The Cutout (52 page)

“Ustashe,” Sophie muttered.

“Ustashe, which in the Croatian language is another word for fascist. Yes, Mrs. Payne.
iv Zakopan was established with the help of Nazi commanders and with the leadership of our great Ante Pavelic, the father of independent Croatia. We swept the Serb hordes out of Bosnia, we threw their women and children off our cliffs, we converted the Orthodox to the one true Catholic faith, and then we sent them to meet their God. There are the camps that everyone knows about— Jasenovac, near Zagreb, and Stara Gradiska—but at
iv Zakopan, we destroyed our worst enemies, the partisans ruled by Tito, the faithless ones. We left them here to
rot in the bowels of the earth, already less than human. And the world did not care.”

“No,” Sophie protested. The pain was growing inside her like a swarm of bees, angry and intense, on the verge of bursting. “We would have known. This place—”

“This place has been buried for half a century, and it will be buried long after your name is forgotten,” he said implacably. “Do you think they remember history in your country, Mrs. Payne? Everyone who knew about
iv Zakopan is dead. Except for me.”

Half a century. Of being classified as
Missing, Presumed Dead.
Of no one knowing. Her gaze met the hollow eye sockets of a skull, inches from her face, flooded with Krucevic’s beam. A thousand jaws, gaping wide in terror. No one walking in the fields above had even heard these people scream.

“Do you know what it means in English—
iv Zakopan?” Krucevic stared into her fevered eyes. “Literally it means ‘buried alive.’ But a more elegant translation might be ‘Living Grave,’ Mrs. Payne.”

Sophie knew, now, why she was here.

Otto dragged her away from the charnel pit.

They reached what must have been the central room, the command center, twelve feet by twenty, with two wooden tables and a scattering of chairs, some broken and canted on their sides. Krucevic stopped short in the entryway sliding the beam around the walls, his breath rapid now and shallow with excitement. “The Kommandant lived in Sarajevo, but his days were spent here—his days and many of his nights. Underground, all hours are the same.”

“You can’t know that. You’re older than I am, but you probably weren’t even born in World War Two.”

“I was three when the Kommandant was taken. Old enough to remember the door to the tunnel, to remember these fields.”

“Your father?” Sophie gasped.

“He denied them the final victory, Mrs. Payne. He died in captivity, by his own hand.” Impossible now to read the crazed eyes under the clipped black hair. But she could feel the singing tension in the dank air of the chamber, the crackling of obsession barely suppressed. Krucevic was at his most dangerous.

“A son should know his father’s greatness. A son should live to see his father avenged.”

“You will never live to see your kind of vengeance, Krucevic, unless the world runs mad and everything good and true is utterly destroyed.”

He turned the torch full on her face, blinding her. “You are dying, Mrs. Payne.” His voice was utterly indifferent. “I want you to die knowing just how wrong you are. You destroyed those vials of antibiotic— yes, Tonio told me how it was done—in the hope that Jozsef’s illness would stop me. You thought you could crush my vision of a new Europe with the ampules under your heel.
You tried to kill my boy.
For that, you forfeit any right you might have had to consideration. You deserve to be tortured, Mrs. Payne.”

“I have been,” Sophie muttered. By the thought of what she had done to Jozsef

“You deserve a public execution.” His face was close to her own now, his eyes shining in the torchlight. “But execution is too painless. I want you to die slowly here, I want you buried alive. And while you struggle for breath—while you crawl through the dirt—I will go on. I will save Europe. And my son.

“Otto—let us see whether Mrs. Payne is able to stand.”

Otto heaved her to her feet, then backed away. Sophie swayed and clutched at a chair; it toppled over as she fell.

“I should judge her in no danger of escape,” Krucevic said.

ELEVEN
Langley, 2:46
P.M.

T
HE CALL JUST CAME THROUGH FROM STATE
,” Scottie Sorensen told the DCI. “Marinelli’s body will be on a plane home tomorrow night.”

“And Michael O’Shaughnessy?” Dare didn’t turn away from her view of the pin oaks bordering the chasm of the Potomac River. “Does his body come home, too?”

The news of Eric’s death had filtered through to only a few of the Agency faithful. It had come in a roundabout fashion, as such news must, because the passport he held as Michael O’Shaughnessy bore a next-of-kin notification number that ended eventually at the CIA. The person designated to take such calls— from the State Department’s consular section—also had access to the bank of real names associated with false passports. Haley Taggert could now be included among the number of those who knew that Eric Carmichael hadn’t exactly died two and a half years before.

In a private session in the DCI’s office, Dare had tried
to impress upon the administrative assistant that the matter was compartmentalized beyond her level of security clearance. Haley didn’t know where Eric’s body had been found or under what circumstances. With any luck, Dare could keep that information a close hold. But luck depended in part upon the Central European LegAtt’s control of the Hungarian police and the press corps milling through Budapest. Dare figured her luck had run out.

“O’Shaughnessy’s body will be on the same plane,” Scottie told her.

“Good. You’ll meet both caskets.”

“Marinelli’s brother will be there.”

“Then meet Eric’s. You owe him that much.”

“I’m sorry, Director, I—”

Dare wheeled around. “Don’t want anything to do with him? It’s a little late for that, Scottie.”

He rocked a little in his Cole-Haan loafers, as he might have done in a White House receiving line, then bent his head attentively toward the DCI. She was suddenly sick with fury at the man—the man who thought he had her snowed, had her right where he wanted her, the man who probably laughed each night in the privacy of his own bedsheets about just how thoroughly she was screwed.

“Sit down,” she said wearily, “you goddamn son of a bitch.”

Scottie sat.

Dare moved purposefully behind her desk. She found the hard copy of Caroline’s Cutout-channel cable, the cable filled with the past thirty months of Eric Carmichael’s life and enough intelligence to roll up Mlan Krucevic’s networks worldwide. Before she handed it to Scottie, she said, “Caroline is missing.”

Concern furrowed the CTC chief’s brow.

“I called Embassy Budapest when I got the news
about Eric. Caroline is gone. She’s checked out of her hotel.”

“I’ll alert our friends at every border crossing,” he said immediately. “Notify the airlines, the trains—”

“‘Mad dogs and Englishmen come out in the noonday sun,’” Dare quoted softly. “I’ve already talked to Hungarian border control. I don’t want Caroline stopped. I want to know where she’s headed.”

He stared at her, perplexed.

“Tell me something, Scottie. That nickname of hers. Do you know how she got it?”

“Eric gave it to her.”

“But
why
, Scottie?
Why?
You don’t know?”

Dare waited implacably. She had a forbidding face in the best of circumstances, a voice like rain-drenched gravel. Scottie lost some of his self-possession. It dissipated, like bubbles in warm champagne.

“Let me tell you a story,” she suggested. “About a woman run mad. You’ve got all the time in the world, Scottie. Eric’s dead and now it’s Caroline’s word against yours about all the dirty tricks you’ve pulled. We don’t place people on trial here; we simply send them to Tbilisi and Uzbekistan and all the other shitholes in the world until their time runs out. It’s a long list, the list of shitholes, Scottie; and you have all the time in the world to consider it. So listen.

“Caroline Carmichael lives by her wits. She prides herself on being logical. On remaining calm in any crisis. On finding objective truth through her subjective lens. She’s so good at projecting complete control that you have to know her well to see the fault lines inside, the places where surfaces shift and crack. There are forces in the earth, Scottie, that even Caroline can’t suppress, and sometimes she remembers it.”

Dare stopped, expecting him to object—to squirm in his chair or express annoyance—but he was paralyzed for once. Tbilisi had taken the wind from his sails.

“You know the training she’s had. Denied Area Penetration, Terrorist Tactics and Countermeasures, Isolation and Interrogation—every course Eric scheduled before he went out to Nicosia, Caroline had, too. They trained
together.
Eric the teacher, Eric the Green Beret, just another student like his logical wife.

“Tell me, Scottie—how does the training go in Isolation and Interrogation?”

He crossed his right leg over his left. Unconsciously protecting his crotch from a ball-breaker, Dare decided. “The trainers try to find a person’s vulnerability. Show him just where he’s weak. So that the weakness can be corrected … or avoided.”

“They put Caroline in isolation for three days. She was told, going into the cell, that there was a way out if only she could find it. She analyzed every square inch of the place, looking for a method of escape. She had no furniture, no bedcoverings, only a pot in the corner and one window. A window that showed her
Eric
, lashed upright to a pole and periodically subject to abuse from a gang of soldiers.

“After the first day, a trainer visited Caroline. He told her she could leave as soon as she confessed to her crimes—espionage, conspiracy, the usual gamut of trumped-up charges. He drew her over to the window and showed her Eric, who by this time was semiconscious, his head hanging, dried blood smeared above one ear. Eric would go free, the trainer explained, once Caroline confessed. She refused. She knew that they expected her, as a woman—a supposedly emotional creature—to find the sight of Eric’s suffering unbearable.

“The process was repeated over two more days. By
that time Eric’s moaning could not be shut out; it filled her head. She recited poetry aloud. She screamed. She ripped her clothes and stuffed scraps into her ears. When the trainer walked in on the third day, Caroline was already waiting at the window. He approached her carefully She allowed him to come close; she seemed oblivious to everything around her. When he was within two feet of her right hand, she reached out and snatched a live grenade off his uniform belt.