Francine Mathews - The Cutout

“Then I can take your SIS slot and hand it to the next available warm body,” she agreed. “That's always been the case. You just never thought I'd do it.”

Dare reached for the Cutout cable and tossed it in Scottie's lap.

“Read this. And if you decide to shoot yourself in a stairwell, call me first, okay? I'd like a front-row seat.”

When the CTC chief had scuttled out of her office like a whipped dog, Dare picked up her phone and called Cuddy Wilmot. She had sent him a copy of the Cutout cable as soon as she saw its importance. “Well? Have you read it?”

“Five times,” he muttered. “There's so much here, we can't digest it fast enough. Networks, operations, fund transfers — ”

“Where will Caroline go, Cuddy?”

“Wherever Krucevic leads. She's on a vendetta now — you realize that, Director?”

“And where will it take her?”

Cuddy hesitated.

“To a place we've never located on any map; Mian Krucevic's boyhood home. Ziv Zakopan.”

“Caroline knows where it is?”

“Eric certainly did.” Cuddy's voice was like flint. “It's clear from the Intel contained in this cable that he saw the place.”

“You thought Krucevic had plans for Poland. You watched money flood into coffers there.”

“I did,” Cuddy admitted.

“But the funds have stopped moving and everything's quiet, from Danzig to Krakow. Poland's as dead as that Budapest bunker.”

Dare debated the point. It was a risk, throwing time and resources at a guess; but Sophie Payne's kidnapping was eighty hours old and the President was losing patience.

“You're sure in your mind?” she asked Cuddy. “You stand by this judgment?”

“I do,” he replied. “God help me.”

“Any idea at all where this camp might be?”

Cuddy hesitated.

“During World War Two, it was thought to be somewhere on the outskirts of Sarajevo. But we only have whispers and rumors. Director. And what happened there occurred over fifty years ago. So much of Yugoslav history was distorted after 1945 — made the tool of Communist ideology — that for a long time, the whole idea of Ziv Zakopan was discredited. Western historians called the story antifascist propaganda. But since the fall of Communism and the Bosnian war, the rumors have resurfaced. And Krucevic is always at the center of them.”

“Sarajevo,” Dare repeated, clutching at the one element she needed to understand. “We still have NATO peacekeeping planes on the ground there; I'll request AWAC coverage in a hundred-mile radius around the city. Retargeting overhead recon will take too much time.”

“Caroline may call in,” Cuddy said, “and give us a fix on her location.”

Or the harder patrol may find her. Tim passports I know of, two possible names. But what if there's a third identity she hid from all of us?

“We don't have time to wait.” Dare's tone was brisk. “Dig your tie out of a drawer, Wilmot, and put it on. We're going to brief the President.”

For a moment, holding the opposing currents between her fingers as she hot-wired the Skoda, Caroline was thrust back into a Tidewater May. The streaming curb of an ill-lit Sarajevo alley was transformed without warning into morning sunlight, kudzu and midges, the sharp green smell of bruised skunk cabbage underfoot.

Forty people were somewhere in the woods around her, forty people attempting to cross the Farm's ten thousand acres to a pinpoint on the map where a chopper would be hovering — and Eric was hunting them from the air.

He had a machine gun mounted in the belly of the Chinook, he had forward-looking infrared, he had aggressors on the ground in jeeps and crawling on their bellies through the underbrush. He had radios and flare guns and diversionary tactics.

His squad had nothing but the camouflage on their backs.

They crouched in a gully, Caroline and three friends, their eyes barely visible above the tips of the wild grasses, watching a dirt road they could not avoid crossing. Suddenly, a green army jeep roared out of nowhere and skidded to a stop. The driver jumped out, his M-16 pointed to the sky. Caroline noted his cap, soiled with sweat above the brim; she saw the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. His name was Carl. He had a baby about twenty months old. And, fake bullets or no, he was going to shoot them down.

Two men burst from the trees behind Carl and flung themselves across the road.

The driver turned and gave chase.

The keys to the jeep were still in Carol's pocket, but Eric had taught her which wires to choose, which ends to touch. Holding her breath, she fired the ignition, a prickling of fear striding up her back, and even when the engine turned over and she whipped the jeep around in the dust, she waited for the sputter of Carol's M-16 and a radio call that would end the exercise for all of them.

Nothing but midges and a cooling breeze across the windscreen, high cirrus curling above, she drove to the pickup point eating the lunch Carl's wife had probably packed that morning, sharing it with her friends — potato chips, a fat ham sandwich, and three chocolate cookies scrupulously divided. They had not eaten in two days.

The jeep they abandoned in the middle of the base's main road, where someone was sure to find it. They slept away the afternoon among the dandelions and headstones of an abandoned graveyard. Caroline awoke at three p.m. to the sound of rotors churning the humid air.

Carl demanded a confession. He demanded an apology. He declared the theft of the vehicle to be against the exercise rules. The rules dictated that one should suffer in order to survive. Caroline admitted nothing.

In the field , Eric told her, you do whatever it takes. If the car means you live and somebody else doesn't, you take the car. You don't stop to think about whether the guy will miss his next meal.

The Skoda's engine turned over. She raised her head above the dashboard and stared out at Sarajevo.

Caroline had been on the road now for nearly four hours. She had formed the vaguest of plans — a hash of hope and guts — thrown together as she scrolled purposefully through Eric's files on an embassy computer. As she read, her mind dazed and jumping with violent death, the superstructure of Krucevic's plan appeared beneath her fingers, like a stockade of privets shaken free of snow.

She saw the brilliance in his simplicity, the tragedy he had engineered. And saw how his dead wife could be used against him.

She left Embassy Budapest and hailed a taxi. She had the presence of mind to go back to the Hilton before heading for the airport she needed a change of clothes and her Walther, comfortable shoes, some extra cash. She checked out of the hotel and left her luggage with the bellman. To be called for later, if she survived.

Caroline had absolutely no right to decide the Vice President's fate in the backseat of a Hungarian taxi. She had no business keeping vital information, such as the location of Krucevic's lab at Ziv Zakopan, entirely to herself. The High Priestess of Reason stood back in judgment, showing Caroline the flaw in all she did; she scolded her and pleaded with her to call in reinforcements Caroline almost tapped the taxi's glass partition and sent the driver back to the Hilton. She should be awash in self-doubt. She was an analyst, after all one who demanded time, one who required more pieces of the puzzle.

But recklessness sang in her veins. Mian Krucevic and Scottie between them had pushed her past her breaking point, and she would have juggled grenades if a few had been handy.

If she failed in this last great act of hubris if she swung out from her trapeze and found no hands dangling she would be destroyed. Failure , thought Caroline, was the headiest prospect she'd been offered in years.