Francine Mathews - The Cutout

Krucevic's stronghold was innocuous in appearance — a loading dock in a neighborhood of warehouses, accessed by an alley. One of Marinelli's case officers had parked the station's van in front of an animal-feed-supply warehouse perpendicular to the bunker. The CO jumped out of the cab and made a great fuss over his cousin, another young Hungarian laborer who had just driven up in a shining red Volkswagen Passat. The CO pulled off his work overalls, secure in the knowledge that no one could be watching; threw on a clean shirt; dragged a comb through his hair; clapped his putative cousin on the back; and slid into the Passat's passenger seat. The two men drove off into the darkness, intent on beer, lap dancers, and oblivion.

The van was left locked and apparently empty in front of the warehouse. Except that Marinelli and Tom were crouching inside. Their position in the back of the armored van was an uncomfortable one: The last team dispatched to monitor the Veep's kidnappers in Bratislava had been murdered as handily as wild geese under a low cloud ceiling. Neither Tom nor Marinelli troubled to make much small talk.

Each had brought a personal weapon. They kept their eyes trained on the surveillance equipment that was the key to Krucevic's kingdom, while silence gathered between them like dead leaves.

Marinelli was the master of a formidable array of electronics. He had eyes that could see and ears that could hear through layers of protective steel. He had hidden antennae and radar and television monitors. Tom heard a warehouse's metal door slide down with a crash; a truck creaked past, looming like a leviathan on the van's black-and-white screen. Snatches of Hungarian sputtered in their earphones. If a dust mote were to settle on the van's roof, Tom thought, they would know about it.

But precious little emanated from the bunker. When Marinelli's beams intersected Krucevic, they fell dead.

“This guy's already walked,” Marinelli muttered as he turned a dial.

“All that bowing and scraping before the Joint Chiefs, and we're gonna look like idiots. It won't be your friend Little Miss Muffet who takes the fall, either. It'll be me. Because I didn't get surveillance out here before the ink was dry on that map. Sometimes I hate this fucking job.”

“The entire U.S. Army couldn't find Saddam Hussein, Marinelli, when it was parked in his front yard. Sometimes people defy technology. You know that.”

The station chief slammed the palm of his hand against the recalcitrant dial he was tuning.

“Hell, yes. And sometimes technology isn't worth shit. I'm just pissed off about that chick in jackboots, Tom. She had Bigelow eating out of her hand. Why do they let women anywhere near Intelligence? They don't know dick about operations.” Shephard smiled faintly, remembering the steel gray Mercedes and the little black wig.

“Caroline doesn't roll over. She looks at you with those cold blue eyes — she lets you dig yourself in deeper as you try to justify your existence — and then she walks right around you.”

“You just want to get into her pants.”

He frowned. But it wasn't Shephards job to explain Caroline Carmichael to the station chief. He had harbored enough doubts about the woman himself. Her conjuring of the map, however, had buoyed his confidence. Whatever her deceptions, her closet loyalties — the things she would not explain — Caroline had gotten the job done.

Marinelli flipped a switch on a scanner; static crackled.

“He's blocking us. Son of a bitch is blocking us.”

“That's the least of what he's doing.”

They had both studied the blueprints of Anatoly Rubikov's security system, the blueprints Wally Aronson had fished out of a train station bathroom at two a.m.

A U.S. government-issue scanner was about as effective against Krucevic as a slingshot and dried peas.

“He's not in there,” Marinelli repeated tensely. “He's blown this hole while we watched Mary Sunshine cream the Prez.”

“You don't know that.”

The afternoon's misting rain had changed to a downpour. Outside the van, darkness was almost absolute. A few spotlights lit isolated corners of the warehouse district — Tom could see them when he panned the surveillance cameras wide — but none had survived Krucevic's installation. The loading dock was blanketed in shadows.

Marinelli bent over a small square item that looked like a viewfinder.

“What is that?”

He glanced up.

“Infrared detection device.”

“You're looking for heat?”

“It's November in Budapest. Coming on for dark. Temperature is dropping to thirty-nine, thirty-seven degrees. The heat should be on in that bunker.”

It should be flying through the seams of the loading-dock door like a sonic wind, Tom thought. Marinelli stood aside; Tom peered through the infrared viewfinder. The outline of the garage door glimmered coldly. “It's dead,” Marinelli told him.

“Shut down. I'd bet my life on it.” The station chief pulled gently on the van's rear-door handle, eased it open.

“Are you nuts?” Tom hissed.

“We've got Delta Force on the wing, Shephard, and the Veep's not here. That map was a fucking diversion. It got us looking at where 30 April was, not where they are. If I'm not back in fifteen, call the station.” He slipped through the door as softly as a whisper.

Marinelli, Tom fumed, was like all of these goddamn Agency people. He was not what he seemed. He'd perfected the art of appearing to be other than what he was — perfected it so well that he made you believe he was a Medici prince when in fact he was nothing but a goddamn cowboy. An adrenaline junkie. Like Caroline Carmichael in her red beret, stepping out of a terrorist's car — Tom bent over the infrared oculars. He tracked Vie Marinelli through the darkness and rain, the heat of the man's body flaring against the green crystal screen. The station chief eased his way from warehouse doorway to trash bin to utility pole, all of them cold under the lens. Tom scanned the roofline, the corners of the building where the blueprints showed fiber-optic cameras to be.

And then he saw it, like a wink in the night. A red laser eye that opened once, then closed. Marinelli had missed it.

The heat might be off — the bunker empty — but something was wired to blow.

The federal police caught up with Mirjana Tarcic twenty-three minutes before her aged mother mounted the steps to her quiet two-room apartment and found the door standing wide open.

There were three of them: Ferenc Esterhazy, who was in charge, and two deputies named Lindros and Berg. They wore charcoal-colored wool suits redolent of nicotine and sausage, petrol fumes and rain. Esterhazy's features were heavy and his pallor unhealthy; he smoked unfiltered cigarettes and had spent fifty-three years in a country where life expectancy for men was fifty-eight. His tie was bright green; his wife had bought it in Prague last Easter. Lindros and Berg were less obviously natty.

The three of them moved, through long habit, in an arrowhead that pierced the foot traffic on Szentendre's streets: Esterhazy to the fore, his deputies flanking each side, none of them requiring direction or even much speech. They had parked the dark blue sedan two blocks above the art gallery on Gorog Utca and crossed to the far sidewalk. None of them carried an umbrella.

Esterhazy mounted the narrow staircase first. Lindros drew his gun and came behind. Berg looked for a second exit to the street, found none, then posted himself at the foot of the stairs. It was quiet enough in the apartment above that when Esterhazy kicked open the door, the sound exploded in the passage and brought Berg around with his gun raised.

The door was unlocked.

It bounced hard against the interior wall and slammed shut in Esterhazy's face before he had a chance to slide through the opening. But not before he glimpsed what lay within.