The Cutout (49 page)

“In Krucevic’s biography,” Finch noted, “you say he’s fifty-eight. That means he was born during the war.”

“Krucevic reportedly lived out his babyhood on the camp grounds,” Caroline affirmed. “He grew up watching people die rather horrible deaths. Mlan’s father, in his eyes, must have seemed like God himself. He held people’s very lives in his hands.
No one survived
iv Zakopan.
Rumors of the place circulated during the war, and that’s what historians are left with. No witnesses surfaced to tell the tale of the camp’s horrors— unless you include Krucevic himself.”

“What happened to his father?” Jack Bigelow asked.

“He shot himself-—and his wife—when the Russian liberators came for them.”

“But not the boy.”

“Krucevic was found bleeding in his dead mother’s arms. He has a bullet scar to this day on his temple. He’s on record, Mr. President, as saying that death is always preferable to failure.”

Jack Bigelow scowled. “Too bad the bastard’s had such a string o’ good luck.”

Matthew Finch looked down at his notepad.

“So what do you think will work, Caroline?” Dare Atwood asked. As though the Director of Central Intelligence routinely deferred to her junior analysts.

Caroline hesitated an instant before replying. She would not allow herself to consider Eric. If he had returned to 30 April’s bunker, he had placed himself beyond all protection. The High Priestess of Reason was back in the briefing room; what the Policy-makers did with her information was their affair.

“If we announce our presence—try to negotiate—he’ll divert us long enough to launch a counterattack. If we land a helicopter on his roof, he’ll kill Mrs. Payne before we’ve killed the rotors. Our only hope lies in stealth.”

Matthew Finch looked straight into the camera. “Thank God. I thought there
was
no hope.”

“We need to use the blueprints Wally Aronson gave us. We need a squad of professionals trained to infiltrate electronic barriers,” Caroline persisted. “Pros who can creep up to the bunker, find the air vents we know are there, and drop canisters of chloroform right into Krucevic’s living room. We need to take out 30 April before they even know they’re blown—and free the Vice President without a shot being fired. But we need to do it
now”.

Jack Bigelow rocked back in his conference chair. “Get the AWACs in the air, Clayt. Tell NATO whatever ya like. Scramble a Delta Force team from Ramstein or wherever else you got ‘em hidden. And make sure they bring their chloroform, hear?’ Cause they ain’t getting off the plane without it.”

When the screens had gone blank and the ambassador had scurried away to his round of appointments with the new Hungarian government, Tom Shephard stood up and held out his hand. Caroline took it in surprise.

“What’s that for?” she asked him.

“Work well done.”

“You coming?” Marinelli barked from the doorway of the vault.

Shephard turned. “Where to?”

“Surveillance. I’m going to watch the bunker until those flyboys arrive. Just in case Krucevic tries to split before it’s convenient.”

Tom vaulted a stray chair and was at the station chief’s side. “You think I’d miss that?”

Marinelli clapped the LegAtt on the shoulder. Then his gaze drifted over to Caroline. “I’d appreciate it if you’d stay behind. This is entirely operational, you understand. And while you convinced the President you know your tradecraft, I’m not entirely sure. I like my visiting analysts safely behind their desks. It saves a lot of explanation back at Headquarters when things go wrong.”

The hostility was unmistakable. Tom Shephard’s eyes widened in surprise. But this was neither the time nor the place, Caroline knew, for a bureaucratic squabble, for a drawing of the line between Analysis and Ops. Too much was at stake.

“Right,” she told Marinelli through bitten lips. “You’re the station chief. I take my orders from
you.”

“’Bout time,” he retorted, and swung into the hallway.

The screaming had been going on for what seemed like hours now, beyond the sealed door, and even Jozsef was done crying.

Krucevic had thrust the boy into Sophie’s room without a word of explanation earlier that day—she did not know what time, she had no clock and no window, nothing but a sense of having slept badly and in increasing pain. She had held Jozsef close to her fevered body, held her hands over his ears to stop the noise, cursing vividly and relentlessly under her breath to drown out the screams. She poured forth a torrent of vituperation into the dead air while Jozsef shuddered with sobs and the screams went on—varying sometimes in pitch, sometimes in duration, but inevitable, as though the tortures they subjected him to had a preordained rhythm.

He was singing now—a broken, dying tune. Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”

“What did he do?” she asked Jozsef at one point. “What could he possibly have done to deserve this?”

The boy had shuddered. “He betrayed Papa.”

Even the singing, now, had stopped.

EIGHT
Budapest, 3:13
P.M.

D
USK FELL SWIFTLY
on a November afternoon in Central Europe, and dusk was their ally.

Tom Shephard studied the pale profile of the man crouched next to him in the back of the armored van. Vic Marinelli was roughly the same age as Tom, but he was in better shape and he had once been a SEAL. That fact alone gave Tom some comfort. The Agency, as a rule, didn’t deal in guns. The FBI did. But a SEAL— even one who’d been out of the navy for the past ten years—knew what the hell he was doing. And Tom, at this moment, felt as though he was flying by the seat of his pants.

Krucevic’s stronghold was innocuous in appearance—a loading dock in a neighborhood of warehouses, accessed by an alley. One of Marinelli’s case officers had parked the station’s van in front of an animal-feed-supply warehouse perpendicular to the bunker. The CO jumped out of the cab and made a great fuss over his cousin, another young Hungarian laborer who had just driven up in a shining red Volkswagen Passat. The CO
pulled off his work overalls, secure in the knowledge that no one could be watching; threw on a clean shirt; dragged a comb through his hair; clapped his putative cousin on the back; and slid into the Passat’s passenger seat. The two men drove off into the darkness, intent on beer, lap dancers, and oblivion.

The van was left locked and apparently empty in front of the warehouse. Except that Marinelli and Tom were crouching inside. Their position in the back of the armored van was an uncomfortable one: The last team dispatched to monitor the Veep’s kidnappers in Bratislava had been murdered as handily as wild geese under a low cloud ceiling. Neither Tom nor Marinelli troubled to make much small talk. Each had brought a personal weapon. They kept their eyes trained on the surveillance equipment that was the key to Krucevic’s kingdom, while silence gathered between them like dead leaves.

Marinelli was the master of a formidable array of electronics. He had eyes that could see and ears that could hear through layers of protective steel. He had hidden antennae and radar and television monitors. Tom heard a warehouse’s metal door slide down with a crash; a truck creaked past, looming like a leviathan on the van’s black-and-white screen. Snatches of Hungarian sputtered in their earphones. If a dust mote were to settle on the van’s roof, Tom thought, they would know about it.

But precious little emanated from the bunker. When Marinelli’s beams intersected Krucevic, they fell dead.

“This guy’s already walked,” Marinelli muttered as he turned a dial. “All that bowing and scraping before the Joint Chiefs, and we’re gonna look like idiots. It won’t be your friend Little Miss Muffet who takes the fall, either. It’ll be
me.
Because
I
didn’t get surveillance out here before the ink was dry on that map. Sometimes I hate this fucking job.”

“The entire U.S. Army couldn’t find Saddam Hussein, Marinelli, when it was parked in his front yard. Sometimes people defy technology. You know that.”

The station chief slammed the palm of his hand against the recalcitrant dial he was tuning. “Hell, yes. And sometimes technology isn’t worth shit. I’m just pissed off about that chick in jackboots, Tom. She had Bigelow eating out of her hand. Why do they let women anywhere near Intelligence? They don’t know dick about operations.”

Shephard smiled faintly, remembering the steel gray Mercedes and the little black wig. “Caroline doesn’t roll over. She looks at you with those cold blue eyes—she lets you dig yourself in deeper as you try to justify your existence—and then she walks right around you.”

“You just want to get into her pants.”

He frowned. But it wasn’t Shephard’s job to explain Caroline Carmichael to the station chief. He had harbored enough doubts about the woman himself. Her conjuring of the map, however, had buoyed his confidence. Whatever her deceptions, her closet loyalties— the things she would not explain—Caroline had gotten the job done.

Marinelli flipped a switch on a scanner; static crackled. “He’s blocking us. Son of a bitch is blocking us.”

“That’s the least of what he’s doing.”

They had both studied the blueprints of Anatoly Rubikov’s security system, the blueprints Wally Aronson had fished out of a train station bathroom at two A.M. A U.S. government–issue scanner was about as effective against Krucevic as a slingshot and dried peas.

“He’s not
in
there,” Marinelli repeated tensely. “He’s blown this hole while we watched Mary Sunshine cream the Prez.”

“You don’t know that.”

The afternoon’s misting rain had changed to a downpour. Outside the van, darkness was almost absolute. A few spotlights lit isolated corners of the warehouse district—Tom could see them when he panned the surveillance cameras wide—but none had survived Krucevic’s installation. The loading dock was blanketed in shadows.

Marinelli bent over a small square item that looked like a viewfinder.

“What is that?”

He glanced up. “Infrared detection device.”

“You’re looking for heat?”

“It’s November in Budapest. Coming on for dark. Temperature is dropping to thirty-nine, thirty-seven degrees. The heat should be on in that bunker.”

It should be flying through the seams of the loading-dock door like a sonic wind
, Tom thought. Marinelli stood aside; Tom peered through the infrared viewfinder. The outline of the garage door glimmered coldly.

“It’s dead,” Marinelli told him. “Shut down. I’d bet my life on it.” The station chief pulled gently on the van’s rear-door handle, eased it open.

“Are you nuts?” Tom hissed.

“We’ve got Delta Force on the wing, Shephard, and the Veep’s not here. That map was a fucking diversion. It got us looking at where 30 April
was
, not where they are. If I’m not back in fifteen, call the station.” He slipped through the door as softly as a whisper.

Marinelli, Tom fumed, was like all of these goddamn Agency people. He was not what he seemed. He’d perfected the art of appearing to be other than what he was—perfected it so well that he made you believe he was a Medici prince when in fact he was nothing but a goddamn cowboy. An adrenaline junkie. Like Caroline
Carmichael in her red beret, stepping out of a terrorist’s car—