Francine Mathews - The Cutout

This book is dedicated with love to Rafe Sagalyn, literary agent and friend, who made me write it;

and to Barbara, the original Mad Dog. I'd never have survived the Farm without you.

Cutout : A third person used to conceal the contact between two people — usually an agent and a handler who do not want to meet because one or both may be under surveillance.

— Norman Polmar and Thomas B. AI. Len

The Encyclopedia of Espionage

A tour through the Intelligence world is marked by a series of rituals. There is the initiation of the polygraph; the rite of passage that is tradecraft training; the ceremonial presentation of the first Certificate of Merit or presidential stickpin. And upon exiting, there is the moment when one is required to sign an oath of secrecy. That oath obligated me to submit The Cutout to the CIA's Publications Review Board, which is charged with removing classified material from text written by former employees. The board reviewed this work in both draft and final manuscript form, and I would like to thank them for their thoroughness, expediency, and professionalism — and for requesting me to change only one word.

The Cutout would never have seen the light of publication without the intelligent editing and heartfelt encouragement of Kate Miciak, vice president and executive editor of Bantam Dell Books. I have worked with Ms. Miciak for years now, on a variety of novels, but never have I valued her skill and dedication so much as in the present instance.

I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Dale and Linda Lovin, formerly of the FBI, and to Paul Gray, Chief of FAA Security at Denver International Airport. Their professional advice and willingness to assist a writer who was sometimes out of her depth were invaluable. Any errors unwittingly committed in the translation of their facts to fiction must be considered entirely my own.

My final word of thanks must go to all those women and men of the CIA who trained, befriended, and inspired me, and to my family, who endured my moods and temper during the long months required for this book's completion.

She was a small woman; the press had always made much of that. On this crisp November morning in the last days of a bloody century, she stood tiptoe on a platform designed to lift her within sight of the crowd. They were a polyglot mass-threadbare German students. Central Europeans, a smattering of American tourists. A few Turks holding bloodred placards were shadowed, of course, by the ubiquitous security detail of the new regime. After twenty-four hours in Berlin, Sophie Payne had grown accustomed to the presence of riot police.

The international press corps jostled her audience freely, cameras held high like religious icons. The new German chancellor had not yet banned the media.

Just across Pariser Platz, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, sat a tangle of television vans and satellite dishes. Sophie surveyed them from her podium and understood that she was making history. The first American Vice President to descend upon the new German capital of Berlin, she had appeared at a troubled time. The people gathered in the square expected her to deliver an American message — the promise of solidarity in struggle. Or perhaps redemption? She had come to Berlin at the request of her President, Jack Bigelow, to inaugurate a foothold in the capital. Behind her, to the rear of the seats held down by the German foreign minister and the U.S. ambassador, the new embassy rose like an operatic set. Before it, Sophie Payne might have been a marionette, Judy playing without Punch, an official government doll.

The U.S. embassy's design had been fiercely debated for years. The trick, it seemed, was to avoid all visual reference to Berlin's twentieth century — that unfortunate period of persistent guilt and klaxons in the night. Comparison with the present regime might prove unfortunate. But neither was the nineteenth century entirely acceptable; that had produced Bismarck, after all, and the march toward German militarism. The State Department planners had settled at last on a post modernist compromise: a smooth, three-storied expanse of limestone corniced like a Chippendale highboy.

It might, Sophie thought, have been a corporate headquarters. It made no statement of any kind. That was probably her job today, too.

But in the last thirty-six hours she had read the obscene graffiti scrawled on the new Holocaust memorial. She had met with third-generation Turkish guest workers — Gastarbeiters — about to be repatriated to a country they had never seen. She had even dined with the new chancellor, Fritz Voekl, and applauded politely when he spoke of the rebirth of German greatness. Then she had lain sleepless far into the night, remembering her parents. And decided that a statement must be made.

Now she set aside her carefully crafted speech and adjusted the mike.

“Meine Damen und Herren.”

In the pause that followed her amplified words, Sophie distinctly heard a child wailing. She drew breath and gripped the podium.

“We come here today to celebrate a new capital for a new century,” she said.

That was innocuous enough; it might have been drawn from the sanitized pages she had just discarded.

“We celebrate, too, the dedication and sacrifice of generations of men and women, on both sides of the Atlantic, who committed their lives to the defeat of Communism.” Nothing to argue with there — nothing that might excite the black-clad police or their waiting truncheons.

“But the fact that we do so today in the city of Berlin is worthy of particular attention,” she continued. “The capital of Germany's past as well as her future, Berlin can never be wholly reborn. It carries its history in every stone of its streets. For Berlin witnessed Hitler's tyranny and horror, and Berlin paid for its sins in blood. As we dedicate this embassy, let us commit ourselves to one proposition: that never again will this nation submit to dictatorship. Never again will it shut its doors to any race. Berlin must be the capital for all Germany's people.”

There was a tremendous roar — spontaneous, uplifting, and utterly foolhardy — from the crowd in the middle of Pariser Platz. A bearded figure waved his placard, chanting in a torrent of Turkish; he was followed by others, scattered throughout the square, and in an instant the police truncheons descended in a savage arc. Someone screamed. Sophie took a step back from the podium; she saw a woman crumple under the feet of the crowd.

Nell Forsyte, her Secret Service agent, was instantly at her side.

“Say thank you and get out,” Nell muttered.

Sophie reached for the microphone. And before the sound of the blast ripped through the cries swelling from Pariser Platz, she felt something — a vibration in the wooden platform beneath her feet, as though the old square sighed once before giving up its ghost. Then the Brandenburg Gate bloomed like a monstrous stone flower and the screaming began — a thin, high shriek piercing the chaos. A wave of red light boiled toward the podium where she stood, paralyzed, and she thought, Good God. It's a bomb. Did I do that?

Nell Forsyte flung Sophie to the platform like a rag doll and lay heavily on her back, a human shield shouting unintelligible orders. Somewhere quite close, a man cried out in French. Glass shattered as the shock wave slammed outward; the plate-glass windows of the luxury hotels buckled, the casements of a dozen tour buses popped like caramelized sugar. And then, with all the violence of a Wagnerian chorus, the massive glass dome of the nearby Reichstag splintered and crashed inward.