The Cutout (41 page)

“What about the video?”

“I’ll deliver it,” Michael said curtly. “I should go on foot anyway. It’s safer.”

“But Mlan—”

“Mlan turned back at the police checkpoint. Mlan will never know. I’ll find you in an hour. Two, at the outside. If I’m later than that, take the car and get out.”

Tonio swallowed nervously. He could never leave without Michael—not and expect to see morning.

His eyes flicked to the dull gold light pouring from the bar’s windows. How long had it been since he’d had a drink? Mlan hated drink like he hated women. He would have to be careful.

Michael was already a block away, heading for the bridge, a shadow under the flame-torn sky.

He waited until he stood on the Pest side of the water before pulling out his cell phone. The number he dialed was one Wally Aronson would recognize. For the past four hours, it had been bugged by the Budapest station.

The click of Mirjana’s machine. He dialed his access code and waited for the messages. Then Sharif’s voice filled his ear.

He listened, the pace of his heart rising slightly as he understood. Then he hung up. His breathing was audible, less perfectly controlled, and he stared intently across the Danube at the distant mass of the Hilton as though he might see her form backlit in a window. The sight of her face on a television screen had been enough to risk a call in the night. Now, knowing that she was here—

A klaxon screamed somewhere behind him.

He turned away from the river and strode swiftly toward the rioters on Szabadsag Ter. They had coalesced, he knew, in front of Magyar Television and the National Bank—one across the square, the other just next door to the embassy. It would be impossible to approach the place without a fight.

U.S. installations throughout Europe should be on alert, their marine guards dying to catch a tourist with the key to Sophie Payne’s whereabouts stuffed tight inside his jacket. The embassy was out of the question. Where, then?

For an instant, memories of that other Budapest—of the nighttime surveillance, Caroline beside him, the conversation unwinding as it had always done through the relentless grid of streets—filled his mind. There was the ambassador’s residence—he knew it well, a nineteenth-century petit palace in a residential quarter of the city, ringed with a sizeable garden. The marines standing vigil there would concentrate on points of egress, not bushes and flower beds. He could toss the tape over the wrought-iron palings and disappear before he was detected.

But first, another call. He slid into the darkened
doorway of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and pulled out his cell phone.

“It’s me,” he said after the beep. “We’re in town. Tell Béla to watch his back. And for Christ’s sake, be careful.”

FOURTEEN
Budapest, 10:53
P.M.

C
AROLINE SAT ON THE FLOOR
of her hotel room, drapes pulled wide to the glowing sky over Pest. She couldn’t sleep. Sleep would be an insult to the ugliness of what was happening in this city, akin to picnicking on the fringe of battle. How had the British slept during that long spring of 1940? Or the Dresdeners gone to bed with carpet bombs? Did exhaustion take over, relentless? Or did you simply grow accustomed to the mutter of unrest, the flare of violence against the night sky?

She swallowed some whiskey from a diminutive bottle, pulled at random from her generous minibar.
Violence.
She had taken it to bed with her amid the Hilton’s hushed opulence; it patrolled the corridors and stairwells and banks of elevators. Violence had Eric’s alias on a piece of audiotape, it smelled his ruin in the smoke roiling off the Danube. She supposed she had Vic Marinelli to thank for the nondescript man reading newspaper after newspaper in a hard chair in the lobby, or the young woman with owlish glasses who spoke
earnestly into the phone. Marinelli was Chief of Station, Budapest. It was his job to send out the best, to place a sympathetic face behind the front desk, a hulking bruiser among the valet parkers. It was a kind of game for Caroline to play, betting the silent odds on exactly who was who. The Agency’s net ringed her round with smiling faces, it strangled her with helping hands. If Michael and Jane ever dared to meet, the two of them were as good as bagged.

Yes, she had Marinelli to thank for the last bars of this cage—but only herself to blame. She had not been able to leave Sharif and his friends alone.

She tipped her whiskey bottle up, let the sweet flame flicker along the lining of her throat, and stared at the orange glow across the river until her eyes burned. She could be honest with herself now. She could tell herself the truth. She wanted Sophie Payne alive and bound for Washington on a C-130 transport. But she wanted Eric to walk away clean—free of Krucevic and Agency and Caroline alike.

It was a paradox she could not reconcile. She was Jane Hathaway, bona fide in a box; she was Caroline Carmichael, the baited wife. Her whiskey was gone. She tossed the bottle toward a wastepaper basket under the desk, and at that moment her telephone rang.

She froze.
Eric. Talking in the dark. And Marinelli would have the hotel phone lines bugged.

She almost didn’t answer. Then, as though it moved of itself, her hand grasped the receiver.

“Caroline,” he said.

“Scottie …” She felt a knife edge of relief-—and disappointment.

“Did I wake you?”

“No”—she glanced at the clock—“it’s only eleven.”

“How’s Buda?”

“Pretty hot. People aren’t hurling themselves out of windows yet—but then, most of the windows are already smashed. The Volksturm arrive tomorrow.”

“Ah,” Scottie said with understanding. “Then we can put the Hungarian republic in the chancellor’s column.”

So Scottie believed it, too. The Third Reich rising like a phoenix from half a century of ashes.

“What’s next?”

“If I knew that, you’d be on a plane home. Caroline, you heard about our mess in Bratislava?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” She kept her voice neutral, her words vague, in deference to the open phone line. There was a rustle across two continents as Scottie shuffled paper.

“It’s not a complete loss. We traced a phone call to the Big Man himself. And the conversation was extremely interesting. His VaccuGen secretary had to tell him about a delivery that went awry.”

Delivery. Caroline pushed herself upright in bed. Had Krucevic planned to dump Sophie Payne?

“Somebody’s prescription got into the wrong hands,” Scottie continued. “The Big Man was quite upset. We’re trying to figure out why.”

“Was this medicine intended for our missing friend?” she asked.

“We don’t think so. But she may not be doing too well. The specialists on this end are worried about her prognosis.”

Caroline’s heart sank. Careful as Scottie might be, the message of his last words was unmistakable. Sophie Payne was dying.

“And the secretary? The one who made that call? Could you find her?”

“That’s been tried. She’s left work under something of a cloud. The Big Man was rather angry, to judge by his tone of voice. Surprised and rattled, even. As though a fly had devoured all the ointment.”

“I see. What do you want me to do, Scottie?”

“I may need you to fly to Poland. I’ll call you tomorrow if it’s necessary.”

“Poland?”

“Our friend Cuddy has spotted some activity there. In the accounts he’s monitoring.”

VaccuGen’s corporate accounts. He’d fired up DESIST and found a financial trail. Caroline’s heartbeat quickened. “New money?”

“Lots of it. Cash is flooding into a certain German party organization—and from there to friends in Poland. We find that …”

“Ironic,” Caroline replied. “Given the state of coffers here.”

“Well, one market’s bear can be another’s bull,” he retorted lazily, as though he enjoyed this game of charades.

But Caroline was sick of it. “You think our missing friend has gone to Poland, too?”

“Possibly. But she’s running out of time.” His voice changed. “Have you heard again from the fair-haired boy?”

“No. But I’ve changed cities. Even he might need some time to adjust.”

Which showed how poorly she’d judged Eric.

She had closed the drapes against the fading glow of the ruined Houses of Parliament and was almost asleep when the knock came on the door.

Shephard
, she thought, and had the impulse to hide under the covers. There was something in the way he looked at her now that made her uneasy. The LegAtt’s eyes were too intense, too probing; somewhere in the air between Berlin and Buda, they had lost a professional distance. Perhaps, Caroline thought, it was because she reminded him of his dead wife. She preferred Shephard caustic and uncommunicative; it made him less threatening.

Another knock, louder this time.

She crossed the room and looked for a peephole. There was none. She slid the chain into the bolt and cracked the door four inches, peering out into the hallway.

Whatever she had intended to say died on her lips.

“For the love of God, get me inside before somebody sees me,” Eric muttered.

She pulled the chain hurriedly out of the bolt.

He slipped through the door and shut it behind him. He was wearing a white busboy’s coat; the dining trolley he’d abandoned in the hall.

Employee entrance
, she thought,
and a kitchen computer listing all the guests, for room service.
“You shouldn’t have come here. The station’s all over the place.”

“How did I know you were going to say that?” he asked, and took her in his arms.

The shock of his hands moving over her in the darkness of that room was too much.
Dead hands
, she thought. How many lost nights in the last two and a half years had she cried for Eric’s touch, for the solid span of his shoulders beneath her fingertips, the warmth of his face skimming hers? She allowed herself an instant of indulgence and breathed deep of his scent. He smelled of cigarettes and of sulfurous brown coal, of dead leaves and
city rain; he smelled of human skin and human hair and the lingering hint of floral-scented soap. He smelled of Budapest and Nicosia and Tidewater, Virginia, of years and heartache and sex and longing. He smelled of life, a life lived without her; a band of pain tightened around her chest. She had mourned the loss of his body as much as his soul—
this
body, strong and controlling, almost feral in the darkness. She shuddered and closed her eyes, feeling his hands on her rib cage, her shoulder, the lobe of her ear. His touch stung her skin with so much rippling life—and for an instant, she wanted to cry aloud with joy, she wanted to forget every unbearable moment of her days without him, she wanted to cradle his head and thank God that he was
alive.
It was what she had prayed for so uselessly during the long nights of grief: a life returned. A second chance. And her prayer had been answered.

But with what vicious reckoning.

This man was no miracle. He was a walking lie.

The rage of the past two years boiled hotly to the surface, so that her own mouth tore back at his, a savage thing that wanted to hurt him. Through the busboy’s coat he wore she could feel the thud of his heart, too fast, and the tension in his body, as though he were coiled to spring. But then, Eric was always a predator. She gripped his arms tightly and thrust him away.

“Where is Sophie Payne?”

He was breathless, a diver mad for air. “I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”

If he refuses to give up the goods
, Scottie muttered in her brain,
shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“You’re
here,” he said baldly, and took a step toward her again.

“I’m here to find the Vice President. Your death made me an expert on 30 April, Eric.”

“Caroline—”

“Tell me where she is. That’s all I want from you.”

“I need more time.”

“You’ve had too much time, you son of a bitch!” Tears of rage pricked at her throat—rage at his insouciance, at the way he had walked back into her life as though he expected her to be there, her arms wide open—