The Cutout

apron spattered with grease. Was he a short-order cook or the café owner?

Caroline sat a little straighter and set the beer glass down in front of her.

“Mahmoud and I have a friend in common. This friend asked to be remembered to Mahmoud.”

The man regarded her steadily, as though her next words were preordained. And so she said them.

“Could I leave a message?”

“A note, perhaps?”

“That would be fine.”

Without taking his eyes from her face, the Walrus pulled a pad of paper from the pocket of his apron and a pen from behind his ear.

“There. You write it, I'll see that he gets it.”

“When?”

He shrugged.

“If time were unimportant, I could find Mahmoud myself tomorrow.”

“When time is important, it is also very expensive,” the Walrus said.

She handed him a five-hundred-mark note.

He pocketed it without a glance.

“I will deliver your message tonight.”

Caroline wrote:

I am Michael Shaughnessy's cousin from London. I have come in search of him on urgent family business. Michael has told me that you know where he may be found.

I will be waiting in Alexanderplatz by the base of the television tower tomorrow morning at 8:00.

She signed the name Jane Hathaway. Her back stopped Agency identity.

She folded the piece of paper precisely in two and handed it to the Walrus. He tucked it without comment into the capacious apron pocket and vanished through the darkened doorway. In an instant, the younger man had reappeared, his face impassive, his eyes still roaming over the café.

She left the Radeburger unfinished on the counter.

Part III Thursday, November 11

One Budapest, 3:14 a.m.

The American Vice President had seen enough of 30 April's hangouts to recognize a legitimate operational base. The one in Budapest was no improvised effort, no apartment borrowed from a cast-off lover. This was a nerve center, Sophie knew, entirely windowless, possibly underground. It had a private garage with cameras and infrared detection devices mounted almost invisibly above the doors; it had comfortable furniture, beds, showers, a sound system, a supply of food and clothing, a weapons arsenal, and an impenetrable security cordon ensuring that a klaxon would sound throughout the complex if she attempted escape.

With the prison came a certain amount of freedom. She was allowed to move about her bedroom and bath — nothing in either room could be used to effect escape or suicide. She lay on the bed and stretched her hands toward the ceiling. And felt the surface pressing down. In such a place it was impossible to guess the hour of day. Whether it was raining out or not. Whether the world believed she was already dead.

“You will be comfortable?” Jozsef asked her anxiously. The bruises under his eyes were painful to see. Sophie's fever had abated; she was weak, she ached for sleep, but her thoughts no longer rippled like silk through a liquid brain.

“Comfortable enough,” she answered.

He smiled the swift, tentative look she'd come to recognize and turned away.

“I will bring you breakfast in a little while. Not like in Bratislava. Real food. And coffee.”

There was the sound of running water, an oddity in the muffled underground atmosphere; it seemed to come from within the wall. And something else: a voice.

She turned.

“Michael,” Jozsef explained simply.

“He talks to himself in the shower. Your bathroom is next to his.”

Sophie nodded.

“I think I may shower myself.” How long had it been? Two, three days? How long since the explosion in the square? Was anyone in the United States doing anything?

“If you need me, press the button.” Jozsef pointed to a panel near the bed.

“The black one, not the red. The black is an intercom, and you can ask for help. Or for a book. Whatever you need.”

“A newspaper would be nice.”

The boy hesitated.

“That is a little difficult.”

Because it would tell her too much? Or because one of the men would have to leave the compound to buy it?

Jozsef took a remote control from his pocket. The door to her room slid back, then slid shut behind him. She was entombed.

She forced herself to move and went into the bathroom. Michael was still talking. She sat down on the toilet seat and leaned her head against the tiled wall.

It was never possible that we would let her go, Jozsef's voice whispered in her brain. The woman named Olga and her child were dead. With them had died Sophie's final hope.

She had seen my father's face.

Sophie, too, had seen Krucevic. She could describe him and his men. Whatever the dance of negotiation that went on above her head whatever Jack Bigelow was prepared to do or say she would never be released.

And so the knot of grief like a clenched fist. Grief for the unknown woman and her daughter, of course, but grief, too, for the stupid hope that had sustained her. She had fabricated a dream that Michael could be trusted, that he was a traitor buried deep in the Krucevic camp. She knew now that he was as brutal as the man he served.

He was still talking to himself on the other side of the bathroom wall. Sophie closed her eyes and listened.

Caroline awoke, as she always did when adjusting to European time, in the middle of the night. She lay in the sterile darkness of the hotel room and listened to the whoosh of an elevator shaft, the rumble of ice from a machine in the corridor. She was twenty-three floors above the streets of Berlin; she might have been anywhere. She had laid down the first planks in a trap meant for her husband, without knowing exactly what to do if he happened to fall into it. She had exhibited herself to television networks; she had asked the Walrus to contact Mahmoud Sharif. She had set a process in motion; and for an instant, alone in the hotel room dark, she felt a shaft of panic. What if that process spun out of control? What if Eric came headlong when she least expected him?

As though she had willed it, the telephone rang at her bedside.

She groped for the receiver.

“You're a difficult woman to find.”

She could not speak. Then her pulse, which seemed to have stopped for an instant, throbbed wickedly through her veins.