Francine Mathews - The Cutout

Bigelow frowned.

“Neo-Nazis, right? The ones you think assassinated Schroeder?”

“We suspect they murdered Schroeder because he championed NATO air strikes against Belgrade. Mrs. Payne might very well have been next on their list.”

The President stretched painfully. A ruptured disk in his lower vertebrae caused chronic back pain.

“The guy who runs that organization is a war criminal.”

“Mian Krucevic. A Croat biologist. We believe he's operating out of Germany. Here's his bio.”

Bigelow reached for his reading glasses and scanned the document swiftly. Then he thrust it at Matthew Finch.

“I'll have to ask my pal Fritz why he isn't cutting the ground from under this joker's feet.”

“Too much money in pharmaceuticals,” Matthew Finch murmured.

“The German police have tried to snare Krucevic for years,” Dare said, “but 30 April is an organization that leaves few tracks. Rather like our own right-wing militia groups.”

“Who's funding them? Or is this nut case an independent operator?”

“Krucevic never lacks for funds,” Dare told Bigelow. “He shifts money through a variety of numbered Swiss accounts. We think he channels most of it through a front company in Berlin called VaccuGen. It produces and exports legitimate livestock vaccines, although there is strong evidence to suggest it also does a healthy trade in illegal biological agents. Krucevic has a reputation in the gray arms world for concocting deadly bugs. I've placed the company on the NSA's target list. We should have everything that goes in or out of the place fairly soon.”

“Do you have anybody inside?”

She repressed a sharp breath, although Bigelow's question seemed innocent enough.

“Not really, but we've been targeting them for some time.”

Clayton Phillips glanced up from his doodling. He was a kind-looking grandfather of a man, despite the rows of brass gleaming on his uniform. He had raised three girls himself and had a soft spot for the Vice President. Dare detected the marks of strain around the general's eyes; he was chafing at inactivity, at his own sense of uselessness. The word target, however, had caught his attention.

“Could we send in some cruise missiles against their operational base?”

“We'd have to locate it first,” Dare answered.

“Krucevic has a genius for self-protection. His identity and movements are so closely held, we've never even seen a picture of him.”

Matthew Finch fluttered the bio.

“This is picture enough. Krucevic is ruthless, he's efficient, and he's got no compunction about butchering Germans. He's nuts. But why snatch Sophie Payne? If revenge was the point, why not just shoot her in the square?”

“Then we should expect a demand,” the President said sharply. “Krucevic's agenda for Sophie's release. Tit for tat. So what exactly will this asshole want?”

“A Europe cleansed of the non-Aryan races,” Dare replied. “And that, Mr. President, you will never give him.”

There was silence as everyone in the room considered the implications of what she had said. “They killed Nell Forsyte,” Bigelow said quietly. “Shot her in the head. It would take that a direct hit to stop Nell in her tracks. She had a four-year-old daughter.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. President.” Dare folded her hands over her briefing book. The topaz winked and was swiftly covered.

“For Ms. Forsyte and all the others.”

“Mr. President?”

Maybelle Williams, his executive secretary, peered apprehensively around the Oval Office door.

Bigelow folded his reading glasses and smiled at her as chough nothing really bad could ever happen.

“Yes, darling'?”

“The Situation Room just called. Embassy Prague has got a videotape of the Vice President.”

The man Sophie thought was Michael sliced the bonds at her ankles and wrists and hauled her down a corridor to the bathroom. Windowless, like everything in the subterranean compound, it offered no chance for escape. Michael stood in the doorway with a gun poised while she used the toilet. She tried to ignore him, knowing that Krucevic would use this sort of humiliation to wear her down. When at last she stole a look at Michael, she detected only boredom.

He threw a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and some socks at her feet.

“Put those on.”

“Why?”

“Because your clothes are starting to stink.”

She turned her back and stripped off her ruined suit. A red line across her thighs showed where Krucevic had pulled the skirt taut, and a dark blot like the map of Europe stained the fabric. Nell's blood.

Wordlessly, Michael handed her a comb.

For the first time in that extraordinary day, Sophie felt an overwhelming desire to cry. Her hands were shaking.

She dragged the comb through her short black hair and splashed water on her cheeks. Then she dried herself with the front of her sweatshirt, a technique recalled from Adirondack camp days. There was no mirror in the room; perhaps they were afraid she would smash the glass and cut them all to pieces.

She probably looked like shit anyway.

“What in God's name are you doing here? You're American, aren't you?”

The look on his face was half amusement, half contempt.

“I have orders to beat you if you try to talk to me, Mrs. Payne,” he answered in German. “We all do. Don't push your luck.”

He seized her by the arm and pulled her along the passageway, back to the room she already thought of as prison. Halogen lights now hung from the ceiling's steel beams; they flooded Mian Krucevic's face and that of the cherubic Vaclav, who held a video camera. Beyond him stood a gurney.

“Ah, Mrs. Payne. A vision in black.” Krucevics mood had altered subtly, she noticed; he seemed in the grip of subdued excitement, his movements jerky and tense. He nodded to Otto.

“The gurney.”

Before she had time to react, Otto seized Sophie in a fireman's carry and dumped her unceremoniously on the stretcher. She lunged upward. But like young Jozsef, she lost. Otto snapped a belt over wrist and ankle, immediately restraining her.

She thought of the needle, the desperate child, and felt a sickness in the pit of her stomach.

“Is this really necessary? I'm not likely to kick you again.”

“No,” Krucevic said slowly as he settled a newspaper next to her right ear, “I don't think you are. Vaclav?”

He stepped toward them, video camera dangling in one hand.

“Start with a close-up of Mrs. Payne's face, will you? Focus on the newspaper's date. Then pan back until they can see how she's lying. On no account are you to focus on me.”

Strapped down and stripped of her elegant suiting, Sophie was no longer a person to Krucevic. She had become the merest prop, a faceless bundle in black sweats.

She struggled uselessly against the gurney straps, then realized she only looked weaker. As though she was afraid. Panicking. How to seize control of the situation?

She refused to admit that control was completely beyond her. Refusal might sustain her for several days if she survived the next few minutes.

The camera lens came within a foot of her face. If this tape was going anywhere near the United States if there was a chance that Peter might see it she had a duty to remain calm.

“Good evening, Mr. President.” Krucevic's voice came from somewhere in the darkness beyond the floodlights. “Let us state for the record that we have in our keeping one Sophie Friedman Payne, Vice President of the United States and apostate Jew. It is Tuesday, November ninth, somewhere in Central Europe. Observe the copy of the International Herald Tribune you see on your screen; it bears today's date. We are the 30 April Organization, and as Mrs. Payne is familiar with us, I must assume we need no introduction.”