The Cutout

at the sill.

“He left her down below,” the boy said against her cheek. “He told me she was dead and buried.”

Dead and buried. The tunnels of old Ziv Zakopan.

There was a six-foot drop from the windowsill. He sat for an instant, weak legs dangling, then crumpled to the ground. Wishing uselessly for her Walther, Caroline thrust herself face first through the window, kicking at the frame. She dropped with a sharp jolt onto her left side, and her collarbone creaked and shifted under her skin; she cried out, then clamped down on the pain searing through her chest.

She felt for Jozsef.

“Here,” he breathed, and she saw his eyes peering through the slit of a doorway opposite. She crawled over and ducked inside the small shed.

The stench was overwhelming. He had hidden in a latrine.

Caroline held her breath against the sour odor. Feet thudded past them.

Something crashed into the door of the latrine with a piercing shriek, bounced away, fell silent. Jozsef shuddered and pressed against her. Caroline put her good arm around him. They waited for what seemed hours, probably no more than eight minutes. The smell of excrement and lime would cling to her clothes and hair, Caroline thought, a stink so solid she would taste it for days to come. If she survived.

Her collarbone was numb, and the bandage had stanched the flow of blood. But she was weakening. Her eyelids drooped. Maybe she could sleep for a while and look for Sophie Payne in the morning.

“I gave her my rabbit's foot,” Jozsef muttered. He seemed to have slipped sideways, down the current of a dark river. She groped her way back to him.

“What?”

“My good-luck charm. The lady needed it more than me. But what if the luck fails?”

Dead and buried. The tunnels... Caroline roused herself with effort. The screams from the compound were fainter now, the pounding feet gone elsewhere.

“Jozsef — can you show me the gate?”

He reached for her hand.

“I do not think it will be guarded any longer.”

It took them thirty-three minutes to descend the narrow path through the rocks.

Caroline's vertigo returned, and Jozsef fainted halfway down, a dead weight dragging on her left arm. She stopped to revive him, chafing his wrists and slapping him methodically; and remembered, as he lay senseless, the antibiotics in Ziv Zakopan's labs. Antidotes to anthrax that might have saved two lives.

They were probably smashed to pieces by this time.

Caroline cursed viciously. It was too late to go back. Jozsef's eyes flickered open. She crouched beside him.

“I can't carry you.” Blood had soaked through her makeshift bandage. “You can stay right here. Close to the cliff face. I'll come back soon with help.”

She had no idea whether she would find Sophie Payne or how to summon help, if any was at hand; but there was nothing else to tell the boy. Jozsef struggled to his knees. And began to crawl. The Skoda still sat where she had left it, wide open to the world. No one had seen fit to use it for a getaway. Despite the slow torture of the hillside path, they were the first to descend from Ziv Zakopan. The rest were too intent on blood and vengeance.

Jozsef heaved himself weakly into the back of the car and lay motionless.

Caroline fumbled in her pocket for the homing device and held it to her ear.

The signal was stronger than it had been in Krucevic's camp.

“Don't leave me,” Jozsef said weakly. She looked down and found his eyes upon her. They were bright with fever and anguish and death.

They struggled across the field together, in search of the signal's source. It was 3:07 A.M. In a little while the birds would sing.

“Mrs. Payne.”

Nell Forsyte, the same Nell Forsyte she had seen murdered in Pariser Platz; Sophie heard her voice with a flush of joy. She loved Nell. Nell had died for her, a senseless sacrifice. But they would be together always. She reached out her arms to hold Nell close. It was so dark in here. She had thought she was buried alive once, in the trunk of a car.

“Mrs. Payne. Can you hear me?”

She tried to open her lips. She may have moved her head. A faint sound, like the mewling of a cat. Then a steel rod was thrust under her back, agony exploded in her skull. Blood surged from her abdomen to her mouth, flooding between her lips. She choked on the words she needed to say.

Someone was crying. Small, little-boy fingers fluttering on her cheek. She would kiss Peters knee and make it better again.

Mrs. Payne, Nell called again, with that gentle insistence of the professional bodyguard, the untitled nanny.

I'm coming, Sophie answered gaily, and took one last look at her reflection in the golden mirror. It was hard to see anything at Malvern tonight. Especially from such a distance.

Panicked, Caroline searched for a pulse in the wrist and neck. She laid her head on the woman's blood- soaked sweatshirt and listened. She felt with her fingertips for a wisp of breath, frantic to snatch this life back — for she had found Sophie Payne alive, and the woman had slipped through her fingers. Water in a bowl of sand.

She stared down at the Vice President and thought of Eric, whom she had failed.

Not Jack Bigelow or Dare Atwood or even, really, Sophie herself — but Eric, who had placed the map and the transmitter and the woman's life in her hands.

Caroline wasted no time debating whether such a burden was fair. She did not hate him for it. It was the burden she had chosen.

She closed Sophie's eyes and left her alone at the base of the ladder. Without help from Sarajevo, there was nothing else she could do. Then she climbed slowly toward the surface, her left hand cramping on the ladders iron rungs. Tears seethed at the back of her throat.

“You found her?” Jozsef asked. He was huddled against the stile near the iron manhole cover, filthy and stuttering with cold.

“We should hurry and get help,” Caroline told him.

He sat up, eyes vivid with hope.

“She's alive?”

Caroline opened her mouth, then shut it again. Not for this boy the kind prevarication, the words better left unsaid. She shook her head.

He went very still. Everything in his face died. Caroline crouched down and drew him close.

Terrible, these tears so long unshed, falling now on a stranger's neck. The fierce, inhuman sobbing of grief. Jozsef wrapped his arms around her and said nothing while she cried.

At 3:32 a.m. the first wave of NATO helicopters thundered overhead.

Four The White House, 12:34 a.m.

Jack Bigelow got the news from the White House Situation Room two minutes after midnight. He had attended a reception f or the president of Somalia; he had listened to a large young soprano sing arias in Italian; he had stood near his wife and smiled tirelessly into the eyes of people whose names he occasionally remembered. Now he sat alone with his bow tie undone and his dress shirt half open, a glass of ice water in his hand. He was reading three paragraphs of an article on the backswing in Golf magazine.

The news came with a ring of his internal phone and the hesitant voice of a detailee from the State