The Cutout (4 page)

“Don’t cry, Mad Dog. It doesn’t suit you.”

He was wrong; she wasn’t going to cry. “Who else knows?” she asked.

Cuddy shrugged. “Can’t say. He looks different. There’s the sunglasses, the longer hair.”

And most of the CTC personnel were fairly new. Their rotations through the Center were at the most two years old. They thought of Eric as a dead hero, one of the stars chiseled sharply on the Agency memorial. There was a good chance he had gone unrecognized.

“Scottie?” she asked.

“We’d have to tell Scottie in any case.”

“He’ll go to Atwood. He’ll have to.”

Cuddy shoved at his glasses impatiently. “What do you want, Caroline? Your husband screwed the entire U.S. government this morning, okay?”

She tore open the door and sped toward the CTC director’s office. Stumbled once on her high heels and swore out loud. It was a testament to the madness of the day that nobody even looked at her.

Scottie’s door was open, but he’d turned off the fluorescent lights. He sat behind his desk in the unnatural
gloom—white-haired, hollow-eyed, host to more parasites than medical science had isolated. His face bore a look that Caroline recognized. The look of a case officer alone in the field who knows he has been betrayed.

He was a private man who kept most people at a distance. He had graduated from Yale at a time when Intelligence was still glamorous, and he wore the code of silence like a good English suit—unobtrusive, yet tailored to the man. A string of ex-wives would argue that he was charming—too charming for his own good— and charm had made his career. Scottie’s recruitments were like an exercise in seduction, and the rush of it all—of taking a soul into the dark side of Intelligence— kept him hungry for the field. He loved running agents, loved the dead drops in the deserted parking lots, the midnight surveillance, the unexpected takedowns.

Caroline thought that he had loved Eric.

It was Scottie who had pulled her husband off his first tour—in Kabul, in the middle of the Soviet-Afghan war—and sent him to Beirut. After Beirut it was Athens, where Scottie was Chief of Station. Then Nicosia. Then back to the CTC, where Scottie got the director’s slot and made Eric his deputy. Only to send him to Budapest twenty months later, a decision that Caroline could barely forgive.

Scottie would not be deceived by long hair and sunglasses.

She tapped twice and waited.

His eyes slid over to hers, slid away. “Come in and shut the door.”

She positioned herself squarely between the chief and the vague middle distance he was studying and said, “What are you going to do?”

“You’ve seen the tape?”

“I’ve seen Eric.”

He smiled grimly. Unlike Cuddy, Scottie didn’t bother to question her loyalties. Thirty years in the buttholes of the world, Scottie would have said, had taught him all he needed to know about loyalty. Either Caroline Carmichael was a terrorist mole or she was a victim like the rest of them. That was a question for the Agency polygraphers to answer.

“How fortunate that you never remarried. Any idea, Mrs. Carmichael, what our fair-haired boy is up to?”

“None whatsoever. Did you set this up, Scottie?”

A faint smile. “Now
that
would have been magnificent. But even I cannot come up with a good reason to snatch Sophie Payne. She’s too short and too intelligent for my taste.”

“Never mind that. Let’s talk about Eric. Why pretend to be dead for more than two years? Why lie to all of us?”

“I don’t know.” He pushed himself away from his desk and stood up. “Only Eric can answer those questions, Caroline, and unfortunately he’s incommunicado at the moment. Our first duty is to find the Vice President. Everything else is homework.”

He was right, of course; Payne’s life hung in the balance. The small matter of a dead man’s resurrection would have to be ignored for a time.

“It seems fairly obvious that she’s not in a German hospital,” Caroline said.

Scottie shrugged himself into his suit jacket. He favored glen plaid, like a latter-day Duke of Windsor; he must own twenty variations on the theme. “The White House is beginning to realize that, too. None of the Berlin facilities has admitted her. President Bigelow is screaming for information, and the Germans are giving him squat.”

“Did you hear Payne’s speech?”

“I imagine we’ll hear it ad nauseam before the day is out. It was impolitic, under the circumstances, but hardly enough to spark a kidnapping. I’ve watched the footage over and over, Caroline. The bombing, the confusion, the medevac chopper—it all took about nine minutes. That argues a fair amount of sophistication and planning. We’re dealing with professionals.”

“Of course,” she replied. “But which ones?”

He held her gaze. “If you don’t know, then I’m certainly not going to guess.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, Caroline, you were married to him. You tell me. Of all the terrorist groups Eric worked, whom did he want to screw the most? Because he’s obviously jumped into bed with somebody.”

“Christ,” she muttered. “I hope to God it’s not 30 April.”

“I doubt he’d still be alive if it were.” The statement was hard. “Krucevic and his kind taste betrayal in their mother’s milk. They’d have blown Eric’s cover inside of three minutes and killed him in three and a half.”

“He’s our only lead, Scottie. To the Vice President. You realize what that means?”

“He’s a killer, Caroline, and he’s out in the cold. Dare Atwood has asked for a briefing. I’m due right now on the seventh floor.”

“You have to tell her about Eric.” It was half statement, half question; Caroline dreaded the answer.

“I was hoping you might do that,” Scottie said.

FOUR
Langley, 8:40
A.M.

S
O
WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE, ERIC
? Tell me that.

Caroline follows Scottie’s elegant back through the broad corridors connecting New Headquarters with Old. The walls here are mostly glass. The space is arranged as a museum. She inventories pieces of the Berlin Wall and OSS radio transmitters without seeing them.
What am I supposed to think? That you’re a hero, or a traitor to the cause? A madman or a savior? What’s the story this time, Eric?

She has been here before. She knows this tight place between reason and heartache as well as she knows the contours of her bed. Words of caution clamor in her brain, and once—for Eric—she would have flung them to the four winds. But now there is her training to think of. Her position within the Intelligence community. All the professionalism that is expected of her. And what the hell does she owe the bastard, anyway?
Two and a half years, Eric.
Alive. And not one word.

Their heels echo on the scarred linoleum, then are swallowed
in the rush of other feet thudding from corridor to corridor. The halls of espionage are awash with bureaucrats, with Case Officers and Managers, Technicians and Administrators. Caroline is an Analyst, and has been for years. Well before the word was a job title.

When she considers her life—when she attempts to picture it—she sees a loop of unbroken thought, coiled like a strand of DNA. She is comfortable in her head. She observes and judges from a distance. It is a talent she was born with, one that earns her a living. Now work reinforces nature—or perhaps it is nature alone that determines the structure of her days, the cubicle in which she sits, the green light of the Intelligence cables flickering softly in the filtered air. Her Agency job is somehow inevitable, a genetic predestination.

Every day she slips off the George Washington Parkway and slides behind the safe shelter of her desk. She flips on her computer. She downloads the truth. She follows an account, which means she tracks 30 April through the wilderness of news flashes, clandestine reports, transcripts of illicit conversation beamed down from satellites orbiting in space. She follows the shadow of a beast unseen and attempts to describe its height and color. She briefs the Policy-makers—she tells them what has been and what might be—and they trust her enough to listen. Caroline has earned a reputation for reliability. And when the Policy-makers award her their respectful silence—when they gaze at her steadily, hanging on every word—Caroline glows with a sense of triumph. What the Policy-makers do with her information is their own affair. Her job is
beyond
policy. She is the High Priestess of Reason, she lives in Objective Thought. It is the deepest safety she has ever known.

Reason can be trusted, reason doesn’t let you down.
Reason won’t leave you grieving without so much as a postcard.

In Caroline’s life, betrayal has always come from what she cannot control.

“You have a very high analytic,” her Agency interviewer had said as he flipped through her application all those years ago, “and the introversion is practically off the charts.”

“High analytic?” Caroline repeated. “Is that good?”

He looked up from the file, dark eyes accusing. He was in his late thirties and might possibly have been attractive once, but was running now to fat. His wedding band was smudged, his tie soiled; he smelled mustily of failure. He told her his name, and she assumed that he lied. She decided to call him George.

“Find the company of strangers utterly draining? Parties exhausting? Do you often stay home, in fact, at the last minute?”

“Sometimes. What has that got to do with the job?”

The office had been part of a square and featureless building on the outskirts of Vienna, Virginia. She sat before George’s desk, her skirt suddenly too short for comfort, uncertain what to do with her knees. She was waiting for the bus to the polygraph center, where it was rumored that three applicants were dismissed for every one who survived. In the past ten months, the FBI had unearthed every drama of her college years, every friend she could claim, every joint she might regret. She was twenty-three and on the verge of security clearance. Only the box and the wire, the unconscious guilt that might trip her up, lay between her and the job.

“You’re an INTJ, Ms. Bisby,” said George.

This was well before Eric and the name she assumed
like an official alias; well before Mad Dog came howling from the underbrush.

“Only four percent of the general population fall into that category. But it’s heavily represented among Agency analysts. Almost thirty percent, in fact. You’ve found your way home. Congratulations.”

“INTJ?”

“Just a classification. In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It means you’re rational rather than emotional; that you make swift judgments; that you prefer to work in quiet and solitude.” The murky eyes slid away from her own. “More comfortable, perhaps, with
ideas
than
people
, Ms. Bisby It’s not a criticism. Just the classic description of an Intelligence analyst. Your ticket to the job.”

“I see,” Caroline replied. “So that’s a good thing, right?”

Now Scottie is pushing the button for the elevator and Caroline is trying not to replay in her mind that piece of German videotape, Eric’s head emerging from the chopper like a fox from its den. Beside her, Cuddy Wilmot rocks on his worn heels, his hands shoved into his pockets. He has retrieved his polyester tie from his desk drawer and scrounged a suit jacket from a friend. It hangs unevenly above his wrinkled khaki pants. Caroline is aware of Cuddy’s unspoken sympathy; it clings to him like sweat. But he says nothing. She folds her hands over her stomach and studies the panel of lights above the elevator, tracking the descent.

What hooks everybody is the information
, the vanished George confides in her ear.
Satellite intercepts, foreign news translations, classified reports from controlled agents—more pieces of the puzzle than you ever knew existed, delivered to
your desktop with the tap of a finger. Access, Ms. Bisby. Access gets the High Analytics every time.

There is such a thing, Caroline might reply, as knowing too much. As drowning in all the data the world flings at you.

Eric
, she thinks,
how the fuck could you do this to me?