The Cutout (19 page)

They had intended to reach Budapest but chose Bratislava by default, because Vaclav Slivik knew a woman in the Slovak State Orchestra. Many years ago, when Olga Teciak was a young woman of twenty-four whose sloe eyes and graceful limbs were utterly bewitching against the prop of her cello, Vaclav had pursued her violently, and she was enough in the thrall of the past to accord him some kindness now. When he knocked on the door at 4:33 A.M., unheralded and un-apologetic, she was so disoriented as to let him in.

It was only after the guns appeared that Olga understood what she had done. But by then, her doom was sealed.

Sophie lay now on the woman’s cracked tile floor, her hands and feet bound, her mouth gagged. The bathroom smelled faintly septic, an odor of decay unsuccessfully masked with ammonia. Olga’s apartment was one of a series of similar faceless cubicles in one of the mass of faceless Soviet-built concrete towers strung across the Danube from the historic heart of old Bratislava. The complex as a whole could boast the highest suicide rate in the country. It looked like an architect’s embodiment of despair. And at the moment, Sophie found the mood to be catching. She had crossed yet another border. No one, it seemed, was following.

They had carried her into Olga’s home in the early-morning darkness with a hood over her head. Olga was not permitted to glimpse her face. Any ministrations required by the captive were offered through the proxy of young Jozsef, who, like Sophie, had suffered the indignities of Anthrax 3A and thus possessed some inkling of how to remedy them. The first thing the boy was permitted to do was to remove the gag from her mouth; the second was to offer her coffee, the very
smell of which turned her sour stomach. He was sitting by her now, knees hunched up under his chin, eyes blazing darkly in his frail white face. He was staring at her, as though struggling to frame her meaning in words he could understand. Sophie was conscious of his gaze, but she kept her eyes fixed on a patch of damp that had stained Olga’s ceiling the color of weak tea.

“You should drink something,” Jozsef said at last. “Water, maybe?” He said it in German, which was the language his father preferred him to speak. It was also, by happenstance, the language of Sophie Payne’s childhood, and she answered him almost without thinking.

“Where is your mother?”

He was silent for the space of several heartbeats. Then, fearful, he hunched himself tighter and whispered, “Belgrade. I think she is still in Belgrade.”

“Does she know where you are?”

He did not answer.

Sophie reconsidered the patch of damp. The iron taste of blood was in her mouth and in her nostrils. Conversation was difficult. Her brain balked at the effort to concentrate. But the issue of Jozsef’s mother recurred, as though it might be important.

“Did you want to leave her?”

“He took me. In the night. He held my mother’s throat to the knife. He said terrible things to her, terrible. She was weeping. I could not even say good-bye.”

“How long ago?”

“I think it was before Christmas. But we never had Christmas, so I do not really know.”

“It’s still November, right? It must be. So you’ve been gone almost a year.”

Again, he did not answer. The knees stayed hunched
under his chin, as though all that kept him alive was the tight grip of hand on wrist.

“You should drink something,” he said again.

“A little water.”

Watching him sway and then recover as he stood up, Sophie remembered that Jozsef, too, had been injected with the bacillus. He would be feeling the same persistent ache in every joint, the pounding at the temples. And looking at the little-boy knees (he wore thin cotton shorts, no socks on his crabbed feet), she remembered Peter at eight, his bare feet filthy from running through the long grass around the Vineyard house, screen door banging in his wake. The sound of his voice, high-pitched as a bobwhite’s at dawn, calling across the meadows that ran down to the sea. The memory suffused her with peace and longing; longing not so much for Peter—who had become a singing wire, taut with strain and the life of his own ideas—but for the simple things Sophie had once held like water in the palm of her hand.

“Here,” Jozsef said. He placed the rim of the glass against her lips. She stared into the dark wells of his eyes. This child was as much a prisoner as she was. But no power and no government would bargain for his release.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Around ten o’clock in the morning.”

He tugged her upright, supporting her with an unexpectedly wiry strength. She drank the tepid water, too thirsty to argue with its taste, and felt the boy’s rapid pulse fluttering against her like a bird.

When she escaped Krucevic, Sophie decided, Jozsef must leave with her.

The bathroom door slammed open, the edge jamming
painfully against Sophie’s leg. She grunted and spurted water on Jozsef’s fingers.

“Mrs. Payne,” Michael said. “You’re awake.”

“Yes.”

Jozsef dabbed at her wet face with a wad of toilet paper.

Michael nodded toward the boy. “Is he treating you right?”

“What a question.”

He slid into the room. With Sophie prone on the floor and Jozsef hunkering by her, there was scarcely space for the man’s feet. Michael bent down and untied her hands; when she tried to bring them forward, every nerve ending from shoulder to wrist screamed in protest.

“Okay, Joe, your dad has some breakfast for Mrs. Payne.” Michael, too, spoke in German; it seemed to be the terrorists’ lingua franca. “Go get it for us, would you?”

The boy vanished through the doorway.

“I’ve been instructed to let you use the facilities,” Michael told Sophie. “If you scream or attempt to leave by the window”—this was a mere mail slot of a metal frame, incapable of accommodating a three-month-old baby—“you will be shot.”

“Fine,” she said wearily. “That sounds like heaven right now.”

“Good girl,” he muttered under his breath in English. “If you can joke about it, you’re still alive. And I will not let you die at this man’s hands, do you understand?”

Arrested, she stared at him. He stared back. She did not know what to read in his eyes.

Then he raised his handgun to shoulder height, muzzle pointed at the ceiling. “I’ll be just outside,” he said impersonally.

Sophie hobbled to the toilet. She felt suddenly stronger.

Mlan Krucevic had miscalculated. Or rather, he had found that circumstances were different from his expectations, and he was forced to improvise. He mistrusted improvisation. He had never known anyone—including himself-—to improvise without error. The key to his entire method of warfare was meticulous preparation. And so of course he had a fallback plan.

He had always loathed Slovakia. In the present instance he loathed it even more.

In Olga Teciak’s living room there was a laminated plywood coffee table, an olive green couch with worn upholstery, two lamps, and a carved chair that had probably belonged to Olga’s grandmother. There was also a very good television. Krucevic sat in front of the blank screen and considered his options. The Hungarian border was watched. He refused to risk a crossing by car. Therefore, he would have to find a plane. That meant a predawn trip to the Bratislava airport and a breakin at the private aircraft hangar. He hoped to God there
were
some private aircraft in this miserable country.

He searched his mind for the flaw, the unseen error that could destroy him. He detected nothing, and that in itself was unsettling. Perfection was against the laws of Nature; perfection’s appearance was always something to mistrust.

He glanced at his watch: 10:53 A.M. And at that instant his cellular phone trilled. He stiffened. The cell phone was solely for emergencies, the last extreme of need. And then only
he
would make the calls. No one was ever to call
him.

He could let it ring—could ignore the caller entirely. But what if disaster overcame him as a consequence? He picked up the phone on the fourth trill and said,
“Ja?”

“Mein Herr.
I am sorry to disturb you—I know it is against the rules—” Her voice was abject with terror.

Greta. He frowned at the phone. “Is something wrong?”

“A woman—a woman came. Not who she said she was. She took the virus.”

“What virus?”

“The vaccine,” she amended. “No. 413. For mumps. The one for humanitarian relief. She said that she was from the Health Ministry, she had a paper, she was so very angry—oh, Herr Krucevic, I am so terribly sorry—”

“No names!” he barked, more loudly than he had intended. “No names,” he repeated. “Who was she?”

“She did not say.”

“And you
allowed
her to take the vaccine?”

“She was from the Health Ministry,” Greta bleated pathetically. “She signed her initials to the dock manifest. I cannot make them out. And then the health minister, Herr Schuler, arrived, and he said it must be a joke. A joke!”

She sounded as though she was nearly peeing with terror, on the verge of tears.
You stupid cow
, he cursed her silently.
You hopeless and sodden piece of human shit.
Gently now, gently, before she fainted.

“What did this woman look like?”

“Dark. Black hair, black eyes, black clothes. She spoke with an accent like—”

She had been about to say,
like yours.

“—Like someone from your country.”

“Anything else?”

“A white scarf. Around her neck.”

Anger flared like bile and flooded his mouth.
alba! Fucking mother of a whore. She—! She had taken it! Then by the bloody cross of King Tomisav, I will find her. And when I do, I will slit her throat as a traitor and a Serb.

“What am I to do?” Greta begged in a whisper.

She was already stupid, but fear would make her dangerous. He must give her something to do, a purpose, before she destroyed them all. Krucevic’s mind leapt forward, considered and discarded options. “Close the office and get to Budapest,” he told her. “I have a job only you can manage.”

“I shall not fail you,
mein Herr
.” She was sickening in her gratitude. He could do with her what he chose. He cut the connection.

His enemies were trying to destroy him. But God was on his side. He had discovered the treachery before it was too late. If only he were in Budapest now! But all movement was impossible before dark. He had roughly one hundred kilometers to travel—three hours by road, twenty minutes by air—and time was slipping through his fingers. He must be patient. He must not allow rage to make him careless.

A white scarf around her neck.

The error of improvisation.

Krucevic cursed the Czech border guards, cursed Slovakia, cursed Vaclav Slivik and all the women he had ever known. He cursed Olga Teciak with particular virulence. She was the most available object of his hatred.

Olga was a stranger. He distrusted her simply because she was unknown and because she was a woman. She was huddled now in her bedroom with her young daughter cradled in a blanket. Both of them were terrified. Olga had probably figured out who Sophie Payne was; it was no secret any longer that the American Vice
President had been kidnapped. Word had gotten out, by newspaper and television broadcast. He had been a fool to follow Vaclav’s advice. Teciak could not possibly be trusted.

He required some sort of insurance.

“Mlan,” Michael said behind him. “Mrs. Payne is awake and eating.”

It was one of Krucevic’s rules that they refer to the woman with courtesy. Courtesy was another form of cruelty. He dismissed his anger, the shadow of fear, and moved on to the next step.

“Good,” he said briskly. “She’ll need her strength. It’s time to take a picture for the President.”