Francine Mathews - The Cutout

Their heels echo on the scarred linoleum, then are swallowed in the rush of other feet thudding from corridor to corridor. The halls of espionage are awash with bureaucrats, with Case Officers and Managers, Technicians and Administrators. Caroline is an Analyst, and has been for years. Well before the word was a job title. When she considers her life — when she attempts to picture it — she sees a loop of unbroken thought, coiled like a strand of DNA. She is comfortable in her head. She observes and judges from a distance. It is a talent she was born with, one that earns her a living. Now work reinforces nature — or perhaps it is nature alone that determines the structure of her days, the cubicle in which she sits, the green light of the Intelligence cables flickering softly in the filtered air. Her Agency job is somehow inevitable, a genetic predestination.

Every day she slips off the George Washington Parkway and slides behind the safe shelter of her desk. She flips on her computer. She downloads the truth. She follows an account, which means she tracks 30 April through the wilderness of news flashes, clandestine reports, transcripts of illicit conversation beamed down from satellites orbiting in space. She follows the shadow of a beast unseen and attempts to describe its height and color. She briefs the Policy-makers — she tells them what has been and what might be — and they trust her enough to listen.

Caroline has earned a reputation for reliability. And when the Policy-makers award her their respectful silence — when they gaze at her steadily, hanging on every word — Caroline glows with a sense of triumph. What the Policy-makers do with her information is their own affair. Her job is beyond policy. She is the High Priestess of Reason, she lives in Objective Thought. It is the deepest safety she has ever known.

Reason can be trusted, reason doesn't let you down. Reason won't leave you grieving without so much as a postcard.

In Caroline's life, betrayal has always come from what she cannot control.

“You have a very high analytic,” her Agency interviewer had said as he flipped through her application all those years ago, “and the introversion is practically off the charts.”

“High analytic?” Caroline repeated. “Is that good?”

He looked up from the file, dark eyes accusing. He was in his late thirties and might possibly have been attractive once, but was running now to fat. His wedding band was smudged, his tie soiled; he smelled mustily of failure. He told her his name, and she assumed that he lied. She decided to call him George.

“Find the company of strangers utterly draining? Parties exhausting? Do you often stay home, in fact, at the last minute?”

“Sometimes. What has that got to do with the job?”

The office had been part of a square and featureless building on the outskirts of Vienna, Virginia. She sat before Georges desk, her skirt suddenly too short for comfort, uncertain what to do with her knees. She was waiting for the bus to the polygraph center, where it was rumored that three applicants were dismissed for every one who survived. In the past ten months, the FBI had unearthed every drama of her college years, every friend she could claim, every joint she might regret. She was twenty-three and on the verge of security clearance. Only the box and the wire, the unconscious guilt that might trip her up, lay between her and the job.

“You're an INTJ, Ms. Bisby,” said George.

This was well before Eric and the name she assumed like an official alias; well before Mad Dog came howling from the underbrush.

“Only four percent of the general population fall into that category. But it's heavily represented among Agency analysts. Almost thirty percent, in fact. You've found your way home. Congratulations.”

“INTJ?”

“Just a classification. In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It means you're rational rather than emotional; that you make swift judgments; that you prefer to work in quiet and solitude.” The murky eyes slid away from her own. “More comfortable, perhaps, with ideas than people, Ms. Bisby. It's not a criticism. Just the classic description of an Intelligence analyst. Your ticket to the job.”

“I see,” Caroline replied.

“So that's a good thing, right?”

Now Scottie is pushing the button for the elevator and Caroline is trying not to replay in her mind that piece of German videotape, Eric's head emerging from the chopper like a fox from its den. Beside her. Cuddy Wilmot rocks on his worn heels, his hands shoved into his pockets. He has retrieved his polyester tie from his desk drawer and scrounged a suit jacket from a friend. It hangs unevenly above his wrinkled khaki pants. Caroline is aware of Cuddy's unspoken sympathy; it clings to him like sweat. But he says nothing. She folds her hands over her stomach and studies the panel of lights above the elevator, tracking the descent. What hooks everybody is the information, the vanished George confides in her ear. Satellite intercepts, foreign news translations, classified reports from controlled agents — more pieces of the puzzle than you ever knew existed, delivered to your desktop with the tap of a finder. Access, Ms. Bisby.

Access gets the High Analytics every time.

There is such a thing, Caroline might reply, as knowing too much. As drowning in all the data the world flings at you.

Eric , she thinks, how the fuck could you do this to me?

When they entered the room, Darien Atwood was gazing through the rain — spattered window at the belt of trees dividing the Agency campus from the George Washington Parkway. Caroline registered beeches and maples, a preponderance of pin oak. The branches wavered and dissolved in sheets of chilling rain. The DCI ignored the three of them, as though concluding some kind of mental conversation; and so they approached her desk in silence, lowly supplicants before an altar. Scottie reached a furtive hand to his perfectly knotted tie.

Caroline had known Dare Atwood for eleven years. Well before she was DCI, Dare had managed the regional office in which Caroline cut her analytic teeth.

Despite the gap in their ages, they were fellow travelers: smart women impatient with mediocrity, demanding of themselves and everyone around them. Dare's progress through the bureaucratic ranks — her ascension to the Senior Intelligence Service and, eventually, to the post of Director of Central Intelligence — had placed a natural distance between them; but if Caroline possessed a mentor in the clandestine world, it was Dare.

She was familiar, through long association, with the small personal tics that betrayed Dare's feelings. She studied the DCI's rigid back and saw that she was enraged.

Dare was a tall woman with a face as lined as a wind fallen apple. Her black wool dress could have graced a Shaker; her smooth gray hair resembled Joan of Arc's.

Her heels were never more than two inches high. She fairly screamed a capable practicality; in another century, she would have commanded a boarding school for young ladies, or ruled a kingdom through the convenience of a husband. The DCI permitted herself two luxuries: a wardrobe of brilliantly colored Hermes scarves purchased through the years in Paris, and a deep topaz stone, cut in a cabochon, that she wore on her middle finger. They seemed revelations of an interior life far richer than her appearance inferred.

Like Caroline, Dare was born an analyst. She, too, was a High Priestess of Reason. Caroline realized she was depending upon that fact this November morning. Dare would find a way out of Eric's labyrinth. It was just a question of time.

“It's three o'clock in the afternoon in Central Europe,” Dare said to the rain beyond her window.

“Berlin was hit at twelve. They've had three hours to get out of the country.”