Francine Mathews - The Cutout

Ziv Zakopan is twenty-three miles south , Eric said in Caroline's mind, along the road to Foa. You climb out of the city and then descend through the pass. After maybe ten miles you'll see a power plant and an explosives factory. The road's rough to begin with, but by the time you're thirteen miles out of Sarajevo, it's pretty smooth. You're in a valley, it runs down to the Drina River. About mile nineteen you'll start to pass collective arms or what's left of them. The buildings are burned-out shells. Four miles beyond, on the left, is a rutted dirt road. Don't miss it in the dark. That's the turning for Ziv Zakopan.

She drove south through the night, along a road littered with derelict tanks and abandoned gun positions and the refuse of war that time had not yet buried. NATO had condemned the Serbs for what they did in Bosnia, and later for the atrocities of Kosovo, but the world did not remember the Ustashe terror of World War II; it knew absolutely nothing about the horrors committed by Croats at Ziv Zakopan. The world had the luxury of simple solutions.

Caroline allowed her gaze to veer for an instant from the empty ribbon of shell-pocked road, to take in the midnight landscape. She thought of postwar movies, still ardent with propaganda. Of desperate partisans allied to the British, of Chetniks who died on behalf of King Peter while he slurped oysters in London and danced at the Ritz. There were no angels in the Balkans, no heroes one could name. This was not a place for choosing sides. It was a place to abandon hope.

“Tell me about Ziv Zakopan,” she commanded Eric's ghost.

It was a Ustashe killing field. The earth there is riddled with tunnels — ancient holes gouged into the hills. The Romans built them. The Hapsburgs hid an army time. And the Ustaslie tortured partisans far below the ground. Mian's laboratory is hidden among the cliffs that soar above.

“A bunker, like in Budapest?”

He shook his head in the shadows. A concentration camp. Barbed wire, electrified fences, searclilights, armed guards. One woman equipped with a double-action Walther TPH, accurate range maybe twelve feet, will never storm tin' fastness alone. Even if she's as steady with a handgun as you are, Mad Dog.

“What's he use the place for?”

Experimentation. He tests his vaccines, this drugs, his clicmical weapons, on Serb and Muslim prisoners.

“And nobody comes looking for these people?”

They're the Disappeared, Carrie. Taken away at gunpoint in the middle of the night. And who knows where they end up? Nobody ever leaves Ziv Zakopan. There's a reason the place is called “Living Grave.”

They came up suddenly — the abandoned collectives, the burned outbuildings. A tractor's skeleton loomed like an iron gibbet near the verge of the road, whispering of ancient crimes. Caroline glanced at her odometer to calculate the distance; when three and a half miles had worn away, she pulled the car to the shoulder and slowed to a stop. From here she would go forward on foot.

She was wearing black micro fleece leggings and a pair of running shoes — workout clothing that would have to double as combat wear. The Walther she pulled out of a black nylon shoulder bag — the only luggage she'd brought with her from Budapest — and strapped it to her thigh. She practiced drawing the weapon from its holster a couple of times, the mechanics a cover for her increasing nervousness, the acceleration of her pulse. She was alone in the middle of dumb-fuck nowhere, with a ghost and a .22-caliber gun for company; she had, at last count, six rounds in the chamber and thirteen extra bullets. Above her head the stars shone with a brilliance that was excruciating; they reminded Caroline of nights in Southampton, the sky deepening after sunset to ink blue rather than black, the constellations whirling to the sound of her great-uncle's voice. The chink of ice cubes. Cicadas. A splash of Bombay Sapphire. Hauls , she assured him, I'm thinking seriously of law school. I just might take you up on it.

A pinprick of light scintillated in her palm. Eric's homing device, registering a signal. Sophie Payne was within range.

“After you,” she told him.

And followed where he led.

Jozsef's eyelids fluttered open, and he stared up at the ceiling. The room had no windows. Light, such as it was, came from a pair of gas lanterns propped on a crude table made of packing crates. Shadows, primitive and strangely comforting, flickered on the wall like the Indonesian puppet dance he'd once seen; for a moment he could not imagine where he was. The haze of delirium receded slowly, the way water drains from a basin — imperceptibly at first, then in a final rush that sweeps everything with it. And when that rush to consciousness came, Jozsef sat up abruptly. There was the helicopter, the lady torn from his arms, the rabbit's foot pressed into her hand. And then the dash from the landing pad to this room, the lines of barracks whirling about him, the faces thrust against the chain-link fence. He was alone in a room on top of a cliff. He was at Ziv Zakopan.

“Papa!” he cried out.

Krucevic appeared in the doorway.

Jozsef kicked away the soiled sheet and wrestled his wrists free of the tape that restrained them.

“Where is the lady? What have you done with her?”

“She is dead and buried,” Krucevic replied.

“That is a lie. I know you lie!” Never had he spoken with such venom to his father, and for an instant, the boy felt sharply afraid. He cowered backward, white-faced and trembling, waiting for the punishment that would surely come.

“If she was not dead when I left her, she is certainly dead now,” his father told him calmly. “You should rest. You're still quite weak. Get back in bed before you disturb your intravenous feed.”

Jozsef set his foot on the floor. His muscles screamed as though they had been crushed under the wheels of a truck. He tasted blood, felt himself sway, and clutched at the mattress.

“Get back in bed.” His father came nearer, looming over him. “You were close to death yourself.”

The boy stared at his own hands, clenched around the sheet to keep from trembling.

“You cannot leave her in the ground, Papa. It is not right.”

“But it is done,” Krucevic said, “and nothing will change it now.” He closed his fingers over Jozsef's wrist, pried his weak hand from the sheet. Then he gathered up the boy and laid him carefully back in the bed, drew the sheet over his body. Jozsef closed his eyes on a surge of rage and anguish; he could not look at his father's face, could not trust himself to speak without sobbing. A tear slid from under his lashes and lay wetly on his cheek. He turned his face into the pillow.

“I am sorry for your pain, my son,” Krucevic said.

It was the first and last time Jozsef would ever hear an apology on his fathers lips. He did not answer him.

Krucevic turned away.

And at that moment, a shout went up from Vaclav at his security station down the hall.

She found the entrance to the ancient tunnels where Eric had told her it would be.

Mian's escape route from Ziv Zakopan. He'll be certain to keep it in good repair.

“He only has one?”

By land. But time's always the air.

Caroline glanced swiftly toward the dark hulk of hillside rising above the ruined barn. No lights, no sound from the heights, to suggest an armed encampment. Just the transmitter signal pulsing strongly in her pocket now, reason enough to keep going.

She crept forward through the withered November grass, the dead stalks rigid with hoar frost The smell of damp earth mingled with the sharp scent of distant snow — a fresh, nostril-flaring whiff that, absurdly, charged Caroline's blood with hope. The barn door's frame was blackened, the space beyond impenetrably dark. If Krucevic was waiting for her, this would be the moment for ambush — for some explosion of light and sound as death came shooting through the shattered door.