The Cutout (29 page)

Fritz Voekl?

“And how many more children will you kill?” For an instant, she expected him to hang up. Nothing but the sluice of water pouring over the damned.

“Her mother was already dead,” he told her. “And Annicka could describe Krucevic if anyone asked. He could not allow her to live.”

“Then let him pull the fucking trigger.” “It was me or Otto. I couldn’t put Annicka into Otto’s hands.”

“Eric, tell me where you are.”

“Get out of this, Mad Dog. While you still can.”

“Eric—”

But he was gone.

After that, she didn’t pretend to sleep. She turned on all the lights, even the ones in the bathroom, and sat propped in bed with the covers pulled up to her armpits, shivering uncontrollably.

How many people had Eric murdered? Not terrorists, whom she could dismiss as so many bodies in a war—but how many men and women? How many little girls? She’d thought of the dead in Pariser Platz as blood on Mlan Krucevic’s hands, not her husband’s. She knew now that she had been comforting herself with a lie.

She reached for the phone at her bedside and punched in an Agency number. He answered on the first ring.

She imagined him sitting there, silk tie loosened, hand to his salt-and-pepper brow. There would be beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, the result of malaria endemic in his bloodstream. It would be dinnertime in Virginia. He’d be thinking of Kentucky bourbon, neat. She closed her eyes in relief.

“Hey, Scottie.”

“Caroline.” A glance at his Rolex, swiftly calculating the time difference.

“I just heard from our fair-haired boy.”

“How?” He was instantly alert.

“Phone call.”

“Change your hotel, Carrie, and watch your back. Did you get his location?”

“Are you kidding? He wasn’t calling on business. He’d just killed a child and needed to justify it.”

“If he calls back—”

“Scottie,”
she interrupted, as though he couldn’t possibly have understood the terrible thing she had just said. “Scottie, have you ever killed anyone?”

“Aside from Athens, I’ve never even carried a gun. Caroline, did you ask him how our missing friend was doing? Did he say anything that might help us find her?”

“No. He shot the breeze and told me to go home.”

There was a creak as Scottie shifted in his desk chair. “He gave you nothing.”

“Squat,” Caroline agreed. “But he’ll make contact again. He’ll have to. I’ll make myself a nuisance.”

“The call was a warning, Caroline. Your next contact could be a bullet in the brain.”

“Scottie,” she cried. “How did this man we both love turn out to be someone we never even knew? Can you tell me that? Have you got a
clue?”

“Carrie, remember the open line,” Scottie urged her softly.

She drew a shuddering breath and raked her fingers through her hair.

“This isn’t your fault,” he said. “It’s not my fault. Neither of us can fix it. So concentrate on what you
can
fix. Okay?”

“It’s part of the training,” she said through her teeth. “You tell these guys that working for the enemy is the ultimate betrayal—of their friends, their country, themselves. And at the same time, their
job
is to convince
other
people to do exactly that: to sell out everything that matters.”

“The line, Caroline,” Scottie repeated.

“Who can live with that kind of paradox? No wonder people go nuts.”

“It’s the nature of the game.” His reproof was like a slap. “Do as we say, not as we do. Cynics handle it best—or idealists. People who can live with an inherent contradiction. The others quit after their second tours. Or drink heavily and stay.”

“So which was our fair-haired boy? Cynic? Or idealist?”

“He’s out there murdering children, Caroline.”

The truth, inexorable. But she tried one last time.

“Let’s say he wants the Big Man. And all the marbles. To do that, he’d have to close his eyes to a certain amount of evil. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that he was evil
himself
, would it?”

“The ends justify the means? I have heard that sentiment so many times in my life, Caroline, and it still sounds infinitely attractive. And false. We saw the means in Berlin two days ago. No ends justify so much spilling of blood.”

Now who had forgotten the open line?

“He
wants
you to feel sorry for him. He’ll use that against you.
He has no right
, Carrie. He cut you out of his life, remember? He cut both of us out. And I for one don’t give a shit about his reasons.”

But Caroline
did.
Caroline wanted to know
why
, more than anything in the world. As though knowing the reasons for deception and betrayal might negate the horror of what had happened, might put her life back into the neat little box in which she had lived. Bitterness flooded her mouth.

“Are you telling me to avoid all contact with him?”

“Have all the contact you like. Do drinks. Do dinner. Take a walk among the autumn leaves. But if our golden boy refuses to give up the goods—our missing friend, in perfect condition—then shut him down, Caroline. Everything else is just crap. Understood?”

All too well.

“Now get some sleep.”

“Thanks, Scottie,” she told the dead line. Then she cradled the receiver and sank back against her pillows. Somewhere in Central Europe, Eric was stepping out of a shower. Cynic or idealist? Did the answer matter anymore?

She thrust back the covers. To find Sophie Payne, she would first have to find Eric. And if luck was with her, Mahmoud Sharif would know exactly where he was.

TWO
Berlin, 7:30
A.M.

C
AROLINE WORE BLACK KNIT LEGGINGS
and a black tunic for the Palestinian bomb maker. A black swing coat that skimmed above her knees. Black cashmere gloves and a red beret perched on her bobbed dark hair. The hair was a wig and it went with her backstopped identity, the passport in the name of Jane Hathaway she had brought from Langley She wore red lipstick to match the beret, and a pair of black Chanel sunglasses.

Eric’s voice murmured with the sound of tap water in her ear, relentless, caressing, the voice of conscience and nightmare. All that he had said looped endlessly in her mind, a refrain she could not banish. He stood behind her as she drew on her clothes; he lifted her hair from the nape of her neck. She moved now under the glare of his gaze—and wondered briefly who had set the trap for whom.

He called me in the night. He knows where I am. Because Sharif already got to him? Because he saw my face on a newscaster’s screen? Eric. That little girl. Jesus, Eric.

Her fingers trembled as she applied her makeup; trembled with anger and longing. At this rate, she’d jump sky-high when Sharif tapped on her shoulder.

She briefly considered carrying her snub-nosed Walther TPH in a thigh holster concealed by the swing coat, then rejected the idea. Palestinian bomb makers might consent to meet with the anxious cousin of an underworld acquaintance, but they would be certain to search her thoroughly first. Jane Hathaway spent her days banking in London; she was unlikely to carry a piece with her on holiday.

The concierge at the front desk looked at her blankly as she passed. Caroline pushed jauntily through the revolving door, as though she had nothing more than shopping on her mind.

She purchased the
Herald Tribune
at a sidewalk kiosk and scanned the headlines as she walked. Sophie Payne had not been found. The U-Bahn in Potsdamer Platz was tempting—she could read as she rode—but the distance was short and the morning air, the
Berliner luft, a
gift to the sleep-deprived. She strode east along Leipzigerstrasse and then north along Grunerstrasse, marveling at the new life springing up amid the careworn avenues of the Mitte district. And rising before her as she walked, more alien with every step, was the Communist television tower’s steel needle, like a hypodermic piercing the sky.
A hypodermic.
Everything reminded her of Sophie Payne.

Alexanderplatz, where Prussian and Russian troops had once drilled to defeat Napoleon; where the streetcar lines of the Bismarck era converged in raucous confusion; where prostitutes and lorry drivers and clerks convened in a hundred different bars, until the Allied bombs of 1943 leveled the square and, two years later, the Soviets marched in to “liberate” the city. It was a
vast and chilly emptiness still, several football fields in size. Grunerstrasse plunged beneath it, to emerge on the other side as Neue Königstrasse; there were very few approaches by car. He would have to walk up to her, or drive by to the northeast, on Karl-Marx-Allee. She took up a position at the television tower’s base, facing the Allee, and proceeded to study her newspaper. It was hard on eight o’clock.

Standing there in the middle of the drab morning, Caroline fought back a persistent sense of the ridiculous. If Mahmoud Sharif could even remember the name of Michael O’Shaughnessy from a telephone call made months before, he was unlikely to risk his neck because of it. Why drive out early in the morning for the sake of a woman he had never seen? She turned over the front section of the
Herald Tribune
(the same edition Mlan Krucevic had placed under Sophie Payne’s chin the previous day) and found a picture of herself, snapped in Pariser Platz by an enterprising news photographer. The Volksturm guard she had confronted was holding his truncheon high, and Caroline’s mouth was open in a scream. She stared at the image, fascinated. She had never seen herself in newsprint before. Was it this, rather than the television footage, that had triggered Eric’s phone call?

At the thought of him, her mind winced and leapt away.

A dirty white Trabant—a pitiful putt-putt the size of a golf cart—drove slowly past on Karl-Marx-Allee. Caroline’s eyes flicked up, considered it, then looked down at her paper. It was for Sharif to broach the question.

Eight-fourteen. More cars passed. She’d read the news that mattered, and was killing time with feature stories. The white Trabant again, traveling in the opposite
direction. Only one person behind the wheel, too distant to be clearly seen.

“I think that perhaps you are Ms. Jane Hathaway,” said a quiet voice at her shoulder.

Caroline did not jump. She folded her newspaper deliberately and tucked it under her arm.

He was a compact and neat person in a black leather jacket and tweed pants. Dark skin, eyes the color of espresso, black brows and mustache.

“I am,” she said. “Are you Mahmoud Sharif?”

“Please come with me,” he said by way of answer.

When she hesitated, a second man materialized behind her. He placed a persuasive hand on her elbow.

“Very well,” she said coolly, and went without a backward glance.

They bundled her into a steel gray Mercedes, Caroline in the middle of the backseat with a man on either side. A third man drove. She felt a moment of panic, a wave of claustrophobia. She subdued it with effort. It would not do to betray a fit of nerves. She was merely a friend’s cousin.

The first man who had approached her drew a length of white cloth from his pocket.

“It is not permitted to see where you are going. I must beg to cover your eyes.”

If they were kidnapping her, Caroline thought, they would hardly have been so polite. They would have shoved a wad of cotton in her mouth and forced her head down to her knees—if they hadn’t stowed her in the trunk first.

She removed her sunglasses and placed them in her purse. Then she inclined her beret toward her escort, praying that
her wig was secure. The hands came up behind her head, a ceremonial gesture. And he covered her eyes.

At first they drove at what seemed a normal pace, darting in and out of Berlin traffic with the occasional pause for a right or left turn. Then Caroline heard a few words flung back from the front seat, something brief and explosive in Arabic. The driver was swearing. Her companion’s fingers tightened on her arm.