eric is using her as a shield, without understanding why. Her position is painful; she has always admired Scottie, after all— he is the father Eric never had, his best friend in the clandestine world. Years later, when Eric is gone and Scottie has abandoned hope, he will turn to Caroline for unconscious comfort; but here in Budapest, on this November afternoon, Scottie eyes her like a delegate from a hostile service. She has turned his Joe.

Scottie is at sea. He hunts perpetually for landmarks, he trolls for intelligence. Beneath the mask of high spirits and bonhomie is a creeping anxiety. He is worried about Eric and all Eric knows; he is afraid that Eric will snap one day like a camel overburdened with straws. A different man might make Caroline his confidante, might break down and ask for explanation—but Scottie knows Caroline for his enemy. She wants to fold up the tent and go home. She wants Eric to quit the Agency.

Eric can no longer say whether home ever existed.

Scottie sees the rifts in marriage before they heave, before the land slides out underfoot; he blames Caroline for Eric’s distance.

The folly of Vajdahunyad Castle towers above them like a bit of Disney plunked down on suspect terrain. Caroline fingers a coin in her left pocket. She answers Scottie when he offers a word; she tosses the ball of conversation over Eric’s head as though they are conspirators, communicating across a garden wall. Eric, as always, has retreated within. His feet find the path of their own accord. His head is sunk into the collar of his coat. He is searching for threats, mapping out protective cover, his eyes are moving constantly. Caroline is on the verge of screaming,
Talk to me, God damn it, talk or let me go
—but Scottie is admiring the baroque wing of the architectural folly. She outlines the history of Vajdahunyad for his particular edification, she maps whole centuries with one finger in the air.

In Washington the breeze would be sharp with wood smoke, a festive smell that quickens the appetite and sings of winter holidays; but in Budapest the air is yellow and rotten with burning coal. Presently they will put the lake to their backs and turn toward the zoo in the park’s northwest corner, not from any desire to see the sad-eyed elephants or the desperate cats pacing in their cages, but because the city’s best restaurant, Gundel’s, is there in its Art Nouveau palace, and today is cause for celebration.

“How many years has it been?” Scottie asks them now.

“Eight,” Caroline says. “Our eighth anniversary.”

“You kids.” He rests one hand casually on Eric’s shoulder, but Eric is staring past him, at a dark patch in the woods. “I don’t think even
one
of my marriages has lasted that long. But I hope you’ve got
years
together.
Really.
I do.”

While Caroline was dreaming with her head against the window, Shephard stirred in his seat. He banged his tray
table, dropped his book in the narrow space between the rows of seats, and swore under his breath. Caroline never moved. Exhaustion shadowed her eyes; her mouth was parted slightly with deep and even breathing. The plane was starting into its descent. He had to know who Sally Bowles was.

He bent down to retrieve the paperback, and flipped open the leather flap of Caroline’s purse. It would be a civilian passport with a blue cover, not her official black diplomatic one.

He riffled delicately through the contents of the purse with his fingertips, tension prickling the back of his neck. There was a zippered compartment. He eased it open with his forefinger, mentally cursing his clumsiness. And felt the folded edge of something.

A matchbook. He thrust it back and felt again—

The two-by-two snapshot was of the woman in the black wig. And the name in the data field was one he had heard only three hours before, on the lips of a wiretapped Palestinian.

Jane Hathaway.

What was the other name Sharif had used? Michael?

Shephard tucked the fake passport back in its compartment and straightened in his seat. His pulse accelerated.
Caroline was working with a Palestinian terrorist.
Sharif had put her in contact with 30 April. And Wally Aronson clearly had no idea.

He drew a sharp breath and ran his fingers through his hair. The plane was steadily losing altitude, and even the flight attendants were strapped in. Was Caroline a terrorist mole in the heart of the investigation? Would she betray them all? Or was she operating under instructions from Washington that no one—not even the Agency’s own station chiefs—was privileged to know?

Shephard closed his eyes. He had gone behind her back and been rewarded with dangerous knowledge. He had chosen this sudden mistrust, this creeping sense of treachery. He would have to live with it now.

And watch Jane Hathaway’s every move in Budapest.

THIRTEEN
Budapest, 9:30
P.M.

A
CRAMPING PAIN CURLED
in Sophie Payne’s bowels, making her writhe like a creature possessed. For the second time this night, she vomited blood.

From the wall behind her head came pitiful wails, the voices of delirium. She buried her face in the damp pillow.

The sound of a belt slicing down on exposed skin. A squeal of pain, pathetically suppressed. Jozsef was no coward.

“What did you tell her?” Harsh words, in fluent German.

“I never said anything, Papa! I haven’t spoken to her in months!”

“You lie!”

The belt. An agonized whimper.

“You lie!”

The blows were raining fiercer now. The boy would be scarred with weals, the blood bright on his translucent skin. “For the love of God, stop it …” Sophie whispered.

“You have been talking to your mother,” Krucevic muttered viciously into the dark. “Telling her everything. How else could she know? How else could she find Greta and convince her to give up the vaccine? You gave her the information. You betrayed me, Jozsef! Do you know the damage you’ve done? We must find her! You must tell me before it is too late!”

“I thought you killed her long ago!” A cry of loss and hatred.

“Killed
her?”

“You
must
have. Why else would she leave me here?”