Francine Mathews - The Cutout

“O'Shaughnessy's body will be on the same plane,” Scottie told her.

“Good. You'll meet both caskets.”

“Marinelli's brother will be there.”

“Then meet Eric's. You owe him that much.”

“I'm sorry. Director, I — ”

Dare wheeled around. “Don't want anything to do with him? It's a little late for that, Scottie.”

He rocked a little in his Cole-Haan loafers, as he might have done in a White House receiving line, then bent his head attentively toward the DCI. She was suddenly sick with fury at the man — the man who thought he had her snowed, had her right where he wanted her, the man who probably laughed each night in the privacy of his own bedsheets about just how thoroughly she was screwed.

“Sit down,” she said wearily, “you goddamn son of a bitch.”

Scottie sat.

Dare moved purposefully behind her desk. She found the hard copy of Caroline's Cutout — channel cable, the cable filled with the past thirty months of Eric Carmichael's life and enough intelligence to roll up Mian Krucevic's networks worldwide. Before she handed it to Scottie, she said, “Caroline is missing.”

Concern furrowed the CTC chief's brow.

“I called Embassy Budapest when I got the news about Eric. Caroline is gone. She's checked out of her hotel.”

“I'll alert our friends at every border crossing,” he said immediately. “Notify the airlines, the trains —”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen come out in the noonday sun,” Dare quoted softly. “I've already talked to Hungarian border control. I don't want Caroline stopped. I want to know where she's headed.”

He stared at her, perplexed.

“Tell me something, Scottie. That nickname of hers. Do you know how she got it?”

“Eric gave it to her.”

“But why, Scottie? Why? You don't know?”

Dare waited implacably. She had a forbidding face in the best of circumstances, a voice like rain-drenched gravel. Scottie lost some of his self-possession. It dissipated, like bubbles in warm champagne.

“Let me tell you a story,” she suggested. “About a woman run mad. You've got all the time in the world, Scottie. Eric's dead and now it's Caroline's word against yours about all the dirty tricks you've pulled. We don't place people on trial here; we simply send them to Tbilisi and Uzbekistan and all the other shit holes in the world until their time runs out. It's a long list, the list of shit holes Scottie; and you have all the time in the world to consider it. So listen.

“Caroline Carmichael lives by her wits. She prides herself on being logical. On remaining calm in any crisis. On finding objective truth through her subjective lens. She's so good at projecting complete control that you have to know her well to see the fault lines inside, the places where surfaces shift and crack. There are forces in the earth, Scottie, that even Caroline can't suppress, and sometimes she remembers it.”

Dare stopped, expecting him to object to squirm in his chair or express annoyance but he was paralyzed for once. Tbilisi had taken the wind from his sails.

“You know the training she's had. Denied Area Penetration, Terrorist Tactics and Countermeasures, Isolation and Interrogation every course Eric scheduled before he went out to Nicosia, Caroline had, too. They trained together. Eric the teacher, Eric the Green Beret, just another student like his logical wife.

“Tell me, Scottie how does the training go in Isolation and Interrogation?”

He crossed his right leg over his left. Unconsciously protecting his crotch from a ball-breaker, Dare decided.

“The trainers try to find a person's vulnerability. Show him just where he's weak. So that the weakness can be corrected … or avoided.”

“They put Caroline in isolation for three days. She was told, going into the cell, that there was a way out if only she could find it. She analyzed every square inch of the place, looking for a method of escape. She had no furniture, no bed coverings only a pot in the corner and one window. A window that showed her Eric, lashed upright to a pole and periodically subject to abuse from a gang of soldiers.

“After the first day, a trainer visited Caroline. He told her she could leave as soon as she confessed to her crimes espionage, conspiracy, the usual gamut of trumped-up charges. He drew her over to the window and showed her Eric, who by this time was semiconscious, his head hanging, dried blood smeared above one ear. Eric would go free, the trainer explained, once Caroline confessed. She refused. She knew that they expected her, as a woman a supposedly emotional creature to find the sight of Eric's suffering unbearable.

“The process was repeated over two more days. By that time Eric's moaning could not be shut out; it filled her head. She recited poetry aloud. She screamed. She ripped her clothes and stuffed scraps into her ears. When the trainer walked in on the third day, Caroline was already waiting at the window. He approached her carefully. She allowed him to come close; she seemed oblivious to everything around her. When he was within two feet of her right hand, she reached out and snatched a live grenade off his uniform belt.”

“Cut Eric down or you die,” she said. Completely calm. Utterly logical. And twenty seconds from annihilation.”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen,” Scottie muttered. “So? What happened?”

“Her trainer screamed an order through the window. Eric was released. Caroline tossed the grenade through the bars of her cell and it detonated in the air. The prison shack collapsed. Caroline was pulled from the rubble along with her trainer, both of them concussed.”

“I'm surprised she wasn't fired,” Scottie said.

“She nearly was. I intervened. I had the power to do that, even then. She was my analyst. My office owned her. I forced her to submit to a complete psychiatric evaluation, and the docs vetted her clean. She had just been pushed, they said, a little too far. And Eric went to Nicosia alone. She was allowed to visit him, of course. They gave her Budapest's analyst-in-station post two years later, for good behavior.”

Dare came around the end of her desk. “So what's the moral of the story, Scottie? Now that Eric's coming home in a body bag and Caroline is A.W.O.L. in Central Europe?”

“Beware men bearing live grenades,” he suggested roguishly.

The DCI raised her right hand in an arc as though she might actually strike her counterterrorism chief — and then she stopped short. Dare, too, could be pushed too far.

“The moral, you stupid ass, is that Caroline fights for what she loves, sometimes beyond the point of reason. She's done trusting the Agency — the Agency, in the form of Scottie Sorensen, sold her husband out. She's on her own now. And she'll bring the prison house down around her if she has to, to save Sophie Payne. It's the only thing she can do to restore Eric's honor.”

“She should be fired,” Scottie said, tight-lipped.

“And it would suit your purposes nicely if Mian Krucevic killed her,” Dare retorted. “But if anything happens to Caroline — if she's hurt in the slightest way — I will hold you personally responsible.”

“May I remind you, Director, that it was your decision to send her to Berlin?”

“You decided for all of us, when you made Eric a rogue operator thirty months ago. In a different country, another century, you'd have been executed by firing squad at dawn, Sorensen.”

Scottie's mouth opened, then shut without a sound. He looked as though she had sucker-punched him. He understood, finally, all that Dare Atwood knew. But he had been too long a professional dissembler to consider honesty now. He rose and stood before her, the last true scion of the old-boy net.

“If you're unhappy with my performance. Director — ”