The Cutout

everything.

Caroline paces the bathroom floor and considers her options. Had Eric left her behind deliberately in Frankfurt airport, ignorant and faithful and trusting and stupid, while he set off to remake the world? Had she been his ultimate cover, the grieving widow no one would blame? Or was today's bomb at the Brandenburg an impossible accident, his face in a helicopter a bizarre coincidence, that defied her attempts at rational explanation?

What was she supposed to believe, exactly, in this particular hell?

Belief, like trust, isn't rational, she thought. Belief is blind, a wash of black in a room full of light, a breath suspended at the end of a diving board.

She had loved Eric, but she never trusted him with much. There were parts of his life forever closed to her, regions of his soul she could not navigate. She had gone with her gut when she married him, ignored the advice of family and friends, giddy with all she was not considering.

But the High Priestess of Reason is not easily silenced. Voices had persisted in Caroline's brain. There were the questions she asked, and answers he tried to give; terms they negotiated like peacemakers at parley.

Until the final silence of the Frankfurt airport, and the final explosion.

What are you thinking? Eric asks.

His body is perfectly still in the cratered grass. All around them the Virginia night is thick with pine pollen, with midges, with the musky smell of spent sex; but his skin, where her fingertip traces a rib, is marble cool. Stillness is one of his talents. He keeps the world at bay, he opts out of action, he retreats inside his head where the best secrets always are. Six months at the Farm, in case officer training. And so it begins, Caroline thinks — the life he cannot share. He has traded his fatigues for chinos and oxford cloth, in the classroom he rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie, he looks like a wolf sleeping by a primeval fire, partly tamed but never domesticated. What do they have to teach him, really, these retired CO's pensioned off into training? Six months, and he knows what he has always known: how to watch without being seen.

She feels him watching even while she sits alone in Arlington, a hundred miles away — that silent surveillance like a stroke on her neck. The sense of him burns in her throat as warm as whiskey, and she thinks, He is watching me. Eric's love, Eric's too — intent and narrow-eyed passion, her breath catching thick at his touch.

“What are you thinking?” he asks her again.

“Have I given you that right, too? The inside of my head? You've never given it to me.”

She sounds deliberately amused. Her way of keeping the world at bay.

“That's important, isn't it? What I give and don't give.”

“Only when you want something in return,” she says.

“You try very hard. To love me without conditions. You think that's what I need.”

“Isn't it?”

“You're afraid of losing me. If you build me a cage.” His voice is remote.

She sits up, pulls her bare knees to her chest, the sticky wetness between her legs nothing more than a mess. She reaches for her clothes.

“All right,” she says.

“I'm thinking about loyalty. Whether it's possible to give without thought, without conditions. Blind loyalty.”

His hand closes on her wrist. She stops pulling up her jeans. Slides into the crevice between his side and his arm and lies there, her cheek against the marble skin.

“Blind loyalty is always possible. And it's always a mistake.”

She lets out a little sigh of despair.

“Where are your loyalties, Eric? I'm not talking about love or sex or even myself. I'm curious. About you. What claims your soul?”

A snort.

“You think I've got one?”

She turns away from him. Shoves her foot into a shoe.

He watches in silence. Another man would be smoking now, but Eric gave up cigarettes when he gave up the streets of Boston, gave up his foster family's name, gave up the idea of fairness. He is watching her trying not to notice him watching her.

“You can't do this job without some kind of loyalty,” he says.

“You can't be a marine, a Green Beret, or an Intelligence operative not unless you decide that something matters beyond yourself.”

“Your country?” She tugs a sweater over her head and mutters, “Bullshit. Country is an excuse for wanting to die.”

He thrusts her back into the grass with such unexpected force that she's winded for an instant. She lies there, Eric's weight on her chest, his eyes inches from her own, and stares into the blue.

“Okay. One loyalty drives me, one thing I won't betray. Call it a pact with myself, Caroline, if you're tired of country. A long time ago I said I'd never close my eyes on deliberate evil. That sounds pretty broad, and pretty simple. But it's my brand of integrity. Of keeping the faith. Of an inner standard I walk every day. I may hurt the people around me, I may fail them in ways they never expected but I will not do less than the best job I can with the work in life I've chosen.”

“Which is?”

“Making the world a safer place.”

She moves under him restlessly, an objection forming. He ignores her. “You think that sounds stupid. Or grandiose. Fine. I'm not like other people, Caroline, who dream of a perfect world and try to create it, even if it's just in their own backyards. I pace off the property and find out why it's for sale. I test the broken board in the fence where the fox creeps in, I poke spikes in the rat holes. I name every weed and mark where it grows. It's all I've got, Caroline — this permanent fixer-upper. You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you.”

Caroline stares at herself now in the fourth-floor bathroom mirror. There are lines scrawled at the corners of her eyes, dark blotches under the skin. Her lips are thin and dry. She closes her eyes, waiting for a whiskey rush, for the sense of Eric watching her — but nothing comes across the miles that separate them, no sense of love or loyalty.

You stop work for a day, and the place falls down around you. Only she hadn't stopped. She'd been working for years, plugging holes and nailing up fences. And he'd never bothered to tell her he was alive.

Where were you going from Frankfurt, Eric? And why are you hiding in those weeds you marked so carefully?

What exactly am I supposed to believe?

Eight Langley, 11:53 a.m.

Caroline's strongest impulse upon quitting the women's room was to leave the Old Headquarters Building. She could retrieve her car from the acres of asphalt that lapped the campus like a modern-day moat, and drive through the back roads of McLean the high banks of horse fields and elm. In a car, however, she would have no buffer from her raging thoughts. No work to consume her, no colleagues to force the daily pleasantries from her mouth. She turned back into the CTC and strode toward the ranks of gray metal shelves that rose at one end of the room.

She had researched the lives of the men — and they were all men — who made up 30 April. Their stories were presented almost clinically in the Agency's biographic profiles.

These one-page reports were intended for use as briefing aids for government officials. The bios were chatty