Francine Mathews - The Cutout

She was still gazing after him when Eric's car pulled up to the corner of Dorottya Utca.

He had the passenger door open. She got in.

Don't speak , Eric had written on a scrap of paper. Car's bugged .

Caroline held the note tightly in her hand and stared straight ahead through the windshield. It had begun to rain, a fine mist that clouded the glass; the interior of the Audi was musty with wet wool and dead smoke.

He drove fast, toward the Elizabeth Bridge and across the Danube to Gellert Hill, up the winding, park like roads that switched back and back. In the eleventh century, pagan Huns had rolled St. Gellert down this hill — to his death in the Danube. In the nineteenth, the Hapsburg rulers had mounted cannon here and trained them against their own city. More recently, the Soviets had erected statues on the hill, celebrating Communist brotherhood. It was, Caroline thought, a place consecrated in betrayal.

He pulled up at the summit, monuments soaring behind his back. Gellert Hill was deserted at this time of day, in this shower of ram. She got out.

Eric left the keys in the Audi's ignition and joined her.

“We don't have much time.” He began to walk, tugging her with him, toward the river roiling gray through the streaming trees.

“What are you doing out here in broad daylight, alone? That's not Krucevic's MO,” Caroline said tensely.

“He sent me out.” Eric's voice was almost feverish. “He sent me out for a fucking newspaper, Caroline. It's a setup.”

“Beta Horvath is dead.”

He stopped in his tracks, swearing softly, and released her.

“Mirjana?”

“Hasn't been found. But Buda station's screening her calls. Don't use her number.”

A hundred yards behind them, the Audi they'd left seconds before exploded with the scream of a flying shell. The drivers side door flew off, kited high into the air, and plummeted to the ground ten feet from where they stood.

“Holy shit,” Caroline whispered.

They stopped running at the entrance to the baths that formed the basement of the Hotel Gellert. Eric paid their admission without waiting for change and they ducked inside, as though intent on some shameful assignation. The air was thick with steam and the pungency of eucalyptus. She looked up, saw the cathedral height of the mosaic tile ceiling, an illusion of sanctuary. And thought. They are hunting him .

Eric led her to a table set into an alcove. She sat down, weak-kneed. He remained standing, a man with places to go, always on the verge of leaving her.

“Last night,” he said, “after I left your hotel, I drove back to Krucevic's base. He wasn't there. Tonio was dead drunk and the boy and Mrs. Payne were sleeping. I downloaded everything from his computer. Everything that matters. Then I tried to get the Veep and Jozsef out. Krucevic came back before I could.”

“And?”

“And he accused me of selling him out to his ex-wife and Horvath.”

“Which I presume you've done.”

“Systematically,” Eric agreed, still in the same intense undertone. “It's the whole point of this operation. I've got a network out there. It's in place. I use it.”

“Why didn't he kill you?”

“I told him he was wrong.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“That alone should have bought you a bullet.”

“I pointed out that I had never been given access to his computer. His computer holds everything that Krucevic values. One person alone has access.” He leaned closer to her, his blue eyes blazing.

“To save myself, I gave him Tonio, who was lying unconscious at his feet, reeking of alcohol. I'd knocked him on the head with the butt of my gun. I told Krucevic that if he was looking for a traitor, he should check first with the man who owned his keyboard. Would you call that cowardice, Caroline?”

“Don't ask me to stand in judgment over anything you do, Eric. I can't grant you absolution.”

“The Veep is dying,” he said. “She's dying, Caroline, and you're right, we're out of time. I can't leave her alone.”

“I think you just did,” she retorted. “There's no road back from a blown car. Did you push the button, or did they?”

“I didn't wire the car. Let's just call that Krucevic's insurance.”

Across the distance of maybe a hundred feet, a wet head was bobbing in the warm spring pool. The echoing vastness of the Gellert baths could play tricks with sound, send deceptive waves curling along the ceiling tiles. But Eric was speaking softly.

“How sick is Payne?” she asked.

“I'd give her twenty-four hours. Less, probably.”

“The antibiotic doesn't work?”

“It works for a while. She's had several doses of it, which accounts for the fact that she's still breathing. But Krucevic has cut her off. His antibiotic supplies were limited. He was saving them for his son. And then Payne smashed all that he had.”

Caroline stared at him in dismay.

“That's .. . that's insane.”

“She thought that if Krucevic was out of drugs, he'd trash his campaign. Head back to the labs in Berlin.”

“You don't agree.”

“Krucevic never retreats, Carrie.”

“He'll kill her for this, won't he?”

“I think that's what she wants,” Eric mused. “She's got immense courage, Caroline. She's tougher than you'd believe but she's in enough pain to think death would be a relief. Last night she asked me to shoot her. I probably should have. Now” He reached into his jacket and withdrew a small brown envelope. “Get this to Scottie.”

“What is it?”

“A computer disk. Everything Scottie needs to know is on it. Mian's contacts in terrorist organizations worldwide, his complete list of accounts, the way the money flows, the mumps epidemic”

“Mumps epidemic? You mean in Pristina?”

An angel with flushed cheeks sinking on her mother's shoulder. Thousands of sick and dying children, the Muslim horde Krucevic despised. No more sacred to him than fire bombed hostels, or dead chancellors, or winsome Dagmar Hammecher, her blond hair shaved and her small hand sawn off. Of course the mumps epidemic was no accident. Caroline's anger flared as the random pieces shifted into place.

“And copies of Krucevic's e-mail correspondence with Fritz Voekl,” Eric concluded.

“Voekl's sending German medical teams into Pristina with vaccines right now,” she said. “Is that the point? Create an epidemic so that Fritz can save a few Muslim lives?”

“You're the analyst.”

She stared at him. The disk in her hand held over two years of their lives.

Outside the rain beat down on Budapest, dead leaves swirled in the city park.

The city park. Where Scottie's ghost still walked in tweeds, an arm around each of their shoulders “Scottie knew about you, didn't he?” she said very softly. “All this time. Scottie knew you weren't dead.”

Eric went utterly still. His face took on a look of brittle awareness.

“He never told you?”

“Told me what?”

Slowly, he reached for the chair opposite and sat down.

“Are you saying that Scottie never told you I was alive?”

When he could have the most exotic undercover operation ever conceived in his own backyard, subject to no oversight, financed by selective borrowing among the CTC's ample accounts? With Eric to run and enough room to run him, Scottie could screw them all Congress, the guys who'd been promoted past him, Dare Atwood in her cherry-paneled office on the seventh floor. Why tell anyone at all? It was a much better secret savored in silence. And with a little luck and expert timing, Scottie might even catch Mian Krucevic, certified sicko, with all the adulation that could bring.