The Cutout (7 page)

She crouches once more in the tower doorway, knees bent, eyes fixed on the line. “Give me the count.”

“One, two—”

And then she feels his hand shove her ruthlessly off the platform, and she is sailing down the line with her mouth open in a full-throttled yell, half terror, half outrage, the anger surging up with the force of the ground. She rolls and tumbles. Tears off the harness. And turns to shout up at him. “You asshole! You
pushed
me!”

But he is already urging the next trainee to jump.

So much
, Caroline thinks,
for trust.

She begins to feel him watching her, blue stare averted as soon as she looks at him. In the base club he bends low over a pool cue, blond hair grazing his brow. The click of the balls, the crowing as a shot goes home—
they resonate through the clamor of voices like bullets singing across an empty range. He ignores her deliberately, flirts with her friends, waits to see if she has noticed. In the manner of men who toy with desire, afraid of what they want.

Caroline begins to hate him. When she speaks to Eric at all, it is with something like contempt.

The last evening of her paramilitary training, the class holds a farewell dinner. Caroline endures the speeches, the increasing inebriation, only so long. Then she slips outside to walk the trail along the river, alone in the cooling dark. She considers leaving early, a drive north in silence. Preferable to predawn hangovers and awkward farewells.

There is a footfall behind her, noiseless as a cougar’s. A sigh that might be the wind stirs last year’s cattails, although the night is windless. She stops short, keenly aware of her isolation, sensing the menace of a predator. To the right, the densest woods. To the left, the blackest water. Somewhere ahead, the Yorktown Bridge twinkles, remote as Brooklyn. A scream would be lost here; to run is suicidal. And she has been trained, after all, in self-defense. She has been taught to kill with a single sharp jab of her cupped hand to the windpipe, although even now she does not believe it.

She turns. Sees the watchful blue eyes, unaverted for the first time. He is poised to spring or run, she is uncertain which.

“You,” she says.

He takes a step toward her. She retreats, and halts him in his tracks.

“I know it seems safe,” he says. “The safest place in the world. Guards at the gate and grenade launchers in
every corner. But you shouldn’t walk alone in the dark by the river.”

“I have never wanted very much to be safe.”

“No.” A flash of teeth in the darkness. “It’s a type of cowardice in your book. You look for risk instead. Why is that, Caroline?”

That’s not who I am
, she thinks.
That’s what you’ve made me.
“You don’t join the CIA for job security, Eric.”

“No. You join to sit at a desk and analyze cables all day. To write up your opinions as fact and generate more reports. A numbing dose of computer screens and low-level briefings, day in and day out. The life of reason. Is that what you want, Caroline?”

Reason is safe
, she wants to say;
reason can’t cut the heart out of your body.

He is within inches of her now. She catches the scent of his skin—sunlight and underbrush, a secretive life lived out-of-doors. “I think you’d die a slow death, like a diver cut off from air. I think you’re made for better things.”

“Are you recruiting me?” she asks in disbelief. “The SAS has no use for women.”

“I’m no longer in the SAS.” His voice is exultant, the voice of conquest. “As of tomorrow, I belong to the Directorate of Operations. Case officer training. It’s what I’ve wanted for years.”

“And what does that have to do with me?”

He studies her for a few seconds, saying nothing. Then his finger traces the skin of her shoulder, bare tonight in her party dress. Gooseflesh under his touch: The demons of sleep come to life.

“What does this have to do with me, Eric?”

“I’ve been poised on the edge a long time, Caroline. Afraid to step out into nothing. Some of us need a little push.”

The hand curves to find her shoulder blade, circles the sudden tautness of a breast. She arches away from him, unreconciled, even as her pelvis melts toward his. And then his mouth is at the base of her throat and her fingers are raking through his hair. The grip of wanting so fierce it robs her of breath.

“I know who you are,” he whispers. “I know what you crave and what you fear, what you pretend and what you hide. I know the depth of your strength and your doubt. I even know what you think of
me
, Caroline.”

She wants to run, she wants to sink down into the grass and take him deep inside her, she wants never to see him again.

The urgency of his mouth is a kind of whip. She feels his hand trace the flesh of her inner thigh, find the heat at its core—and then he releases her so abruptly she nearly falls. In the sudden quiet there is only his breathing, the sound of river water slipping through the weeds. She considers telling him to go to hell. But nothing he has said—nothing he knows—is untrue. And he is staring at her as though she could decide his life with a word.

“What does this have to do with me?” she repeats.

“You’re the one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything. You’re what I need, Caroline. And I’ve never needed much.”

She closes her eyes, takes a shuddering breath.
“Let’s leave tonight,” she says. And steps off some inner tower.

The one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything.

Caroline paces the bathroom floor and considers her options. Had Eric left her behind deliberately in Frankfurt airport, ignorant and faithful and trusting and stupid, while he set off to remake the world? Had she been his ultimate cover, the grieving widow no one would blame? Or was today’s bomb at the Brandenburg an impossible accident, his face in a helicopter a bizarre coincidence, that defied her attempts at rational explanation?

What was she supposed to believe, exactly, in this particular hell?

Belief, like trust, isn’t rational
, she thought. Belief is blind, a wash of black in a room full of light, a breath suspended at the end of a diving board. She had loved Eric, but she never trusted him with much. There were parts of his life forever closed to her, regions of his soul she could not navigate. She had gone with her gut when she married him, ignored the advice of family and friends, giddy with all she was not considering.

But the High Priestess of Reason is not easily silenced. Voices had persisted in Caroline’s brain. There were the questions she asked, and answers he tried to give; terms they negotiated like peacemakers at parley.

Until the final silence of the Frankfurt airport, and the final explosion.

What are you thinking?
Eric asks.

His body is perfectly still in the cratered grass. All
around them the Virginia night is thick with pine pollen, with midges, with the musky smell of spent sex; but his skin, where her fingertip traces a rib, is marble cool. Stillness is one of his talents. He keeps the world at bay, he opts out of action, he retreats inside his head where the best secrets always are. Six months at the Farm, in case officer training.
And so it begins
, Caroline thinks—the life he cannot share. He has traded his fatigues for chinos and oxford cloth, in the classroom he rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie, he looks like a wolf sleeping by a primeval fire, partly tamed but never domesticated. What do they have to teach him, really, these retired CO’s pensioned off into training? Six months, and he knows what he has always known: how to watch without being seen.

She feels him watching even while she sits alone in Arlington, a hundred miles away—that silent surveillance like a stroke on her neck. The sense of him burns in her throat as warm as whiskey, and she thinks,
He is watching me.
Eric’s love, Eric’s too-intent and narrow-eyed passion, her breath catching thick at his touch.

“What are you thinking?” he asks her again.

“Have I given you that right, too? The inside of my head? You’ve never given it to me.”

She sounds deliberately amused. Her way of keeping the world at bay.

“That’s important, isn’t it? What I give and don’t give.”

“Only when you want something in return,” she says.

“You try very hard. To love me without conditions. You think that’s what I need.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You’re afraid of losing me. If you build me a cage.” His voice is remote.

She sits up, pulls her bare knees to her chest, the sticky wetness between her legs nothing more than a mess. She reaches for her clothes.

“All right,” she says. “I’m thinking about loyalty. Whether it’s possible to give without thought, without conditions. Blind loyalty.”

His hand closes on her wrist. She stops pulling up her jeans. Slides into the crevice between his side and his arm and lies there, her cheek against the marble skin.

“Blind loyalty is always possible. And it’s always a mistake.”

She lets out a little sigh of despair. “Where are
your
loyalties, Eric? I’m not talking about love or sex or even myself. I’m curious. About you. What claims your soul?”

A snort. “You think I’ve got one?”

She turns away from him. Shoves her foot into a shoe.

He watches in silence. Another man would be smoking now, but Eric gave up cigarettes when he gave up the streets of Boston, gave up his foster family’s name, gave up the idea of fairness. He is watching her trying not to notice him watching her.

“You can’t do this job without some kind of loyalty,” he says. “You can’t be a marine, a Green Beret, or an Intelligence operative—not unless you decide that something matters beyond yourself.”

“Your country?” She tugs a sweater over her head and mutters, “Bullshit.
Country
is an excuse for wanting to die.”

He thrusts her back into the grass with such unexpected
force that she’s winded for an instant. She lies there, Eric’s weight on her chest, his eyes inches from her own, and stares into the blue.

“Okay. One loyalty drives me, one thing I won’t betray. Call it a pact with myself, Caroline, if you’re tired
of country.
A long time ago I said I’d never close my eyes on deliberate evil. That sounds pretty broad, and pretty simple. But it’s my brand of integrity. Of keeping the faith. Of an inner standard I walk every day. I may hurt the people around me, I may fail them in ways they never expected—but I will not do less than the best job I can with the work in life I’ve chosen.”

“Which is?”

“Making the world a safer place.”

She moves under him restlessly, an objection forming. He ignores her.

“You think that sounds stupid. Or grandiose. Fine. I’m not like other people, Caroline, who dream of a perfect world and try to create it, even if it’s just in their own backyards. I pace off the property and find out why it’s for sale. I test the broken board in the fence where the fox creeps in, I poke spikes in the rat holes. I name every weed and mark where it grows. It’s all I’ve got, Caroline—this permanent fixer-upper. You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you.”