Francine Mathews - The Cutout

She wanted to go home. She had no home any longer.

Hank, she prayed as her driver leaned on the horn, I promise I will call you if I manage to survive.

When she closed her eyes, she saw a man in black leather walking slowly away.

Did he wave once, in farewell? Or was he motioning her onward? The one woman I could trust I'm the depths of hell, the woman who would believe regardless of everything.

What , Caroline thought, would Eric do if he were alive tonight and sitting beside her? He would trust her to follow her particular instincts, the ones she never believed she had.

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

She should contact the Agency. Tell them how and where to throw raiders into the breach. She should give them the location of Ziv Zakopan. But Caroline was uncertain whom to trust at the CIA. Twice in the past four days, rescue operations had failed horribly. Eric was dead and Sophie Payne close to it. The military option was dicey at best; even the reluctant High Priestess in her head agreed.

Not Tom Sliephard , she thought as the taxi careened over the northwest highway. I cannot trust Tom with this questioning eyes and his u'ay-too-obvious suspicion. Not Cuddy — not poor loyal Cuddy, with one thumb on his classes and his pulse on the polygraph. Not Dare, who has her position to think of. An entire bureaucracy to protect. And never Scottie.

Scottie of the debonair suits and the poker face, Scottie who ran agents the way a child threw toys into battle — Scottie danced among shadows of his own, a parallel kingdom within the Agency itself. In a world where who you are depends upon what you know, Scottie had always known the most.

Now, for the first time, Caroline knew more.

She had a fix on 30 April's location. She had a homing device for tracking the Vice President. And she knew what Mian Krucevic did not: that Beta Horvaths lab notebook and vials of stolen vaccine — mumps vaccine No. 413, according to Eric's disk — were in the possession of the Hungarian federal police.

Krucevic feared that notebook and those vials more than Chinooks on the roof or Delta Force troops in the heating ducts. He feared them more than losing Sophie Payne. He had killed his wife and his oldest friend to suppress the truth. And now Caroline was going to inform him that he had failed.

She made the last plane out of Budapest that night — the last plane that week — bound for Bosnia. She bought a ticket in her true name because she had no intention of leaving the Walther in Hungary, and her paperwork for the weapon read Caroline Carmichael. The Agency was already tracking her — the look on the face of the Hungarian border control guard told her that. Her alias was probably compromised as well. He did not have a poker face, that passport official; it was rumpled like a used paper bag, his eyes two small prunes. He studied her malevolently, glancing from passport to woman and back again. The question in the back of Caroline's mind was why he didn't simply bar her from the plane.

Nothing was easier. A polite word — a hand on the arm — a tedious wait in a featureless office — and her documents returned when the flight took off. The answer, she knew, was because he didn't care where she came from. He wanted to know only where she was going. And so an hour later she bundled Jane Hathaway into a garbage can at Sarajevo Airport and became someone she had almost forgotten: Caroline Bisby, High Analytic, with her finger on the afterburner and contrail streaming. The stuff of which mad dogs are made.

She pulled the hot-wired Skoda away from the curb and drove deeper into the city, feeling her way. She knew Sarajevo only as a series of images on a television screen, a garble of names too difficult to pronounce. It was a European city, beautiful in the Baroque manner of Vienna and Prague and old-town Bratislava, a small city cupped in a valley ringed by mountains. On the hills above the red tile roofs, the army of neighboring Serbia had erected siege guns and positioned tanks. Each day between 1992 and 1996, the Serbs had bombarded Sarajevo with four thousand shells. It was the longest siege in modern memory, longer even than the vicious Nazi siege of Leningrad; but in the end, NATO marched in and the Serbs marched out.

The Stabilisation Force peacekeepers were still there, afraid of what might happen if they left.

The Skoda bobbled and dipped as she drove across a shell hole. Someone had filled it with bright red epoxy, a cartoon attempt at public works. As far as the eye could see, brilliant gouts of blood dotted the street.

She was looking for the university on a map spread across her knees — which was in Croatian with Hungarian translation, neither helpful — while driving through the darkness of a city that seemed to have had most of its street signs blown away. But the university must surely possess a student center that never closed down, a place where coffee could be bought and politics debated and a laptop connected to the World Wide Web. Caroline had memorized Mian Krucevic's E-mail address. It was there like a lost pearl among the terrorist's messages to Fritz Voekl, part of the archives Eric had managed to steal.

“Papa,” Jozsef croaked through his swollen lips, “what have you done to the lady? Where is she?”

Mian Krucevic laid his cool hand on his son's forehead and brushed back his sweat-soaked hair. The antibiotic for which he had retreated to Ziv Zakopan was already streaming through an IV into his son's veins, but it would be hours before he glimpsed signs of improvement in Jozsef.

He refused to consider that improvement was beyond him, that Jozsef might have slipped too far into the maw of the disease. Mian Krucevic had not played God for so many decades to succumb to failure now. He had not built this new Ziv Zakopan high above the old killing ground and labored patiently for years in its laboratory to be defeated by a germ of his own making. He would not pay for immortality with the blood of his son.

“Shh,” he said. “You must rest. You are safe now. I have saved you.”

The boy squirmed fretfully under the sheet, tugging at the tape that secured his arm to the bed, the precious IV feeding into his wrist.

“Sophie,” he murmured, and then the sheet above his abdomen blossomed like a flower, a spreading stain that darkened as it grew, first peach and then salmon and then a rusty orange.

Jozsef was pissing blood.

Krucevic shuddered. He sank to his knees on the cold cement floor. He gripped the metal rail of the boy's bed until his hands lost their feeling, and this alone must be his prayer, the prayer of a man who acknowledges no god. He was crouched thus, doubled over with grief and rage, when Vaclav appeared in the doorway.

“Don't bother me,” Mian spat out.

“There's something you should see.”

“Go away.”

“But Mian — ”

He came to his feet with a howl, whipping his gun from its shoulder holster. Vaclav was twenty-two inches removed from a bullet in the brain. The cherub-faced Czech stared the gun barrel down.

“You should, Mian. See this.”

Krucevic drew a shuddering breath, bolstered the gun, and followed Vaclav down the hall.

Otto was seated in front of Tonio's laptop, his forehead almost touching the screen.

“It's from the university. How the tuck did some college kid find Mian?”

Krucevic stood behind him and read the Email. Bela's blood is on your hands, MIaii. Mirjana's dead. But I have Beta's notes and vaccine No. 413. Come and get them, if you can find me.

“The salba told someone,” he whispered.

Caroline left the university student center immediately after sending the first message. Time was of the essence: if her ruse was to help the dying Vice President, it must be effected quickly. She drove to the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, temporary home of war correspondents and relief workers, where a third of the three hundred and fifty rooms still showed damage. Patches in the curtains covered machine-gun holes, concrete crumbled under the hallway carpets, and a bored cocktail waitress chain — smoked through the lobby at 12:03 a.m. Caroline ordered a large cup of coffee and found an Internet port.