Francine Mathews - The Cutout

She paused at the door, expecting the inevitable — the bruising flight of one of her colleagues toward the hallway connecting the New Headquarters Building with the Old — and was rewarded with a sharp jolt in the rib cage as Sandy Courts careened past her.

“Sorry,” he muttered. And never looked up from the cable he was reading.

Sandy was a small, fussy, white-haired man with a correct British accent. His wire-rimmed spectacles were clouded with thumbprints. He disapproved of Caroline — Sandy disapproved of all young people on principle, and particularly female ones — and yet she regarded him with affection. He was a character straight out of George Smiley's Circus. And he knew everything there was to know about Beirut and Lebanon. If, while crossing the street in his distracted fashion, Sandy Coutts were to be hit by a bus one day, the collective memory of Middle East analysis would be wiped out in an instant.

Where partitions divided the room, a particular branch held sway: the Hizballah people, the Bin Laden people, the ones who followed the PFLP-GC. Caroline turned right on Bin Laden Lane and made her way to Via Krucevic. It was the place she called home in the CTC — the branch that watched the 30 April Organization. Its members were an elusive band of international killers — madmen, probably; psychotics and sadists and all-around bad boys, certainly — but disciplined and deadly. Their agenda was simple. They wanted a Europe cleansed of the non-Aryan races; they waged terror in order to achieve it.

Thirty months earlier, they had blown up Eric's plane.

“Hey, Mad Dog.” Cuddy Wilmot was already standing by Caroline's desk. He was one of the few people allowed to call her that — the name Eric had given her after a reckless display of courage during her paramilitary training — but then, Cuddy had been Eric's friend. Now he was Caroline's. He was also her branch chief.

“The afternoon briefing at State is canceled,” he told her.

“Scottie's called a staff meeting for nine A.M.”

“Any news of the Veep? What hospital she's in?”

Something about Cuddy's face — the half-apologetic way he shoved the bridge of his glasses upward with one finger — warned Caroline that bad news was coming.

Cuddy never apologized.

“Have you seen the footage?” he asked.

“Didn't have time.” She glanced at a television monitor suspended from the ceiling; a few people were gathered in a tight knot under it. She started to walk toward Scottie Sorenson, the Center's director, but Cuddy grabbed her elbow.

“Come into my office.”

They serpentined through the huddle of desks, past fat piles of paper balancing rotary fans and coffee mugs tattooed with lipstick, past bookshelves bulging with academic journals and videotapes and yellowing scraps of newsprint. Other than the people watching the news, everybody in the place was bent over their terminals, intent on scanning the traffic that had been dumped overnight. Searching for the spoor that presaged a terrorist kill — the threat phoned in to an embassy, the report of a suspicious briefcase — anything that might scream culpability in the Berlin bombing.

“What is it?” she asked Cuddy, feeling her heart accelerate.

He closed his office door behind her. Not that it mattered; the walls were made of glass.

“I think you ought to see this in what passes for privacy.” He bent over the VCR and stabbed at a button.

“Why?”

He didn't answer. Everything about Cuddy — the sleeves of his yellow oxford cloth shirt rolled up to the elbows, the ugly polyester tie he kept in a desk drawer and knotted around his neck as an afterthought — was as it should be. But in the small room Caroline could feel his tension humming.

“You think this was done by our boys.” She said it quietly.

“That they hit the Gate. You think 30 April tried to kill the Vice President.”

“I don't know what to think. That I'm going insane, maybe. Have a seat, Caroline.”

The footage was German, pulled off the Agency's massive satellite dishes. She ignored the network voice-over and focused on the screen. A wide-angle shot of the new embassy, the crowd milling around Pariser Platz. A surprisingly nice day for Berlin in November.

“Who's the guy at the mike?” Cuddy asked.

“Dietrich, Graf von Orbsdorff,” she replied.

“Foreign minister. Former Christian Democrat turned Social Conservative. He fought with Helmut Kohl for two decades, then switched parties when Fritz Voekl and his fascist buddies moved into town.”

“He's dead,” Cuddy said without emotion.

Caroline took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. As a leadership analyst in the Office of Russian and European Analysis (a place known by the unfortunate acronym of DI/OREA), she had followed von Orbsdorff for nearly six years, before Scottie Sorenson had persuaded her to join the CTC. She knew everything about the German foreign minister — where he bought his suits and how much he paid, the address of the apartment where he kept his mistress, why his father had committed suicide before the Nuremberg trials.

“There's Payne,” Cuddy said.

“Watch closely.”

“Meine Damen und Herren …”

The Vice President looked so very small, Caroline thought, as she stood poised behind the podium. Her black hair, cut in a smooth bob to the chin, fluttered in the breeze. She wore a dark red suit well tailored, the color of blood.

“Interesting speech.” Caroline folded her arms across her chest, as though they might protect her from the coming blast.

“Probably not the one she was supposed to give.”

Cuddy did not reply.

And then Sophie Payne lifted her head, distracted by something off camera. A second later, the image rocked, then careened wildly out of focus.

“Veep's down,” Caroline said, eyes on the screen.

The television camera wheeled to face the Brandenburg Gate. The lens caught a mad stampede of bodies, the opened mouths screaming. Cuddy lowered the volume.

“Now watch.”

The film went blank. A pause, and then a helicopter filled the camera, wavering against a slate gray sky. A stretcher swung gracefully upward into its belly.

“That's Payne?” Caroline leaned forward, frowning.

“What exactly happened to her?”

“German liaison is claiming she was shot by a Turkish sniper. They found the guy with a slug in his head from a dead Secret Service agent's gun.”

“The agent's dead? Shit.”

“Twenty-eight people are dead, Carrie.” Cuddy said it savagely.

“Forget the Veep. Look at the belly of that chopper.”

He picked up the remote and rewound the tape. Again, the helicopter filled the screen.

“Look at the guy at the winch. Everyone's so focused on the goddamn stretcher they haven't even noticed.”

Caroline looked. She saw a man with unruly blond hair curling over his black leather jacket. Aviator sunglasses. Powerful shoulders. A thin blade of a nose. Wide lips pinched together in concentration. His hands reached out to steady the swaying stretcher, and with one glimpse of his strong, blunt fingers Caroline knew the truth.

She stumbled out of her chair and fell on her knees by the monitor. Splayed her hands across the screen as though that might bring him home.

The man in the chopper was Eric.

“Okay. So she's probably not in 3. hospital.”

Caroline was pacing like a leopard on a short leash, five feet in one direction, five feet in the other. She wanted to run out of the Center, run madly down the hall, run to wherever Eric was at that moment. He's alive, he's alive. The bastard is alive.

“Sit down, Caroline,” Cuddy told her.