The Cutout

stepped across the threshold.

There were sixteen of them strapped into beds, arms handcuffed to the iron railings. The livid glow of a fluorescent light spotlit their faces. A guard Jozsef did not know sat in a chair with a tattered copy of a Sarajevo newspaper spread open on his knees. He was in the act of rising, alerted by the screams, when Jozsef appeared.

“Go!” the boy commanded. “My father needs you. We are betrayed!”

The guard tossed aside the newspaper and reached for his gun.

“Give me the keys.” Jozsef thrust out his hand. “My father's orders.”

The man looked doubtful.

“Are you well enough?”

“The keys!” Jozsef snarled.

The man hesitated, then slapped a metal ring into his palm and dashed through the doorway. Jozsef shut the door behind him and locked it. Then he turned to face the damaged things lying in the beds.

Two old men he discounted at sight; both were obviously adrift in coma. A girl of perhaps five stared sightlessly upward while her fingers plucked at the thin sheet. A woman was moaning, the sound repetitive, maddening — she had already lost her mind. But the rest, three women, two boys his own age, and seven men — were staring at him with expressions ranging from curiosity to open hatred.

He moved toward the first as quickly as his own illness would allow, fingering the keys. No time. No time to test them all, with these people helpless and his mother's screams silenced.

“That one,” the man before him muttered in Serbian. He had bright blue eyes, impossibly blue eyes, under a mat of filthy black hair. His face was scabbed and bruised. “The one between your fingers. No — the one you just let go. It is the skeleton key.”

Jozsef's hands were shaking uncontrollably. He thrust the key into the lock, turned it to the right, and heard the click. The cuffs fell away.

“You must fight,” he said haltingly in his mother's tongue. “Fight for your life. Can you do it?”

The man sat up and rubbed his aching arms. Then he stared at the door at the end of the hall, the one Jozsef had not yet locked.

“There are guns in that storeroom. But it will be guarded.”

“Then we must draw the guard to us,” Jozsef told him. He had unlocked four more sets of cuffs; all the prisoners capable of listening were listening now.

He nodded at one of the women — dirty-blond hair chopped any which way, bright spots of color burning in her cheeks. She looked more alert than the rest.

“Scream as though someone wanted to slit your throat. Break some glass. When the guard comes through that door, we will be waiting.”

The blue-eyed man found a scalpel on a shelf. And when the woman screamed and the gun-room guard raced in with his automatic leveled, the man stood ready behind the door.

The guard fell with the scalpel through his neck.

Jozsef steadied himself against a bed. Stars were exploding behind his eyes. I must not faint. The blond woman's hand gripped his shoulder. He saw, as from a great distance, that three of her fingers were missing. In her other hand she held a knife.

“What now?” she asked. As though he were a grown-up. Someone who knew what should be done.

“To the barracks,” he cried. And heard his father in his voice.

Caroline crouched with her ear against the tunnel door, listening intently. Her gun was raised. Beyond the flat panel of wood must be the supply closet; beyond that, a silence that made her flesh crawl. Too tight. Too heavy. A silence screaming for air.

Someone was waiting beyond the closet door.

Of course he's waiting. You didn't really think this would work, did you?

Shut up. I don't have time for this now.

Caroline clutched her Walther more firmly and thrust aside her fear. She was within an inch of death and singing about it, she was intoxicated with derring-do. For an instant she stood alone on a forty-foot jump tower in deepest Tidewater — only this time there was no Eric to shove his hand into the small of her back. She took a deep breath. Felt for the latch of the tunnel door. And hurled herself off the platform — He must have expected her to ease the door open gently, to peer around the edge, a deer in his headlights, while he pumped a round of bullets straight into her face. Instead the tunnel door slammed open and Caroline propelled herself, still crouching, straight at the man's knees. He lost his balance and swayed heavily against a shelf, raining boxes and vials to the floor. The crash of glass.

Caroline screaming, a guttural, wordless battle yell.

It won her a few seconds longer.

She saw the man's dark eyes, the close-cropped hair, the healed white sickle at his temple where a bullet had traveled long ago. Mian Krucevic. The man she had hunted obsessively for years, the man whose face she had never seen. The man who had strapped Eric to a door and waited for it to explode.

His foot swung in an arc toward her head. She had no place to roll in the closet's narrow space, no place to dodge. A piece of glass knifed into her bicep — She thrust herself upward and fired. If you're going to use a Walther, Eric murmured to her, a closet's the only place to do it.

Krucevic grunted with pain. Then the boot completed its arc and smashed into her cheekbone. Pain exploded behind her eyes, her hands came up to her face, she was curled in a fetal ball on the floor. He kicked her again in the kidneys. Then his hand was on her wrist, twisting. The delicate bones snapped under his strength — and she let go of the Walther's grip. Two iron talons grasped her shoulders and hauled her to her feet.

In an instant he would put his gun to her skull and pull the trigger. The pain was a dull roar in the back of her ears, like the sound of the sea captured in a shell.

“Where are they?” he screamed in German. “Your team. Where are they?”

Her bullet had struck him in the abdomen. Blood spread like a map across his stomach, it stained the dark gray sweater he wore to black. Why was he still standing?

“Where are they?”

The sound of a gunshot, and a man's brutal scream, from the hallway beyond.

His gun smashed again into her battered cheekbone. Agony cut like a jagged knife through her brain. She summoned her last shred of strength — and shoved her knee straight into the dark stain at his abdomen.

He howled and doubled over, still clutching his gun. She kicked backward and scrabbled for the missing Walther.

Footsteps pounded toward them.

“Papa!”

Her skull still ringing, Caroline glanced over her shoulder and saw a thin kid in underwear, his eyes two charcoal holes in a bone white face. Jozsef. He had called Krucevic Papa. Behind him were other faces — haggard, deranged, a crowd of eyes burning. He had brought the whole camp with him.

“Vaclav!” Krucevic yelled hoarsely. One hand clutched his stomach, his gun was still potent in the other. “Vaclav!”

Caroline rose slowly to her feet, her eyes fixed on Krucevic. He had sunk to the floor, and the Walther was pinned beneath him. There was no salvation that way. Blood spilled between the fingers he pressed against his shirt. His teeth were clenched in a snarl. But still he raised his gun — “Papa!”

The boy slid across the floor to huddle at Krucevic's side, his face a mask of fear.

“You're bleeding!”

Krucevic clapped a crimson hand on his son's shoulder. He turned Jozsef around to face Caroline and the throng of silent inmates standing twelve feet away. She saw now that they were armed. There would be no reply from Vaclav.

Krucevic raised his gun to Jozsef's temple. He gasped out something in Serbian.

Caroline could not understand the words, but she caught the meaning. He would shoot the boy in the head if they came any closer.

The value of a life is relative. Krucevic has known that since birth. He's on record as saying that death is