The Cutout (42 page)

She was terrified, suddenly, of breaking down. Rage was her friend. Rage was a tool. Let him believe she was stronger alone than she had ever been in his shadow. Let him fear the High Priestess of Reason.

She moved toward him, her hand punching hard into his chest with each step.

“One call to the lobby, Eric, and I shut you down!
One call
.”

“You won’t do that.”

“Give me a good reason!” She had one already: Bring Eric in, and he’d damage the Agency irrevocably. She cared little for bureaucracies creaking roughshod over the world, but Dare Atwood, Cuddy, Scottie Sorensen—they were all the people Caroline loved, the only ones left to protect. “Don’t you understand? It’s
over.
No more vendettas, no more little girls with bullets in their brains. No hijacked VP’s.
It ends here”.

He gave way, a bewildered expression on his face. “Much more is at stake than Sophie Payne. You need Krucevic, Caroline. More than that, you need everything he runs—the bank accounts, the networks, the points of liaison worldwide. You’ve got to roll him up. That’s what I’ve been working for. Not just Krucevic’s life, but everything he’s built.”

“So work with
me,”
she demanded. “Give me the route to his base here in Hungary. Give me the Polish operation. Anything, Eric, that might help.”

“You know about Poland?”

Caroline laughed harshly. “What did you think—that only
you
could do this job? We’ve all been doing it while you were dead and buried. I wish to hell you’d stayed that way.”

“No, you don’t,” he whispered. His face was stark in the orange glow flooding the room from across the river. The light made a death mask of the sharp planes of his face, and she saw how much the past few years had aged him.

But she could not relent. Relent, and she’d lose him. “Where’s your base, Eric? Tell me and I’ll have a team inside of it before dawn.”

He hesitated; he gave it an instant’s thought. But the habit of self-reliance ran too deep. “I need a few more hours, Carrie.”

“Time’s up.” Her voice was sharp with contempt. “Now get out of here before I call the cops.”

“Caroline—”

“Nothing.”
It came out with explosive force.

He stopped, frozen.

“Nothing. You. Say. Will. Make. Any. Difference.” It seemed important to pronounce each word with equal weight, as though he were deaf, half literate, a confused and pathetic foreigner. The small flower of hope that had bloomed in Berlin turned brown within her and died.

“I know I hurt you,” he began. He raised a hand to touch her, and she went rigid.

His eyes—Eric’s eyes, bluer than the sea and stark with pain—stared at her wordlessly. Was he begging her?
Her?

Shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap.
One call. That was all. Let him plead to the station if he was so goddamn desperate. “Get out,” she whispered. And he did.

FIFTEEN
Budapest, 11:40
P.M.

L
ADY
.
Lady Sophie—are you awake?”

He was whispering urgently from the hallway. She pulled herself to the edge of her bed and dangled one arm toward the floor. If she could roll off the bed, perhaps she could crawl over and talk to him…. She tested her weight, leaning down on one hand, and felt her wrist buckle. The effort made her dizzy with exhaustion.

“Lady Sophie!”

“Yes, Jozsef?” she croaked.

“My father is gone. May I come in?”

Despite the pain cramping deep in her bowels, Sophie smiled. It was like the boy to ask permission. “By all means. If only I could open the door.”

It slid back soundlessly. She saw his small body outlined against the light of the passage, the remote control in one hand. In the other, he held a hypodermic.

“I have medicine.” He slipped to her bedside still whispering. He was a boy who would probably whisper for the rest of his life. “You must take it soon, before it is
too late. There is not much medicine left. And I have had more than my share.”

“Your father can make more,” Sophie said.

“Not here in Budapest. If he went back to Berlin, maybe, to his lab … the Anthrax 3A bacillus is highly secret and very dangerous, lady. Papa does not carry it everywhere.”

“Keep your antibiotic, Jozsef.”

He frowned. “But you must take it! Do you know what is happening to you? It is very bad, lady. First you vomit blood. Then you vomit your entire stomach. Your heart is eaten away within you. And then at last, in unbearable pain, you die. My father has told me.”

“And is your father always right? Was he right about your calls to your mother?”

He looked away.

“Where did he beat you?”

Wordlessly, he lifted the front of his shirt. His abdomen was a mass of red lines.

Asshole
, Sophie thought impotently
He’s already bleeding inside.
“No one has the right to keep you from her. She’s your mother and she loves you.”

“If she’s alive,” Jozsef retorted, “then why hasn’t
she
tried to find
me
?”

“When your father decides to kidnap somebody, he makes sure they’re never found. Don’t blame your mother. Look what he’s done to the marines.”

Jozsef giggled—a boyish sound, the first she had ever heard him make—and she was transported for an instant back to her old house in Malvern, before Mitch’s death, Peter’s grubby hands clutching his father’s ankle while Mitch dragged him along, pretending not to notice. Roughhousing. Wrestling. The tumble of boyhood. “Do you want to escape?” she asked Jozsef.

The laughter died. “I could not.”

“Do you want to?”

It was easier to be honest in this darkened room, her voice as relentless as the voice of conscience. “How? We can’t even get out of this compound. We’re locked in. The doors are impossible to force. They’re electronic. And you’re too ill.”

“Then we’ll have to make your father give us up.”

Jozsef snorted. “My father will never do that. You’re too important.”

“I don’t mean anything to him at all,” she said firmly. “I’ve served my purpose. But you mean the world to him. For you, Jozsef, he would do anything.”

“Then why does he beat me? If he loved me, he would not beat me.”

“I wish that were true. There’d be far less abuse in the world. But beatings or no, he fears for your life. He fears the illness inside you. That’s why he’s saving the antibiotic he has for you—and letting me die.”

The boy turned and looked at her piercingly.

“Where did you get that hypodermic?” Sophie asked.

“From the supply room, where he keeps the antibiotic.”

“Do you have the strength to take me there?”

He did not answer for fully fifteen seconds. Then he said: “Don’t do this, lady. It will make him angry. Papa cannot control himself when he is angry.”

“I know,” she said.

He shook his head. “You know nothing at all. I have seen him kill. I know what he can do.”

“Jozsef-—do you want to see your mother?”

“More than God Himself,” the boy whispered.

“Then take me to the supplies.”

Anxiously, Béla Horváth scanned the pages of his notebook and then thrust it into the plain black knapsack he
carried to the lab every day. It was nearly midnight. The meeting with Vic Marinelli in Városliget Park was only eight hours away, but he was sweating with fear and nausea. The notebook was the embodiment of his betrayal, the embodiment of his faith. It must not come to harm.

He searched his untidy bedroom, eyes straining in the dark. A light at this hour would be a mistake. He had taken a risk even returning to the house. At the thought of Mlan and what he would do if he knew of the notebook—if he knew of the meeting with Marinelli—Horváth’s fingers twitched spasmodically. He dropped the knapsack.

He had wanted this meeting, had almost initiated it when the city went up like a torch that afternoon and the laboratory had closed. He had suspected the truth at last tonight, he had tested and retested it out of thoroughness and disbelief, until with a scientist’s harsh honesty he understood. Someone had to stop it.

He had bicycled home along the usual streets, crowded with people shouting as they had not done since 1989, since 1956, but those had been questions of politics then—of something worth dying for. This was about money. The ugliness in people’s faces depressed him, and he wove in and out among the stalled cars, knapsack tight as a leech against his back, wondering what he hoped to save.

The chalk mark was a red slash trailing haphazardly across a concrete pillar, and for an instant, he was uncertain whether he had actually seen it. He stopped the bike and thrust his glasses higher on his nose, staring at the scrawl on the Vigadó concert hall. The signal was supposed to be done this way—but could it be a mistake? Something to do with the rioting? He was
supposed to mark the opposite pillar himself, in blue chalk—he carried it always in a knapsack pocket—but the square, he noticed now, was blocked off by police. They were ranked shoulder to shoulder in front of Gerbeaud’s, the coffeehouse. Trapped patrons glared through the broad plate-glass windows; others perused their papers, bored. Horváth felt a bubble of laughter shatter inside him: How like the police to protect their pastry!

He had backed away from the Vigadó, turned out of Vörösmarty Ter, and pedaled home. When he called Mirjana’s answering machine, the message from Michael awaited him. He prayed that by now, Mirjana had safely left town.

The sound of breaking glass from the front of the house brought his head up sharply. The back door—

He crept out of the bedroom, turned left in the darkened hall, and saw the gloved hand snake through the shattered living-room window. They would have it open in seconds.

He sidestepped into the kitchen—and there, backlit in the alley streetlight, was the silent shape of a man. He was surrounded.

Horváth looked about wildly. He saw the too-obvious cupboards, the pathetic tray of cold supper his cleaning lady had prepared, the broom closet smelling sharply of vinegar and ammonia. He thrust the black knapsack behind a damp pail at the closet’s rear just as Krucevic entered the kitchen.

“Mlan,” Horváth said breathlessly, his back to the closet door. “Did you have to break my window?”

Krucevic smiled. “There are broken windows all over Budapest today. Besides, you didn’t answer my knock.”

“I never heard it,” he said. That was certainly true; he
had been lost in a fever of his own making. Horváth gestured toward the tray, the limp slices of meat and the tepid vegetables covered in plastic. “I was just about to eat.”

“At midnight?”

“As you see. I—I was working late.”

“Poor Béla,” Krucevic said slowly. “Always the desperate grind. You should get away for a while. Take a break from all this.” He glanced at one of his men—a malevolent-looking bruiser with a shaved head—who stepped forward and took Horváth by the arm. “You haven’t said you’re glad to see me, Béla.”

“I was just surprised, Mlan, that’s all. You’re well?” The thug’s hand was like an iron cuff above his elbow.

“Strange,” Krucevic mused. “I’d have said you weren’t surprised at all. In fact, you looked like you were expecting me. Perhaps you’ll tell me why while we drive.”

“Drive?”

“To your lab. I’m afraid, Béla, you took something that does not belong to you. And now I want it back.”

Part IV
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12

ONE
Berlin, 2
A.M.

A
NATOLY RUBIKOV CARED NOTHING
for the lateness of the hour. Nor for the dull headache that throbbed in his temples, or the sourness in his mouth. He called his wife in Hamburg from the main Berlin train station and felt a shaft of joy at her sleepy hello. Then he told her he loved her and promised he would see her in the morning.

Next he dialed Wally Aronson’s cellular phone. Wally answered on the second ring.