Francine Mathews - The Cutout

She swallows, nods.

“Trust the line. Trust me.”

“Just let me jump by myself.”

“It's a little like sex,” he continues, in the same tone. “Some of us need a push now and then. To get over the edge.”

She pivots and stares at him, amazed at his recklessness; but his expression is perfectly neutral. Only a watchfulness in the blue eyes, a shrewd calculation of her response. She glances away, feels the heat flood her face.

She is exactly twenty-five years old. Eric is maybe thirty, a lean and agile man she barely knows. He belongs to the Agency's Special Activities Service, SAS, a paramilitary force designed to be sent at a moment's notice anywhere in the world. He has ruled Caroline's life for the past month, demanding what she once thought impossible. And for Eric, she has tried to do it. She has navigated alone across ten thousand acres, dodging armed Chinooks hunting her by air; she has rappelled off a helicopter skid with an M-16 strapped to her back. The desire for his respect, his grudging acceptance of a woman in a man's world, is like a junkie's need for a drug.

He has begun to invade her dreams with a desire so complete that she awakens wet and shaking in the predawn darkness, crying out for his touch. Sleep for Caroline has become both seduction and purgatory. She will return soon to Langley. Eric will stay in deepest Tidewater. It is unlikely she will ever see him again. The vital thing, the essential thing, is never to let him know the extent of his power. She crouches once more in the tower doorway, knees bent, eyes fixed on the line.

“Give me the count.”

“One, two—” And then she feels his hand shove her ruthlessly off the platform, and she is sailing down the line with her mouth open in a full-throttled yell, half terror, half outrage, the anger surging up with the force of the ground. She rolls and tumbles. Tears off the harness. And turns to shout up at him.

“You asshole! You pushed me!”

But he is already urging the next trainee to jump.

So much, Caroline thinks, for trust.

She begins to feel him watching her, blue stare averted as soon as she looks at him. In the base club he bends low over a pool cue, blond hair grazing his brow.

The click of the balls, the crowing as a shot goes home — they resonate through the clamor of voices like bullets singing across an empty range. He ignores her deliberately, flirts with her friends, waits to see if she has noticed. In the manner of men who toy with desire, afraid of what they want.

Caroline begins to hate him. When she speaks to Eric at all, it is with something like contempt.

The last evening of her paramilitary training, the class holds a farewell dinner. Caroline endures the speeches, the increasing inebriation, only so long.

Then she slips outside to walk the trail along the river, alone in the cooling dark. She considers leaving early, a drive north in silence. Preferable to predawn hangovers and awkward farewells.

There is a footfall behind her, noiseless as a cougar's. A sigh that might be the wind stirs last year's cattails, although the night is windless. She stops short, keenly aware of her isolation, sensing the menace of a predator. To the right, the densest woods. To the left, the blackest water. Somewhere ahead, the Yorktown Bridge twinkles, remote as Brooklyn. A scream would be lost here; to run is suicidal. And she has been trained, after all, in self-defense. She has been taught to kill with a single sharp jab of her cupped hand to the windpipe, although even now she does not believe it.

She turns. Sees the watchful blue eyes, un averted for the first time. He is poised to spring or run, she is uncertain which. “You,” she says.

He takes a step toward her. She retreats, and halts him in his tracks.

“I know it seems safe,” he says.

“The safest place in the world. Guards at the gate and grenade launchers in every corner. But you shouldn't walk alone in the dark by the river.”

“I have never wanted very much to be safe.”

“No.” A flash of teeth in the darkness.

“It's a type of cowardice in your book. You look for risk instead. Why is that, Caroline?”

That's not who I am , she thinks. That's what you've made me.

“You don't join the CIA for job security, Eric.”

“No. You join to sit at a desk and analyze cables all day. To write up your opinions as fact and generate more reports. A numbing dose of computer screens and low-level briefings, day in and day out. The life of reason. Is that what you want, Caroline?”

Reason is safe , she wants to say; reason can't cut the heart out of your bod what you fear, what you pretend and what you hide .

“I know the depth of your strength and your doubt. I even know what you think of me, Caroline.”

She wants to run, she wants to sink down into the grass and take him deep inside her, she wants never to see him again.

The urgency of his mouth is a kind of whip. She feels his hand trace the flesh of her inner thigh, find the heat at its core — and then he releases her so abruptly she nearly falls. In the sudden quiet there is only his breathing, the sound of river water slipping through the weeds. She considers telling him to go to hell. But nothing he has said — nothing he knows — is untrue. And he is staring at her as though she could decide his life with a word.

“What does this have to do with me?” she repeats.

“You're the one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything. You're what I need, Caroline. And I've never needed much.”

She closes her eyes, takes a shuddering breath.

“Let's leave tonight,” she says.

And steps off some inner tower.

The one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything.

Caroline paces the bathroom floor and considers her options. Had Eric left her behind deliberately in Frankfurt airport, ignorant and faithful and trusting and stupid, while he set off to remake the world? Had she been his ultimate cover, the grieving widow no one would blame? Or was today's bomb at the Brandenburg an impossible accident, his face in a helicopter a bizarre coincidence, that defied her attempts at rational explanation?

What was she supposed to believe, exactly, in this particular hell?

Belief, like trust, isn't rational , she thought. Belief is blind, a wash of black in a room full of light, a breath suspended at the end of a diving board.

She had loved Eric, but she never trusted him with much. There were parts of his life forever closed to her, regions of his soul she could not navigate. She had gone with her gut when she married him, ignored the advice of family and friends, giddy with all she was not considering.

But the High Priestess of Reason is not easily silenced. Voices had persisted in Caroline's brain. There were the questions she asked, and answers he tried to give; terms they negotiated like peacemakers at parley.

Until the final silence of the Frankfurt airport, and the final explosion.

What are you thinking? Eric asks.

His body is perfectly still in the cratered grass. All around them the Virginia night is thick with pine pollen, with midges, with the musky smell of spent sex; but his skin, where her fingertip traces a rib, is marble cool. Stillness is one of his talents. He keeps the world at bay, he opts out of action, he retreats inside his head where the best secrets always are. Six months at the Farm, in case officer training. And so it begins , Caroline thinks — the life he cannot share . He has traded his fatigues for chinos and oxford cloth, in the classroom he rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie, he looks like a wolf sleeping by a primeval fire, partly tamed but never domesticated. What do they have to teach him, really, these retired CO's pensioned off into training? Six months, and he knows what he has always known: how to watch without being seen.