The Cutout (47 page)

They crept through the Var, the Castle District, scorning the open expanse of the Danube ramparts, the funicular railroad, the places where tourists thronged. They took the side streets and alleyways beyond Gellérthegy until at last they emerged at the north end of the Var. This part of Buda had been destroyed and rebuilt so many times—by Mongols and Turks and Austrians and Nazis—it seemed a fitting place to turn over the rubble of their lives. A place where the appearance of order was all that remained.

“There was a girl,” Eric said as they walked, “at the university. A graduate student in molecular biology. Her name was Erzsébet Király.”

“What about her?”

“She worked part time in Mlan’s lab. I recruited her there, before the end—before MedAir 901. She was sharp and funny and you would have liked her, Caroline, with her peasant skirts and her long red braids hanging down her back. She knew something was wrong with Mlan’s vaccines.”

“You mean the mumps?”

“His small contribution to the Muslim problem.” Eric looked at her searchingly “It’s all on the disk. Make sure you get it to Dare.
Not to Scottie.
Is that understood?”

She nodded. He walked on, head down, hands thrust
in his pockets. She tried not to look over her shoulder for a man with a gun.

“Three years ago, I started paying Erzsébet to smuggle information out of the lab,” Eric said. “She did a good job. So good, Mlan chose her to carry his germs to Turkey.”

“On MedAir 901?”

“It made excellent sense.” Eric kicked at a paving stone and watched it skitter into the street. “Airlines don’t x-ray boxes of certified medical supplies. Not vaccines. Not when the boxes come with the right government seals and stamps. They’re too afraid that radiation will destroy the drugs. Do you see?”

“There was a bomb in the VaccuGen cargo and Erzsébet put it on the plane,” Caroline said flatly. “Why weren’t you on that flight, too?”

“I was. I gave up my seat.” His voice was still flush with amazement at it, the narrowness of chance. “I gave up my seat to a woman with a sick child, a woman who needed to get back to Istanbul. The baby was wailing. A flight attendant stood at the front of the plane and asked for volunteers. I went.”

“They didn’t bother to pull your boarding pass?”

“This was not an American airline, Carrie. It was a third-world plane with about forty seconds to hit its takeoff slot at one of the busiest airports in the world. They sent me to the counter to rebook and plunked the woman and baby down in my seat. Never took my name off the 901 manifest.”

“But you didn’t rebook.”

“I went first to your gate. Your plane had already pulled back. So I got lunch instead.”

“And thirty-three minutes after takeoff, MedAir 901 exploded,” Caroline finished.
Life as I knew it, shot down in flames. The jetway at Dulles seven hours later, Scottie andDare waiting with the news. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it. And then Scottie’s face—grief on that perfect forehead. Mourning the only thing that mattered. His Eric. Then I knew it was true.

“The plane blew up with Erzsébet and the woman and her baby on board,” Eric said. “I called Scottie as soon as the news came through.”

“Why didn’t you call
me
?”

“You were somewhere over the Atlantic. And Scottie promised he’d explain.”

Explain. As though I were a lunch date skipped for a perfectly good reason.
She raised her fists and beat them against his chest in fury. “You did this for Erzsébet Király? You traded
me
for
her?”

He circled her wrists and held them tightly. “I paid her to betray Mlan. I caused her death. A twenty-one-year-old girl. I owed her something, I think.”

“Your life for hers. Our marriage.” Caroline’s voice was lacerating. “So was it worth it, Eric? Your payment in blood? Are you happy with the bargain?”

His eyes were shuttered. “Happiness was never the point, Mad Dog.”

“No. I see that now.”

Three blocks from the Hilton he stepped into the doorway of a vacant storefront and pulled her roughly against him. The embrace was cover, she thought; there was no emotion behind it. Just a piece of business in case anyone was watching. The cold hollow in the center of her chest widened and spread, dulling her senses.

“I’ve got to leave you here,” he said, “and get back to Sophie.”

“Back? That’s insane! Krucevic will kill you.”
Caroline gazed at Eric’s face and saw the wind howling in his bones. He was only forty. He looked far older. He had no way in from the cold, and he knew it. He would live for a while, a hunted man. And then he would die in the dark, far from home. This time, no one would break the news.

He reached into his pocket, his eyes scanning the street beyond her head. “Take this. It’s a map to Krucevic’s Budapest base. Take it to your COS”—he was dissociating himself now, he wanted nothing to do with the Agency apparatus—“and get a raid going. But do it fast. You haven’t much time.”

Caroline glanced at her watch. It was 12:32 P.M.

“The place is an arsenal—”

“I know. We have the blueprints.” She clutched the paper between chilled fingers. “Eric, Krucevic blew your car. He wants you
dead.
Béla Horváth may have told Krucevic everything before he died. You can’t walk back into that sort of situation. Unless you have a death wish.”

“Sophie Payne is alone, Caroline.”

“We’ll get to her. In a matter of hours. But it’s time you walked away. Anything else is just ego. The Eric Carmichael I knew would never throw himself away on pride.”

“We both know there’s no going back, Mad Dog.” And at last, she heard bitterness in his voice. “To survive evil, you have to become its friend. You have to take its hand and walk with it a ways. And then the path behind is barred to you. You’re no longer the person you were, the person who would never think of putting a silencer to a little girl’s head. You can’t wake up on a Saturday morning in the suburbs of Washington and take a run along the canal or chat over coffee about the Super Bowl—not if
you have the remnants of a soul. You’re too guilty for peace.”

“It’s as though you really did die,” she said.

“I’ve done some terrible things, Caroline. I don’t live with them easily. I can’t wipe them off my soul.”

It was true, she thought, with infinite sadness; and there was no going back to her marriage, either. The man she had loved—yearned for in death, and desired in life—was gone.

“Take this.” He was holding out a beeper. “It’s a homing device for a transmitter I planted. Highly sophisticated—German technology. If you’re within two miles, it should lead you to the Veep.”

Her fingers closed around it. “Promise me you won’t return to that bunker.”

“What promise could I possibly make that you would ever believe?” He studied her narrowly. “Krucevic suspects he’s been betrayed. He may already have left Budapest. If the map’s no good—”

“Then what? Berlin? For more antibiotic?”

He shook his head. “Like I said, Mlan doesn’t retreat. He’ll go onward, not back. There’s only one place left.”

Caroline’s brain raced furiously. To Poland, where Cuddy had traced the Hungarian treasury funds? But Krucevic had no lab in Poland—or none that she had ever identified. If Krucevic cared at all about Jozsef—

“He’ll go to ground,” she murmured. “Like a wounded animal. He’ll go
home
, won’t he?”

Eric nodded. “To Bosnia.
iv Zakopan. The old death camp south of Sarajevo. He’s got a lab there, set high in the hills.”

She took a step backward, her breath catching in her throat.
iv Zakopan. A place so terrible, even rumor spoke inwhispers. A place no prisoner had ever left alive.
“It really exists?”

“It must,” Eric said bleakly. “I’ve been there. Now listen carefully, Mad Dog. I’m going to tell you where it is.”

SEVEN
Budapest, 1:03
P.M.

I
N THAT LAST MOMENT
, when Eric turned to walk away, Caroline reached for him and held him close. She was done with bitterness and rage. Done with weighing her options, cataloging pain, attempting to control the future—it was enough, in that moment, to feel the heart of the man she loved beating close to her own.

“God, don’t leave me,” she whispered. “I can’t stand it, Eric.”

“Neither can I,” he muttered into her hair. “You tear the soul from my body, Carrie.”

“Then take me with you. We can run together.”

She felt no loyalty now to the Agency that had betrayed him.

He loosened the hands she had locked around his waist and held her at arm’s length. For perhaps three seconds, she watched him consider her offer. Then he shook his head.

“It’s not finished. This business. Running won’t end it.”

“You’ve done enough!”

“Remember Sophie, Caroline.
Sophie.
I owe her a chance. And I need you to help me.”

Caroline’s protests died on her lips. She dropped her head to his chest, as futile as pounding a brick wall. Sophie Payne was more innocent than Eric. Sophie Payne demanded retribution.

“Let it go, Mad Dog,” he said quietly. “We live the lives we’re left with.”

“We will not let him win, do you hear?”

“Mlan?”

“Scottie,” she said fiercely.
“Scottie.
We will not let him ruin us and walk away clean.”

He smiled at her, but there was no belief in his eyes. She felt like a child he was humoring. She snatched at his wrist. “Damn it, Eric. I won’t let you just lie down and
die
.”

“No. You never would. My mad dog—”

He leaned forward and kissed her full on the mouth. The savagery behind it was like an electric shock.

“Do you still have your grenade pin?” he asked her.

She nodded, too breathless to speak.
The cunning and unlikely grenade pin.

“Here’s mine.”

It dangled before her nose, an olive drab metallic ring broad enough to circle a man’s finger. She reached a trembling hand to his, and their fingers locked.

“I’ve kept it all these years,” Eric said. “My link to the past. To
you
.” His grip tightened. “If we both survive this, Mad Dog, I will find you.
Believe that
.”

And then her hand was hers again. The grenade pin slipped back into his pocket. She watched him walk away, hoping he would look back—but what would she do if he did? To stand stock-still on the paving stones of
Budapest while Eric left her once again was much more difficult than running.
Caroline is no trouble
, whispered Uncle Hank in her ear.
Caroline does the hardest thing, always.

Eric did not look back.

When he had turned into a side street and vanished from view, she took a shuddering breath and thrust her hands into her pockets. The sharp, clean edge of his computer disk. The homing device. And the folded piece of paper that was the key to Sophie Payne’s prison.

Time was short. She would need an explanation for the map’s existence—Vic Marinelli would demand it. Heading for her hotel, Caroline crossed the street at a run.