The Cutout (8 page)

Caroline stares at herself now in the fourth-floor bathroom mirror. There are lines scrawled at the corners of her eyes, dark blotches under the skin. Her lips are thin and dry. She closes her eyes, waiting for a whiskey rush, for the sense of Eric watching her—but nothing comes across the miles that separate them, no sense of love or loyalty.

You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you.
Only she hadn’t stopped. She’d been working for years, plugging holes and nailing up fences. And he’d never bothered to tell her he was alive.

Where were you going from Frankfurt, Eric? And why are you hiding in those weeds you marked so carefully?

What exactly am I supposed to believe?

EIGHT
Langley, 11:53
A.M.

C
AROLINE’S STRONGEST IMPULSE
upon quitting the women’s room was to leave the Old Headquarters Building. She could retrieve her car from the acres of asphalt that lapped the campus like a modern-day moat, and drive through the back roads of McLean, the high banks of horse fields and elm. In a car, however, she would have no buffer from her raging thoughts. No work to consume her, no colleagues to force the daily pleasantries from her mouth. She turned back into the CTC and strode toward the ranks of gray metal shelves that rose at one end of the room. She had researched the lives of the men—and they were all men—who made up 30 April. Their stories were presented almost clinically in the Agency’s biographic profiles.

These one-page reports were intended for use as briefing aids for government officials. The bios were chatty and informative, riddled with small detail and the occasional sweeping judgment. Text was punctuated with Intelligence controls—
U
for Unclassified,
C
for Confidential,
S
for Secret. The most heated debates flared over the use of ORCON information—Originator-Controlled—which signaled that the source was a foreign national, an asset on the payroll of the Directorate of Operations.

A secret agent, in the more romantic language of a vanished age.

Caroline pulled out a heavy green file and sat awkwardly on the carpet, high-heeled legs folded as discreetly as her slim skirt would allow. She would start with the apprentice in the group, the youngest of Mlan Krucevic’s recruits: thirty-year-old Antonio Fioretto.

Fioretto was a computer genius, twice incarcerated for fraud in Italy, where no one is imprisoned for fraud. The funds he’d illegally transferred out of a variety of Swiss bank accounts had never been recovered. He now served as 30 April’s main accountant and electronics whiz. The photograph in his biographic profile had been taken from a police mug shot—grainy, unsmiling, curly-headed, and weak-jawed. The hair was blond; he was
Milanese.
What the photo failed to show was the healed scars of three suicide attempts. Antonio’s wrists were hacked to shreds.

She slid his file back into the stack.

Otto Weber.
Native of Zurich, recovered heroin addict, an obsessive bodybuilder and martial arts practitioner. He had grown up on the streets, quit school at thirteen, worked episodically as a male prostitute. Weber was rumored to be a confirmed sadist. The 30 April member who enjoyed killing.

Vaclav Slivik.
A retired captain in the former Czechoslovak Army, Slivik could fly anything with wings and served as 30 April’s explosives and weapons expert. A mild-looking man, from his photograph; cynical
eyes, a humorous mouth. In 1972, at the Munich Olympics, he had won a gold medal in the pentathlon. He allegedly played cello in his spare time, although public performances were rare of late.

Caroline pulled the fourth file and opened it with unsteady fingers. This one she would read in its entirety.

Mlan Krucevic. Leader, 30 April Organization.

No picture for the bio she had written three years before, and updated every six months. Krucevic had never been captured on film.

Perhaps the most ruthless terrorist to emerge from the breakup of Yugoslavia, Mlan Krucevic is thought to reside in Germany, although his present whereabouts are unknown. A trained geneticist with advanced degrees from two European universities, Krucevic served as director of a Croat prison camp in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1990 to 1993. He is alleged to have approved the torture and murder of over three thousand Muslim and Serb men during his tenure at the prison camp, where he is believed to have used biological agents in human experimentation. He has been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal on nineteen counts of crimes against humanity and is currently a fugitive from justice. (C NF NC)

In 1993, Krucevic announced the formation of the 30 April Organization, a neo-Nazi militarist group, with the simultaneous firebombing of seven Turkish guest-worker hostels throughout Germany; sixteen people died in the acts of arson. According to a reliable source with limited access, 30 April is also responsible for the death of Anneke Schmidt, Germany’s former Green Party leader, and the kidnapping and murder of Dagmar Hammecher, granddaughter of the German federal court judge Ernst Hammecher. The terrorist group is also suspected of orchestrating last year’s assassination of Germany’s popular Socialist chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. (S NF NC OC)

In the 30 April Organization, Krucevic has assembled and trained an elite group of mercenary fighters hailing from several European countries, who are united by their adherence to his ideology. Although Krucevic has allegedly professed anti-Semitic views, his deepest hatred is reserved for adherents to the faith of Islam, which he has declared is on the verge of destroying Christianity. An untested source with good access reports that Krucevic’s ultimate goal is the ethnic cleansing of Central Europe. (S NF NC OC)

According to a reliable source with limited access, Krucevic filed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993 and lived under a series of assumed names in Scandinavia and eastern Germany. He is reported to have set up a black-market network for the production and distribution of deadly biological agents. Krucevic may secure considerable income from a series of legitimate front companies to which he has been tied, but the chief source of 30 April’s funding remains unknown. As an avowed enemy of Islam, Krucevic has spurned the usual Middle Eastern patrons of terrorism. The bulk of his funding probably comes from private sources within Europe who support his ideological goals. (S NF NC OC)

We believe that Krucevic is highly intelligent, disciplined, and dedicated. Although an extremist in his political views and the methods he employs to further them, he is not, in our view, mentally ill. When he kills, it is for strategic or philosophic reasons, rather than as arbitrary acts of sadism. (S NF NC OC)

Krucevic demands unquestioned loyalty from others, but is incapable of trust. He does not tolerate dissent within the 30 April Organization; according to an untested source with good access, Krucevic personally shot two of his senior deputies last year in an internal purge. (S NF NC OC)

Krucevic, fifty-eight, is the son of a Croat who committed suicide after World War II. He is estranged from his wife of thirteen years, Mirjana Tarcic, but is believed to have custody of their twelve-year-old son, Jozsef. He reportedly speaks Croatian, Serbian, German, and some English. (C)

What the bio did not mention, Caroline thought, was that Krucevic’s father was rumored to have been an Ustashe concentration camp commander. The place he might have governed from 1942 to 1945 bore one of the ugliest names in Yugoslav history:
iv Zakopan, “Living Grave.” But no one had ever found the camp after the war; no witnesses survived to describe its horrors. Only whispers and imprecations remained, the furtive sign against the evil eye, among the children and grandchildren of those who had died.

The CIA was not in the practice of printing rumors.

Four grainy black-and-white photographs were tucked into Krucevic’s file. Caroline studied the first, dated seven years before: a shot of a tenement house in flames, a Turkish woman raising her hands in anguish, keening. At her feet was the blanketed corpse of her small son. The next photo was now famous the world over: a Mercedes limousine creased in its midsection like a metallic boomerang. Gerhard Schroeder’s body lay at a bizarre angle across the backseat, his right hand dangling from the open passenger door. The chancellor had been an attractive man before Krucevic crushed his armored car like a soda can.

Caroline’s fingers hesitated over the final two pictures. She hated seeing them. They had been taken in a police morgue, as exhibits in a trial that would never be held. Krucevic’s trial for inhuman cruelty, for utter lack of heart.

Dagmar Hammecher was three and a half when she was snatched from her nanny at gunpoint. She had bright gold hair that cascaded down her back, and she loved to pose in ballet shoes. Her mother taught in a Hamburg medical school, her father was a banker. But it was Dagmar’s grandpa whom Krucevic intended to destroy. Ernst Hammecher was a federal court judge charged with considering the constitutionality of Germany’s new alien-repatriation laws. He had survived the Nazi era, and was no friend to bigots. He was expected to reverse the legislation. Ernst Hammecher received his granddaughter’s hand in the mail two days after she had been kidnapped.

Caroline forced herself to look at the police photograph. The childish fingers still curled upward, as they must have done a thousand times in Dagmar’s short life—reaching for her mother, her favorite stuffed toy, the curved handle of a juice cup. But the edge of the severed wrist was ragged and black with blood. They had not attempted to spare her pain.

“Otto,”
Caroline whispered. The 30 April member who enjoyed killing.

The final shot was of Dagmar’s corpse, dropped on her grandfather’s doorstep six days after the child’s abduction. The small features were gaunt and pale, too drawn with suffering to be those of the little girl who loved ballet tutus and chocolate ice cream. Krucevic had shaved her head. The wounds of
electrodes placed in the child’s skull were obvious even in reproduction.

Her throat tightening, Caroline thrust the vicious image facedown against the file folder and read through Krucevic’s bio again.

One of the sources she had used in the report—a DO source—had been characterized as untested, with good access. She flipped quickly through the documents attached to the left-hand flap of Krucevic’s file. A translated piece from the German newsmagazine
Das Bild;
another from a Sarajevo newspaper; five State Department cables out of Frankfurt, Bonn, and Belgrade; and three TD’s—the classified and sifted reports disseminated by the Directorate of Operations. These were what she sought.

When the DO released clandestine reporting for an Intelligence analyst’s use, it always withheld the foreign agent’s code name. As an act of kindness, however, the directorate characterized the sourcing. A reliable source was one whose information had proved accurate over time; an untested one offered intelligence that couldn’t easily be verified or that was too recently reported to assess. But any source with good access was inherently more valuable than one without.

Unless that access was used to sell false information. Krucevic was certainly clever enough to plant a mole in the CIA’s turf; but what had this one actually reported? That the good doctor had shot two of his people in an internal purge. That he was driven to wipe Islam out of Central Europe. Nothing particularly earthshaking, and hardly worth Krucevic’s brilliant effort at deception. A 30 April mole would have been put to better use.

And yet Caroline felt an almost sickening surge of
excitement at the thought: A source with good access to 30 April
existed.
A source who might know where Eric was. A source who could lead them to Vice President Sophie Payne.

His code name and history could be found in one of the DO’s asset files, to which Caroline was routinely denied access. She was an analyst, not a case officer; she had no clearance for information that linked a source to his identity, a code name to an address. But Scottie Sorensen and Cuddy Wilmot did.