Francine Mathews - The Cutout

“I'll tell Shephard.” Caroline stood up, intent upon the answers she knew she'd find on Eric's disk. “He'll contact you as soon as he can. And Mr. Esterhazy — ”

“Yes?”

“Tell your lab to be careful with that glass.”

She knew disaster well — its look, its smell, the way the static charge of air itself changed in disaster's presence — and the station was filled with it when she returned three minutes later. Teddy was standing behind her desk, the phone pressed against her shoulder. She stared unseeing at Caroline's face, then dropped the receiver with a clatter and sank into her chair.

Caroline snatched up the phone.

“Carmichael.”

“It's me,” Shephard said.

“Where are you?”

“Marinelli's dead. Bunker was wired. Blew sky-high.”

“You should have known it would be wired! You had the goddamn blueprints — ”

“Don't yell at me.” Shephard cut across her viciously. “I nearly died tonight, okay? Because of a guy who should've known better. Hell, we all should've known better. That map was a dangle. Krucevic was long gone.”

Dangle. A deliberate plant. Had Krucevic suspected, then, what Eric was doing? Had he known everything?

“You searched the bunker?” she asked Shephard.

“Once the flames were out. Flames have a way of drawing police, even in Budapest, even in the midst of riots. Try explaining that one, Sally. Just try explaining what the hell the U.S. Legal Attache for Central Europe is doing with explosives in Buda. Christ.”

“Tom — ”

“So I told the fucking police the truth. That we thought the warehouse held the Vice President. They were not impressed. It took every string I could pull to get me off the hook, every apology I could think of in three different languages, before they'd let me go into the place with the firemen.”

“You went in.”

“I stepped over what was left of Vie Marinelli, Caroline, and I crawled through a shitload of wreckage.” The savagery in his voice scalded her. “You never told me Krucevic had an American in his entourage. But then there's lots of crap you've never told me, right? Like your alias. Jane Hathaway. The name Mahmoud Sharifused in Berlin to set up contact with 30 April. What the hell are you playing at, Caroline? And when are you going to come clean?”

“What American?”

“One Michael O'Shaughnessy, from the passport in his breast pocket. A blond guy in his mid-thirties. But you know that, don't you? Michael was Sharif's other bona fide.”

Her legs nearly folded under her.

“You saw him?” she whispered.

“What was left of him, yeah. Krucevic tortured him, then strapped him to the door and set it to blow. There was a grenade pin still dangling from his finger.”

Caroline cradled the receiver and walked unsteadily away from Teddy's desk. She groped her way to the computer. Her face was a mask, her mind screaming his name.

She had already mourned Eric once. She knew how it was done. But this second time felt like a thin steel blade twisting between her ribs, a torment she could not grip strongly enough to tear out.

Remember Sophie, Caroline. Sophie. I give her a chance.

He had gone back, despite her best arguments. While she waited for Shephard to pay his bill at Gerbeaud's, they had nailed him to the cross.

Good-bye, dear love. Goodbye.

And then the word torture — that idle little word on Shephards tongue — flooded her senses. She gasped, leaned hard against the desk, gripped it until the pain knifed upward through her shoulders and she knew that she could feel.

For the past four days Eric had dominated her thoughts, her work, her sleep, her heart. She had flown out of Washington in a fog of bitterness, suppressing emotion like a terminal illness. The High Priestess of Reason had no time to feel. Love could never be as strong as rage. Caroline had had no room for empathy, no thought for Eric's torment during the past thirty months. Retribution was what she wanted, payment in blood for the agony he'd caused.

She had seen him clearly for the first time in years. Calculating. Morally equivocal. Ruthless. A man for whom, nonetheless, justice had still meant something. He had thrown them both into this final battle because he thought it was more important than love or happiness. He had never asked permission. He had assumed that she would understand.

The one woman I could trust in the depths of hell, the woman who would believe, regardless of everything.

She had never justified that trust. She'd punished him like a spiteful child.

And Krucevic had tortured him. The grenade pin. She drew a shuddering breath, her throat so choked with unspent tears she could not breathe. It was too late for regret. Too late for love. What remained must be a settling of accounts, for Eric's sake.

It was the consummate Agency word, account. She and Eric had shared one for years: 30 April. It was time to make Krucevic pay.

Teddy was weeping harshly for Marinelli in the outer room. Caroline pressed her fingers against her burning eyes and steadied herself. Then she stared once more at the computer screen. Clicked back into her cable. And began to learn what Eric had died for.

Sophie Payne regained consciousness as the helicopter landed in the clearing beyond the trees. Pain tore at the lining of her stomach like talons; pain rattled in her lungs with every breath. For hours now she had drifted in a delirium where the voices of her son Peter and the terrorist named Michael blended with the face of her dead husband. I'm coming, Curtis, she told him, and was vaguely irritated by his impatience, by the way his looming form twisted and vanished before her eyes. It seemed desperately important that she reach for Peter; she clung to him, and held him tight, and felt his thin, little-boy bones tremble in her arms. And then, when the darkness cleared and Curt's face receded, she knew that it was young Jozsef she clasped, not her son, and that her filthy sweatshirt was damp with his sweat and spatters of blood. The boy was burning with fever.

When Vaclav killed the rotors. Otto and Krucevic carried her from the chopper.

Jozsef whimpered as she was taken from him — he clung to her like a small bird, as though he knew that he would never see her again — but in her illness she was no proof against the men's strength. She squeezed his hands tightly once in parting and felt him press something small and hard into her palm. The rabbits foot. He had given her his most precious possession. She clenched her fingers around it and did not look back.

They dumped her unceremoniously on the ground. She lay there, curled in the fetal position, thinking of water. Cool water that trickled down the throat, still tasting of the ice it had once been. Water that gurgled over stones in the paddock at Malvern. It had its own language, that stream, an inconsequential chatter of horses' mouths dipped and lapping, the scarlet flit of a cardinal's wing, the slow, sinuous glide of a trout. Leaves spiraling in an eddy and the puncture point of a raindrop, Peter's boats made of empty egg cartons, a toothpick for a mast. Sophie's parched throat ached with the taste of blood.

The thin beam of a pocket torch picked out a tumbled stile, a heap of scattered stones. Otto heaved the latter aside with a grunt. Beneath them was a manhole cover fashioned of solid iron. It took Otto and Krucevic pulling together to haul the thing out. Rust stained their hands corrosive orange. Then Otto turned and looked at her. He smiled.

Oh, Michael, Sophie thought uselessly, you were wrong. I am going to die at this man's hands.

Slung over Otto's shoulder in a fireman's carry, she flailed out with her fists against his back... but she might as well have been the summer rain in the paddock stream, for all that she diverted him from his course. He dropped feet first into the manhole, his face against a ladder, so that her dangling head and back filled the passage's remaining space. Her legs were pinned between the tunnel wall and Otto's chest. There was barely room for one large man, much less the burden he carried; Sophie's hair snagged on old concrete, she smelled dirt and mold and felt the small creatures that live in mold scatter at their passage. Where his shoulder jutted into her abdomen, pain shot upward and radiated, as severe as the contractions of labor. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of her mouth. She could not wipe it away.