Francine Mathews - The Cutout

“He intends to taunt and humiliate you by displaying Mrs. Payne's subjugation. He believes this could make you feel frustrated and powerless. The videos are one of Krucevic's instruments of terror, not a method of brokering a deal.”

All three men in the White House Situation Room were listening to her now. Dare Atwood, on the Agency screen, had a faint smile playing about her lips.

“But let's just say,” Matthew Finch argued, “that we pretend to negotiate in order to buy some time. Keep Krucevic focused on the dialogue while Delta Force gets their act together. Then we'll have tried the diplomatic option — and the world will know it — and we can go in shooting.”

Caroline shook her head.

“Go in shooting and all you'll find is bodies.”

Finch threw up his hands and stared at Jack Bigelow.

The President smiled at Caroline through the secure video feed.

“You're pretty damn sure of yourself, young lady.”

“Mr. President — ” She sighed and searched for a succinct way to explain. “For the past five years, I've followed Mian Krucevic and 30 April. He's a tough man to pick out of the crowd. But I've done it. It's my job. I've read every scrap of classified and open-source material on the man, I've researched his childhood, I've placed him on a couch and trotted out the psychiatrists. I know more about Krucevic than anyone, with the possible exceptions of his mother and his wife. His mother's dead. His wife is missing. I'm all you've got.”

“How can you say he'll never negotiate?” Matthew Finch was still resistant. “This could mean life and death to the man.”

“The value of a life is relative, Mr. Finch,” Caroline said patiently. “Mian Krucevic has known that from birth. His father was a member of the Croatian Ustashe — the fascist allies of Nazi Germany. Anton Krucevic is believed to have been in charge of a concentration camp somewhere near Sarajevo that was built entirely underground. Everyone connected with the camp's organizational hierarchy was ordered to commit suicide at the German surrender, and the location of the camp itself has never been positively identified — but estimates of the number of Serb partisans executed there range from several thousand to nearly one hundred thousand.”

“In Krucevic's biography,” Finch noted, “you say he's fifty-eight. That means he was born during the war.”

“Krucevic reportedly lived out his babyhood on the camp grounds,” Caroline affirmed. “He grew up watching people die rather horrible deaths. Mian's father, in his eyes, must have seemed like God himself. He held people's very lives in his hands. No one survived Ziv Zakopan. Rumors of the place circulated during the war, and that's what historians are left with. No witnesses surfaced to tell the tale of the camp's horrors — unless you include Krucevic himself.”

“What happened to his father?” Jack Bigelow asked.

“He shot himself — and his wife — when the Russian liberators came for them.”

“But not the boy.”

“Krucevic was found bleeding in his dead mother's arms. He has a bullet scar to this day on his temple. He's on record, Mr. President, as saying that death is always preferable to failure.”

Jack Bigelow scowled.

“Too bad the bastard's had such a string o' good luck.”

Matthew Finch looked down at his notepad.

“So what do you think will work, Caroline?” Dare Atwood asked. As though the Director of Central Intelligence routinely deferred to her junior analysts.

Caroline hesitated an instant before replying. She would not allow herself to consider Eric. If he had returned to 30 April's bunker, he had placed himself beyond all protection. The High Priestess of Reason was back in the briefing room; what the Policy-makers did with her information was their affair.

“If we announce our presence — try to negotiate — he'll divert us long enough to launch a counterattack. If we land a helicopter on his roof, he'll kill Mrs. Payne before we've killed the rotors. Our only hope lies in stealth.”

Matthew Finch looked straight into the camera.

“Thank God. I thought there was no hope.”

“We need to use the blueprints Wally Aronson gave us. We need a squad of professionals trained to infiltrate electronic barriers,” Caroline persisted.

“Pros who can creep up to the bunker, find the air vents we know are there, and drop canisters of chloroform right into Krucevic's living room. We need to take out 30 April before they even know they're blown — and free the Vice President without a shot being fired. But we need to do it now” Jack Bigelow rocked back in his conference chair.

“Get the AWACs in the air, Clay. Tell NATO whatever ya like. Scramble a Delta Force team from Ramstein or wherever else you got 'em hidden. And make sure they bring their chloroform, hear?

“Cause they ain't getting off the plane without it.”

When the screens had gone blank and the ambassador had scurried away to his round of appointments with the new Hungarian government, Tom Shephard stood up and held out his hand. Caroline took it in surprise.

“What's that for?” she asked him.

“Work well done.”

“You coming?” Marinelli barked from the doorway of the vault.

Shephard turned.

“Where to?”

“Surveillance. I'm going to watch the bunker until those flyboys arrive. Just in case Krucevic tries to split before it's convenient.”

Tom vaulted a stray chair and was at the station chief's side.

“You think I'd miss that?”

Marinelli clapped the LegAtt on the shoulder. Then his gaze drifted over to Caroline.

“I'd appreciate it if you'd stay behind. This is entirely operational, you understand. And while you convinced the President you know your tradecraft, I'm not entirely sure. I like my visiting analysts safely behind their desks. It saves a lot of explanation back at Headquarters when things go wrong.”

The hostility was unmistakable. Tom Shephard's eyes widened in surprise. But this was neither the time nor the place, Caroline knew, for a bureaucratic squabble, for a drawing of the line between Analysis and Ops. Too much was at stake.

“Right,” she told Marinelli through bitten lips. “You're the station chief. I take my orders from you.”

“Bout time,” he retorted, and swung into the hallway.

The screaming had been going on for what seemed like hours now, beyond the sealed door, and even Jozsef was done crying.

Krucevic had thrust the boy into Sophie's room without a word of explanation earlier that day — she did not know what time, she had no clock and no window, nothing but a sense of having slept badly and in increasing pain. She had held Jozsef close to her fevered body, held her hands over his ears to stop the noise, cursing vividly and relentlessly under her breath to drown out the screams. She poured forth a torrent of vituperation into the dead air while Jozsef shuddered with sobs and the screams went on — varying sometimes in pitch, sometimes in duration, but inevitable, as though the tortures they subjected him to had a preordained rhythm.

He was singing now — a broken, dying tune. Paul Simon's “Graceland.”

“What did he do?” she asked Jozsef at one point. “What could he possibly have done to deserve this?”

The boy had shuddered.

“He betrayed Papa.”

Even the singing, now, had stopped.

Dusk fell swiftly on a November afternoon in Central Europe, and dusk was their ally.

Tom Shephard studied the pale profile of the man crouched next to him in the back of the armored van. Vie Marinelli was roughly the same age as Tom, but he was in better shape and he had once been a SEAL. That fact alone gave Tom some comfort. The Agency, as a rule, didn't deal in guns. The FBI did. But a SEAL — even one who'd been out of the navy for the past ten years — knew what the hell he was doing. And Tom, at this moment, felt as though he was flying by the seat of his pants.