The Cutout (9 page)

She checked the report’s date and origination. The TD had been disseminated the previous February from the DO’s Hungarian branch. Which meant the asset was probably handled by Buda station.

“Hey, Mad Dog, could I see you in my office for a minute?”

She gasped involuntarily, clutching the file to her chest. “Cuddy, you scared the hell out of me. What’s up?”

He grimaced. “Nothing major. Just an evaluation I’d like you to sign.”

It was a deliberate lie, and Caroline saw with mild shock that they had become a cell within a cell, collaborators in a subterfuge.

“Okay,” she said neutrally, and tucked the Krucevic file under her arm.

“Interesting reading?” Cuddy inquired as they walked toward his office.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before. They like to say that leadership analysis is the
People
magazine of Intelligence, but I don’t think
People
will be running this stuff anytime soon.”

“Let’s pray for that, shall we?” He shut the door firmly behind her. He had abandoned his glasses, and the hazel eyes were bloodshot from hours of scrolling
through text on a computer screen. The look on his face—self-absorbed, absent, as though he pursued a line of thought only remotely connected to the scene before him—was one Caroline knew well. Cuddy was in the grip of the chase. Until he nailed Sophie Payne’s kidnappers, he would abuse his body, his brain, and the people around him.

“You need a cigarette,” she said, dropping into the seat before his desk. “Or a good long run.”

“And what do you need? A leave of absence?”

“Answers to a lot of questions would be just fine. Or a shoulder to cry on.”

“Why don’t you call Hank?”

“Hank’s shoulders are a little too well tailored for tears. Besides, I haven’t talked to him in nearly a year.”

“Then I’d say it’s high time.”

“He never liked Eric, Cud. And what could I tell him? It’s all a close hold anyway.”

Hank.
His silver-haired profile rose in Caroline’s mind, shimmered there like the outline of a perfect knight, an old-world cavalier. The acute gaze, the measured speech. Hank never swerved from the path of reason. He’d taught her everything she knew, and most of what she’d forgotten.

“The DCI would advise me not to talk to my lawyer,” she added. “Even one in my family.”

“Not all Hank’s counsel is professional.”

Caroline shrugged in discomfort, and Cuddy dropped the subject. They stared at each other for a few seconds in silence, uncertain what to say. Every topic seemed forbidden.

“Feeling betrayed?” Caroline asked finally.

“Feeling stupid,” Cuddy replied.

“Sometimes they’re the same thing.”

“Scottie’s asked me to head up the Berlin Task Force. I got the impression I had no choice.”

“This is where I say, ‘That’s why they pay you the big bucks.’ Right?”

“Not if you want to survive.” His eyes were unreadable. “I’ve had just about as much as I can take, Carrie. I’ve spent thirty months investigating a crash that didn’t kill my best friend, and I’ve just been told by the DCI herself to suppress information critical to the recovery of the Vice President. I don’t know why I’m still here.”

“Maybe,” she suggested, “because you think you can fix it. Big mistake, Cud.”

He laughed harshly and looked away.

She felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the man. He was a good person, a faultlessly honest person, who didn’t deserve this kind of painful ambiguity. Never mind that ambiguity was the human condition: Cuddy lived in a happy mess of absolutes. He refused to eat meat, but his fingertips were permanently stained with nicotine. He stood in the rain-filled doorways at the end of the Agency’s corridors ten times a day, burning his death ration and hoping to save his lungs later with a three-mile run. He fought the last good fight in the U.S. government—tracking terrorists—but believed Amnesty International was a front for Communist insurgency. He spoke five languages, all of them well, which was something that most people did not know. Cuddy never advertised.

Each morning, he drove down the Maryland side of the Potomac while Caroline drove up the Virginia. He wore jeans and carried his work clothes in a backpack. He parked his car on Canal Road and canoed across the
Potomac to the Agency’s foot. Those last few moments, Caroline thought—Cuddy gliding alone through an arrowhead of water—were all he could really claim of his day.

“Who’s working the task force with you?” she asked him.

“Dave Tarnovsky Lisa Hughes. Fatima, in case there’s a Middle East connection.”

But not Eric’s wife. Caroline would be kept at bay, an unknown quantity. There was nothing wrong with Cuddy’s team—Tarnovsky was an ex-SEAL, an expert on explosives; Lisa Hughes had just completed her doctorate in Middle Eastern studies; and Fatima Bowen was a native Lebanese, one of the dark-skinned, silk-clad, black-haired women who served the CTC as a translator and general cultural referent. She’d married Mike Bowen twenty years earlier, during his last tour in Beirut. When he died in the 1983 car bomb attack on the U.S. embassy, Headquarters had given Fatima a job. Lebanese women with a thirst for revenge were to be prized above rubies.

“Sounds like Scottie is focusing on the Palestinians,” Caroline said neutrally. “To buy time, I suppose?”

“To divert attention from Eric. Per Atwood’s instructions.”

“That might work … until 30 April makes contact.”

“And won’t we look like idiots if they do.” He glanced at her sidelong. “What was Eric really like in Budapest, Carrie?”

“You visited us in Nicosia,” she said tiredly “Multiply that by ten. On good days, he was jumping out of his skin. On bad days, he was comatose.”

“Was he close?”

A sudden, sharp memory of Eric’s hands roaming
over her body. The Mediterranean heat, black olives and lemon. How long had it been since he had touched her?

“Close? Not to me. I suppose it makes sense that he walked away without a backward glance in the Frankfurt airport. I don’t know what happened, Cuddy. How he managed to drift so far.”

“Not close to
you,”
he corrected impatiently. “To penetrating 30 April. Was he jumping out of his skin because of the danger? Or because he’d already turned on all of us?”

“I don’t know.” Her throat was tightening despite her best efforts. “I just do not know, Cuddy. He stopped talking.”

“Even to you.” A flat statement.

What kind of wife were you, anyway?

She could not trust herself to reply.

“That’s strange,” he muttered. “Even the polygraphers recognize a case officer’s right to pillow talk. They’ve practically canonized it.”

Pillow talk. From a man who had walked the streets at night, while she tossed alone and restless? Cuddy, Caroline thought, would make a damn good polygrapher himself. He had a genius for posing the brutal question.

“Maybe he wanted to protect me—” She bit off the words. A more credulous woman could go on believing that Eric was protecting her—that the whole elaborate lie of the past thirty months had been designed to shield her from terror. But Caroline refused to be credulous any longer. The credulous impaled themselves on swords of their own making.

“Scottie tells me Atwood wants you polygraphed.”

She laughed at the abrupt change of subject. “I suppose
it’s inevitable. She has to know whether I’m telling the truth about believing Eric was dead. Let’s hope the polygraphers keep their questions confined to MedAir 901.”

“I think we can assume they will. Atwood is unlikely to share the fact of Eric’s existence with Security. Just keep your mind on the plane crash and forget about Sophie Payne. You’ll be fine.”

“Scottie likes to add a column of numbers when he’s hooked up to the machine.” Caroline spoke with an effort at lightheartedness she was far from feeling. “He swears it keeps him from reacting to the questions. But I’m lousy at math.”

“Then try spelling. Anything is preferable to nerves. Nerves can look like guilt to the box, and guilt might register as deception.”

“Thanks. You’ve no idea how comforting that is.”

He studied her, then said, “I wish I could go with you.”

“But some things, as my grandma told me during potty training, we are forced to do alone.” Caroline unclipped the clandestine report from Krucevic’s file and slid it across the desk. “Take a look at this, Cuddy. There’s a DO asset who’s close to 30 April.”

“Hungarian desk.” Cuddy flipped to the second page, brows knit, instantly absorbed. “This guy could be in Buda. Hell, by this time Sophie
Payne
could be in Buda.”

“Exactly. We’ve got to send out a tasking cable.”

“And how do we phrase that cable, Carrie? ‘Hey guys, the official Task Force line is that the Palestinians are responsible for the Berlin bombing, but chat up your 30 April asset and ask whether he’s ever heard of Sophie Payne’?”

Caroline frowned. “I’ve read weirder tasking cables, thank you very much. Case officers are used to working blind. And with the Veep snatched, Scottie will have every terrorist expert the Agency owns sniffing the ground—the reports will come flooding in. This is a
lead
, Cuddy—”

Cuddy tossed her the DO report. “We don’t know diddly about this guy, Mad Dog. He’s untested. What if he’s one of Eric’s recruits?”

He was closer to penetrating 30 April than ever before.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he was,” she replied.

“Then think about that. The source would be tainted, wouldn’t he?”

“Tainted,” she repeated. “Because he knew Eric?”

“For Christ’s sake, Carrie! As of this morning Eric’s whole career is suspect. We don’t know when he betrayed us or how completely. We don’t know what’s true and what’s crap. Every report, every recruitment— they’re compromised. And that goes for everybody Eric ever handled.”

“We could find out who recruited this one,” she shot back, tapping the TD. “The Hungarian desk could tell us.”

“If I called in some favors, maybe. But I’m not sure that’d be a good idea.”

“The TD is barely six months old,” she argued. “This source is still out there, Cud—still on our payroll.”

“And you think he could lead us to Eric and, by extension, Payne. Forget it. It’s a nonstarter. Don’t let Eric screw you again, Carrie, just because you want to believe.”

There was a short and painful silence.

“I think you ought to see something,” Cuddy said.
He walked out of the office. After a second, she followed.

He led her to a computer terminal that Scottie kept reserved for one use only—the terrorism database, DESIST.

It was the pride of the CTC, a compilation of over a thousand terrorist groups and organizations. Raw data—phone numbers, bank accounts, airline manifests, business cards—could be fed into the computer and analyzed for patterns too slight and seemingly random to attract attention. When DESIST went to work, the most amazing connections between utter strangers appeared as if by magic. DESIST could tell you when one man in Belgrade carried the address of another in Zurich, or whose phone number rang in which safe house. It could match passports to false pictures, bring up a myriad of aliases, connect the dots between terrorist groups that the world believed to be enemies: members of the IRA who were friendly with Hizballah; bankers who laundered money for both the Kurdish PKK and the Algerian Jihad. An entire world of uneasy relationships existed in the DESIST data banks, a labyrinth of obligations and mortal mistrust.

“Sit down,” Cuddy said, “and plug in Eric’s alias.”

“Which one?” she asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “I only
knew
one.”

“In Budapest, he was using ‘Michael O’Shaughnessy.’”

“Try it.”

“But you know there are no Americans listed in this database,” she protested. “It’s illegal for the CIA to track U.S. citizens.”

Cuddy shrugged. “Does a dead man have citizenship? Try it, Mad Dog.”

She typed in the name. The computer thought about it for a split second. And then it spat out two words,
Mahmoud Sharif
, and a phone number. She wrote down the number and plugged it into the database. Nothing. She glanced at Cuddy.

“Try just ‘Sharif.’”

Obediently, she ran the name through the system. An extensive file reeled out. “‘Hizballah bomb maker,’” she read, “‘legally resident in Berlin.’”

“Sharif is believed responsible for that series of bombs the BKA found last March,” Cuddy told her. The BKA—the Bundeskriminalamt—was the German equivalent of the FBI. “He’d wired them into electronics—television sets, stereo components, laptop computers—and stored them in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt.”

“I remember that,” Caroline said. The BKA had confiscated seven of the bombs safely; an eighth had exploded in the act of being defused. Two men had died. “Why didn’t he go down for it?”

“Sympathetic judge. Circumstantial evidence.”

“I see.”

“German Intelligence is convinced Sharif made twelve bombs. So where are the other four?”

“Underneath the Brandenburg?”

Cuddy shrugged. “Ask Sharif, he’ll say he knows nothing about electronics. He’s just a carpenter with a German wife and a kid named Moammar.”

“Aren’t they all. I guess the phone number wasn’t his, or it’d be in the file.”

“The phone is disconnected. I walked down to the Exxon station on Chain Bridge Road twenty minutes ago and dialed it.”

“So if it’s not Sharif’s …”

“It’s Michael O’Shaughnessy’s. Got it in one.” He
pulled up a chair next to her. “Last August, Sharif was shaken down by Israeli airport security when he tried to fly from Frankfurt to Malta. They pulled his address book, Xeroxed it, and sent the contents here. Somebody—a Career Trainee, probably, who never heard of Michael O’Shaughnessy and couldn’t have known it was an Agency alias—entered the name into the database.”

“We don’t know how old this information is,” Caroline hedged. “People keep numbers in their black books for years. Maybe Eric made legitimate contact with Sharif years ago. Maybe he targeted him for recruitment.”

“It was a datebook, Caroline. Sharif bought it last January. Nothing in there is less than current. He talked to Eric sometime this year. And that disconnected phone was in Berlin.”