The Cutout (44 page)

She swayed and clutched at the jamb. That quickly he was at her side. She looked ghastly.

“Here. Sit.” He helped her to a chair.

“I wish you would tell me why you’re pretending to be a terrorist,” she said plaintively as she sank into his seat. “I’m almost dead. I deserve to know.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m puking pieces of my stomach.”

“The medicine,” he said. “I’ll get you some. He’ll never know.”

“Don’t,” she called after him; but he was already in the passage, he had the code punched into the supply-room pad, and it was only when the door had slid open that he understood what she meant. Twelve dozen ampules lay smashed to powder on the floor.

“My God,” he groaned, and leaned against the doorjamb. “What have you done, Mrs. Payne?”

Her eyes blazed at him. “I’ve placed that boy’s life in jeopardy, and he helped me do it. I almost lacked the courage. But it had to be done. I had to force Krucevic’s hand. Jozsef says there’s no more medicine here. If he wants to save his son’s life, Krucevic must go back to Berlin. He’ll abort this insane campaign.”

Michael stared at her in wonder and pity. “He’ll slit your throat for this.”

“But not the throats of a million Muslims, and that is all that matters. I’ve been a dead woman since Tuesday.” She sank down to the floor, her back against the wall, and took a shuddering breath. “Would you kill me now? Like that little girl in Bratislava? Before he gets back?”

“Mrs. Payne—”

“My name is Sophie. I do not think yours is really Michael, somehow.”

“Let me take you back to your room—”

“I’d rather die where I am,” she interrupted. “Now get out your gun, God damn it.”

“I can’t.”

“You must. I order you as the second in command of your country!”

He knelt down before her. “I told you once I would not let you die at this man’s hands. I’m certainly not going to kill you myself.”

“You won’t have to. Krucevic will.” Her eyes closed tightly; she drew a rattling breath. “Give me your gun, then.”

Michael put his hand under Sophie’s elbow. “Come on. Let’s get Jozsef We’ll leave now.”

Her eyes flew open. “Can you get out? Once you’re inside?”

“Of course.”

“Jozsef couldn’t.”

“Jozsef’s a prisoner,” he reminded her brutally. “I’m a jailor.” He crossed to the boy’s door and pounded on it, hard. “Jozsef. Hurry up and get dressed.”

“I can’t walk anywhere,” Sophie protested faintly. “I’ll just hold you back.”

“There’s a car in the garage. We’ll take that to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be in a hospital in an hour.”

The flash of joy that crossed her face was almost too painful to watch. “Why now?”

He held aloft his computer disk. “Because it’s all here—the entire 30 April Organization. In American hands, as of tonight.”

“But you won’t actually get him, will you?” she challenged.
“Krucevic will escape. And he’ll wreak havoc for the rest of his days.”

“I’ll have saved you. That’s enough.”

Sophie shook her head. “Not for me.”

He started to speak—started to tell her that once she was returned safely to the United States, Fritz Voekl and Mlan Krucevic would have the World Court to contend with—but the lies died on his lips.

Tonio was standing in the doorway. How long had he been there? How much had he heard?

“What’s going on, Michael?”

“Nothing much. How’s your head?” He did not look at Sophie Payne.

Tonio walked toward him, rubbing his eyes groggily
“Dio
, but it aches. I’m going to bed.” His eyes drifted over the room indifferently. They came to rest on the computer. “Who’s been messing with that?”

Michael began to move easily behind him, coming around in position behind his head, the butt of his gun in his hand. It was a myth that you could knock a person out with a single blow; the human skull was extremely sturdy. It required a punishing force. Or a knock at the base of the cranium.

“I turned it on,” Jozsef said from his door. Little-boy sullenness in his voice. “I wanted to play a computer game, Tonio, but I didn’t know the access code.”

Sophie Payne had pushed herself, impossibly, to her feet. Her sunken eyes were crazed with fever.

Tonio focused drunkenly on the woman. “What are you doing out of your cell?”

“I wanted to play, too,” she said.

Tonio swore viciously under his breath and lifted the
laptop’s lid. Before he wheeled to confront them, Michael’s gun crashed down on his skull.

And at that moment, they all heard the sound of the garage door opening.

Mlan Krucevic was back.

THREE
Budapest, 2:15
A.M.

M
IRJANA TARCIC WAS PARKED
in an alley near Béla Horváth’s house, about a hundred feet beyond his small backyard. Vaclav Slivik had never noticed her, a lapse in his tradecraft and judgment; but Mlan had given the assassin too little time to reconnoiter. Mirjana’s car was old and indeterminate of color, it was pulled up in the lee of a battered garage, and a tree trunk blocked the line of sight from Béla’s kitchen door. A better man than Vaclav would have missed it.

Mirjana had spent most of the day in the emergency room of a Budapest hospital, waiting to be treated for bruises and cracked ribs. She had never gone home. One call to her answering machine had convinced her that home was a mistake.

Mlan and his men had left Béla’s house hours ago. If she did not move soon, someone would come back.

She had hoped against hope that it would be Béla himself who returned—whistling cheerfully as he walked up the drive, letting himself in through the front
door, putting the teakettle on the stove in the wee hours of morning. That was foolishness, of course.

Her cold hand sought the door handle and eased it open.

The rains had brought down a mass of deadwood from the trees. The crunch of twigs beneath her feet was remorseless as death. She could not allow herself to breathe. She crept up to the back door wondering why his neighbors said nothing, why lights did not go on and alarms sound—and yet, they had suffered the noise of breaking glass without reaction. They were Hungarians. They had grown up under the Party system; black cars in the night had always taken people away. The wisest course was simply to go on sleeping.

Her fingers found the latch. Inside, darkness.

She stepped forward, toward a patch of moonlight bright as halogen on the gray linoleum, and saw a tumbled mass of human hair. The sight stopped her in her tracks.

Not hair. Wet strands of a mop, fallen from the open broom closet. With a ragged breath, she reached for it and propped it inside. What had they wanted with this, in the middle of the night? Or had the broom closet door, poorly latched, fallen open under the mop’s weight?

She hesitated, eyes adjusting now to the darkness, and scanned the narrow space. There was the usual broom, a dustpan neatly stacked beside a pail, bottles of cleaning stuff and a carryall filled with clean rags. She knelt and groped along the floor, dreading mice. And touched the square shape of the knapsack.

She had seen him pedaling to work so many times, the knapsack a memory of those university days in Leipzig when they’d all managed to be happy. Béla had
hidden it here in his last moments, and Mlan in his viciousness had not understood.

Mirjana clutched the backpack to her chest and ran— heedless of the neighbors, of the branches cracking underfoot—for her life.

FOUR
Budapest, 7:30
A.M.

I
HAVE A THEORY
, Tom Shephard said as the taxi pulled away from the entrance to the Hilton, “that a city’s soul is something you can feel. It walks the streets, asks you for change on a deserted corner, tells you what song it has to sing. You know what I mean?”

Caroline glanced at him wordlessly. So Tom was a morning person. He had found something to love in this sordid new day, the air rank with burning and the looters asleep in the streets. After Eric had left her, she’d lain awake for hours.

It was impossible not to consider every one of his words, every choice she had made; impossible not to see that she had fucked up abominably She had drawn Eric straight into her trap, and for emotional reasons, she had let him go. It was unforgivable.
Unprofessional.
It was exactly the kind of example a male case officer would use in an argument against women in Intelligence. Caroline showered blue language on her own head while Tom Shephard chatted genially at her side—Shephard, who had no idea that she had held the Vice President’s kidnappers
in the palm of her hand and simply waved good-bye. Eric would never contact her again. And Sophie Payne’s life was at risk—

“You okay?” Shephard asked.

“I didn’t sleep well,” Caroline said brusquely. She felt bruised and overly sensitive, as though she suffered from sunburn.

“Take Paris,” he went on. “Paris is a wealthy woman with a checkered past. She danced at the Folies Bergères in her youth, then married a besotted
comte”

“The very opposite of Washington,” Caroline managed.

“Washington has the fussy correctness of a bureaucrat’s briefcase.”

“And a tropical-weight suit,” she added, “permanently creased.”

“Istanbul—Istanbul is a stalled caravan, hardening in the sun.”

“St. Petersburg has diamonds in her hair and a gun at her back.”

“So what’s Buda’s story?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s part of
your
territory.”

“But you’ve lived here.” His look was almost accusing. Intent, invasive, as disturbing as it had been in the plane the previous night. Her pulse quickened.
What is he looking for?

“I just visit here,” he persisted. “I want to hear your version of the truth.”

No, you don’t
, she thought.
My version is a lie.
The taxi had crossed the Chain Bridge and was now in Pest. Here, rioters had spared not a single shop window; shards of glass were flung across the sidewalk like hail. A lavender silk slip trailed across an overturned park bench; more clothes had snagged on trash cans and street signs as the whirlwind of looters had swept
through them. Garbage from the dented cans sprawled across the roadbed. A forlorn dog rooted in a sodden cardboard box. Nearby, the sidewalk was stained with what looked like battery acid. Or blood.

The taxi driver grunted and slowed his car to maneuver around an overturned van. Its engine block was still burning. They were the only people moving on the streets—except for a contingent of black-shirted guards. All stared at the taxi suspiciously as it creaked past. Caroline refused to make eye contact. And prayed that she and Shephard would be allowed to proceed.

“Budapest,” she told him, “is a middle-aged man in a shabby coat, nursing an espresso at an outdoor café. It is very cold, and the smell of dog urine from the wet pavement mingles with the coffee and the sharp scent of pickled beets from somewhere down the street.”

“He’s wearing wire-rimmed spectacles,” Shephard offered, “and writing in a notebook with a torn cover. His wife left him years ago, but he’s haunted by the memory of her laugh.”

Caroline turned to look at him. “Is he?” she asked. “Better laughter than tears, Tom.”

The hazel eyes did not waver. “What are you haunted by, Caroline?”

It was all there before her suddenly, the concourse in Frankfurt and the man turning away.

“The memory of silence,” she replied. And did not speak again until they had reached Szabadsag Ter.

The protesters had abandoned the U.S. embassy. No megaphoned speeches or hurled rocks greeted Shephard and Caroline as they approached. There was a checkpoint, however, backed by the ominous clatter of tanks,
so they dismissed the taxi and covered the last thirty yards on foot, their diplomatic passports held high. After a grim few moments of consideration, the guards waved them through.

The stretch of turf that ran between Magyar Television and the National Bank, a modernist cube of glass and steel, was churned to mud and studded with green shards of what had once been soda bottles. The burned trash cans were smoldering now, and stank of seared plastic; a bird, brown as the Danube in winter, pecked disconsolately among the torn seat cushions of a torched car. But the impulse toward civilization had begun to reassert itself; red tape with harsh Hungarian exclamations already cordoned off the worst areas.

Vic Marinelli met them at the embassy door.

“I’m glad you’re early,” the Budapest station chief said without preamble. “Our meeting’s off.”

“Because of the riots?” Caroline asked.

He shook his head. “We’ll discuss it upstairs. Let’s get you through security. Morning, Corporal. I’d like to take these people up.”

The marine guard studied their diplomatic passports, then gave them embassy passes they clipped to their clothing. Vic hovered impatiently. He looked, she thought, like a Medici prince—black eyes heavily lidded, full lips set in a permanent curl. She glanced at his hands: the long, tapering fingers of a philosopher-priest.