The Cutout (61 page)

“But don’t drop that kid smack in the middle of Fritz Voekl’s camp,” Caroline insisted. “He deserves a break. Sophie Payne would have wanted that much—” She broke off and bit hard at her lip.

“Fritz Voekl shot himself two hours ago.”

Caroline’s eyes widened fractionally. Then surprise gave way swiftly to calculation, so that Shephard might almost have believed they were back in Berlin, briefing Ambrose Dalton. “Who took over? His deputy party chief, or—”

The corners of Shephard’s mouth twitched. Her case could not be that desperate if she was already analyzing.

“Get some sleep, Carrie,” he ordered. “I’ll talk to the ambassador about Jozsef Krucevic.”

“Talk to the BKA,” Caroline ordered, “then come back and tell me who’s running Germany. I want to know!”

“But you don’t
need
to know, Mad Dog,” he said. “Not yet.”

The body of the Vice President of the United States was returned to Washington two days later. Jozsef Krucevic accompanied his lady on the plane, a dirty white rabbit’s foot clutched tightly in his hand.

Jack Bigelow and an honor guard were waiting on the tarmac. So were the press crews of thirty-four nations and a crowd of nearly a thousand people, held back by a phalanx of helmeted police. The coffin was draped in the American flag; the mood was solemn. Peter Payne laid his cheek on Sophie’s casket before fifty million television viewers, then paced slowly behind the honor guard to the waiting hearse.

Jack Bigelow put his arm around the young man’s shoulders and said a few words the microphones could not catch. Something, probably, about sacrifice and sorrow. Peter Payne nodded and extended his hand.

Later, the pundits would say a torch of some kind had been passed.

But before all this occurred—before the motorcade to Arlington and the
Newsweek
cover of Caroline Carmichael, before the presidential letter of appreciation and the Bronze Intelligence Star—there was a different sort of homecoming, in a freight hangar at Washington Dulles, and Scottie Sorensen was the only person there.

He stood with his hands in his pockets while they wheeled the coffin forward on a gurney, a medical examiner at his side.

“Are you ready, sir?” the attendant asked him. Sorensen nodded, his expression debonair as always. He was not required to make a formal identification of the body. It would probably be unpleasant. There had, after all, been an explosion. But Scottie thought he might sleep better, nights, if he knew for certain that Eric Carmichael was dead. Eric had possessed too many secrets.

They lifted open the casket’s cover. Scottie stared down at the blond hair, the corpse riddled with shrapnel.
Most of the facial features were missing. He studied one hand and an arm. Ugly red weals crisscrossed the wrist. Eric had, after all, been tortured; but these scars were old. These scars had healed years before. They were the marks of a razor blade inexpertly applied by a man who hadn’t really wanted to die.

He took a step backward. He motioned that the casket should be closed. He drew a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it delicately against his nose.

“Can you identify this man as Michael O’Shaughnessy?” the medical examiner asked.

Scottie hesitated. There were so many possible answers.

“His name is Antonio Fioretto,” he said at last. “An Italian national, and a terrorist.”

And for a wild instant, he almost laughed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FRANCINE MATHEWS
spent four years as an intelligence analyst for the CIA, where she was trained in Operations and served a brief stint in the Counterterrorism Center assisting the investigation into the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The author of ten previous novels, she lives and writes in Colorado, where she is at work on her next thriller,
The Secret Agent.

Visit Francine Mathews’s website at
www.francinemathews.com
.

If you enjoyed Francine Mathews’s
THE CUTOUT,
you won’t want to miss her next tantalizing novel
of international intrigue and suspense,
THE SECRET AGENT.

Look for THE SECRET AGENT in hardcover at
your favorite bookseller’s in Summer 2002.

And turn the page for an exciting preview of
THE
SECRET AGENT
by
Francine Mathews

Coming soon in hardcover!

R
OSE
C
OTTAGE
, M
ARCH
26, 1967

H
E HAD NEVER BEEN A MAN
who minded the heat. In Bangkok he disdained air conditioners and forced his houseboy to cook nightly over a charcoal brazier, the flames flickering like knives on the man’s burnished skin. By day he slipped through the humid, sweltering streets when the sun was strongest, silk suit tailored close to his lean frame. His face was deeply tanned from sitting by the pool at the Royal Sports Club, his brow furrowed from staring into the light.

They called him many things in Bangkok: the Silk King, the Boss, the Quiet American. The braver ones called him Spy and Devil, and he admired their courage and honored their names in turn. He fashioned a life from myths and lies over the course of twenty years; he bought and sold entire villages, entertained everyone who stumbled into Southeast Asia, advised ambassadors and court potentates, dried the tears of women desperate for love. They had always whispered behind his back
in Bangkok and the names they called him were proxies for one word:
Power.
He relished this about Siam the way he loved the stench of the klongs and the liquid snatch of raw silk through his fingers: Siam was ruthless, Siam cared for no man not born of the River of Kings, Siam bowed only to secrets and the power secrets held.

He was a man who could buy anything with money; but secrets were traded in blood and that was why he cherished them.

This afternoon, alone in the blessed quiet that is granted to those who remain alert while the rest of the household is napping, he sat on the terrace and turned a cigarette in his restless fingers. His doctor insisted that he quit smoking—but he was past sixty now and far beyond a human caution. He had lost too much in recent days to give up anything by choice.

The sun was fitful and the air was chill, six thousand feet above the Malaysian coast. He shivered slightly, closed his eyes, and thought of monsoons—of moist warmth, of stones streaming with fragrance. Of skin wet and shining in the garden torchlight, her head rising like a serpent’s from the filthy water of the klong—

He discarded the cigarette in a burning arc.

He was alone at last after the fuss and clatter of Easter morning, the service at the Anglican church in Tanah Rata, the picnic later on a distant hillside. He knew that his urgency had disconcerted them—the way he hustled them through the meal, packing up the plates and glasses as soon as the last morsel was consumed, shooing them back to the car without explanation. It was a sign of advancing age, this lack of courtesy; a slip in tradecraft. He was stripped raw with tension, his ears preternaturally alert, a fine beading of sweat at the hairline—he, who had never minded the heat.

Tradecraft had got him this far. It would take him no farther.

He glanced at his watch. Time to rise and push back
the chair, time to set off purposefully down the gravel drive toward a man he had not seen in years and might be forgiven for failing to recognize. It was his last possible chance at a meeting. He had cased the route earlier in the day, refusing the car that would have conveyed him to church, joining the others at the foot of the road that wound past the golf course. He would take nothing with him now but the briefcase brought from Bangkok—the briefcase, and every mortal lust or fear that had propelled him through two decades of life in Asia.

His eyes narrowed in the failing light. The road was deserted, the whole world asleep. He set off.

Later, they would admit that they heard him go. His footsteps, even in their dreaming ears, could be those of only one man. The girl he had brought with him from Bangkok turned restlessly in her sleep, arm lifted in a gesture akin to dancing. Her lips might have formed his name. She slept on.

Part I
MAX

T
HE ORIENTAL HOTEL
in the heart of Bangkok is a name to conjure history. It recalls a time when tourists were travelers, when steamer trunks came by long-tail boat up the Chao Phraya, the River of Kings; when stoic male writers and legends of the Asian bush crawled out of the jungle to swap stories in the Bamboo Bar. Somerset Maugham almost died of fever there, in the nineteen-twenties, and Joseph Conrad tossed sleepless on a sweat-soaked cot; Hemingway ought to have seduced a legion of hard-drinking women behind the swinging shuttered doors, but apparently never did. During the Second World War the natives of Bangkok edged warily around the place, which had become an object of fear under the Japanese; and when Thailand capitulated to the Allies, the Oriental turned hostel for U.S. and British officers.

They must have felt right at home, those Allied soldiers, between the French doors and the lawns running down to the swollen brown river. Orchids bloomed as profusely as English violets at the foot of the towering palms, and the whistles of the boatmen flew over the water like lark song. Under the drift of electric fans they
drank deep of gin and Pimm’s, and composed letters to women they hadn’t seen in years. They imagined themselves conquerors, without having fired a shot.

This is the trick of Thailand, and of the Oriental Hotel: to make a guest feel at home without ever implying he is anything but a guest. But like all great hotels, the Oriental is a stage for public drama: it demands a decent performance from the people who walk through its doors. The right to enter history comes at considerable cost, and style is the preferred form of currency. Shorts and backpacks— those hallmarks of the indigent tourist desperate for an hour of quiet and air conditioning—are strictly forbidden in the main lobby of the Oriental.

Stefani Fogg had stayed at the hotel before. She had read the dress-code notice etched politely near the revolving main door. But she was the sort of woman who rarely apologized, particularly to the hired help. And so this morning she hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder and swung her long, bare legs out of the taxi.

“Welcome back to the Oriental, Ms. Fogg,” the doorman said, and bowed low over his steepled hands.

She took the spray of jasmine he offered her and raised it to her face. The scent was elusive—the essence of untimely death. She nodded to the doorman, paid off the taxi, and stalked inside.

She may have been conscious of the eyes that followed her as she crossed the spotless carpet. If so, she ignored them. She ignored the soaring windows, the comfortable chairs swathed in silk, the towering arrangements of lilies, the four different employees who bowed in succession as she passed. She ignored the powerfully built man with the gleaming black hair, who sedulously scanned his newspaper at a desk opposite the magazine kiosk, although he was the only person in the room pretending disinterest and thus ought to have been alarming. Stefani was too tired to care. The rigid set of her shoulders and the thin line of her mouth
screamed exhaustion. During the past week she had slept badly and in the previous twenty-seven hours, not at all.