Francine Mathews - The Cutout

Deception was second nature to Scottie; he had compartments to spare in his sinuous brain. Eric fit so conveniently into one of them. Caroline felt suddenly giddy with hilarity. Of course Scottie told nobody. This thing was as sexy as a stripper in the living room, it was the wet dream of a case officer's long, dry career.

“What do you think Scottie is,” she replied with a shaky laugh. “Unprofessional?”

Eric stood up suddenly and tossed the small table aside like so many milk cartons, tossed it at the tiled wall of the baths with a violence that echoed and reechoed under the streaming ceiling. Her second explosion that hour. And seized her by the shoulders, oblivious of the bathers watching them now.

“You honestly thought that I would leave you spend all this time under cover without a word? You think I would do that? You think any kind of operation would be worth that kind of pain?”

“I had nothing else to believe.”

“Thirty months.” He paced viciously away from her. “Thirty months of hell, of being not what I am, of plotting and calculating and hoping there's some kind of God between me and death, of thinking, Caroline is there. She is there. I will get back to her ” He stopped. “Only that was never part of the plan, was it? That's why he didn't tell you. Scottie never thought I was coming back.”

“Eric,” she said brusquely, “you're dead and buried. And believe me, right now, everybody at the Agency would prefer you stayed that way. No one's prepared to offer an explanation for your survival. The truth has never had much to do with Operations, has it?”

“But this is Scottie we're talking about.” He stared, unseeing, at the steam rising like cumulus from the surface of the pool.

“There's no way he could have told me. I'd have rejected the entire idea. Or I'd have shared the secret with Cuddy, maybe. You know I would.”

“Cuddy doesn't know?” Eric stared at her blankly. “What about Dare Atwood?”

“She sure as hell knows nothing.”

“You all wish I were dead.” Accusing now, with herself as proxy for the man he couldn't strike. “That's what you want.”

“Well .. .” She rose and went to him, afraid of the high-vaulted chamber's effect on sound. “Nobody was thrilled to see you alive and well and kidnapping the Vice President, understand?”

Eric wheeled away from her.

“He used me. Completely and utterly. And I volunteered for the privilege. I was so proud that he trusted me...”

“Are you saying that Scottie engineered the hit against Payne?”

“That would be Oliver Stone's version, Caroline. Don't be paranoid. Scottie put me under deep cover, working for Krucevic. And told me that when I had what I needed to nail the asshole, he'd get me out.”

What had Scottie said only Tuesday morning? He's a killer, Caroline, and he's out in the cold. It wouldn't be Scottie who brought Eric home. Scottie had run a rogue operation. As a result, Vice President Sophie Payne was dying.

But Scottie had complete deniability — as long as Eric was silenced forever.

They crept through the Var, the Castle District, scorning the open expanse of the Danube ramparts, the funicular railroad, the places where tourists thronged.

They took the side streets and alleyways beyond Gellerthegy until at last they emerged at the north end of the Var. This part of Buda had been destroyed and rebuilt so many times — by Mongols and Turks and Austrians and Nazis — it seemed a fitting place to turn over the rubble of their lives. A place where the appearance of order was all that remained.

“There was a girl,” Eric said as they walked, “at the university. A graduate student in molecular biology. Her name was Erzsebet Kiraly”

“What about her?”

“She worked part time in Mian's lab. I recruited her there, before the end — before MedAir 901. She was sharp and funny and you would have liked her, Caroline, with her peasant skirts and her long red braids hanging down her back. She knew something was wrong with Mian's vaccines.”

“You mean the mumps?”

“His small contribution to the Muslim problem.” Eric looked at her searchingly. “It's all on the disk. Make sure you get it to Dare. Not to Scottie. Is that understood?”

She nodded. He walked on, head down, hands thrust in his pockets. She tried not to look over her shoulder for a man with a gun.

“Three years ago, I started paying Erzsebet to smuggle information out of the lab,” Eric said. “She did a good job. So good, Mian chose her to carry his germs to Turkey.”

“On MedAir 901?”

“It made excellent sense.” Eric kicked at a paving stone and watched it skitter into the street. “Airlines don't x-ray boxes of certified medical supplies. Not vaccines. Not when the boxes come with the right government seals and stamps. They're too afraid that radiation will destroy the drugs. Do you see?”

“There was a bomb in the VaccuGen cargo and Erzsebet put it on the plane,” Caroline said flatly. “Why weren't you on that flight, too?”

“I was. I gave up my seat.” His voice was still flush with amazement at it, the narrowness of chance. “I gave up my seat to a woman with a sick child, a woman who needed to get back to Istanbul. The baby was wailing. A flight attendant stood at the front of the plane and asked for volunteers. I went.”

“They didn't bother to pull your boarding pass?”

“This was not an American airline, Carrie. It was a third-world plane with about forty seconds to hit its takeoff slot at one of the busiest airports in the world. They sent me to the counter to rebook and plunked the woman and baby down in my seat. Never took my name off the 901 manifest.”

“But you didn't rebook.”

“I went first to your gate. Your plane had already pulled back. So I got lunch instead.”

“And thirty-three minutes after takeoff, MedAir 901 exploded,” Caroline finished. Life as I knew it, shot down in flames. The jetway at Duties seven hours later, Scottie and Dare wailing with the news. I didn't believe it. I didn't believe it. And then Scottic's face — yiefon that perfect forehead. Mourning tlic only tiling that mattered. His Eric. Then I knew it was true.

“The plane blew up with Erzsebet and the woman and her baby on board,” Eric said. “I called Scottie as soon as the news came through.”

“Why didn't you call me?”

“You were somewhere over the Atlantic. And Scottie promised he'd explain.”

Explain. As though I were a lunch date skipped for a perfectly good reason. She raised her fists and beat them against his chest in fury.

“You did this for Erzsebet Kiraly? You traded me for her?”

He circled her wrists and held them tightly.

“I paid her to betray Mian. I caused her death. A twenty-one-year-old girl. I owed her something, I think.”

“Your life for hers. Our marriage.” Caroline's voice was lacerating. “So was it worth it, Eric? Your payment in blood? Are you happy with the bargain?”

His eyes were shuttered.

“Happiness was never the point, Mad Dog”

“No. I see that now.”

Three blocks from the Hilton he stepped into the doorway of a vacant storefront and pulled her roughly against him. The embrace was cover, she thought; there was no emotion behind it. Just a piece of business in case anyone was watching.

The cold hollow in the center of her chest widened and spread, dulling her senses.

“I've got to leave you here,” he said, “and get back to Sophie.”

“Back? That's insane! Krucevic will kill you.”

Caroline gazed at Eric's face and saw the wind howling in his bones. He was only forty. He looked far older. He had no way in from the cold, and he knew it. He would live for a while, a hunted man. And then he would die in the dark, far from home. This time, no one would break the news.